
The most prized degree in India became the most worthless - danso
https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/
======
throwawayengda
> 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 filtering services.

Aspiring Minds tested engineering students from all fields (including
chemical, mechanical and civil) to make up the misleading '90% of Indian
graduates are stupid' headlines. It worked. The headlines went viral and
people still quote their misleading study. The coding part of the test was to
submit compile-able Java code through an HTML input without any syntax
highlighting or formatting. Needless to say most chemical and civil
engineering graduates will not be able to do that.

I was a CS student at an Indian engineering college. I was forced to take an
Aspiring Minds test. The test was buggy and had no feedback. I probably
failed. But today I'm a full-stack developer in Denmark. Most of my graduating
class have good jobs and almost half of us work overseas.

~~~
the_pwner224
> But today I'm a full-stack developer in Denmark.

Would you mind sharing more details about this? Were your recruited or did you
seek out overseas employment?

I'm Indian but in the US since a young age; I'll be finishing my CS education
next year and would like to leave this country.

~~~
rusticpenn
Europe is pretty welcoming. There is a huge shortage of software engineers (of
acceptable quality) here.

~~~
siscia
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.

~~~
igorkraw
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 active shooters as a matter of normal life,
the cities are made for humans not cars and employee rights are a thing. And
looking at the worst case, Europe wins: a medical emergency will not bankrupt
you, if you call the cops they won't shoot you etc. And on a political level,
having more than 2 parties and a wider overton window is quote nice.

If you think of yourself as a human and social being, not a shark or worker
bee, I think Europe isn't too bad. But I recognize that dollar amounts and
funding for new ventures is still in the US, or China nowadays. And all the
stuff I cited are things at odds with the pure capitalist system some people
seem to want to live in, and so might not actually be desirable for all

~~~
plandis
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 US and that’s not anywhere close to the pay I
was offered or researched in the EU.

> Europe we don't treat active shooters as a matter of normal life

People in the US certainly do not treat active shooters as a matter of normal
life. Have you ever considered that it makes the new explicitly because it’s a
rare thing that people do not expect?

> the cities are made for humans not cars and employee rights are a thing.

I think you would find that most technology companies are in cities with
walkability/public transit in the US. I think you would also find that
software engineers are not treated poorly as well.

> And looking at the worst case, Europe wins: a medical emergency will not
> bankrupt you

Medical insurance at tech companies I’ve worked for in the US are very good.
For example, I pay $20/mo and the theoretical maximum I would pay for
insurance in any given year is $3000.

> if you call the cops they won't shoot you

Again, I think you’re treating news as proof that this is a common occurrence.
It gets reported explicitly because it is not

————

I’m not saying the US is perfect because it certainly isn’t. No place is
perfect. But, I think that you would find that the US is a very nice place to
live for the upper half of the middle class and above and software engineering
would definitely put you in that category in the US.

~~~
maddax
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 being would consider that to be a
positive.

You may think I am crazy, but 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? While you may have excellent health care for $20/month, what about
the barista at your local coffee shop? What about your disabled neighbor who
got laid off for no fault of hers? How can you live with yourself while they
die of cancer as they cannot afford to go to the hospital? And don't get me
started on education. How that is viewed as a commodity rather than a basic
human right astounds me.

I am very happy with my $60k/year job. I have more than sufficient for myself,
and a decent amount to spare. I have excellent healthcare for free and
independent of my job situation, and so do all my neighbors. I live in a city
with no homeless, and no one desperately poor. I do engaging work for 7 hrs a
day and religiously shut my computer at 4 pm, and pursue my many passions
afterwards. I have 6 weeks a year of paid vacations, and travel to a handful
of countries every year. I paid $50/semester to get educated at a top
university, and so will my children. And I received a stipend to cover part of
my living expenses. I love the fact that I do not have to worry about getting
shot (as rare as that might be). I love living in a country with highly
educated people all around with most having the skills of critical thinking. I
love living in one of the most gender equal countries of the world (I am
male). No offense to anyone, but I wouldn't trade this for a $250k/year job in
the U.S. (as levels.fyi seems to suggest for my case).

~~~
JAlexoid
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.

------
umvi
"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/Chinese/etc. universities] has preconditioned you to think _all
engineers_ from [Indian/Chinese/etc. universities] are crappy, which couldn't
be further from the truth.

~~~
mikorym
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 with inherent abilities that are
uncommon. (Take Fortran coders as an example.)

~~~
remmargorp64
Wait... so in your mind there is a distinct difference between a developer,
programmer, and engineer? Because in my mind, they are all the same.

How are they different, in your mind?

~~~
jeromegv
In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you studied engineering
in university and went through licensing.

It's not really enforced in tech, but for me the definition is someone who at
the minimum studied an engineering degree. Calling yourself an engineer when
you studied Computer Science is a bit odd to me.

~~~
indiv0
I'm fully OK with the distinction because of the licensing process and strict
requirements on engineer-certified work, but as someone with a CS degree from
a Canadian university I can tell you with confidence that my friends in the
software engineering pathway had probably 90% the same course load as I did.

Really the only major difference at our university (IMO) was that they had a
capstone project they did as a group and took two semesters, while mine was
done individually and took one semester.

