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

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

#321

Post by duskwuff » Wed, May 13, 2020, 7:56 AM UTC

mesaframe wrote: post #287

duskwuff wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Another significant element I'd point to is outdated curricula.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.

I don't think the curriculum is outdated. Those are tools you are talking about.

They go hand in hand. A C++ IDE from the mid-1990s implements C++ as it existed in the mid-1990s -- which is a rather different language from that which exists today. No STL, for instance. Without access to modern features of the language, it's inevitable that the course won't end up teaching those features.

Moreover -- the use of a 25-year-old IDE is symptomatic of a more general problem in Indian CS (and probably other) curricula. Many instructors are teaching to a syllabus which was set in stone many years ago. If you look at some of the links I posted in a sibling thread or explore other universities' posted materials, you'll probably see signs of this -- Java courses which still cover applet development is another common one, for instance.

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

#322

Post by igorkraw » Wed, May 13, 2020, 8:00 AM UTC

siscia wrote: post #311

rusticpenn wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is pretty welcoming. There is a huge shortage of software engineers (of acceptable quality) here.

Well it is also true that wage are lower than in the US. So if you are young without many families bonds makes a lot of sense to seek employment oversea. If Europe started to pay better money, then there would not be such lack of engineers.

Gonna defend Europe a bit more here, I'd wager there are soft benefits which aren't as easily appreciated as cash. On Europe you make less, but you also get out of the meat grinder much earlier. If you are a median person (which most likely, we all are), then your expected value will be about the same, at most a bit lower cash wise than in the US. But even that is debatable, in most of (western) Europe we don't treat active shooters as a matter of normal life, the cities are made for humans not cars and employee rights are a thing. And looking at the worst case, Europe wins: a medical emergency will not bankrupt you, if you call the cops they won't shoot you etc. And on a political level, having more than 2 parties and a wider overton window is quote nice.

If you think of yourself as a human and social being, not a shark or worker bee, I think Europe isn't too bad. But I recognize that dollar amounts and funding for new ventures is still in the US, or China nowadays. And all the stuff I cited are things at odds with the pure capitalist system some people seem to want to live in, and so might not actually be desirable for all

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

#323

Post by Bost » Wed, May 13, 2020, 8:01 AM UTC

siscia wrote: post #311

rusticpenn wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is pretty welcoming. There is a huge shortage of software engineers (of acceptable quality) here.

Well it is also true that wage are lower than in the US. So if you are young without many families bonds makes a lot of sense to seek employment oversea. If Europe started to pay better money, then there would not be such lack of engineers.

Don't forget in Europe you have between 25 - 30 holidays guaranteed, better health care - people live longer here, much much cheaper education (I had it for free.), better public transportation... And it's also closer to Asia.

Also there's definitely less extremes around. Less of the bad stuff. Less violence, less criminality, less guns, less social disparity, less racism etc. On the whole I think life is better over here.

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

#324

Post by alkonaut » Wed, May 13, 2020, 8:23 AM UTC

WkndTriathlete wrote: post #104

tpmx wrote: post #56

Five years ago I was working at a software company in Europe that was willing to accept hires from anywhere, globally. We managed to hire about one smart person a month, out of a torrent of perhaps 1000 applicants per month. The vast majority (like 85%) of the applicants were from India and Pakistan. And out of those, 95% used the exact same resume/personal letter layout and content, sometimes down to the exact same…

Resume scanning/filtering is a real problem. Generally I start classifying resumes into two piles: those that put everything they know on their resume, and those that include a handful of relevant, interesting pieces of knowledge with a few lines of job experience to back those up. When "everything they know" fits on four pages, in my experience they aren't worth interviewing. When "interesting pieces of knowledge" m…

Having an HR department filter resumes for qualification before the relevant manager/team sounds like an absolute disaster. If I heard that happened at the company I was at, I'd probably pack up and leave because I wouldn't want to work in a place where leadership doesn't realize how obviously stupid that is.

