111–120 of 393 posts
That said, I'm curious how you could talk to someone about programming for four years and at the end of that 9 out of 10 of them could not actually do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something similar happened in the US where numbers of students in CS went up over time. However, academic fraud has not been as big of a problem as it is in India. An Indian friend of mine said that IIT is good but hardly anyone can get in and the caste system dictates admissions policies anyway so many people try to get engineering degrees from schools with lax standards. The professors are completely unqualified, a…
> ...and the caste system dictates admissions policies anyway Like, officially, in writing? Even if it's informal, as an American it blows my mind that that's still a thing.
The relevant portion:
> For candidates in the general category, successful students must generally score within the top 0.25% or top 0.5% of all students to gain admission to the IITs, whereas SC/ST/OBC candidates must generally score within the top 2% of all students to gain admission to the IITs.
> Currently, reservation of 15%, 7.5% and 27% seats are provided for candidates originating from the SC, ST and OBC communities respectively.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_policy_in_Indian_I...
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I've seen this bias in myself. I interned with several guys from India during college. I was an undergrad, they were grad students, having gotten their undergrad in India. We all went to the same university in the US. They weren't "crappy" engineers, per se, they just seemed to not actually have an undergrad degree in CS. Obviously I never saw their transcripts, but we seemed to be working from very different knowled…
I posted a comment a while back about this subject and the funny part was I got flamed by a bunch of US based technical workers, while the Indian techies pretty much agreed with me. Anyways the TLDR was I have a buddy Karthick and he is one of the best developers I know. So I asked him one day about why there was such low quality in India and he explained to me it was misaligned incentives due to the fact that, the f…
I think it's often a self limiting thing because word gets around that there isn't enough brass rings for everyone.
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In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you studied engineering in university and went through licensing. It's not really enforced in tech, but for me the definition is someone who at the minimum studied an engineering degree. Calling yourself an engineer when you studied Computer Science is a bit odd to me.
I'm fully OK with the distinction because of the licensing process and strict requirements on engineer-certified work, but as someone with a CS degree from a Canadian university I can tell you with confidence that my friends in the software engineering pathway had probably 90% the same course load as I did. Really the only major difference at our university (IMO) was that they had a capstone project they did as a gro…
e: and yes, cf. the sibling comment, some of those courses were mandatory curricula set by The Professional Body Formerly Known As APEGBC (I forget what they're called now).
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> ...and the caste system dictates admissions policies anyway Like, officially, in writing? Even if it's informal, as an American it blows my mind that that's still a thing.
Yes. There is actually a whole Wikipedia entry[1] on it. The relevant portion: > For candidates in the general category, successful students must generally score within the top 0.25% or top 0.5% of all students to gain admission to the IITs, whereas SC/ST/OBC candidates must generally score within the top 2% of all students to gain admission to the IITs. > Currently, reservation of 15%, 7.5% and 27% seats are provide…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something similar happened in the US where numbers of students in CS went up over time. However, academic fraud has not been as big of a problem as it is in India. An Indian friend of mine said that IIT is good but hardly anyone can get in and the caste system dictates admissions policies anyway so many people try to get engineering degrees from schools with lax standards. The professors are completely unqualified, a…
> ...and the caste system dictates admissions policies anyway Like, officially, in writing? Even if it's informal, as an American it blows my mind that that's still a thing.
> The best jobs are reserved for graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the crown jewels of the country’s higher education system. Every April, over a million students take the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), the primary pathway to the IITs. There are fewer than 12 thousand seats at the 16 IITs in India, and they accept one in 50 applicants each year. This is one of the core issues many people seem…
I wonder why this is. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to teach basic CS well, nor would I think that India would lack for competent people able to teach this way.
Does this occur in other parts of Indian society? For example, is it like this in medicine? Or food processing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something similar happened in the US where numbers of students in CS went up over time. However, academic fraud has not been as big of a problem as it is in India. An Indian friend of mine said that IIT is good but hardly anyone can get in and the caste system dictates admissions policies anyway so many people try to get engineering degrees from schools with lax standards. The professors are completely unqualified, a…
> ...and the caste system dictates admissions policies anyway Like, officially, in writing? Even if it's informal, as an American it blows my mind that that's still a thing.
In history there was a caste system that led to systemic deprivation of education and opportunity to underprivileged castes. So India (few decades back) came up with a reservation system so that people belonging to those castes could get jobs/education/opportunities.
In today's times it's scale is more like racism that you would find in most developed nations.
However after achieving the basic purpose, the reservation system based on caste was never withdrawn. Lots of political parties invested into those vote banks.
Nowadays, the situation is such that many people who get admissions based on the reservation policy are from acceptably well off educated families. There are many people who are relatively poor and financially underprivileged but belong to the upper caste and they cannot get any benefits.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Churning out engineers as fast as possible and pressuring everyone to become one despite lack of interest just guarantees you will churn out astronomical numbers of crappy engineers. And I hate to say it... but it possibly creates unintentional racial bias in interviewers because the sheer volume of crappy engineers being churned out from [Indian/Chin…
I was going to say the solution is to raise the bar for software engineers, but it seems the problem here is the culture around prestige and money which has prompted millions of people to go after programming careers. It's not easy to change culture. Still I think there should be some needed post-grad accreditation for software engineers if they want to actually be called engineers.
Everywhere in the world people flock to careers with prestige and money. Chasing cash in a developing country makes even more sense because being poor there sucks even worse than being poor in a developed country.