~~~
ceejayoz
The course load isn't the critical aspect, though, is it?

Licensing typically means professional standards set by a licensing body,
continuing education requirements, insurance/liability rules, etc.

~~~
indiv0
Absolutely, not disputing that. I just took offense to the "Calling yourself
an engineer when you studied Computer Science is a bit odd to me" statement. I
don't think the degree makes the difference, the licensing does.

~~~
seemack
I don't believe you would be able to get the licensing without the degree so
saying the degree doesn't make any difference doesn't seem accurate.

------
inapis
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 want to get out of it as fast as
possible. Out of the 700+ in my graduating class of Computer Science, less
than 70-80 are still associated with computers in some for or manner. Most
fucked off to other fields, predominantly MBA. I hear similar stories from
other Tier 2/3 institutions.

I can't wait for Indians to realize just how much easier it is to get employed
today if you are willing to let go of the traditional path. Internet has
unlocked so much opportunity and after 2016, pretty much all barriers to
internet access have been lowered as much as possible. All you need is a
computing device like a phone or laptop to get started. Doesn't work for the
extremely poor still, but the opportunity for mass swathes of people have been
widened much more than before.

~~~
throwawayengda
> Out of the 700+ in my graduating class of Computer Science, less than 70-80
> are still associated with computers in some for or manner

'700+ graduating class' sounds more like a fraudulent diploma mill than a Tier
2/3 college.

Actual Computer Science and Computer Engineering grads from Indian Tier 1/2/3
colleges have no problem finding jobs.

~~~
inapis
Nope. Legit college whose students went onto excellent post graduate programs
in US and Europe. 700 in a graduating class is chump change in India. Plenty
of colleges whose annual batches are that size.

I never said they had trouble finding jobs. You jumped the gun. I said they
were not happy with choosing computer science as a career.

------
hypesafe
Indian universities outside of the top rung (IITs et al.) have been issuing
worthless degrees for at least 3 decades. In my state during the 90s
tech/outsourcing boom a lot of corrupt politicians realized that engineering
education was a gold mine and opened degree factories all over the state. I
graduated from a supposedly "reputable" university in 2004 and was basically
unemployable on graduation.

Looking back here are a few memories of my college education experience that
stand out:

* 1 computer "lab" with 15 PCs shared amongst 720 students. Only 1 PC had a dial-up internet connection that rarely worked.

* Majority of the courses taught by industry rejects who were unemployable.

* Hilariously we learnt standard _nix command line tools (sed , awk, filesystem commands etc.) by writing the commands and their outputs using a pen and paper never once using a real terminal + shell because the college did not have a single_ nix machine.

* "Systems Programming" professor walks in the first day and declares she cannot code in C and 8086 assembly which the course mandated. She encouraged us to seek external tutoring (coaching classes as they are known in India) instead of relying on her.

* There was small cottage industry that sold finished projects to students - including source code, project reports, electronic circuitry where applicable. About 30% of the class bought these “projects” off the shelf.

Thankfully my family was able to send me to an American university for a
graduate degree allowing me to have a shot at a tech career. Now having lived
and worked in the Bay Area for 15 years I can say that quality of education at
an average community college in the US is far superior to the tier-2 / tier-3
_universities_ in India.

------
SmartestUnknown
I am an Indian and I have seen so many worthless engineering colleges. The
main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and very low
incentives for someone to study well. I can't fathom how easy it is to pass a
class in these engineering colleges and how widespread plagiarism is. When
>50% points of the class is determined by a single exam that repeats same
questions every year, it isn't hard to study for a day and pass the class. I
am not kidding, you can buy an "all-in-one" of around 600 pages which is
essentially enough to pass or even score 80% in "all the classes" in a
semester.

I would say at most 10% of engineering students in India are properly taught
and properly tested and rest of them just spend 4 years in college essentially
learning nothing. When it is so easy to get an engineering degree, people who
barely pass high school also enroll in these programs for "engineering degree"
and become an "engineer" after 4 years of college. It's no wonder that most of
these "engineers" can't do anything.

~~~
duskwuff
> The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and
> very low incentives for someone to study well.

Another significant element I'd point to is outdated curricula. By way of
example, many Indian CS course materials still require students to use Turbo
C++ -- an IDE from the mid-1990s which runs under DOS. Needless to say, what
ends up being taught is hardly representative of modern practices.

