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If you delve deep enough into Google, you will find a page on its search technology. “As a Google user, you’re familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search,” says the page. “How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google’s search technology is PigeonRank... (this) relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognise objects. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.
“When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks are returned at the top of the user’s results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.”
We’ll come back to the PigeonRank later. But talking about the pecking order, Google has suddenly emerged as an employer of choice of engineering graduates in India. It is No 2 in the Class of 2006 ORG-MARG Campus Recruiter Index (CRI) for Engineering Colleges. It wasn’t in the picture in 2005.
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What are engineers doing in Google (apart from replacing pigeons)? The truth is that many of them are in marketing functions. The same is true at Microsoft India, the leader the past two years, clambering up from ninth rank in 2004. McKinsey (no 3), Hindustan Lever (no 4) and newcomer to the list ITC (no 7) are hardly known for their engineers also.
In the 2004 ranking, the top five were TCS, Levers, Oracle, McKinsey and Larsen & Toubro (L&T). The last is the only traditional engineering company of this lot. L&T no longer figures on this list. “Engineering has lost its charm,” says a Mumbai-based headhunter.
It had to happen. The Kota coaching classes, which are designed to get cretins and cauliflowers into the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), have taken a toll. “There is no creativity left among the IITians,” says a professor at IIT Kharagpur. “If these guys were to go abroad today, they would not deliver like our earlier alumni have done.” (The entrance exams to the IITs are being revamped today. But some suspect it will take a decade for the institutes to regain their glory.)
Does the CRI index indicate the death of engineering? Continues the IIT professor: “Today, the best students join the IIMs. Those who can’t get in, take up marketing jobs, and try for the IIMs again after gaining some work experience. Those who can’t manage a suitable job, stay on for their M-Tech. And those who have rich fathers go abroad. There are fewer scholarships to be had. So going abroad has lost its cachet.”
The ACNielsen survey also underscores the point that engineers want to be managers. According to associate director Prasenjit Das: “As engineers aspire to be a core part of the businesses they enter, the ubiquitous MBA degree is increasingly considered a prerequisite and not an add-on.” Additional evidence: only 11 per cent of the class of 2006 expect to stay on in their first jobs for more than five years, against 21 per cent for the Class of 2004.
Concludes the IIT professor: “Engineering has become less glamorous. It pays less. It is better to be a pigeon at Google.” (For those who really swallowed the pigeon tale, it was actually an April Fool joke. But you can check out http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html anyway.)