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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

#301

Post by mikorym »

umvi wrote: post #40
mikorym wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer: Someone qualified with a B Eng or equivalent. In some countries this requires a masters level as well. Programmer: A person who writes computer programs. I would personally also imply that the programs are typically not deployment of other programs, but this is my own view and not a standard definition. (Actually all of these are not standard definitions. At least, not anymore.) Developer: A web developer;…

"hacker"/"cracker" are terms only used/understood with nuance in the tech community. For the non-tech community: hacker = person committing computer crimes (black hat) cracker = a tasty snack (or, if you are in the American South, a contemptuous term for a white person) tinkerer = someone who tinkers around with stuff (what tech community traditionally called hacker as in hacker news)

The top two are wrong.

The concrete definitions are:

Hacker: A programmer; someone who embodies the spirit of the programmer's way of thinking

Cracker: A programmer that commits crimes by illegally breaking in to systems.

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

#302

Post by mikorym »

fingerlocks wrote: post #55
mikorym wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer: Someone qualified with a B Eng or equivalent. In some countries this requires a masters level as well. Programmer: A person who writes computer programs. I would personally also imply that the programs are typically not deployment of other programs, but this is my own view and not a standard definition. (Actually all of these are not standard definitions. At least, not anymore.) Developer: A web developer;…

A programmer writes programs, but a developer writes applications? Really odd line to draw in the sand. If I build an iOS app that streams video to a webpage, am I developer or a programmer?

A developer is a type of programmer.

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

#303

Post by eps »

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 there is a clear correlation between an amount of blatant lies in an average resume and the country of origin.

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

#305

Post by watwut »

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.

That could not have possibly be born out of observing engineers ...

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

#306

Post by mewpmewp2 »

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.

All in all no-one is beyond bias. Most of interview judgment comes from system 1 thinking. Meaning you feel some way about the candidate. And you only use system 2 to justify what you are feeling. So you use system 2 for cherry picking instead of determining whether candidate is good or not.

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

#307

Post by taurath »

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…

If you want to have good objective judgement you must remove or at least be aware of your biases as much as possible.

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

#308

Post by Causality1 »

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…

Indeed. Categorization is how the brain works. On purpose or not, if you have two people with the same resume your initial impression of "Steve Smith" is better than your initial impression of "Bubba-Joe Willum Jr."

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

#309

Post by Taniwha »

kls wrote: post #182
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…

> I was with you until the "cast (sic) system" You will have to take this as second hand information as I am not familiar with the relics of the cast system. But as he relayed it to me. When you go on a date with a girl that would be considered to be in a higher social status than yourself, the first thing the father will ask is how many people do you manage. Being a manager seems to provide some mobility in the reli…

I think he was suggesting that the word you were looking for was "caste"

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

#310

Post by battery_cowboy »

joelbluminator wrote: post #290
outworlder wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minu…

well, so if requirements were easier back then you can't really say things got easier. The stack got harder. you used to be able to get by with asp.net / php and that's it. Yes, you would throw files into ftp and there weren't any stackoverflow or frameworks. But still, the amount of knowledge you needed to keep up was way less than what we have today. My point: 20 years ago you could learn php and make good money. N…

You can still do simple stuff, it's not hard: just don't use the complex garbage :)

I wrote a web app the other day with vanilla Python, it doesn't do much (it's a tasks app for my wife and I), but it does it's job, and in one file even! It doesn't use fancy front end stuff, just HTML template strings and some links that send CRUD ops to the server, then that saves the data in a big text file. It uses CSS to make it look nice.

I bet I could get a hundred people using it without edits, and it took a few hours. With a proper database and server, it would support thousands easily.

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