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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

#381

Post by JAlexoid »

mytherin wrote: post #365
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.

While the salaries are indeed lower, you should take into account that in the US people almost always report their salary before tax, whereas in Europe salaries are almost always reported after taxes. An engineer earning 100K in Europe will be listed as earning 60~65K, whereas in the US that engineer would be listed as earning 100K, despite earning the exact same wage.

Not necessarily.

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

#382

Post by JAlexoid »

int_19h wrote: post #376
filoleg wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, e…

I mean... They have serious misunderstanding how Europe works and how the "almighty" US can come in 17th place in freedom according to pretty much every single rating.

PS: US doesn't have universal healthcare, but universal healthcare doesn't imply that government must provide the services.

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

#383

Post by JAlexoid »

triceratops wrote: post #286
stubish wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consultants, lawyers, physicians, engineers, architects, designers, board members... lots of occupations with high status and/or pay without managing people. The 'how many people' you manage metric is just a heuristic, and maybe believed by people stuck in the middle of business hierarchies. Agree on 'Staff' and 'Senior staff'... military terms that never caught on generally. Not sure why they have started being adop…

I'll go by them in order: > Consultants A term so generic as to be almost meaningless. It can apply to an Agile coach, an Ivy League fresh grad billed at $1200/hr by McKinsey et al, or a programmer with an LLC and some marketing skills. These all vary widely in prestige. > lawyers Ditto. No one is impressed by a poor ambulance chaser or public defender. Judges, senior partners at big law firms, senior corporate couns…

Consultants - the term has been diluted. But if you say that you're a consultant, people's imagination takes over. There's a reason why so many people are consultants. It's because generally speaking it's a term that projects high value merit.

Layers - people respect lawyers?

Engineers - we generally have very low respectability, among laypeople.

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

#384

Post by JAlexoid »

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…

This has racial connotation only because India is mostly populated by brown people. Other than Pakistan and Bangladesh - no other place has a clear majority of what you would call brown people.

That said - Indian cultural quirks definitely play a role in how majority is raised and how they operate. Economic situation and a very clear way to get a well paying job makes people try to get into these fields. IT doesn't have an insane filter like medicine, which is another way to earn a lot in India. Thus you get a lot of people that try to get around the system.

I had two cases happen in India to demonstrate this:

One of developers lied about their qualifications for the previous 3 years. He was supposed to be working for Oracle for 3 years, but we found out that he worked at multiple companies for 3 months at time.

The other one was one of three brothers, but only one of them was somewhat competent and would do the interviews... while the other brothers would actually try to show up for work.

I could not make up this crap.

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

#385

Post by JAlexoid »

core-questions wrote: post #366
iguy wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if we do wish to reduce various biases Again, though, the desire to do this is based entirely on marketing, and not on merit. > judging someone to be incompetent based on the reputation of those of the same ethnicity is unfair Sure, but mandatory hiring of people of particular ethnicities in order to boost some arbitrary "diversity quotient" (read: non-white quotient) is potentially just as unfair to other qualifie…

I work with exactly 0 black software engineers in NYC office.

I see it as a reflection upon America, rather than a reflection on my company.

The same company has black engineers in London.

When we seek new employees - we had 0 black applicants in NYC over the last 3 years. We have a small percentage in London.

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

#386

Post by JAlexoid »

core-questions wrote: post #367
red_admiral wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fair" can mean a lot of things. If you asked three people to define fairness, you'd get at least three definitions, and I can think of some definitions that would indeed have a business purpose; I can also think of some that wouldn't. An example of something that would serve a business purpose: widening the potential target market. Of course if your company is producing maternity wear then you probably don't want to…

There's no reason to assume that a diverse (read: non-white) group is required in order to market to a diverse audience. Plenty of 100% Chinese companies manage to market to everyone in America via Amazon etc. every day. Will there be some requirement or even some business advantage to them to hire diversely?

I can't see much practical value for diversity based on skin pigmentation intensity, in software engineering. (There's a good amount of research for gender diversity, though)

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

#387

Post by JAlexoid »

entha_saava wrote: post #361
eps wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am from India and I think it is because many people try to game the system instead of actually working hard. It is rooted deeply in the education system itself.

That's cultural, historic and economic reality that puts pressure.

I'm in US and despite US having 20%(?) black population, I'm yet to have a black American colleague in engineering.

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

#388

Post by dang »

IlyaMoroshkin wrote: post #313
justwalt wrote: post #109

Earlier 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.

We ban accounts that post like this. Please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#389

Post by int_19h »

JAlexoid wrote: post #382
int_19h wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, e…

I mean... They have serious misunderstanding how Europe works and how the "almighty" US can come in 17th place in freedom according to pretty much every single rating. PS: US doesn't have universal healthcare, but universal healthcare doesn't imply that government must provide the services.

Yes, I know. I meant the ongoing discussions about how it should look like when we do get it. A lot of M4A agitprop is built on that notion that it would be uniquely bad in comparison to other countries for US to go for anything other than single payer.

I get why this is, propaganda aside - the only developed country that borders US is Canada, so their health system is the one that Americans are most familiar with, and the one that's most often used as a prop in political debates here. And Canada is single payer...

But even that doesn't fully explain it. For example, all proponents of M4A in US want to implement it on the federal level. Canadian healthcare system was created bottom-up - started in one province due to popular demand, gradually adopted by others as it became obvious that the benefits vastly exceed any downsides, and eventually the feds stepped into the coordinating role, but provinces still retain the final say as they can always opt out of that federal system. So, why can't US do the same? For that matter, why shouldn't the states be able to decide for themselves whether they prefer the Canadian model, the German one, or the Swiss one - and then we can see which one works better here? I never got coherent answers to any of those questions.

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

#390

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

chrononaut wrote: post #174
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really naive enough to think that American standards are global standards? You should really get out of the country more, read books by non-American authors, and most especially -- befriend non-Americans.

This is pretty harsh criticism. People perceive the world in the form that they experienced it through life. There's probably very few people in the world who are familiar with every culture and the nuances with it. You should encourage people to learn more, not attempt to make them feel ashamed that they didn't know it already.

> you should encourage people to learn more

I think you stopped reading after the first sentence because encouragement is exactly what I did. And I stand by the comment about naïveté.

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