~~~
mesaframe
I don't think the curriculum is outdated. Those are tools you are talking
about.

~~~
duskwuff
They go hand in hand. A C++ IDE from the mid-1990s implements C++ as it
existed in the mid-1990s -- which is a rather different language from that
which exists today. No STL, for instance. Without access to modern features of
the language, it's inevitable that the course won't end up teaching those
features.

Moreover -- the use of a 25-year-old IDE is _symptomatic_ of a more general
problem in Indian CS (and probably other) curricula. Many instructors are
teaching to a syllabus which was set in stone many years ago. If you look at
some of the links I posted in a sibling thread or explore other universities'
posted materials, you'll probably see signs of this -- Java courses which
still cover applet development is another common one, for instance.

------
kumarm
When I joined Engineering in India (1994), my state had 2000 engineering
seats. 120K people wrote the entrance test for the 2K seats.

Today the same state has about 250K seats. Anyone who writes the entrance test
can get into some college or other.

Has the quality gone down? I would think so. But I definitely think qualified
students is definitely greater than 2k even when I went to college.

I would rather prefer over supply rather than shortage of educational
opportunities any day.

~~~
totalZero
To play devil's advocate...

The value of an education comes as much from the group of peers (classmates
who interact regarding experiences, plans, lessons, and ideas) as from the
books and professors themselves. Like a critical mass of brains.

If you water the group down, then the most talented cohort benefits less than
if they were the only people to advance.

~~~
aaaxyz
As someone who got an undergrad degree from a top 40 school and is now taking
courses at a state system school accepting a lot more students, I completely
agree.

The difference in terms of work output and professionalism between students is
massive. Presentations from other students lack depth and often fail to
explain basic concept; they have very little educational value. Group work is
a complete mess since a lot of people never learned how to organize
themselves, have very little motivation or fail to explain their ideas
properly. Simple things you usually learn in undergrad like putting a
bibliography together or spell checking documents are lacking. You end up
wasting huge amounts of time correcting other people's mistakes.

Another big difference I've noticed is that students seem to have little
interest in the area of study; none of the ones I met have non curricular side
projects. There's also a lot less discussion happening outside of classrooms.

~~~
google234123
You are not hanging out with the right people then. I think you will find the
top students in any random state school are just as good as at an ivy league
institution. Source: I've been at both.

~~~
BeetleB
I've been at both an average school (undergrad) and a top school (grad). I
somewhat agree with your parent.

I don't doubt great undergrads exist in an average school, but the chances of
randomly running into one are much lower. I did not run into any.

I'd also disagree with the characterization of "top" students. A lot of the
top students at the average school, while great at academics, were still a lot
less "well rounded". They had few projects that they worked on outside of
class, etc. Not that they weren't interested - just that there was not enough
"critical mass" of such people for it to become natural.

~~~
sunstone
Or maybe they spend their spare time working so they can afford to stay in
school.

------
wobbly_bush
This article is all over the place, with some elements of truth. The essence
is that Indian universities don't provide good education - that's been known
for decades now. This is reflected in how many Indians have been going for
higher education to Western universities for decades.

> There are currently more than 3,500 engineering schools across the country,
> and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in
> software engineering

That's because there are non computer science graduates as well?

> In India, you need a ‘traditional degree’ before you pursue your passion,”
> he said. “And that degree in almost all cases is engineering.”

Not true, this depends on the region. Engineering is way more prominent in
South India than the rest of the country.

> With programmers everywhere, annual salaries for entry-level jobs have
> remained at around $4,500 for the better part of a decade

This is referring to the outsourcing companies I'm assuming. Ironically,
majority of intake of the outsourcing companies are graduates whose major is
not computer science. So the presence of "programmers" should not have an
impact on the other engineers.

------
tpmx
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
wording.

We tried to be openminded, so we set up a bunch of interview calls with
especially promisingly people from this "pool". After about 10-15 of those
calls we just gave up.

We did eventually hire two indian people and were very happy with their
contributions, but only after they had made their ways to our little country
on their own. Imagine being a talented developer in India, interviewing for a
job overseas, against this background of overwhelming mediocrity?

~~~
WkndTriathlete
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.

~~~
alkonaut
Having an HR department filter resumes for qualification before the relevant
manager/team sounds like an absolute disaster. If I heard that happened at the
company I was at, I'd probably pack up and leave because I wouldn't want to
work in a place where leadership doesn't realize how obviously stupid that is.

------
Animats
The article draws mostly from this piece from a company that apparently tests
prospective employees.[1]

 _Good coding skills (the ability to write functionally correct code) are
possessed by 4.6% of Indian job applicants, 2.1% of Chinese candidates and
18.8% of the US candidates in the IT and software industries. However, if we
consider only those candidates who can write correct code with few errors, the
gap between China and India narrows (8.6% vs. 9.8%, respectively).
Interestingly, while the percentage of Indian engineers who code well is
greater than the number of Chinese engineers, a much higher proportion of
Indian engineers (37.7%) cannot write a compilable code compared to Chinese
engineers (10.35%). This means that India must do more to educate its general
population in proper coding skills. By comparison, the US engineers perform
four times better than Indian engineers in coding: only 4% of the US
candidates cannot write compilable code despite the fact that the base of the
engineering population in the US is approximately four times smaller than in
India._

I wonder what their tests look like.

