> 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.
Ha I was given one of those when I graduated and interviewed for some random firm (in US), I don't know if it's Aspiring Minds but it was clearly from India. They really go to an extreme length to monitor the tested and I felt very uncomfortable during the whole thing.
The camera's on, Document.hasFocus() is obviously also on, I use multiple screen and you can't move your mouse out of that screen. The test questions are repetitive recital garbage that ask you to recite java syntax and concepts. All in all I would judge it as a complete failure in selecting for technical talent.
All you need to prepare for this is to recite some book about locks or thread and names. And have the coding ability to write hello world level programs in Java without a linter or autocomplete, god forbid you forgot how to use Scanner interface.
I might sound salty, but I didn't need that job and I'm in a much better position today. My opinion is that those filtering tests are loads of crap.
"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.
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 knowledge bases. I've since worked, as many of us have, with brilliant people from all over the world. It just gave me a weird impression of CS education in India. But, I'm sure others have similar experiences of graduates from [random school in the US or elsewhere].
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.
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 fastest path to management is via a tech degree. So India is churning out a bunch of want to be MBA's with tech degrees that are just doing their time in tech to get to management. He said it was a hold over from the cast system and that you are held in more esteem in India when you manage more people.
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 book by it's cover, metaphorically speaking.
> 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 can get the job done.
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, according to her, and people have to pay more to learn the material from off-campus tutors but not everyone can afford that.
I think this should be the focus is ending academic fraud rather than some of these other issues. That could do a lot of good. Here is a reference to a story I found that corroborates what I was told.[1]
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.)
> 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 equations they have learned at university.
> Heck, I would be offended if someone called me a developer rather than a programmer.
It depends on the specific job, but currently, I can spend 30 minutes changing one line of code followed by one week of deploying, testing it, making sure the configs are all right etc. So that's 30 minutes of programming followed by one week of "installing dishwashers" (as the joke on the team goes). Lately, I see myself more of a software configurator than creator (my nominal job title is a backend web developer).
I prefer the term "software engineer" for a reason I haven't seen yet in this thread: clarity when speaking to people in other industries.
Among many of the people I talk to on a regular basis, if I told them I was a "developer" they would assume that I was a real estate developer.
If I told them I was a "programmer" it would be a little clearer, but before I moved into software I worked in the events industry for a few years, where "programmer" means "one who develops event programming."
In practice, I could append "software" in front of either "programmer" or "developer" to provide that clarity, but "software engineer" seems to be more common, and to me feels like it more adequately covers the totality of my job, which is as much about measuring, planning, and communicating as it is about producing code.
I immigrated into the US (from Canada) to work for a tech company, and a piece of advice I got from our legal dept was: Whenever you cross the border and the guard asks you what your job is, answer "Software Engineer". IIRC it was important I answer this correctly because that's the role that I was permitted to work for (under a TN, later a H1B; I'm now naturalized). Saying "programmer" or "developer" may have been fine (I don't know), but I do recall some emphasis on getting this right.
I don't have an engineering degree, or even a CS degree.
I feel pretty uncomfortable calling myself an engineer since it seems to carry a certain weight of responsibility, but seeing as the title was bestowed upon me by my work place, I'll continue using it.
IMO the designations are meaningless until there is a real standard in place for "software engineer" and what it entails (in the US at least).
I refer to myself as a "programmer" or "developer", but I use them interchangeably.
Anyone putting any real weight on the title is splitting hairs.
I agree, I tend not to call myself an engineer because I don't have a PE license and never took a PE exam (though at one point I almost took the PE exam for electrical engineering). However, I was using the terminology of the article.
On a side note, when people ask what my job is, I usually say "programmer" or "software developer". For some reason I just feel uncomfortable calling myself an "engineer", I think I find it is just a bit pretentious.
It's funny, I actually have an undergraduate and graduate degree in engineering - but not software engineering - and I work as a software engineer.
Yet I tell everyone that I'm a programmer/developer. To me, having seen what goes for engineering in other fields, I feel like a small subset of engineering jobs in non-software fields is true engineering. To me, that bar is inventing something worth patenting. I'd say its an even smaller subset in software.
The thing is, I wouldn't say it the highest value work is the stuff that is true engineering. Actually implementing ideas is so much more value adding and difficult in my opinion. Execution and front lines gritty work is incredibly undervalued in every industry. So I prefer to go by developer because I take more pride in that part.
I have no issue calling myself engineer, because I have a degree in Informatics Engineering and in Portugal it is a professional title validated by the Engineers Organization and all universities must have a green light to offer such degrees.
What I have an issue with, is developers feeling like calling themselves "engineer" after a six months bootcamp, or not having any kind of engineering degree to start with.
