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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

#241

Post by chillacy »

garganzol wrote: post #216
Priem19 wrote: post #127

3 Idiots is a remarkably inspirational Bollywood movie depicting the problem; one of my all-time favorites. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/3_idiots

"3 Idiots" is just a name of the movie. Just have started to watch it and it looks pretty relevant to the discussion, so far. I presume that downvotes to your comment are unwarranted. I have a question to Hindi speakers: they say a word that sounds like "futur" meaning literally "future". Is that a borrowed word? Or is it something native to Hindi? I am quite astonished that I can grasp a bit of it. The language kind…

I don't know the specific etymology of that word, and I do recall that there is a lot of english in bollywood films, but the linguistically the languages are actually related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

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

#242

Post by carrolldunham »

The article and the thread are horribly mixing at least three different things under the word Engineer. Actual Engineer degrees B. Eng., 'programmers' which I guess could be B. Software Eng. and something called IT Engineer which I presume is a sort of two year network admin thing. No wonder there's so much confusion about the value of things and people being surprised not to have the status they expected when the person telling you you need to be an engineer meant a substation designer and you thought it meant tech support.

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

#243

Post by sn41 »

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…

There is a crisp answer: the disparity in pay between the tech sector and teaching jobs. When you get 3-4 times the pay in a software job, only the desperate and the dedicated opt for teaching. That is a recipe for disaster. Dedicated teachers might demand more pay, so it is mostly people who can't find a tech job for the moment, and are desperately unhappy to teach, and ready to flee as soon as they get a software developer position.

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

#244

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> For decades, the Indian society has tried to use engineering (along with law, medicine and IAS) as a template to success.

Isn't this the case everywhere? Even in developed countries education has become the default path to a successful life. Medicine and law are extremely competitive fields because they have a reputation for guaranteed success. There aren't many opportunities available for people without qualifications.

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

#245

Post by gentleman11 »

carrolldunham wrote: post #242

The article and the thread are horribly mixing at least three different things under the word Engineer. Actual Engineer degrees B. Eng., 'programmers' which I guess could be B. Software Eng. and something called IT Engineer which I presume is a sort of two year network admin thing. No wonder there's so much confusion about the value of things and people being surprised not to have the status they expected when the pe…

In Canada, the term “engineer” is protected, but in most places the term is used loosely. Eg, in the USA, if you email Unity about a licensing question, you get a response from a “customer service engineer”

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

#247

Post by joshvm »

mattkrause wrote: post #152
mywittyname wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of CS programs in the US are accredited by ABET [1] (our professional engineering standards board) and graduates from said programs are eligible to take the PE exam. I call myself an engineer and is anyone has a problem with that, I just point out that I graduated from an engineering college and am eligible to become a PE, and will, should the world ever decide that's an important credential for building softwar…

That list has some rather notable omissions. Stanford isn’t on there, nor is CMU, nor any of the Ivies besides UPenn. This frustrates me because ABET degrees are required for a bunch of government jobs (and the patent bar). While it might make sense for certain fields, it’s silly to gate CS jobs on a credential that the field evidentially doesn’t take seriously.

Accreditation is weird. I lived with some engineers at university and they had a huge range of interesting courses they could choose. In physics we had mostly core modules and a smattering of electives.

I asked whether they could take the courses they liked (eg mix a bit of civil, mechanical and electrical) and they said in theory they could, in practice nobody does because your degree wouldn't be accredited. And no accredited degree, no job in engineering. I think for civil it made a bigger difference than the others.

I always thought that was quite sad, since the mathematicians did whatever the hell they wanted between maths, engineering, CS and physics and still ended up with a maths degree.

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

#248

Post by refurb »

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?

I think it's the absoluteness of his statement. He basically said there are no Indians who got their role through merit.

That seems extreme.

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

#249

Post by the_pwner224 »

throwawayengda wrote: post #80

> 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. The "study" is by 'Aspiring Minds' - an Indian company that sells buggy web-based pre-interview filtering tests as a service. It is in Aspiring Minds interest to portray Indian graduates as incompetent to make Indian employers buy their pre-interview fi…

> But today I'm a full-stack developer in Denmark.

Would you mind sharing more details about this? Were your recruited or did you seek out overseas employment?

I'm Indian but in the US since a young age; I'll be finishing my CS education next year and would like to leave this country.

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

#250

Post by downerending »

sn41 wrote: post #243
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…

There is a crisp answer: the disparity in pay between the tech sector and teaching jobs. When you get 3-4 times the pay in a software job, only the desperate and the dedicated opt for teaching. That is a recipe for disaster. Dedicated teachers might demand more pay, so it is mostly people who can't find a tech job for the moment, and are desperately unhappy to teach, and ready to flee as soon as they get a software d…

Put another way, why is this problem worse in India than it is in the US? Those factors would seem to apply more-or-less equally in both places.
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