Ram Shriram says India bereft of middle management, skilled engineers
Ram Shriram, the guy who invested early in Google and made at least a billion, has in part switched his attention to Indian investment possibilities.
Now he’s decrying the dearth of skills there.
Surprising, given all the hand-wringing and publicity in the U.S. in recent years about the never ending supply of talented labor there.
First comes this story from the NYT, which cited studies saying that only one in four engineering graduates in India are employable, due to lack of required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations.
And Shriram, in a recent talk here in the valley, noted a shortage of middle management and of engineers with the latest Web development skills, such as knowledge of Javascript and AJAX:
“The people are smart, innately smart but don’t have this particular skill set yet,” said Shriram, an Indian native who is a founding member of Google’s board of directors.
It’s been really hard to find middle management, for example. It’s great to find a good founding team, but then I can’t find middle management. I can’t find engineers.”
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
