Nobody mentioned the problem of Indian "high context society". Individual developers may be very productive when employed by western companies but from my anecdotal experience Indian teams in India have very low real productivity due to the "cultural specifics", aka rigid hierarchy and people dynamics.
The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
121–130 of 393 posts
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To be clear, that's affirmative action for people in the lowest castes (not everyone knows what SC etc mean offhand).
TIL that "SC" is the caste formerly known as "untouchables". It does not seem unreasonable to institute some affirmative action for them.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#123Pretty damning " There are currently more than 3,500 engineering schools across the country, and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in software engineering, according to one study. " 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.
I taught intro web dev courses at a "highly rated" college in Canada in a program that was specifically for a post-grad, international audience. It was 99% people from India who finished 4 year university degrees in computer science and the like.
Out of a class of 35 students who were already in their 2nd, 3rd or 4th term of this program, no one knew to press F12 to see the console in a browser. This was a web development program. I basically had to teach these kids as if they just walked off the street. No matter which new batch of kids I had, it was like this. I asked them how they could know so little about anything development wise if they took 4 years of CS, like literally what did they do. They'd always just answer that they learned "Theory" and something about learning out of a book, not actually developing or anything.
I still didn't understand how 4 years of theory or book learning couldn't teach you the most basic programming concepts. I'm pretty sure the schools were just mills or scams or something, it was sad.
Most of the students had no real interest in actually learning how to code or doing any learning either, they seemed to believe that just by showing up they'd pass, get a degree and a good job, which was bizarre, especially in a university town and tech hot bed. The amount of cheating, copying, lying, begging, etc. didn't help. A few folks were genuine, but the program seems like it's just a legal loophole to get into the country where if they get at least a technical support job after 2 years of grad they can legally become citizens. This is the fastest growing and most profitable sector of this college.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#124> 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…
> The number of universities where you can actually become a good engineer is really small, apart from the IIT/NIT/BITS/IIIT, the rest can be categorized into mediocre to astonishingly bad. 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 ex…
> It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to teach basic CS well
Why do you think so? If anything it's harder than doing a regular programming job, because in addition to knowing CS, you have to know how to teach. And programming pays better than teaching.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#125Earlier 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.
Officially - yes. It's affirmative action. About 40% or more of the seats are reserved for students from a "lower caste".
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#126"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 also have a problem with calling developers engineers . Heck, I would be offended if someone called me a developer rather than a programmer. But unfortunately even the degrees themselves become less significant. A PhD in mathematics used to mean more than it does now. But another point is that with global literacy going up, scarse skills are now not based on the amount of people with certain degrees, but rather wit…
My title is "software engineer".
I don't have an engineering degree, or even a CS degree.
I feel pretty uncomfortable calling myself an engineer since it seems to carry a certain weight of responsibility, but seeing as the title was bestowed upon me by my work place, I'll continue using it.
IMO the designations are meaningless until there is a real standard in place for "software engineer" and what it entails (in the US at least).
I refer to myself as a "programmer" or "developer", but I use them interchangeably.
Anyone putting any real weight on the title is splitting hairs.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#1273 Idiots is a remarkably inspirational Bollywood movie depicting the problem; one of my all-time favorites.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/3_idiots
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sort of opportunities are available for someone with little experience/qualifications in a poorer country?
In East Asian economies, the workforce transitioned from farming to labor-intensive manufacturing before moving onto high-tech services. India, in contrast, had a booming tech consultancy sector before they had a strong manufacturing sector. A poor farmer in China, and Japan/Korea in the decades prior, could move to a city and make a better income on an assembly line despite not having any formal education. A poor fa…
Which is good overall because automation is making those manufacturing jobs worth less and less. Companies are starting to leave China for low wage countries already. Right now service jobs designing the automation is where the real money is and India is well positioned to take it.
Note there are no easy roads to success in general. Being born to the right family helps (a lot) , but you can sti mess up.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#129Pretty damning " There are currently more than 3,500 engineering schools across the country, and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in software engineering, according to one study. " 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.
To follow up on what CosmicShadow said, one of my most memorable interviewees was the candidate with an MS Comp Sci who, upon being shown the problem for our team effort design exercise was able to categorize it (something in CS theory I had never heard of), explain what the canonical solution would be, but was completely incapable of writing the for{..} loop that comprised the first part of the solution.
I honestly don't know how it happens. She clearly wasn't an idiot, and she certainly learned a lot of theory but couldn't program her way out of a paper bag. And this was not for an entry level position, either.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#130Pretty damning " There are currently more than 3,500 engineering schools across the country, and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in software engineering, according to one study. " 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.
I taught intro web dev courses at a "highly rated" college in Canada in a program that was specifically for a post-grad, international audience. It was 99% people from India who finished 4 year university degrees in computer science and the like. Out of a class of 35 students who were already in their 2nd, 3rd or 4th term of this program, no one knew to press F12 to see the console in a browser. This was a web develo…
My MS (Software Engineering) classmates usually didn't have that problem but interestingly, someone pointed out to us that it was possible to go through the entire MSSE program without writing a single line of code if you chose the right classes.
I sometimes wonder if they did that by design...