Chimney cleaners

At Univ of Tennessee when I was teaching, I had a colleague Dr. Chapman. At times I used to spill out my frustration to him regarding my low wages. $22,500 starting for nine months.

He kept quite. One day he let me know his thought on this topic.

He talked out the chimney cleaners at McDonald’s. They need their chimneys cleaned occasionally because of huge amount of beef fat deposited in them. Very dirty job. So the companies paid an impossible amount to attract the cleaners – some number I don’t remember but it was huge.

A similar incident happened a few years later. At University of California at Berkeley, one fellow student who was doing his PhD in statistics, I asked him do you plan to join Wall Street doing option pricing, I very glamorous and ego boosting field in India. He laughed. He said no, most of us want to get into teaching profession, where we can use leading edge technologies.

It seems like the students who don’t succeed there, are picked up by Wall Street to do option pricing. Option pricing is simple and leading brains don’t want to do that. That’s where Indians enter.

Same thing is going on with Microsoft or Google jobs. Smart Americans, in fact they are much smarter than Indians, go for other fields, leaving Microsoft jobs for Indians. Indians love those jobs.

Americans love the money but not to the extent Indians do. I read about packages IITians or other engineering school graduates are earning, the whole family is so proud of them. Americans generally don’t envy them. First converted to their local currency it is just the median salary that an American earns there.Technology is new, they need lots of mechanics, who will give up their family etc to settle there. Indian fill the bill.

Indians are like chimney sweepers.

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