LIFE IN BETA AN YA KAMENETZ
get our economy firing on all cylin- ders. As with much conventional wisdom, this is conventional in the worst sense of that word. If you want the truth, talk to the competition. Phaneesh Murthy is CEO of iGate Patni, a top- 10 Indian outsourcing company. Murthy over- sees 26,000 employees—not the ones snapping SIM chips into cell phones or nagging you about your unpaid AmEx bill, but the ones writ- ing iPhone apps, processing mort- gage applications, and redesigning supply chains—in jobs that would be handled in the U.S. by highly paid, college-educated workers. In other words, you. Yet Murthy, a regular bogeyman of outsourcing, believes American education is by far the best in the world. “The U.S. educa- tion system is much more geared to innovation and practical applica- tion,” says Murthy. “It’s really good from high school onward.” To com- pete long term, we need more brain- storming, not memorization; more individuality, not standardization. Murthy will tell you that the outsourcing industry is not some unstoppable force: It’s hitting real
limits. Indian engineers are not
nearly as cheap or plentiful as they
used to be. “Labor costs were so
cheap you could always throw more
people at a problem,” he says. “But
wages are up 14% to 15% each year
for the last 20 years.” A software
Last April, when sharing a stage at Facebook with CEO Mark Zuckerberg,
President Obama summed up the conventional wisdom on what’s needed
to shape American minds for the global marketplace. “We’ve got to do such
a better job when it comes to STEM education,” he said. “That’s how we’re
going to stay competitive for the future.” If we could just tighten standards
and lean harder on the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—we’d better our rigorous rivals in India and China, and
“In India, it takes engineers two to three years to recover from the damage of the education system.”
Science and math won’t
improve U.S. job prospects.
But creativity will.
THE IRREPLACEABLE MINDS
PHOTOGRAPH BY RITAM BANERJEE
Phaneesh Murthy,
CEO of Indian
outsourcing
company
iGate Patni
engineer who would have earned
$700 a year in the late ’80s now gets
roughly $12,000 a year—still a huge
discount compared to the U.S., but
not peanuts. Despite the lure of
these higher wages, India’s schools
can’t keep up with demand. In the
late ’80s, Indian software companies hired about 100 graduates a
year; 25 years later, they need about
200,000 every spring, an astronomical increase in demand. And
yet the supply of engineering grads
has merely doubled, making it
harder than ever for Murthy to compete for talent.
As a short-term solution, iGate
Patni is hiring grads who majored
in other disciplines, including math
and physics. The company is also
spending more on training, which