[1]
[https://www.aspiringminds.com/thankyou/?url=2602](https://www.aspiringminds.com/thankyou/?url=2602)

~~~
in_cahoots
The last sentence of this paragraph makes me distrust the whole analysis.
Mixing percentages with population-dependent numbers makes no sense. And even
if that did make sense, the conclusion is exactly backwards. If fewer people
go into engineering you would expect the few people who do make it to be of
higher caliber. Obviously as you widen your pool you will regress to something
closer to the mean programming ability.

~~~
barbegal
And I don't consider being able to "write compilable code" as a good metric
for programming ability. You can be a great programmer in many different ways:
in optimising for performance, in optimising for testability, in increasing
readability or in reducing the time taken to produce working code. Most people
I know really heavily on an IDE to help them write compilable code because
they want to use their brain power on solving issues the IDE can't help you
with.

------
MattGaiser
I would be interested to know if there is actually an oversupply of
programmers or whether there is still a shortage of skilled ones in the labour
force and they are just graduating anyone who pays their tuition.

We have that problem here in Canada and the USA. Plenty of developer jobs are
open, but I also know lots of CS grads who never found jobs, even two years
out of university. That's because most would struggle with FizzBuzz.

Sure, they are on paper qualified to do the work, but absurdly unqualified in
actual skill.

~~~
admiral33
A good CS program will touch on FizzBuzzesque questions early on as part of
one of the introduction to programming classes, and in later classes do a deep
dive on algorithms and their efficiency in pseudocode or real code.

I guess it's possible they didn't practice, but I have a hard time believing
that they could get through an undergrad CS program and not be able to quickly
remind themselves of some basic code logic beforehand if they don't already
code regurarly.

Were they actually passionate about CS? Did they have bad professors?

------
as1mov
> The best jobs are reserved for graduates of the Indian Institutes of
> Technology (IIT), the crown jewels of the country’s higher education system.
> Every April, over a million students take the Joint Entrance Examination
> (JEE), the primary pathway to the IITs. There are fewer than 12 thousand
> seats at the 16 IITs in India, and they accept one in 50 applicants each
> year.

This is one of the core issues many people seem to ignore. The number of
universities where you can actually become a good engineer is really small,
apart from the IIT/NIT/BITS/IIIT, the rest can be categorized into mediocre to
astonishingly bad.

I do have a lot to say about this topic, as I had go through this experience
first hand, and I wasn't one of those who managed to get into a good
university (in fact, I barely managed to get into a really shitty one).

Here's a short summary of what's it like to get a degree from shitty private
university in India -

a) There's no focus on getting an actual education, people (including
professors, students, their parents) are more concerned with getting a piece
of paper which certifies that the student is an engineer now.

b) The faculty responsible for teaching rarely give a shit, not that they have
an ability to give a shit in this case. Most of them barely know the material
they teach. I've had lecturers who would literally write out Java code on a
board and then explain the meaning of each word for the next hour.

c) Most of these schools have mandatory attendance for classes, so if you have
assumed you'll just sign up and go through the material on your own, you're
screwed. You will end up spending 8 hours everyday for 4 years doing this,
then spend additional 2-3 hours everyday doing assignments which basically
consist of copying shit from a textbook.

d) Exams are just an exercise in mugging up the textbooks. Even for subjects
which involve programming.

e) Companies that hire out of these schools are usually service based like
Infosys, TCS, etc on a salary of about $300/mo. So the next time you complain
about the shitty Indian guy with a thick accent who writes spaghetti code,
just remember that they're getting paid peanuts for doing so. Also these
companies have a bond of anywhere from an year to 3 (which basically means if
you leave anytime before this period, you pay the company <X> amount), it
might be illegal, but then your lowly IT guy doesn't have the resources to
take these companies to court.

There's lot to write about this topic, there are a lot of facets which
intermingle with one another in absurd ways, perhaps I might write something
more detailed some other day.

~~~
downerending
> The number of universities where you can actually become a good engineer is
> really small, apart from the IIT/NIT/BITS/IIIT, the rest can be categorized
> into mediocre to astonishingly bad.

I wonder why this is. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to teach
basic CS well, nor would I think that India would lack for competent people
able to teach this way.

Does this occur in other parts of Indian society? For example, is it like this
in medicine? Or food processing?

~~~
triceratops
> It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to teach basic CS well

Why do you think so? If anything it's harder than doing a regular programming
job, because in addition to knowing CS, you have to know how to teach. And
programming pays better than teaching.

~~~
bsder
> And programming pays better than teaching.

Let's quantify that since most people don't understand just how bad the
discrepancy is.

A lecturer in CS _might_ get $4000 for a semester. That's 12+weeks at 40 hours
a week of work preparing the lectures, grading, preparing tests, and answering
student questions via email. Not joking.

That's right around minimum wage in most civilized places in the US (about $8
an hour).

I presume the discrepancy is much worse in other countries.

------
dandare
Nobody mentioned the problem of Indian "high context society". Individual
developers may be very productive when employed by western companies but from
my anecdotal experience Indian teams in India have very low real productivity
due to the "cultural specifics", aka rigid hierarchy and people dynamics.

