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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

#141

Post by andrewflnr »

smdz wrote: post #119
andrewflnr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

It is not the caste based discrimination like you might intuitively perceive. 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 mos…

Ah, that is not what I assumed, and rather less surprising.

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

#142

Post by dmode »

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.

In this case, the caste system based admission is equivalent to affirmative action in US universities

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

#143

Post by dmode »

throwawayengda wrote: post #87
inapis wrote: post #41

This is a well written article. For decades, the Indian society has tried to use engineering (along with law, medicine and IAS) as a template to success. Given the population numbers, it was bound to break sooner or later. As an Indian CompSci graduate, I am excited for this bust to happen as soon as possible. Most people I know did not like studying computer science, are absolutely unhappy with their worklife and wa…

> Out of the 700+ in my graduating class of Computer Science, less than 70-80 are still associated with computers in some for or manner '700+ graduating class' sounds more like a fraudulent diploma mill than a Tier 2/3 college. Actual Computer Science and Computer Engineering grads from Indian Tier 1/2/3 colleges have no problem finding jobs.

Why is 700+ fraudulent ? HBS for example, has >1000 students in their graduating class

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

#144

Post by mcguire »

decafninja wrote: post #44
remmargorp64 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where did the term "software engineer" originate? The only anecdotal observation I had is that people in nontech, non SV companies use the term "developer". People in SV style tech companies use the term "engineer". YMMV. The line is blurring though, as I see the term "engineer" becoming more common in nontech companies too. Just like how leetcode interviews are spreading too.

Back in about 1970, various people realized that writing code was not the cakewalk in the park that everyone (who did electrical or mechanical engineering) thought it would be. See "software crisis".

They decided that "we would have to get serious" about this whole software production thing. Some people like C.A.R. Hoare and Edsger Dijkstra said something to the effect of "formal logic..." to which the reply was, "Hol' up, there. That's too hard." They then assumed the term "software engineering" and went off in the '70s, '80s, and '90s to develop stuff like UML and the software engineeing lifecycle requirements -> code -> testing -> acceptance V-thing.

For the cynical computer science programmery-type person such as myself, the end result seems to have been the software engineering degree, sort of a lite CS degree (just enough to be employable) with more project management and what-not. At least it's more comprehensive than information technology degrees.

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #139
justwalt wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by CosmicShadow »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #131
CosmicShadow wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Cisc…

I don't even think they knew what the console was...

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

#147

Post by SmartestUnknown »

I am an Indian and I have seen so many worthless engineering colleges. The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and very low incentives for someone to study well. I can't fathom how easy it is to pass a class in these engineering colleges and how widespread plagiarism is. When >50% points of the class is determined by a single exam that repeats same questions every year, it isn't hard to study for a day and pass the class. I am not kidding, you can buy an "all-in-one" of around 600 pages which is essentially enough to pass or even score 80% in "all the classes" in a semester.

I would say at most 10% of engineering students in India are properly taught and properly tested and rest of them just spend 4 years in college essentially learning nothing. When it is so easy to get an engineering degree, people who barely pass high school also enroll in these programs for "engineering degree" and become an "engineer" after 4 years of college. It's no wonder that most of these "engineers" can't do anything.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

umvi wrote: post #2

"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…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by tpmx »

WkndTriathlete wrote: post #104
tpmx wrote: post #56

Five years ago I was working at a software company in Europe that was willing to accept hires from anywhere, globally. We managed to hire about one smart person a month, out of a torrent of perhaps 1000 applicants per month. The vast majority (like 85%) of the applicants were from India and Pakistan. And out of those, 95% used the exact same resume/personal letter layout and content, sometimes down to the exact same…

Resume scanning/filtering is a real problem. Generally I start classifying resumes into two piles: those that put everything they know on their resume, and those that include a handful of relevant, interesting pieces of knowledge with a few lines of job experience to back those up. When "everything they know" fits on four pages, in my experience they aren't worth interviewing. When "interesting pieces of knowledge" m…

"HR" wasn't really involved in hiring, except as a secretary role here. The scanning and decisions were made by development managers and team leads. I think that's the way it should be.

(HR printed out all applications on paper. We sat in a meeting room to scan through them, and discuss them. The mechanism was: scan through each one; write your initial and then yay or nay. Obvious ones got into the yay/nay piles, then we debated the maybe pile. After all of that, HR set up interviews with the people who ended up in the yay pile.)

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