I have a mechanical engineering BS, but I work as a "software engineer". None of my engineering friends in college had a problem with "software engineer" as a title.
Pretending that engineer is a restricted title does not match the reality of the world today, and is unnecessary at best and creates miscommunication at worst. Language evolves and certain words become more lax and widely applied. We can prevent it in cases that are sufficiently technical (Zoom does not have E2EE, that's a blatant lie), but getting the world to use "literally" as it was originally defined is no longer feasible IMO.
>I also have a problem with calling developers engineers.
Well, I for one am both a developer and an engineer. I have a B. Eng (equivalent) degree in ICT and I work as a full-stack dev. I don't really have a problem with using either "developer" or "software engineer" to describe myself.
> 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.)
Soft skills and people skills are also scarce skills, in my experience. You can always teach a monkey a new trick (you can always teach a fresh looking young man to program in Python or to solve a differential equation), but you can't as easily teach them to: communicate in a professional manner, talk like a professional to other professionals (both people above you and people below you), write clearly, concisely, and without grammatical or orthographical mistakes, sell yourself or your product, etc.
The geeks will not inherit the Earth. Socially sophisticated people will inherit the Earth.
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.
It's not helped by the Indian consulting sweatshops.
I didn't have any particular prejudices about Indians before I started dealing with Tata and Cognizant and Infosys and Cap-Gemini and the ATT/IBM/Oracle Global Services divisions, but afterwards, it's just hard. You get to where you just expect dishonesty and incompetence and disorganization and abusive behavior as the default.
I was going to say the solution is to raise the bar for software engineers, but it seems the problem here is the culture around prestige and money which has prompted millions of people to go after programming careers. It's not easy to change culture.
Still I think there should be some needed post-grad accreditation for software engineers if they want to actually be called engineers.
> the problem here is the culture around prestige and money
Everywhere in the world people flock to careers with prestige and money. Chasing cash in a developing country makes even more sense because being poor there sucks even worse than being poor in a developed country.
> Still I think there should be some needed post-grad accreditation for software engineers if they want to actually be called engineers.
That's just the opposite of what works. I personally find looking at github or whatever personal project the person had to be the best indicator of whether he/she actually liked/is good at programming - for someone coming out of school or claiming little/no experience otherwise.
> but it possibly creates unintentional racial bias in interviewers because the sheer volume of crappy engineers being churned out from universities has preconditioned you to think all engineers from there are crappy
You can't blame interviewers being racist on the bad actions of some university. They have to address their own racism themselves.
Biggest predictor for anything is past experience, and understanding what bad habits people pick up in different places and roles — your interview needs to look for that.
End of the day, people are snobs about education, etc. Some companies just won’t deal with you if you didn’t go to a school on the happy list.
The article is about the education of engineers in the country of India. The vast majority of Indians working in engineering in the US were born and raised in the US, or at the very least educated here. Ethnically Indian people in the US are disproportionately represented in the upper levels of tech. Anybody who can't recognize this has only themselves to blame.
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.
> 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.
I can back that up with my anecdotal stat as well, that number is rather generous, not even 70-80 would be doing it still. There were some which hated it and it showed. They were pressured into it and they were just struggling all around to develop any interest at all in the field.
> 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.
I am skeptical about this. Unless you can actively demonstrate competence (select few) you are not going to be favoured against someone with real degrees in the pile of resumes.
> I am skeptical about this. Unless you can actively demonstrate competence (select few) you are not going to be favoured against someone with real degrees in the pile of resumes.
That's why I said, if you are willing to let go of the traditional path. If you have to compete against a pile of resume, you are near or on the traditional path.
Employment doesn't necessarily mean you have to be working for a company.
In East Asian economies, the workforce transitioned from farming to labor-intensive manufacturing before moving onto high-tech services. India, in contrast, had a booming tech consultancy sector before they had a strong manufacturing sector. A poor farmer in China, and Japan/Korea in the decades prior, could move to a city and make a better income on an assembly line despite not having any formal education. A poor farmer in India needs to jump up to a service job which needs a lot more training and preferably a diploma to prove it. So even if your local college is a shit diploma mill, you'll still send your kids to it because there's no other choice for upwards mobility. There's no factory job where your children can get hired at and save up so the next generation can go to a college with legitimate training.
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.
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.
> For decades, the Indian society has tried to use engineering (along with law, medicine and IAS) as a template to success.
Isn't this the case everywhere? Even in developed countries education has become the default path to a successful life. Medicine and law are extremely competitive fields because they have a reputation for guaranteed success. There aren't many opportunities available for people without qualifications.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Looks like the parent is saying that the right answer is somewhere in between. When enough engineers can be educated without watering down the entire cohort
Value of education in a professional context comes from such things. Many professional groups such as lawyers , accountants, actuaries etc have entry systems which are not directly linked to the education itself ( BAR membership and degree in law etc).