------
travisoneill1
Same thing has happened with college degrees in the US. Why are people always
surprised by this? A credential only has value through exclusion.

~~~
Jaygles
The credential's value doesn't go down for the entity seeking someone with the
credential. The value only goes down for the person who has the credential IF
they were deriving value from the exclusivity of the credential.

In other words, the value one gets from the exclusivity of a credential is
separate from the practical value of having the credential.

The value from the exclusivity is bound to decrease as a population recognizes
that value and rush to claim some of that for themselves which in turn
diminishes that value for everyone.

As the value of the exclusivity is removed, the true value of the credential
is discovered.

~~~
wccrawford
If a credential gets less exclusive over time (meaning they relax the
requirements on it) and the same company seeks someone with that credential
repeatedly over time, the value that the company expects from that credential
_does_ go down.

~~~
Jaygles
A credential becoming less exclusive doesn't necessarily mean the requirements
are relaxed. Could mean the requirements stay constant and there are more
people shifting their priorities, seeking to obtain it and succeeding.

Of course in the real world, supply will react to the increase in demand and
those looking to make a quick buck will offer an inferior credentialing
service. For example: the fairly recent glut of web dev bootcamps (Of which I
am a graduate of one, it can work occasionally).

And then things get complicated and every firm tries to filter out unqualified
candidates with wild interview processes which leads to countless blogs about
the whole situation including the article featured here, which is, at least,
tangentially related.

------
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.

~~~
ardy42
> 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...](https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/urge-to-merge-law-school)

------
Aperocky
Sounds like India's 'push against tech event'

The same around early 2000s where suddenly there were a large amount of
surplus programmer and even my parents social circle which is about 3 level
removed from any programming start talking about this 'surplus' and how
starting a programming career or major is a bad choice.

Tech is still the biggest job creator and the best paying job for what we do.
It's easy to be shortsighted over a couple of months about what you don't
understand or can't do well, but this world is clearly marching towards an
more autonomous future.

------
hodder
The top story on Hacker News right now is how Twitter is allowing (some)
employees to work from home permanently. The locational cost of living
arbitrage (from an employee perspective) and labor arbitrage (from an employer
perspective) available in the market is immense and companies that can succeed
in overcoming the language and cultural barriers are looking at a massive
opportunity.

~~~
mesozoic
The story goes into how 90% of them are unqualified even after training. It
doesn't matter how cheap I can hire someone if they can't do the job they're a
net negative.

~~~
joelbluminator
OK, but what about millions of European devs who earn 50% what an American dev
is earning? Or Canadian, or South American?

------
duxup
I felt similarly after a career change via a coding bootcamp regarding what
perspective employers would really think about someone coming out of such a
system.

I think bootcamps can work, but the incentives for those running them are off.

At the camp I'd look around the room and think that about half the folks
straight up can't do the job, and "If one of these people interviews before me
/ or worse gets a job and bombs ... am I even going to get an interview?"

Fortunately I got a chance to prove myself with an employer and got my foot in
the door.

But even so sometimes in casual conversation I just say "self taught".

------
sabujp
It's only worthless if you don't practice. There are tons of programming jobs
out there but don't expect to get hired if you can't do the simplest
algorithms. Many people who earn CS bachelors in India have barely even
touched computers. There were some in my Masters courses who were hopelessly
lost. Then there are some who are topcoders and into competitve programming,
practice and experience are what really matter.

~~~
ineedasername
What do they do in their CS curriculum if they're not actually programming?

~~~
sabujp
they just do the math and theory, many classes have hundreds of students and
neither the students nor the universities have the infrastructure to support
computing for all the students. Not all students can afford a Rs35k (~$500)
laptop (or cheaper) when that's the price of admission for the entire year.

------
GaryNumanVevo
I've noticed something similar in the US university system. I was a Assistant
Prof during my PhD in CS at a state college. Students from our program went on
to directly compete and get jobs over students from Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc.
Our program probably cost 1/4 that of other "prestigious" universities yet we
largely had the same outcomes for students.

Personally, I'm glad there's been a leveling of the playing field.

~~~
yaitsyaboi
But the article is describing the opposite phenomenon, it seems that in India
only students from their Stanfords and MITs are qualified for and get the
jobs.

------
matchagaucho
A lot of this argument seems to rest on this premise...

 _" Good coding skills (the ability to write functionally correct code) are
possessed by 4.6% of Indian job applicants, 2.1% of Chinese candidates and
18.8% of the US candidates in the IT and software industries"_

~~~
throwawayengda
A wrong premise based on Aspiring Minds fraudulent studies.

Aspiring Minds is an Indian company that sells buggy web-based pre-interview
filtering tests as a service. It is in Aspiring Minds interest to portray
(Indian) college graduates as incompetent to make companies buy their pre-
interview filtering services.

