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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

#371

Post by JAlexoid »

throwawayengda wrote: post #80

> 3,500 engineering schools across the country, and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in software engineering, according to one study. The "study" is by 'Aspiring Minds' - an Indian company that sells buggy web-based pre-interview filtering tests as a service. It is in Aspiring Minds interest to portray Indian graduates as incompetent to make Indian employers buy their pre-interview fi…

"It is in Aspiring Minds interest to portray Indian graduates as incompetent to make Indian employers buy their pre-interview filtering services."

They really don't need to do anything. Indian graduates, in my experience, have done everything to screw up quality standings of Indian IT education.

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

#372

Post by JAlexoid »

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.

Cost of living is also considerably lower than US. Your employment guarantees are also considerably higher. Let's also not forget that graduates from European schools don't come out with 100k of student debt.

Then... If you really want to make a lot of money, there are options to do so in Europe as well. Though US should just open the floodgates for CS talent and force the rest of the world to catch up.

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

#373

Post by JAlexoid »

plandis wrote: post #354
igorkraw wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I expected this kind of lazy analysis to appear on Reddit but not on Hacker News. > 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. In my experience wage offers were significantly lower in Europe when I was potentially looking about a year ago. levels.fyi seems to be pretty in line with my pay experience in the…

If you completely ignore the cost of living - yes, San Francisco offers way more.

Practically - the compensation offered is on par with your expenses, between US and Europe. Some places in Europe are better than others, but same goes for US.

Booking.com in Amsterdam offered me as much as I get in NYC right now.

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

#374

Post by JAlexoid »

maddax wrote: post #360
plandis wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expected this kind of lazy analysis to appear on Reddit but not on Hacker News. > 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. In my experience wage offers were significantly lower in Europe when I was potentially looking about a year ago. levels.fyi seems to be pretty in line with my pay experience in the…

Wow, just wow! Unfortunately I did expect your response from the HN crowd. You and I have very different ways of looking at the world. The entitlement and privilege among software engineers in the US to have crazy high salaries and "perks" such as health insurance is exactly the reason why I will never move there. I think your last statement sums up the situation very well, but it baffles me how any decent human bein…

I just find that Americans have little understanding on how things run in Europe. But same goes the other way around.

If you want to earn a lot - you go contracting in Europe. I used to save about half of my income when contracting 6 years ago in London. My rate was 470 GBP for 220 days out of the year. My expenses were taxes and 700GBP in rent. I saved 60k after tax... and I used to fly business class to Thailand, NYC and Mexico.

My income is technically higher, but expenses are through the roof. You sneeze here and it's $20 gone.

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

#375

Post by int_19h »

maddax wrote: post #360
plandis wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expected this kind of lazy analysis to appear on Reddit but not on Hacker News. > 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. In my experience wage offers were significantly lower in Europe when I was potentially looking about a year ago. levels.fyi seems to be pretty in line with my pay experience in the…

Wow, just wow! Unfortunately I did expect your response from the HN crowd. You and I have very different ways of looking at the world. The entitlement and privilege among software engineers in the US to have crazy high salaries and "perks" such as health insurance is exactly the reason why I will never move there. I think your last statement sums up the situation very well, but it baffles me how any decent human bein…

> did you know that insanely high salaries of a select few is one of the reasons that directly or indirectly leads to income and wealth inequalities in the world, one of the biggest problems of our generation?

Yes, but it's not the engineers and other well-paid workers that are the problem. They are still workers - they get paid for wealth produced. It's the insanely high incomes - which are mostly not salaries, BTW, but capital gains - of the top management and owners where all the money (that would otherwise have stayed in the pockets of those who actually earned it) goes.

Europe patches it up by taxing the entire top half of the scale more, and redistributing it to the bottom half - but it's still a hack, and it still has substantial wealth inequality as a result.

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

#376

Post by int_19h »

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…

The irony in this is that it's yet another manifestation of the American Exceptionalism myth, merely applied with the opposite sign.

There's other stuff like that, too. For example, many Americans - especially progressive left politically, but plenty on the right as well - appear to believe that single payer is the norm in the developed world, and US is unique in deviating from that recipe for universal healthcare, even when discussing other options. When you tell them that one can opt to go with fully private insurance in Germany, or that Switzerland runs on something like ACA (much better done, obviously - but the same basic principle), it just doesn't compute.

Or gun control: some lefties literally refuse to believe that civilians can own an AR-15 in Germany, or a silencer in UK, or carry a handgun concealed in Czechia, without much trouble.

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

#377

Post by int_19h »

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…

Society exists to serve people, not businesses. Businesses are a tool to that end, so business purposes are only relevant when they don't run counter to human needs or cause human suffering.

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

#378

Post by int_19h »

stormdennis wrote: post #293
couchcombinator wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just matched all engineers to a pattern you observed.

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

In fact, I would argue that engineers tend to be people with stronger pattern matching capabilities, because that's exactly how most engineering problems are solved.

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

#379

Post by int_19h »

dmode wrote: post #142
andrewflnr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

In this case, the caste system based admission is equivalent to affirmative action in US universities

The proportions would be different. Minorities in US are, well, minorities - but if Wikipedia is to be believed, the category that is targeted for affirmative action in India constitutes about 40% of the entire population.

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

#380

Post by int_19h »

battery_cowboy wrote: post #105
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…

The new "software engineer" is just a software assembly line worker. I guess the same goes for other engineers. I would imagine the quality of software engineer will get worse over time as it becomes easier to assemble software from an assortment of black boxes.

An assembly line worker just puts parts together - they don't understand why those particular parts have to go together in that particular way to achieve the desired result. Engineer is the person who does.

And engineers have always been assembling boxes together. At first those were the most basic components, like levers. Then we figured out about standardized parts and interfaces, and components got a lot less basic. But, fundamentally, what's the difference between an engineer fitting two cogs together, and an engineer fitting two pieces of electronics?

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