Value of education itself cannot be only quantified by the its value in a job, even a poor education is better than none. Lack of employability should not be a reason for not learning.
TLDR:
The passion and rigor for study/education died and it shows
Being from the same decade , could not agree more. It was really selection through fire (especially if you were in general category of applicants) . Not all set their sights on this degree , the later part of the decade set about this whole boom of software engineers (Y2K , eCommerce etc.)
Those who didn't get in , then got into roles of lecturers in these colleges that mushroomed. The quality started going down in GP , 1/2 cooked engineers produced 1/4 cooked ones and this went on.
I think what is to blame as well was the fact that the path was all too easy and clear , finish engineering , pass through some quant tests , 3 month bootcamp and lo you have your job (or in some variant of this). Attitudes changed toward this easy life.
Compared to this other professions like Charted Accountants (CPA equivalent) , Actuaries (who i think are the best data scientists around) or Doctors where there is a lot more work in the first decade of one's career post undergrad , engineering was a cake walk.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"HR" wasn't really involved in hiring, except as a secretary role here. The scanning and decisions were made by development managers and team leads. I think that's the way it should be.
(HR printed out all applications on paper. We sat in a meeting room to scan through them, and discuss them. The mechanism was: scan through each one; write your initial and then yay or nay. Obvious ones got into the yay/nay piles, then we debated the maybe pile. After all of that, HR set up interviews with the people who ended up in the yay pile.)
Readit News
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 camera's on, Document.hasFocus() is obviously also on, I use multiple screen and you can't move your mouse out of that screen. The test questions are repetitive recital garbage that ask you to recite java syntax and concepts. All in all I would judge it as a complete failure in selecting for technical talent.
All you need to prepare for this is to recite some book about locks or thread and names. And have the coding ability to write hello world level programs in Java without a linter or autocomplete, god forbid you forgot how to use Scanner interface.
I might sound salty, but I didn't need that job and I'm in a much better position today. My opinion is that those filtering tests are loads of crap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 can get the job done.
Small nit, this is a nationality, not an ethnicity.
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, according to her, and people have to pay more to learn the material from off-campus tutors but not everyone can afford that.
I think this should be the focus is ending academic fraud rather than some of these other issues. That could do a lot of good. Here is a reference to a story I found that corroborates what I was told.[1]
[1]:https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/UGC-probe-f...
Like, officially, in writing? Even if it's informal, as an American it blows my mind that that's still a thing.
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.)
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 equations they have learned at university.
> Heck, I would be offended if someone called me a developer rather than a programmer.
It depends on the specific job, but currently, I can spend 30 minutes changing one line of code followed by one week of deploying, testing it, making sure the configs are all right etc. So that's 30 minutes of programming followed by one week of "installing dishwashers" (as the joke on the team goes). Lately, I see myself more of a software configurator than creator (my nominal job title is a backend web developer).
Among many of the people I talk to on a regular basis, if I told them I was a "developer" they would assume that I was a real estate developer.
If I told them I was a "programmer" it would be a little clearer, but before I moved into software I worked in the events industry for a few years, where "programmer" means "one who develops event programming."
In practice, I could append "software" in front of either "programmer" or "developer" to provide that clarity, but "software engineer" seems to be more common, and to me feels like it more adequately covers the totality of my job, which is as much about measuring, planning, and communicating as it is about producing code.
How are they different, in your mind?
I don't have an engineering degree, or even a CS degree.
I feel pretty uncomfortable calling myself an engineer since it seems to carry a certain weight of responsibility, but seeing as the title was bestowed upon me by my work place, I'll continue using it.
IMO the designations are meaningless until there is a real standard in place for "software engineer" and what it entails (in the US at least).
I refer to myself as a "programmer" or "developer", but I use them interchangeably.
Anyone putting any real weight on the title is splitting hairs.
On a side note, when people ask what my job is, I usually say "programmer" or "software developer". For some reason I just feel uncomfortable calling myself an "engineer", I think I find it is just a bit pretentious.
Yet I tell everyone that I'm a programmer/developer. To me, having seen what goes for engineering in other fields, I feel like a small subset of engineering jobs in non-software fields is true engineering. To me, that bar is inventing something worth patenting. I'd say its an even smaller subset in software.
The thing is, I wouldn't say it the highest value work is the stuff that is true engineering. Actually implementing ideas is so much more value adding and difficult in my opinion. Execution and front lines gritty work is incredibly undervalued in every industry. So I prefer to go by developer because I take more pride in that part.