------
throwaway158497
Tagnetially related. Because of COVID lockdowns, many consulting firms are
shutting down. I hired an engineer with 2 years experience to teach me
HTML/CSS/JS for one month. So fa I am satisfied with him compared to what I
learnt on Udacity frontend nanodegree. I am paying him $100 for 30 hours of
classes. For people wanting to learn stuff, this is the best time. If you want
to contact him, email is in profile

~~~
scarface74
Who in the world would be willing to teach for 30 hours for $100? I would be
much better off spending those 30 hours looking for the few available jobs
that are out there or do the old r/cscareerquestions “learn leetCode and work
for a FAANG”

~~~
throwaway158497
Err. The kid is awake for 16 hours a day. He is applying for jobs in 15 of
those hours. This one hour is extra money for him. Also, it is at the same
rate as as his full time job pre covid.

There are just not enough new people hiring in India right now. So any extra
little money helps.

To your question, who in the world is willing to teach for that low, think of
it as his first teaching gig. Through this, he is discovering a new market for
himself.

------
upquarking
Just 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.

------
ChuckMcM
Pretty damning " _There are currently more than 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._ "

That said, I'm curious how you could talk to someone about programming for
four years and at the end of that 9 out of 10 of them could not actually do
it.

~~~
CosmicShadow
I taught intro web dev courses at a "highly rated" college in Canada in a
program that was specifically for a post-grad, international audience. It was
99% people from India who finished 4 year university degrees in computer
science and the like.

Out of a class of 35 students who were already in their 2nd, 3rd or 4th term
of this program, no one knew to press F12 to see the console in a browser.
This was a web development program. I basically had to teach these kids as if
they just walked off the street. No matter which new batch of kids I had, it
was like this. I asked them how they could know so little about anything
development wise if they took 4 years of CS, like literally what did they do.
They'd always just answer that they learned "Theory" and something about
learning out of a book, not actually developing or anything.

I still didn't understand how 4 years of theory or book learning couldn't
teach you the most basic programming concepts. I'm pretty sure the schools
were just mills or scams or something, it was sad.

Most of the students had no real interest in actually learning how to code or
doing any learning either, they seemed to believe that just by showing up
they'd pass, get a degree and a good job, which was bizarre, especially in a
university town and tech hot bed. The amount of cheating, copying, lying,
begging, etc. didn't help. A few folks were genuine, but the program seems
like it's just a legal loophole to get into the country where if they get at
least a technical support job after 2 years of grad they can legally become
citizens. This is the fastest growing and most profitable sector of this
college.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ouch! That is so sad on so many levels.

To be fair, I can understand when someone doesn't know that the shortcut key
for the dev console is F12, but I would hope they would at least start at the
"hamburger" menu to see if they could find it.

Your anecdote reminds me of the dot com days when I was trying to hire some
network engineers. Their only qualification appeared to be they passed some
certification test on Cisco gear. The only questions they asked about the job
were "how much stock will I get?" and "when do you think the company will go
public?" It was easy to not hire them, even when we were really in need of
people.

~~~
CosmicShadow
I don't even think they knew what the console was...

------
stanfordkid
Peter Thiel talks about how the "4-year degree" has obtained a similar status
within the United States.

~~~
danso
Not exactly. It is much more common than it was a couple decades ago for jobs
to require a bachelors degree as a minimum. You can argue that the intrinsic
educational value of a 4-year-degree has become diluted, but the (unfortunate)
reality is that having a degree is a baseline requirement to even get an
interview.

That's different than a computer science/engineering degree being devalued to
the point where it's no longer more attractive than any other college degree.

------
carrolldunham
The article and the thread are horribly mixing at least three different things
under the word Engineer. Actual Engineer degrees B. Eng., 'programmers' which
I guess could be B. Software Eng. and something called IT Engineer which I
presume is a sort of two year network admin thing. No wonder there's so much
confusion about the value of things and people being surprised not to have the
status they expected when the person telling you you need to be an engineer
meant a substation designer and you thought it meant tech support.

~~~
gentleman11
In Canada, the term “engineer” is protected, but in most places the term is
used loosely. Eg, in the USA, if you email Unity about a licensing question,
you get a response from a “customer service engineer”

~~~
52-6F-62
Only with regard to certain industries.

I believe software engineer is pretty free-for-all. Just don't try and
represent yourself as a P. Eng. Then you're in trouble.

------
luminati
I know clickbait, hyperbolic titles allow for more, hmm, clicks, but they
rarely help make the case for your article.

Since he uses the word "worthless", how does that compare it to folks who
graduated in History or anthropology or (running joke in the US) graduated in
English?

Think of this: People in poor country, need to do what it takes to better
their prospects. So they go for the one industry that pays relatively better.
Nothing illogical about it and seems perfectly rational to me. And I can see
similar trends in the US too. A lot of lamenting on "how I wished I learned to
code, major in CS, etc.", given how drastically better the tech industry pays.
[https://levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) ICYMI. Oh, the poor worthless English
majors.

Also the lack of empathy was quite striking given the author himself is a
recent "worthless" graduate of a technical degree -
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilesh-
christopher-20831784/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilesh-
christopher-20831784/) Maybe he comes from an upper-middle class background
and was able to pivot into journalism, but the fact that he didn't mention his
own background meant that I couldn't take this article seriously.

On a more meta topic, does education always have to "worthful"?

------
EL_Loco
Change 'engineering' to 'law', and you have a similar situation in Brazil.
There are 1,500 law schools in the country. Most graduates today never end up
practicing it.

------
drchiu
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 actual CS degree vs self taught? And
is there some glass ceiling as a result?

