I am currently pursuing a CS Degree in one of the top schools of India (top 0.01 percentile) and I also have some friends in Tier 3 colleges. CS education is only good in top 15 colleges in the country i.e. around 10k CS graduates every year. The rest 50k - 100k graduates are of much lower aptitude. The reason for this is that learning in Indian colleges is mostly peer learning and the top students all end up in the top colleges.
The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
331–340 of 393 posts
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#332Earlier 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.
Engineers tend to be more empirical and less idealistic, not to mention not uncommonly somewhat autistic.
They are more likely than the average bear to apply Bayesian probability, which comes alarmingly close to confirming stereotypes in most cases.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#333Earlier 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…
Which manifests itself with Indians in the West hiring other Indians exclusively. There are just so many negatives with Indian migrants that they should be more heavily restricted from working in the West.
(Anecdotal counterevidence:) Founder of Omio, Naren Shaam, has a very diverse company.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#334I interviewed some "Masters" level students from India. They couldn't do FizzBuzz.
if(i % 3)
...
else if(i % 5)
...Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities aren't allowed to have racial quotas in the US. They are allowed have affirmative action that is implemented in a fuzzy non-numerical way, but they can't just say "we will admit X students of Y race".
They aren't allowed to have racial quotas anymore , but it was commonly done before the 2003 supreme court ruling that ended the practice.
Racial quotas haven't been allowed since 1978[1]. The 2003 case[2] was about a points-based system, not about racial quotas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v...
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#336Earlier 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.
I would think that engineers would also respect that cognitive operations have a cost just like computer operations.
If a cognitive bias lets you arrive at a conclusion 10 times faster and is right lets say 90 percent of the time, is that strictly worse than being super fair and objective as the thinking pattern you employ? I think if you had a process at your job that is 10 times faster and was what right 99.9 percent of the time you would absolutely be for using that process over the one that reaches a 100 percent accuracy rate but was vastly slower for anything that isn't fatal to your career.
Large parts of society seem to reward thinking fast and making quick decisions, and would prefer a quick decision even if its wrong. We have 2 pressures here. Making the decision quickly, and then making the "correct" decision. Your circumstances will determine which is correct at the time. But saying to always stick to one and avoid the other doesn't seem super rational to me.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#337Just want to make 3 quick points:
1/ Society should provide the courses that people want to study. Not everyone wins the lottery when they are young. So to to limit engineering to X number of slots and lock the rest of society out of engineering degrees. That's wrong. That's not freedom. And that's why bootcamps and diploma serve important roles. They give people a choice. As for the quality of graduates, that's up to the filtering process of companies.
2/ Computer science is far too broad and should obviously be broken up. Yet it hasn't. People focus on different things. Some focus on security, on web dev, on robotics, on machine learning. You can't throw a frontend guy into the backend and 1 month later call him "a terrible coder". That's unfair yet it happens.
3/ Programming is clearly on the path to becoming ubiquitous. My prediction is that the trend will move towards having more domain knowledge. So yes, the degree is becoming useless because just being a programmer isn't going to be enough anymore in the future.
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#338Earlier 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…
There have been studies on the value-add of diversity in the workforce. TL;DR: research "suggests that diverse work environments boost profitability, culture, and public perception.[1]"
1: https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/careers/how-does-workplace...
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, developer and programmer are the same. Engineer implies a higher level of skill WRT establishing and following processes designed to minimize risk. A software engineer, like their mechanical or civil equivalents, has a strong sense of duty WRT building things that are useful, safe, reproducible, etc. No doubt the line is gray. But, your stereotypical web app developer (failing fast while chasing a unicorn) is no…
So, whom will you exactly call an engineer? A person with degree or a person with a specific set of skills? If skills, then can you enumerate few of them?
Generally, any licensed engineer (PE or non-US equivalent) would be an engineer. That usually means a proof of skills via professional exam. Somebody could have an engineering degree, but not be a practicing engineer at all.
Of course, there is no PE for software. So, within our industry, it's a lot more squishy. There's a bit of "I know it when I see it" here...
If you're building complex systems with an eye for reliability and/or safety, you might be an engineer.
If you're just building a business/consumer app, using infrastructure and tooling that somebody else built and maintains, you might not be an engineer.
With all that said, as a hiring manager, I'm not going to be hung up on what title you held at a previous job, as long as you appear capable of doing the job now. And my career has mostly been on the "just a developer" side of the line - there's nothing wrong with that. I'm simply not building software that has massive negative repercussions if I get it wrong (beyond impact on my employer's bottom line).
Re: The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer the term "software engineer" for a reason I haven't seen yet in this thread: clarity when speaking to people in other industries. Among many of the people I talk to on a regular basis, if I told them I was a "developer" they would assume that I was a real estate developer. If I told them I was a "programmer" it would be a little clearer, but before I moved into software I worked in the events industry for a…
I think part of the discomfort is that there is no exam that software engineers have to pass (other than a few states) unlike real engineering professions. I suspect and I suspect many others suspect that a large percentage would not actually be able pass a meaningful exam. However passing such an exam would probably only be partly correlated to success in the field. Part of this is because exams are imperfect, part…
The funny thing is, to be a professional engineer in Canada, the exam you take is more of an ethics and law exam rather than a skills exam. You prove that you've worked for four years or more under a P.Eng and do that exam and you've got your cert.