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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

#231

Post by outworlder »

joelbluminator wrote: post #214
battery_cowboy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new "software engineer" is just a software assembly line worker. I guess the same goes for other engineers. I would imagine the quality of software engineer will get worse over time as it becomes easier to assemble software from an assortment of black boxes.

Is it getting easier though? Did you try "modern" web development lately? Good luck piecing together a working website...

It is easier. If you wanted to create a web application from the dotcom era, you could probably knock it out faster by one or two orders of magnitude. It will probably look neater too, and you won't spend days or months tuning it so it will look decent in IE. We even have amazing CSS capabilities now.

If you wanted to create something that's better than the pages we had in the Geocities era, you can do that in 5 minutes (download some static page generator, add a theme and voila).

When it was unveiled, the GMail frontend was a remarkable feat of engineering. Nowadays? Polishing to that extent (also scaling, etc) will take time, but creating a knockoff UI is no longer a revolutionary job. Most web developers would be able to single-handedly replicate the basic functionality ('ajax' and lots of client side javascript are no longer arcane).

As web development progressed, so did expectations.

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

#232

Post by BeetleB »

google234123 wrote: post #209
aaaxyz wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who got an undergrad degree from a top 40 school and is now taking courses at a state system school accepting a lot more students, I completely agree. The difference in terms of work output and professionalism between students is massive. Presentations from other students lack depth and often fail to explain basic concept; they have very little educational value. Group work is a complete mess since a lot o…

You are not hanging out with the right people then. I think you will find the top students in any random state school are just as good as at an ivy league institution. Source: I've been at both.

I've been at both an average school (undergrad) and a top school (grad). I somewhat agree with your parent.

I don't doubt great undergrads exist in an average school, but the chances of randomly running into one are much lower. I did not run into any.

I'd also disagree with the characterization of "top" students. A lot of the top students at the average school, while great at academics, were still a lot less "well rounded". They had few projects that they worked on outside of class, etc. Not that they weren't interested - just that there was not enough "critical mass" of such people for it to become natural.

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

#235

Post by ekianjo »

BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #199
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 have noticed this as well, both as a worker and an interviewer. The number of unqualified people of Indian ethnicity that inundate job applications is staggering, and some perform embarrassingly bad in the interview. That said some of my favorite people to work with (smart, easy to work with) are Indian. It's really a shame that the issues affect perception of everybody. It's a good reminder to me not to judge a bo…

> That said some of my favorite people to work with (smart, easy to work with) are Indian. It's really a shame that the issues affect perception of everybody. It's a good reminder to me not to judge a book by it's cover, metaphorically speaking.

I don't even know why race or color would even matter when it comes to considering one's capability to do some engineering job. At the end of the day just work with whoever can get the job done.

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

#236

Post by kelnos »

triceratops wrote: post #167
CydeWeys wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not sure why you're being downvoted; this is true in my experience as well.

Hell, I've been (a software developer) in SV for 16 years now and I hadn't heard of the "Staff" title until a few years ago.

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

#237

Post by sethammons »

ekianjo wrote: post #235
BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed this as well, both as a worker and an interviewer. The number of unqualified people of Indian ethnicity that inundate job applications is staggering, and some perform embarrassingly bad in the interview. That said some of my favorite people to work with (smart, easy to work with) are Indian. It's really a shame that the issues affect perception of everybody. It's a good reminder to me not to judge a bo…

> That said some of my favorite people to work with (smart, easy to work with) are Indian. It's really a shame that the issues affect perception of everybody. It's a good reminder to me not to judge a book by it's cover, metaphorically speaking. I don't even know why race or color would even matter when it comes to considering one's capability to do some engineering job. At the end of the day just work with whoever c…

Because humans are pattern matchers. We have to strive to eliminate or reduce conscience and subconscious biases to ensure fairness.

I know intelligent and successful people who would never take financial advice from someone with a beard for example.

Edit: maybe an interesting example. I grew up around smart woman and girls. From observation, I “knew” women were smarter than men. I was in college before I heard that some thought that woman were not suited for math. I couldn’t even process that. But people see patterns and extrapolate based on their observations and what they hear, and often start to believe something that does not exist.

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

#238

Post by kelnos »

protonimitate wrote: post #126
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…

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…

I feel the same way and try to say "software developer" when I can, though, same as you, my official job title has "engineer" in it.

Of course, I also see titles like "Customer Success Engineer" and "Technical Support Engineer", which are just as, if not more, ridiculous.

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

#239

Post by sn41 »

In the Indian context, what matters today is not _what_ the degree is, but _where_ the degree is from.

Some historical perspective as I recall it: even as late as the late 1990s, there were very few engineering colleges in India, and a B.E. or B.Tech was a prestigious degree to have. For example, Uttar Pradesh, which is a state that has about the population of the entire US, had 5 or 6 state engineering colleges (+ IIT Kanpur + Univ. of Roorkee + Banaras Hindu Univ, which were national level institutions).

The AICTE which controls technical education in India, mandated that no CS department should take more than 65 students in a year.

I think what changed was Y2K. I suspect under pressure from NASSCOM, (led by the charismatic Dewang Mehta [1]), B.Tech in CSE got doubled in number by creating a second department called I.T. thus working around existing norms. In the 5 years following, engineering education itself got "liberalized" by allowing a large number of private for-profit colleges.

The impression was that they will become places like Harvard and MIT, just because private is better than public sector. Many of these colleges still do not want to employ qualified teaching staff - the faculty are mostly people with just a B.Tech degree from similar colleges, who did not get a job in the tech sector, hence are willing to pay for dirt pay, and under draconian corporate-style management.

The situation is true to this day.

An inevitable result has been the deluge of people ill-trained, but holding a degree, tarnishing the reputation of Indian engineering education.

TLDR: 20 years ago, there were very few engineering colleges in India, the degree was prized, and the graduates were kind-of well-trained. Then there was a huge and unregulated explosion in graduates from for-profit colleges. Today, the graduates who are assured of good jobs and whose degrees hold value, are still those from the pre-1990s engineering colleges.

Doctors have resisted a similar dilution of norms. But recently India achieved a significant "number" - one can only hope that the doctors are better off than the engineers. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewang_Mehta

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6259525/

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

#240

Post by onemoresoop »

ekianjo wrote: post #235
BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed this as well, both as a worker and an interviewer. The number of unqualified people of Indian ethnicity that inundate job applications is staggering, and some perform embarrassingly bad in the interview. That said some of my favorite people to work with (smart, easy to work with) are Indian. It's really a shame that the issues affect perception of everybody. It's a good reminder to me not to judge a bo…

> That said some of my favorite people to work with (smart, easy to work with) are Indian. It's really a shame that the issues affect perception of everybody. It's a good reminder to me not to judge a book by it's cover, metaphorically speaking. I don't even know why race or color would even matter when it comes to considering one's capability to do some engineering job. At the end of the day just work with whoever c…

Maybe it’s not the race but the culture that makes working with them a pleasant experience. And they are also good engineers. From my experience with working with indian engineers they are very agreeable and polite people. Of course it’s a big generality and they have flaws like everybody else
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