Giving back

There is a disquieting story in a recent Indian Express, about how seats in Engineering colleges are being reduced for lack of faculty to teach them.

This brings up two issues in my mind: Quality and Quantity. Of the faculty, of course.

Traditionally, Industry and Academics in India tend to look down on each other. Your average professor or Ph.D student would scorn the idea of actually doing the work which an engineer in a company would do, and the engineer would think the research student is only doing research because he couldn't get a job anywhere. Both stereotypes are partially true, in fact. But it didn't matter, because the demand for teaching faculty in the colleges was much less than employable engineers in industry. And the subjects which the faculty taught moved slowly enough that it was possible to wait till the next editions of textbooks came out and were incorporated into syllabi.

None of these things are true for software in India. Actually, none of those things are true for any engineering discipline in, say, the US, but research and innovation was such a low priority in Indian industry that it used to be all right. But for software, the field is intrinsically fast-moving, and besides we have this sense of really competing with the world here. Hence the interaction between academia and industry is more in this area. In order to sustain the growing demand for software folks, more and more teachers are required - teachers who know what the latest technologies are, who know the hot research topics and the newest theoretic trends.

And this is where, for some time now, the Quality issue of college faculty comes in. From personal experience I can say that the vast majority of people who teach computer science are not up to date with what is going on in the industry. The feeling of inferiority persists - people who can gets jobs programming take them, the ones that are left, teach, feeling they have no other option. I don't include professors in the absolute top institutes - IITs and their sort - but the average college which produces the bulk of the programmers for the IT companies. Since the teachers are not up to date, neither are the students. I remember a particularly inept Databases teacher who brought printouts of Oracle command manuals and dictated them to us as notes. All of our class ultimately learnt databases by ourselves, and then did some fast learning when we were recruited.

If our current crop of teachers is this bad, how are we going to get more of even the same quality, if we want to produce more engineers? Something tells me we're already dredging the bottom here.

A good friend of mine, something of an activist and a brilliant engineer besides other things, took it upon himself to help. He went back to the college he graduated from and offered to teach a subject for a semester. Together with one of his classmates, he went every week to his alma mater and taught the subject to his juniors. He had the benefit of having actually used the subject in his job, so he knew what he was talking about. The exercises he set were practical, the problems were real-life situations he'd faced. He knew which books were really useful.

The net result was that that particular batch learned the subject from a real expert - or atleast someone who really knew the topic. All the classes were packed throughout the semester, and the experiment was a real success. Subsequently, people from that batch came back from their jobs to teach their juniors, too.

It only takes a little bit of effort to solve a problem. You, dear reader, fellow software engineer, have learned a lot of things after you graduated from college and began working. Wouldn't you like that the people who come after you don't have to struggle as much? Wouldn't you like it that the new trainees in your company pick up things quickly, and that they know what's what, right after joining? How much effort does it take to solve the problem reported in that IE story? If not teaching for an entire semester, you could take on a final-year project for your juniors. If not that, you could create web tutorials and question sets and pass them on to someone at your college. If not even that - well, any little bit would help - you know best what can be done.