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

#325

Post by vinay427 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

knolax wrote: post #26

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…

The article is about the education of engineers in the country of India. The vast majority of Indians working in engineering in the US were born and raised in the US, or at the very least educated here. Ethnically Indian people in the US are disproportionately represented in the upper levels of tech. Anybody who can't recognize this has only themselves to blame.

Which part of the parent comment are you responding to? I'm afraid I don't see how your comment follows.

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

#326

Post by vinay427 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

Bost wrote: post #323

siscia wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is also true that wage are lower than in the US. So if you are young without many families bonds makes a lot of sense to seek employment oversea. If Europe started to pay better money, then there would not be such lack of engineers.

Don't forget in Europe you have between 25 - 30 holidays guaranteed, better health care - people live longer here, much much cheaper education (I had it for free.), better public transportation... And it's also closer to Asia. Also there's definitely less extremes around. Less of the bad stuff. Less violence, less criminality, less guns, less social disparity, less racism etc. On the whole I think life is better over…

> less racism

I think this one is much more contentious than the others. The racism certainly takes more latent forms, so it's perhaps less extreme in that sense, but "less racism" to me implies lower in rate of incidence which I'm not sure is true. It probably is true in at least a few European countries compared to the US.

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

#327

Post by rusticpenn » Wed, May 13, 2020, 10:42 AM UTC

siscia wrote: post #311

rusticpenn wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is pretty welcoming. There is a huge shortage of software engineers (of acceptable quality) here.

Well it is also true that wage are lower than in the US. So if you are young without many families bonds makes a lot of sense to seek employment oversea. If Europe started to pay better money, then there would not be such lack of engineers.

The wages are indeed much lower than in US, atleast for me. However, I work in a company with a proper labour Union (IG Metal). I have 36 hours working time, any overtime will be paid 30% more than normal. I have extremely good health insurance. My kids get free education all the way to university ( and are part of my insurance until 24). The retirement is linked to the government, not the company. 30 days of compulsory holidays. Sick leaves are not counted.

With all this calculated, the salary sort of equalizes itself.

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

#328

Post by rusticpenn » Wed, May 13, 2020, 10:44 AM UTC

vinay427 wrote: post #326

Bost wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget in Europe you have between 25 - 30 holidays guaranteed, better health care - people live longer here, much much cheaper education (I had it for free.), better public transportation... And it's also closer to Asia. Also there's definitely less extremes around. Less of the bad stuff. Less violence, less criminality, less guns, less social disparity, less racism etc. On the whole I think life is better over…

> less racism I think this one is much more contentious than the others. The racism certainly takes more latent forms, so it's perhaps less extreme in that sense, but "less racism" to me implies lower in rate of incidence which I'm not sure is true. It probably is true in at least a few European countries compared to the US.

There is definitely a glass ceiling for immigrants/expats in many companies in Europe.

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

#329

Post by andarleen » Wed, May 13, 2020, 10:53 AM UTC

Strangely enough east european outsourcing is skyrocketing, so demand is out there. Most companies coming here complain about their negative experience with outsourcing to India, and are willing to pay far more than outsourcing there, albeit still less than in western europe. So the issue is not necessarily numbers, but the quality of those numbers. Indian programmers are great, this is honest feedback based on what i heard.

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

#330

Post by burntoutfire » Wed, May 13, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

macromagnon wrote: post #218

burntoutfire wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also have a problem with calling developers engineers. I held this point of view for a long time but, after lurking at r/engineering, I've learned that their jobs are (depressingly) similar to ours. I.e. it's almost never deriving things from first principles, but rather trying to quickly bolt together a solution out of pieces looked up at different vendors' catalogs. Most engineers don't even remember the basic…

Sounds like your job could use devops with some deployment stack. I know the basics of chef/ansible etc but I much prefer traditional dev.

We have top-notch devops stack, but "thanks" to relying on microservices, a lot of changes in software require changing something in the devops part as well, which takes much longer than writing the software change.