Knowledge Industry

There is one thing among all the IT workers which intrigues me --the extreme narrowness of their job profile.

The 4 years of BTech in India are spent by most of the engineering students in a real dilute academic scenario. When they join job, some sort of programming language training is imparted in the first few months and then they are put mostly in maintenance / enhancement project where they just keep on doing the same job for years at a stretch. Some buggy code is churned out which are pointed out by people ( another set of BTech graduates ) in the quality team with the help of a few automated test tools and a few of the bugs are partially fixed.

Mass communication / literature graduates working in the field of print & electronic media lacking insight about the complexity of different technologies term these people as “knowledge workers”.

Years pass by, these coders make career progress, become project leaders , lose the touch with the bare minimum technologies that they used to know ( coding skills), spend the day in communicating with different groups , & working in word processors & spreadsheets & email clients( Microsoft word, Microsoft Excel, Outlook).

IT companies are recruiting en masse. The same thing used to be done by the PSU s in India 2-3 decades back. Today the economy forced the PSU s to close down. Most obedient employees were forced to resign & social soothing was given with the help of words like Voluntary retirement service, Golden Handshake etc.

Technologies change, rules of economy do not. Is there any guarantee that tomorrow the outsourced jobs will not migrate to some cheaper destinations? What will happen to these millions of people ( technologists) who do not even have the slightest of idea about the progress in technology happening elsewhere or the change in the ways in which business values are being enforced on the technologies , who do not care to bother about the emerging digital business paradigms in the new era or the changes that are sweeping the manufacturing industry ?

What will happen to the IT parks in various states? Will they also turn out to be multi storied housing complexes (Jute mills in eastern India & Textile mills in West are examples).

If that happens who / what is to be blamed?
The traditional “system” of exploitation?
The immaturity / lack of career ambitions of the laborers (“knowledge workers”)?

Academia may put the blame squarely on the laziness & the lack of insight on part of the IT professionals only but that does not lead us anywhere.

Is the academia no way related to the dilute academic standard prevalent in the engineering colleges in India? Are they no way responsible when a Computer Science graduate gets frightened at the elementary concept of mathematics in spite of the fact that the computer was invented to shed light on a philosophical crisis in the foundations of pure mathematics .


Is there any way out of this situation??
MTech???
The MTech guys in the software industry do not prove to be so...
I do not know....