The most prized degree in India became the most worthless • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by dumbfoundded » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #91

remmargorp64 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the dictionary, an "engineer" is a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works. A computer is a physical machine that runs programs which are encoded digitally on physical hardware (memory). I could see an argument for considering a computer program to be an engineered "machine" that runs on a turing-complete computational platform. Just because a computer program is digit…

> According to the dictionary, an "engineer" is a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works. That's exactly the point. Programmers write programs. They don't design engines, machines, or public works. Programmers are excluded from the very definition you're quoting. If you want to expand the definition to include the application of scientific methods to solve a problem, so that it in…

https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/software/

You can become a licensed software engineer

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

#162

Post by addicted44 » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #156

triceratops wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anecd…

> 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 This is true to a much greater or lesser degree depending on country, though. Here in the US you can be a really senior leaf node software engineer with fancy titles like "Staff" or "Senior Staff" or "Distinguished Fellow" and command tremendous respect and…

That's only true for a small subset of technology companies.

Outside the tech world it's barely true, and even within the tech world, the vast majority of companies still require you to enter management the moment you've been promoted a couple of times.

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

#163

Post by YokoZar » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

dmode wrote: post #142

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.

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

Well, sort of. Explicit quotas used to be a thing in American universities until Bakke in 1978, and racial "points" systems were ended in 2003 with Grutter. Notably these Supreme Court decisions actively endorsed Affirmative action in general, they just implied you couldn't be too explicit about how you were using it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger

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

#164

Post by downerending » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #124

downerending wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have taught CS, and I'm not sure I'd say it's harder or easier than a straight programming job. It's certainly different. Teaching definitely is an independent skill. But on the other hand, there are a very large set of skills that are part of being a professional programmer that are never really touched on in an academic CS program.

Based on the above description, though, the issue doesn't seem to be that CS education there is mediocre, but rather than it is abysmal. Not sure what to make of that.

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

#165

Post by postsantum » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:41 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #61

throwaway158497 wrote: post #42

Tagnetially related. Because of COVID lockdowns, many consulting firms are shutting down. I hired an engineer with 2 years experience to teach me HTML/CSS/JS for one month. So fa I am satisfied with him compared to what I learnt on Udacity frontend nanodegree. I am paying him $100 for 30 hours of classes. For people wanting to learn stuff, this is the best time. If you want to contact him, email is in profile

Who in the world would be willing to teach for 30 hours for $100? I would be much better off spending those 30 hours looking for the few available jobs that are out there or do the old r/cscareerquestions “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG”

I live not in the poorest of countries, but $3 is what school teachers make working full-time outside of a few major cities

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

#166

Post by catlas3r » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:42 PM UTC

mikorym wrote: post #4

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…

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…

I prefer the term "software engineer" for a reason I haven't seen yet in this thread: clarity when speaking to people in other industries.

Among many of the people I talk to on a regular basis, if I told them I was a "developer" they would assume that I was a real estate developer.

If I told them I was a "programmer" it would be a little clearer, but before I moved into software I worked in the events industry for a few years, where "programmer" means "one who develops event programming."

In practice, I could append "software" in front of either "programmer" or "developer" to provide that clarity, but "software engineer" seems to be more common, and to me feels like it more adequately covers the totality of my job, which is as much about measuring, planning, and communicating as it is about producing code.

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

#167

Post by triceratops » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #156

triceratops wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anecd…

> 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 This is true to a much greater or lesser degree depending on country, though. Here in the US you can be a really senior leaf node software engineer with fancy titles like "Staff" or "Senior Staff" or "Distinguished Fellow" and command tremendous respect and…

"Staff" and "Senior staff" and such are only recognized by ingroups. And often you need to be a staff level engineer to even begin managing people in tech.

In most industries that aren't tech, compensation and prestige are directly proportional to how many people you manage. Only in tech can individual senior engineers have impact that justifies the high pay without managing people.

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

#168

Post by Talanes » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #135

kls wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anecd…

While your points on broader power structures are entirely correct, I can understand why their friend put it that way. There's a natural tendency to attribute the state of your country to its past. The caste system was just the noticeable local manifestation of how societies have tended to structure power the world over.

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

#169

Post by sushid » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

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.

Is it that surprising? We have the exact same system in the States.

Affirmative Action exists today. The Ivies modified its acceptance criteria to "soft" discriminate against Jewish Americans in the 50s and 60s. There are arguments that this is indeed the case for Asian Americans today.

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

#170

Post by 205guy » Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

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…

Sounds like you're describing was what Americans call affirmative action ("a reservation system so that people belonging to those castes could get jobs/education/opportunities"). I am not knowledgeable about India's system, but I get the impression that like the one in the US, it is politically/culturally divisive and I would take any comment about it as opinion/preference rather than fact.