Forget the fads...

Chitra Phadnis

Vishwanath Kulkarni

NO one wants to do a Java course any more. I don't know why,'' said an unsure student a while ago. ``Forget jobs, even projects are not available in companies for Java,'' said another.

Robin, a developer, has gone back to school to pick up XML in addition to Java. People who trained in Java are going back to learn basic programming skills, which they never learnt in the first place.

``Our student intake has come down drastically, to about a tenth of what it was,'' says a counsellor at a training institute.

Professionals who did short-term courses and flew off to the US are now returning to India. ``Most of them had no grounding in basic programming skills and once the dotcom bust happened, they were left without any avenues,'' says the regional manager of a training institute. The emphasis is now on languages such as C, C++ and Visual Basics, to get the ``fundas'' right, he says.

Java's fortunes have been much like the Internet industry itself. The hype about it soared some time ago; courses were short, hardly a few months; students with any degree could take them up; jobs were to be had for the asking and finally the entire honeymoon was shortlived.

Yet another training institute which places people abroad says that the demand for Java professionals has become very specific. ``There is no place for guys with less than a year's experience. Companies only want Java experts now.''

At RCS, another Java training centre in Bangalore, the CEO, Ranjith Singh, says there had been a significant drop in interest in Java a few months ago. But it has been picking up in the last two months, he says.

However, there are enough corporate students, sent in by companies who don't like to see their benched employees idle, says Singh.

Sun Education Services reacted to the ``unnecessary hype in the Indian market,'' by holding a series of seminars for students throughout the country in India, telling them of ``opportunities'' and the ``recent advances'' in Java.

``The student crowd should not be considered as the yardstick for popularity,'' says Swapan Dutta, Country Manager - Sun Education Services. Students, particularly in India, ``appear to have been misled,'' he says. And then adds ``they are cautious about taking up any IT-related course, not just Java.'' The consolation seems to be that the response to .NET or C Sharp is not good either.

Java is popular among the architects, developers and programmers, Dutta says. Mobile telephony companies such as NTT, Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola are users. Quoting a Garter Group survey, he says that the developer community is growing and is expected to touch 4 million by 2003.

The response has been very good all over the country after the seminars were held, maintains Sun. Students came in large numbers and got a lot of queries clarified. Which is in sharp contrast to what the institutes have to say - ``The students refuse to touch Java,'' they say.

While the industry feels that the demand for Java will pick up soon, it is unlikely to be in the huge numbers of last year. They also believe that the professional has to be a complete programmer. Java skills have to go with others. A more rational picture is emerging, in sharp contrast to what prevailed earlier.

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