~~~
NwtnsMthd
Most of our developers either have a degree unrelated to programming or hold
no degree. Of our top three programmers, two are dropouts and one has a degree
in physics. Two of them started with us having dropped out undergrad
(unrelated), and the third we hired after decades of experience at other
companies. The common theme I've found with all three is a passion for
programming and learning in general. If they didn't do this as a job it would
be their hobby, this is what makes a good engineer or developer. Forget the
experience, if a person is driven they will learn what they need to know.

But my viewpoint is skewed, there are only about 25 of us at our company.

------
woem
This is precisely why most top tech companies in India only hire from the top
colleges (IITs, BITS Pilani, IIITs, NITs, etc). It's usually not worth their
time to even interview someone who did not graduate from one of these.

This is also evident in the compensation for new grads. CS grads from lower
ranked colleges typically make $5k-$10k per year, while those from these good
colleges make $20k-$40k per year(gross). Exceptions exist of course.

------
rajasimon
I graduate in 2009 ( BE - EIE ). But I got my first software company job in
2015. It was hard for me. And during college days I love reading CS books and
playing with computer. After doing Non technical job including Call center and
printing machine service engineer finally I got a job. I learned programming
myself.

------
Priem19
3 Idiots is a remarkably inspirational Bollywood movie depicting the problem;
one of my all-time favorites.
[https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/3_idiots](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/3_idiots)

~~~
garganzol
"3 Idiots" is just a name of the movie. Just have started to watch it and it
looks pretty relevant to the discussion, so far. I presume that downvotes to
your comment are unwarranted.

I have a question to Hindi speakers: they say a word that sounds like "futur"
meaning literally "future". Is that a borrowed word? Or is it something native
to Hindi?

I am quite astonished that I can grasp a bit of it. The language kind of
reflects some European languages. For instance, I can understand a tiny
fraction of what actors are saying in Hindi. Never learnt it before, but that
lingual link is interesting.

~~~
chillacy
I don't know the specific etymology of that word, and I do recall that there
is a lot of english in bollywood films, but the linguistically the languages
are actually related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-
European_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages)

------
unnouinceput
"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". A famous quote,
can't remember by who and too lazy to search, but it also can be reversed to
summarize the article:

"Do it for money and you'll be crappy at your job"

------
CivBase
A degree is supposed to be a guarantee issued by an organization that someone
has met that organization's standards for some dicipline. In theory, those
degrees are valuable to businesses because they assure some baseline
competency from prospective hires.

It sounds like many organizations in India have significantly reduced their
standards or are awarding their degrees to unqualified people. So why do
businesses continue to value degrees issued by those organizations?

------
analog31
I wonder if India faced a problem similar to the for profit college system in
the us, where a lot of the programs were fake.

~~~
redis_mlc
> for profit college system in the us, where a lot of the programs were fake.

The programs in the US weren't fake ...

The US government (VA, etc.) didn't like paying for schools that had low
graduation rates, or had high student loan defaults, so closed them. In some
cases, legit trade schools were closed, like Wyotech:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WyoTech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WyoTech)

Ironically, this being HN, private investor groups trying to monetize
education were behind a lot of the closed schools.

~~~
analog31
Maybe the term "fake" is over-used, but I meant something along the lines of
selling people an expensive training that leaves them in debt and
unemployable. Some of those schools also made hyperbolic claims about the
career prospects and earnings of their graduates.

------
gumby
The saddest quote in this article was this: “I majored in computer science but
realized I wasn’t cut out for a coding job. Dropping out wasn’t an option, so
I stuck to the course,”. At lease _he_ appears to have landed on his feet.

------
gxqoz
First article I've seen from what looks like a newly launched site. Seems like
a neat niche--tech stories outside of the West. Any existing sites/newsletters
already on this beat?

------
sn41
In the Indian context, what matters today is not _what_ the degree is, but
_where_ the degree is from.

Some historical perspective as I recall it: even as late as the late 1990s,
there were very few engineering colleges in India, and a B.E. or B.Tech was a
prestigious degree to have. For example, Uttar Pradesh, which is a state that
has about the population of the entire US, had 5 or 6 state engineering
colleges (+ IIT Kanpur + Univ. of Roorkee + Banaras Hindu Univ, which were
national level institutions).

The AICTE which controls technical education in India, mandated that no CS
department should take more than 65 students in a year.

I think what changed was Y2K. I suspect under pressure from NASSCOM, (led by
the charismatic Dewang Mehta [1]), B.Tech in CSE got doubled in number by
creating a second department called I.T. thus working around existing norms.
In the 5 years following, engineering education itself got "liberalized" by
allowing a large number of private for-profit colleges.