I have no issue calling myself engineer, because I have a degree in Informatics Engineering and in Portugal it is a professional title validated by the Engineers Organization and all universities must have a green light to offer such degrees.
What I have an issue with, is developers feeling like calling themselves "engineer" after a six months bootcamp, or not having any kind of engineering degree to start with.
Pretending that engineer is a restricted title does not match the reality of the world today, and is unnecessary at best and creates miscommunication at worst. Language evolves and certain words become more lax and widely applied. We can prevent it in cases that are sufficiently technical (Zoom does not have E2EE, that's a blatant lie), but getting the world to use "literally" as it was originally defined is no longer feasible IMO.
Well, I for one am both a developer and an engineer. I have a B. Eng (equivalent) degree in ICT and I work as a full-stack dev. I don't really have a problem with using either "developer" or "software engineer" to describe myself.
Soft skills and people skills are also scarce skills, in my experience. You can always teach a monkey a new trick (you can always teach a fresh looking young man to program in Python or to solve a differential equation), but you can't as easily teach them to: communicate in a professional manner, talk like a professional to other professionals (both people above you and people below you), write clearly, concisely, and without grammatical or orthographical mistakes, sell yourself or your product, etc.
The geeks will not inherit the Earth. Socially sophisticated people will inherit the Earth.
I didn't have any particular prejudices about Indians before I started dealing with Tata and Cognizant and Infosys and Cap-Gemini and the ATT/IBM/Oracle Global Services divisions, but afterwards, it's just hard. You get to where you just expect dishonesty and incompetence and disorganization and abusive behavior as the default.
Still I think there should be some needed post-grad accreditation for software engineers if they want to actually be called engineers.
Everywhere in the world people flock to careers with prestige and money. Chasing cash in a developing country makes even more sense because being poor there sucks even worse than being poor in a developed country.
Which will depreciate just as fast for the same reason.
That's just the opposite of what works. I personally find looking at github or whatever personal project the person had to be the best indicator of whether he/she actually liked/is good at programming - for someone coming out of school or claiming little/no experience otherwise.
You can't blame interviewers being racist on the bad actions of some university. They have to address their own racism themselves.
Yes, you always blame the racists for being racists.
Edit: instead of deleting my (incorrect) parsing of the parent poster, I’ll leave this here and accept my well deserved lashings and downvotes...
Biggest predictor for anything is past experience, and understanding what bad habits people pick up in different places and roles — your interview needs to look for that.
End of the day, people are snobs about education, etc. Some companies just won’t deal with you if you didn’t go to a school on the happy list.
This has been a problem my entire career. Long before China, India, Vietnam, etc entered the fight.
Credentials are just one signal in the torrent of noise.
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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.
I can back that up with my anecdotal stat as well, that number is rather generous, not even 70-80 would be doing it still. There were some which hated it and it showed. They were pressured into it and they were just struggling all around to develop any interest at all in the field.
> 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.
I am skeptical about this. Unless you can actively demonstrate competence (select few) you are not going to be favoured against someone with real degrees in the pile of resumes.
That's why I said, if you are willing to let go of the traditional path. If you have to compete against a pile of resume, you are near or on the traditional path.
Employment doesn't necessarily mean you have to be working for a company.
It does not work for literally everyone from the country but the people I'm talking about can definitely travel on this path.
'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.
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.
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers
Isn't this the case everywhere? Even in developed countries education has become the default path to a successful life. Medicine and law are extremely competitive fields because they have a reputation for guaranteed success. There aren't many opportunities available for people without qualifications.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Value of education itself cannot be only quantified by the its value in a job, even a poor education is better than none. Lack of employability should not be a reason for not learning.
Being from the same decade , could not agree more. It was really selection through fire (especially if you were in general category of applicants) . Not all set their sights on this degree , the later part of the decade set about this whole boom of software engineers (Y2K , eCommerce etc.)
Those who didn't get in , then got into roles of lecturers in these colleges that mushroomed. The quality started going down in GP , 1/2 cooked engineers produced 1/4 cooked ones and this went on.
I think what is to blame as well was the fact that the path was all too easy and clear , finish engineering , pass through some quant tests , 3 month bootcamp and lo you have your job (or in some variant of this). Attitudes changed toward this easy life.
Compared to this other professions like Charted Accountants (CPA equivalent) , Actuaries (who i think are the best data scientists around) or Doctors where there is a lot more work in the first decade of one's career post undergrad , engineering was a cake walk.
> 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.
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?
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.
(HR printed out all applications on paper. We sat in a meeting room to scan through them, and discuss them. The mechanism was: scan through each one; write your initial and then yay or nay. Obvious ones got into the yay/nay piles, then we debated the maybe pile. After all of that, HR set up interviews with the people who ended up in the yay pile.)