Thanks for the ‘first-hand’ observations. This is something that I’ve been hearing quite frequently these days — the quality of engineers is just going down the drain. Folks who dont know how to read a Java stack trace are being recruited by supposedly the Indian IT services ‘elite’.

Blr as of now has too much money from the IT services and the BPO industry…That unfortunatley, adversely impacts small startups – from hiring to motivating ppl etc.

As far as your skepticism is concerned – about India being a sleeping giant – that’s why I’m looking for that spark. The spark which will ignite people’s appetite and outlook towards entrepreneurship. Remember – it just takes one voice – one leader.

I’m hopeful that it will happen. A couple of years back, there was no such ecosystem – now you have VC’s, you have networking events like proto, relative increased awareness and enthusiasm towards entpreneurship. Pieces of the puzzle are falling in place.

I am (RSS) subscriber of your blog, so I had never visited your site to find out about you. First off, I am amazed that you are doing such a good job on reporting about “desi” startups sitting in Ft Lauderdale, FL! Keep up the good work.

Now about my comments on this post. During the past few years (about past 4 years) I have been interacting with various engineers in Bangalore. I have found that there’s more talk and less action here. People start companies so they can get “founder” and “ceo” titles on their business cards which are generously exchanged at various bogus TIE meetings and other forums (Barcamps, MOMO-s, etc). Most of the startup ideas are copies of some or the other american startup. Heck! These guys can’t even come up with their own unconferences! They have copies of Momo, Barcamp, Proto! And unlike the Japanese of ’70s and ’80s, these “desi” copies aren’t doing any better than the originals. In fact, a few TIE meetings, Barcamps, and Momos I attended have convinced me that these “desi” unconferences are more like fish-market meetings in Cambodia than entrepreneurial meetings that they ought to be.

The second set of engineers, who aren’t starting companies, want lots of hard-cash, lots of equity, and lots of free time to attend to their families/relatives/bill-payments/etc. Referals is possibly the biggest scam in Bangalore’s IT industry: these useless engineers create a non-working, pay-negotiating mafia in every company they go to. At a point last year, I had proclaimed that it was easier to deal/negotiate with VC-s for equity than to deal with these mafia engineers. The bogus indian law system prevents companies from throwing out these useless engineers! If what I heard is true then there’s even a “software engineers” union out there in Bangalore.

Basically, Blr does NOT work! People here just have fun thanks to their American masters who are throwing a lot of money at these useless engineers. The American big-biz-IT companies are feeding this greed for now. When the US economy tumbles, so will Bangalore because almost 90% of these useless “desi” engineers in India are NOT worth 1/8 what they claim on their resumes.

As for which particular institute in India could play the role of “Stanford” I don’t think there’s any. The IITs are “export oriented units” though over the past few years I have started seeing a lot of IIT-ians stay back and “work” in India after completing their BTechs. The REC/NIT are churning out the second grade engineers for India’s “relaxed” IT companies. The private colleges are churning out absolute junk all the way.

All in all, I am very skeptical that India will ever amount to anything. That country is like “Kumbhakarna”: a sleeping giant that will be slaughtered by Ram/Laxman/(who ever killed Kumbhakarna) when it wakes up. And that slaughtering is going to happen by some east-European (Poland, etc) or East Asian country (China, Korea, etc).

Isn’t it hard-to-believe that all these useless desi engineers work hard and do well when they come to the US! Or maybe they do better because of the earlier useless desis here in the US.