The impression was that they will become places like Harvard and MIT, just
because private is better than public sector. Many of these colleges still do
not want to employ qualified teaching staff - the faculty are mostly people
with just a B.Tech degree from similar colleges, who did not get a job in the
tech sector, hence are willing to pay for dirt pay, and under draconian
corporate-style management.

The situation is true to this day.

An inevitable result has been the deluge of people ill-trained, but holding a
degree, tarnishing the reputation of Indian engineering education.

TLDR: 20 years ago, there were very few engineering colleges in India, the
degree was prized, and the graduates were kind-of well-trained. Then there was
a huge and unregulated explosion in graduates from for-profit colleges. Today,
the graduates who are assured of good jobs and whose degrees hold value, are
still those from the pre-1990s engineering colleges.

Doctors have resisted a similar dilution of norms. But recently India achieved
a significant "number" \- one can only hope that the doctors are better off
than the engineers. [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewang_Mehta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewang_Mehta)

[2]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6259525/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6259525/)

------
LeagueSucks
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.

------
ineedasername
How much of the problem is too much supply, and how much of the problem is
poor quality of the supply?

------
Fede_V
I want to emphasize one thing: all the graduates from IITs I've worked with
are truly top notch.

------
entha_saava
I am an Indian student studying in freshman year in one of the so-called "top"
colleges and there are just too many problems.

* First of all, the system is very rote learning oriented. The questions in the exam will be exactly same as those solved in the class. That means people without proper understanding of concepts can still get A+ grades by memorization techniques. But it is PITA if you actually have some interest in subject. You may not get good grades if you write right answers in exams but they aren't like what is in the book.

* Too many people enter Engineering, especially CSE in hope of getting a Job. Entrance process is based completely on basic sciences and while better than other exams, people still game the system by studying four years for entrance exams. This and management quota in Engineering colleges leads to huge influx of students out of them somewhere like 2% - 5% actually have interest in the branch of engineering they take.

* Talent gets no recognition many times. Rote-based exams make it easy to distinguish average from absolute low. But average and talented appear to be at same level because a talented person can be as good as an average but hard working student in these rote based exams.

* Since there is huge influx of students and huge number of engineering colleges, most faculty is underskilled and better we could have robots teach us. We had a teacher who doesn't appear to indent C code, but also has a "qualification" in "distributed systems" and "computer networking".

* Something that has been a problem to me: I was pretty good in basic sciences, passed entrance exam with good marks without any tedious "coaching", and I took up CSE because I was interested in computer science. The first year of engineering syllabus consists of same common subjects to all branches, like Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics (Calculus) and introductory courses to other engineering disciplines (C programming is only CSE related thing they teach us). That's improperly using one year. However relevant those subjects are, they aren't as relevant as teaching programming/CS related subjects in practice. We will have campus placements in 7th semester and due to this, we only get 2nd and 3rd year to actually study CSE. Even those subjects wouldn't have been a problem apart from being waste of time - but they are too rote learning based and uninteresting - As in teaching some methodologies to solve some kind of numerical problems and asking them in exam. Today as I am writing this I have an online exam some hours later. I never thought I would be grades in 7/10 range but the uninteresting and rote based nature of these exams doesn't motivate me to study anything.

And this "interdisciplinary" kool-aid has another effect. I have seen even
toppers of my class not understanding recursion and algorithm complexity.
Because algorithm complexity is not taught in first year. We only get to learn
C programming (No 'advanced' concepts like malloc / free, file I/O) in first
year. This is huge waste of resources because all these rote learned physics
fundamentals don't be useful for most of these people in practice. They will
be forgotten after exams. If they had taught something related to CS, at least
it would be useful to do side projects and have something more on our resumes,
and would be perhaps useful as an engineer.

* Perhaps as a result of the above, Syllabus is far behind the actual advancements in technology. Git? Apparently only members of college's coding club know what that is. Docker? What's that?

I am frustrated. It is just pointless. Especially because all this is too
costly for a middle class rural student and we have to get education loans. If
it was not the societal pressure / norms, I could have self studied and could
have become a better engineer. The system is so screwed up - perfect one to
churn out enterprise droids anyway.

------
ycombonator
Great solution to “economic inequality”. We should do it here too, increase
admissions in ivy leagues by 100 fold. Will solve the inequality problem the
television pundits and grifter politicians breathlessly blabber about.

------
GnarfGnarf
I interviewed some "Masters" level students from India. They couldn't do
FizzBuzz.

    
    
        if(i % 3)
            ...
        else if(i % 5)
            ...

------
mnwsth
There are 23 IITs

------
vmception
tl;dr oversupply. nothing unexpected here

------
andarleen
Strangely enough east european outsourcing is skyrocketing, so demand is out
there. Most companies coming here complain about their negative experience
with outsourcing to India, and are willing to pay far more than outsourcing
there, albeit still less than in western europe. So the issue is not
necessarily numbers, but the quality of those numbers. Indian programmers are
great, this is honest feedback based on what i heard.

