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

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

#291

Post by cocoland » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

kumarm wrote: post #157

When I joined Engineering in India (1994), my state had 2000 engineering seats. 120K people wrote the entrance test for the 2K seats. Today the same state has about 250K seats. Anyone who writes the entrance test can get into some college or other. Has the quality gone down? I would think so. But I definitely think qualified students is definitely greater than 2k even when I went to college. I would rather prefer ove…

TLDR: The passion and rigor for study/education died and it shows

Being from the same decade , could not agree more. It was really selection through fire (especially if you were in general category of applicants) . Not all set their sights on this degree , the later part of the decade set about this whole boom of software engineers (Y2K , eCommerce etc.)

Those who didn't get in , then got into roles of lecturers in these colleges that mushroomed. The quality started going down in GP , 1/2 cooked engineers produced 1/4 cooked ones and this went on.

I think what is to blame as well was the fact that the path was all too easy and clear , finish engineering , pass through some quant tests , 3 month bootcamp and lo you have your job (or in some variant of this). Attitudes changed toward this easy life.

Compared to this other professions like Charted Accountants (CPA equivalent) , Actuaries (who i think are the best data scientists around) or Doctors where there is a lot more work in the first decade of one's career post undergrad , engineering was a cake walk.

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

#292

Post by devcpp » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:54 AM UTC

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…

If you noticed that people with a pimple on the left cheek performed significantly worse in interviews and you had limited time to review candidates, wouldn't you apply more scrutiny to resumes of this type of people? Well, this case is even stronger because there is an intuition at to why people of certain races are more likely to be worse engineers.

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

#293

Post by stormdennis » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:01 AM UTC

couchcombinator wrote: post #288

ekianjo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 just matched all engineers to a pattern you observed.

That's brilliant! (as is the observation that humans are naturally pattern matchers)

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

#294

Post by reshie » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:02 AM UTC

monadic2 wrote: post #268

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…

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

true but its like saying African as a ethnicity even African American is pointing to both. there is original regionality to ethnics so to speak. perhaps our terms are at fault here but is still accepted and not negative in a racial context.

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

#295

Post by raverbashing » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

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…

I've realized this as well. It's probably an "overcorrection" of the perceived average (racially biased) image of a people (which guess what, ends up being prejudiced as well).

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

#296

Post by raverbashing » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:16 AM 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.

> Even if it's informal, as an American it blows my mind that that's still a thing.

In past times (and by that I mean XX century - before WWII usually) anti-semitism was pretty harsh, and official. Even on university admissions in the US.

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

#297

Post by core-questions » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:20 AM UTC

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…

> We have to strive to eliminate or reduce conscience and subconscious biases to ensure fairness.

Why? Does fairness serve a business purpose? Are businesses held to be fair to their employees in other circumstances?

What is fair? Perfect proportional representation of the host population? Within what limits? Can we make a heuristic for what's more fair? Should that drive hiring decisions more than other factors?

The way I've come to see it, so-called fair hiring practices are purely a social signal that companies are required, by the market, to hold - and only in the sense that they need to NOT appear to NOT be fair, in terms of bad press.

Other than that, companies don't seem to have any actual obligation to be fair, unless held accountable by some other mechanism (a union, the court of public opinion, government regulations, etc). They will only do so as far as it provides a favourable outlook for the company, and not further. When sweatshop-like conditions are profitable and the attention of the public is elsewhere, for instance, sweatshops you will get. It doesn't matter much if every race is slaving away in there together side by side if they're still slaving away.

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

#298

Post by pjmlp » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:25 AM 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…

Depends where one comes from.

I have no issue calling myself engineer, because I have a degree in Informatics Engineering and in Portugal it is a professional title validated by the Engineers Organization and all universities must have a green light to offer such degrees.

What I have an issue with, is developers feeling like calling themselves "engineer" after a six months bootcamp, or not having any kind of engineering degree to start with.

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

#299

Post by barbegal » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:28 AM UTC

in_cahoots wrote: post #270

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 abili…

And I don't consider being able to "write compilable code" as a good metric for programming ability. You can be a great programmer in many different ways: in optimising for performance, in optimising for testability, in increasing readability or in reducing the time taken to produce working code. Most people I know really heavily on an IDE to help them write compilable code because they want to use their brain power on solving issues the IDE can't help you with.

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

#300

Post by iguy » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:33 AM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #297

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…

> We have to strive to eliminate or reduce conscience and subconscious biases to ensure fairness. Why? Does fairness serve a business purpose? Are businesses held to be fair to their employees in other circumstances? What is fair? Perfect proportional representation of the host population? Within what limits? Can we make a heuristic for what's more fair? Should that drive hiring decisions more than other factors? The…

Another reading of "We have to strive" is simply that, if we do wish to reduce various biases, it is something we must do consciously. That doing so runs against what's easy, our natural inclination is to extrapolate and generalize.

Deciding what fair means is indeed hard. But most would today agree (I think) that judging someone to be incompetent based on the reputation of those of the same ethnicity is unfair.