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The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

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Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#131

Post by ChuckMcM »

CosmicShadow wrote: post #123
ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

Pretty 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…

Ouch! That is so sad on so many levels.

To be fair, I can understand when someone doesn't know that the shortcut key for the dev console is F12, but I would hope they would at least start at the "hamburger" menu to see if they could find it.

Your anecdote reminds me of the dot com days when I was trying to hire some network engineers. Their only qualification appeared to be they passed some certification test on Cisco gear. The only questions they asked about the job were "how much stock will I get?" and "when do you think the company will go public?" It was easy to not hire them, even when we were really in need of people.

Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#133

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

matchagaucho wrote: post #38

A lot of this argument seems to rest on this premise... "Good coding skills (the ability to write functionally correct code) are possessed by 4.6% of Indian job applicants, 2.1% of Chinese candidates and 18.8% of the US candidates in the IT and software industries"

Based on the US candidates that have come across my desk, I'd agree with that!

Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#134

Post by knolax »

andrewflnr wrote: post #110
onetimeusename wrote: post #85

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.

I mean it's literally the same thing as affirmative action.

Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#135

Post by triceratops »

kls wrote: post #78
cmckn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> He said it was a hold over from the cast system

I was with you until the "cast (sic) system".

> you are held in more esteem in India when you manage more people.

You can replace "India" with literally any country in the world. Managers and bosses always are and always have been held in more esteem than leaf node workers, in every society past and present. It's got nothing to do with the caste system.

Personal anecdote: I caught up with an American friend from school after about 15 years. He worked in some kind of product/project management role. When I told him I was an engineer in the Bay Area he said "Oh, you're just a programmer?" (OK so he wasn't a great friend, and that was the last time I spoke to him...)

Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#136

Post by muststopmyths »

downerending wrote: post #117
as1mov wrote: post #77

> 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…

I spent a good half hour composing a reply and then I decided to defer to the expertise of someone who's spent the last decade and half grappling with the Indian education system.

Full disclosure: The author is a friend.

https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/9B4x2LbRpZuwuFz72g9f3O/The-...

https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/RybPVLh2hlTYsSBycUIzgM/The-...

(edit removed an irrelevant link)

Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#137

Post by woem »

This is precisely why most top tech companies in India only hire from the top colleges (IITs, BITS Pilani, IIITs, NITs, etc). It's usually not worth their time to even interview someone who did not graduate from one of these.

This is also evident in the compensation for new grads. CS grads from lower ranked colleges typically make $5k-$10k per year, while those from these good colleges make $20k-$40k per year(gross). Exceptions exist of course.

Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#138

Post by mcguire »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #23
jeromegv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you think Computer Science is not "engineering" aka a scientist with thumbs.

As explained to me by an engineer: the distinct lack of statics, dynamics, and thermodynamics.

Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#139

Post by thaumasiotes »

justwalt wrote: post #109
cmckn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have a similar story. I used to work with a guy from India, and he told me “If you ever meet an Indian in a position of power, they got there through nepotism and not by their own merit.” Hearing that was pretty shocking, not so much because it’s clearly untrue, but because he held that opinion of other Indian people. He did fall under the description you gave, though. He seemed to struggle with basic Arduino and R…

> Hearing that was pretty shocking, not so much because it’s clearly untrue, but because he held that opinion of other Indian people.

Why would it be shocking for people to perceive nepotism in their own society?

Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

#140

Post by yesenadam »

remmargorp64 wrote: post #7
mikorym wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait... so in your mind there is a distinct difference between a developer, programmer, and engineer? Because in my mind, they are all the same. How are they different, in your mind?

I always thought calling programmers engineers was very weird until I watched this great talk:

Real Software Engineering, Glenn Vanderburg, Lone Star Ruby 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9AIUT9nos

which explains what various kinds of engineers actually do. Not at all dry and boring like it might sound! From the YouTube blurb:

Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all. That's odd, because in every other field, the term "engineering" is reserved for methods that work. What then, does real software engineering look like?

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