101–110 of 171 posts
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Something is really wrong, if he highly capable kids are checking off "JIRA tickets". Couldn't you find some college dropouts in Oklahoma instead?
Even the 120k managers and on up to the two levels higher director level, check off Jira tickets at the company I work at...
I have been hiring IIT graduates and building a team in India for several years now. They are all really smart people with a strong work ethic, but their approach to work tends to be the same as the approach they needed to succeed in a test-based education system. The engineers will grind until any hour of the night to ensure that all feature requirements are met and JIRA tickets checked off, but nobody will stop to…
When you complete a course there's an exam, and labs and assignments typically have a set of instructions to get started and a list of requirements.
And there is always a domain expert (TA) not far. Now they are learning to become the domain expert in their own (limited) area.
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I still think the "holistic" approach is flawed. The "holistic" criteria benefits upper-class students because lower and middle class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be involved in extra-curricular activities the way upper-class kids are. I experienced this first hand growing up, many future Ivy league students almost seemed to have been trained for it from the moment they were born. The parents had conne…
> middle class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be involved in extra-curricular activities I almost can't think of something more middle-class than an aggressive dedication to as many extra-curricular activities as possible. SUVs full of children being driven from baseball to ballet to swimming? Seems a common part of culture for the middle-class?
And those SUVs require parents (usually moms) with the free time to do all that driving and managing.
This article is a gross misrepresentation of what it takes to get into IITs. I got into one, and I can guarantee that this article pretty much picks and chooses data points as it wants. Yes it is academically challenging to get into IITs, but there's two ways you can get into one: Devote your entire life towards "cracking" the game that's the entrance exams, or just study enough that you've mastered the understanding…
The following is a great example of how the article cherry-picks its data: > “They have been cut off from society, they are unaware of current affairs, and are desperately in need of our induction programme for freshers where we try to re-orient them to society and the institute,” the (IIT) professor said on the condition of anonymity. This skill gap haunts them even when they graduate. Despite all the hard work engi…
Completely unrelated to IITs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something is really wrong, if he highly capable kids are checking off "JIRA tickets". Couldn't you find some college dropouts in Oklahoma instead?
I think to check off they tickets, the first need to submit the fix and have it merged
I used to think that the “holistic” criteria elite US colleges use to select students was a failure of meritocracy. My view was that the non-objective metrics were excuses for colleges to let in students who wouldn’t grind but wanted prestige and had rich parents. But if you tie a person’s social status to performance on a single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be doing if they didn’t have to s…
I still think the "holistic" approach is flawed. The "holistic" criteria benefits upper-class students because lower and middle class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be involved in extra-curricular activities the way upper-class kids are. I experienced this first hand growing up, many future Ivy league students almost seemed to have been trained for it from the moment they were born. The parents had conne…
Every admission system prides itself in being the best but they all ultimately end up getting gamified. Because there is too much at stake.
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I'm becoming convinced by the idea that meritocracy itself is bad and a terrible way to organize society. But perhaps I'm biased by being a failure in the meritocratic system.
I'm interested in hear about why you believe you're a failure in the meritocratic system. I also have some doubts about meritocracy for a couple of reasons: 1) Although we can try very hard to be objective, at the end of the day everything is subjective 2) So called "merit" seems to be largely based on genetic traits (Intelligence, personality, physical, etc)
I'm genuinely asking because I have no clue what people want "merit" to mean. I always assumed the entire point was to remove environmental factors (to varying degrees).
The IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology) system is almost an order of magnitude more competitive than the average Ivy League University in the US. About 0.9% of IIT applicants will be admitted. Compare to Ivy League Universities, which range from 4.5% (Harvard) to 10.6% (Cornell). That said, I spoke with one IIT graduate who tried to downplay the experience. I could never tell if he was being humble or polite, or if…
4.5% for Harvard honestly seems high to me. Do you have a source? (Not doubting, moreso curious about other Ivys).
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I think to check off they tickets, the first need to submit the fix and have it merged
JIRA tickets are typically used in IT departments. Do you really have to go outside the country to find people good enough to work in IT?
So, when do the parents step out of the picture, if ever? Sounds like the worst affected would fly apart the moment they had to live on their own. This is a type of student I've heard of in the US of course, but this appears to affect a huge portion of the students.
For the elite, never. If nothing else, there is always a family safety net, and some starting capital.