Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The most prized degree in India became the most worthless

restofworld.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 393 posts

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

#101

Post by inapis »

AQuantized wrote: post #69
inapis wrote: post #41

This is a well written article. For decades, the Indian society has tried to use engineering (along with law, medicine and IAS) as a template to success. Given the population numbers, it was bound to break sooner or later. As an Indian CompSci graduate, I am excited for this bust to happen as soon as possible. Most people I know did not like studying computer science, are absolutely unhappy with their worklife and wa…

What sort of opportunities are available for someone with little experience/qualifications in a poorer country?

Plenty if you are willing to learn. People are creating exceptional stuff on the internet. From blogs, youtube, instagram to SaaS and apps, the content to learn all of this is available easily.

It does not work for literally everyone from the country but the people I'm talking about can definitely travel on this path.

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

#102

Post by cmckn »

kls wrote: post #78
cmckn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this bias in myself. I interned with several guys from India during college. I was an undergrad, they were grad students, having gotten their undergrad in India. We all went to the same university in the US. They weren't "crappy" engineers, per se, they just seemed to not actually have an undergrad degree in CS. Obviously I never saw their transcripts, but we seemed to be working from very different knowled…

I posted a comment a while back about this subject and the funny part was I got flamed by a bunch of US based technical workers, while the Indian techies pretty much agreed with me. Anyways the TLDR was I have a buddy Karthick and he is one of the best developers I know. So I asked him one day about why there was such low quality in India and he explained to me it was misaligned incentives due to the fact that, the f…

I've had similar conversations. These guys were pretty open about the fact that they crammed for exams and didn't take undergrad very seriously. People that are in tech for the money is common everywhere, but there is definitely something unique about the Indian experience.

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

#103

Post by tannhauser23 »

It's really interesting to see the bottom-rung schools closing. In the U.S. the legal field has been saturated for years and I'm not aware of any law schools closing. I wonder if the easy availability of school loans is propping up the lower schools in the U.S.

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

#104

Post by WkndTriathlete »

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" makes me want to ask more questions about what they did, in my experience they are worth interviewing.

Unfortunately the HR system scans for keywords, which makes the "interesting pieces of knowledge" resume less likely to get through HR and "everything they know" more likely to get through HR, which is the opposite of what I want to see. HR needs to either admit that they need to hire a developer to scan resumes instead of using automated software or just admit defeat and pass all resumes on, regardless of source or quality. They just are not capable of filtering software developer resumes in their current form.

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

#105

Post by battery_cowboy »

burntoutfire wrote: post #53
mikorym wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have a problem with calling developers engineers . Heck, I would be offended if someone called me a developer rather than a programmer. But unfortunately even the degrees themselves become less significant. A PhD in mathematics used to mean more than it does now. But another point is that with global literacy going up, scarse skills are now not based on the amount of people with certain degrees, but rather wit…

> 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.

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

#106

Post by moneywoes »

drchiu wrote: post #37

Tangential question (which has been on my mind) related to this: I don’t have a CS degree. Background in something completely unrelated. But I’ve been able to make a living programming doing my own thing (bootstrapped online stuff). As a result, I never bothered to apply for jobs at established CO’s. For those who work in established tech start ups or tech companies, what proportion of your software devs have an actu…

Can you talk about your path to bootstrapping successfully? Working on that but I'm lost.

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

#107

Post by ardy42 »

tannhauser23 wrote: post #103

It's really interesting to see the bottom-rung schools closing. In the U.S. the legal field has been saturated for years and I'm not aware of any law schools closing. I wonder if the easy availability of school loans is propping up the lower schools in the U.S.

> In the U.S. the legal field has been saturated for years and I'm not aware of any law schools closing.

There have been several mergers (I'm personally aware of one in my area), and it sounds like some schools have closed as well:

https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/urge-to-merge-la...

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

#108

Post by emiliobumachar »

pinewurst wrote: post #51
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…

I hesitate to label that "racist". Developing a feeling from interviewing engineers trained in India or China that they're generally not competent is not equivalent to feeling they're inherently stupid or bad people. They just came through a crummy education system.

I agree, as far as that. But it's racist to overgeneralize that feeling to ethnic Indians or Chinese who did not go through that system.

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

#109

Post by justwalt »

cmckn wrote: post #49
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…

I've seen this bias in myself. I interned with several guys from India during college. I was an undergrad, they were grad students, having gotten their undergrad in India. We all went to the same university in the US. They weren't "crappy" engineers, per se, they just seemed to not actually have an undergrad degree in CS. Obviously I never saw their transcripts, but we seemed to be working from very different knowled…

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 Raspberry Pi programming even though he had a degree in computer science from an Indian university.

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

#110

Post by andrewflnr »

onetimeusename wrote: post #85
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…

Something similar happened in the US where numbers of students in CS went up over time. However, academic fraud has not been as big of a problem as it is in India. An Indian friend of mine said that IIT is good but hardly anyone can get in and the caste system dictates admissions policies anyway so many people try to get engineering degrees from schools with lax standards. The professors are completely unqualified, a…

> ...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.

Post reply on HN