Now an IT finishing school

NASSCOM chief Kiran Karnik inaugurated an IT finishing school (apparently, the second such in the country) in Bangalore recently. It's not very clear to me what such a school is meant to teach and polish, but it does underline two things: one, the grave situation involving hordes of students seeing IT-stars and a critical lack of good teaching, and two, the increasing uneasiness of IT corporates as to the hiring options before them. If one needs a finishing school to be employable after 4 years of education, then something is wrong, and a waste of resources is happening.

We also continue to be caught in this language-centric rut, which is potentially myopic - we don't seem to encourage our IT workers to be good enough also at the abstract skills; rather, it seems preferable to focus on the immediate needs of churning out code. True, this makes sense if you want to get your product out there as soon as you can help it, but will it necessarily help in the long-run? I fear not. But sadly, we are unable to properly instruct our students even at these language skills.