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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

#261

Post by ekianjo »

sethammons wrote: post #237
ekianjo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Because humans are pattern matchers

Agree, but then you would think that engineers (when it comes to working with other engineers) are a little more rational than the average folks and can go beyond superficial observations.

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

#262

Post by wyclif »

filoleg wrote: post #172
thaumasiotes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

From my personal observation, it seems to be because a lot of sheltered people who grew up in the US tend to assume that the US culture is the epitome of racism, divisiveness, and inequality that is unprecedented in the rest of the world. So, in their minds, it is very shocking that a racial minority immigrant said something negative about their own culture. Especially since it sounds even worse than their over-exagg…

There's another assumption going on too, which may explain another component of the shock. People educated in the USA and UK tend to assume that both education and work are based on meritocracy. So when a minority from another country points out this isn't the case, and perhaps even not the case anywhere by offering examples, it can be shocking to people who have spent their entire educational and career trajectory in 'the system' which presupposes meritocracy.

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

#263

Post by sabujp »

ineedasername wrote: post #225
sabujp wrote: post #222

It's only worthless if you don't practice. There are tons of programming jobs out there but don't expect to get hired if you can't do the simplest algorithms. Many people who earn CS bachelors in India have barely even touched computers. There were some in my Masters courses who were hopelessly lost. Then there are some who are topcoders and into competitve programming, practice and experience are what really matter.

What do they do in their CS curriculum if they're not actually programming?

they just do the math and theory, many classes have hundreds of students and neither the students nor the universities have the infrastructure to support computing for all the students. Not all students can afford a Rs35k (~$500) laptop (or cheaper) when that's the price of admission for the entire year.

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

#264

Post by Qu3tzal »

gentleman11 wrote: post #245
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”

Which probably means an regular engineer assigned to customer service, I don't think it is means that customer service is viewed as an engineering discipline.

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

#265

Post by kshacker »

duskwuff wrote: post #159
SmartestUnknown wrote: post #147

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…

> The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and very low incentives for someone to study well. Another significant element I'd point to is outdated curricula. By way of example, many Indian CS course materials still require students to use Turbo C++ -- an IDE from the mid-1990s which runs under DOS. Needless to say, what ends up being taught is hardly representative of modern practices.

Reference please...

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

#266

Post by nsonha »

ekianjo wrote: post #261
sethammons wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Because humans are pattern matchers Agree, but then you would think that engineers (when it comes to working with other engineers) are a little more rational than the average folks and can go beyond superficial observations.

> > Because humans are pattern matchers

> Agree, but then you would think that engineers (when it comes to working with other engineers) are a little more rational than the average folks and can go beyond superficial observations.

You are saying pattern matting is irrational? If one is to apply pattern matching in an absolutely rational way, they would not make abitrary judgements that some traits are/are not superficial. They should just take the fact as is, then make their hypothesis, then prove or disprove it then act upon the result.

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

#267

Post by splintercell »

ekianjo wrote: post #261
sethammons wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Because humans are pattern matchers Agree, but then you would think that engineers (when it comes to working with other engineers) are a little more rational than the average folks and can go beyond superficial observations.

But these are not 'superficial' observations. People of Indian ethnicity are more likely to be the product of (tier B) Indian educational system (which is based on Brahminical rote memorization), Indian culture (always say yes to your superior), Indian incentive structure ("how many people are you managing?").

The last job I worked at, more than 50% developers on the floor were Indian (like either fresh H1b or intra-company transfers), so I noticed that I would get 'lost' in the crowd. A non-Indian person will immediately notice other non-Indian person, and ignore me. It wasn't their fault because most Indians on my floor never bothered to say 'hi' or 'bless you' or even acknowledge anyone who wasn't Indian. But then, I'd also ignore other 'pattern breaking' Indians (until, like me, they made themselves stand out).

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

#268

Post by monadic2 »

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…

> Indian ethnicity

Small nit, this is a nationality, not an ethnicity.

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

#269

Post by hypesafe »

Indian universities outside of the top rung (IITs et al.) have been issuing worthless degrees for at least 3 decades. In my state during the 90s tech/outsourcing boom a lot of corrupt politicians realized that engineering education was a gold mine and opened degree factories all over the state. I graduated from a supposedly "reputable" university in 2004 and was basically unemployable on graduation.

Looking back here are a few memories of my college education experience that stand out:

* 1 computer "lab" with 15 PCs shared amongst 720 students. Only 1 PC had a dial-up internet connection that rarely worked.

* Majority of the courses taught by industry rejects who were unemployable.

* Hilariously we learnt standard nix command line tools (sed , awk, filesystem commands etc.) by writing the commands and their outputs using a pen and paper never once using a real terminal + shell because the college did not have a single nix machine.

* "Systems Programming" professor walks in the first day and declares she cannot code in C and 8086 assembly which the course mandated. She encouraged us to seek external tutoring (coaching classes as they are known in India) instead of relying on her.

* There was small cottage industry that sold finished projects to students - including source code, project reports, electronic circuitry where applicable. About 30% of the class bought these “projects” off the shelf.

Thankfully my family was able to send me to an American university for a graduate degree allowing me to have a shot at a tech career. Now having lived and worked in the Bay Area for 15 years I can say that quality of education at an average community college in the US is far superior to the tier-2 / tier-3 universities in India.

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

#270

Post by in_cahoots »

Animats wrote: post #259

The article draws mostly from this piece from a company that apparently tests prospective employees.[1] 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. However, if we consider only those candidates who can write correct code with few errors, the gap between C…

The last sentence of this paragraph makes me distrust the whole analysis. Mixing percentages with population-dependent numbers makes no sense. And even if that did make sense, the conclusion is exactly backwards. If fewer people go into engineering you would expect the few people who do make it to be of higher caliber. Obviously as you widen your pool you will regress to something closer to the mean programming ability.
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