In India hiring decisions, on any level, are mostly based on which college one comes from, how many random buzzwords one can speak, and not based on the actual

In India hiring decisions, on any level, are mostly based on which college one comes from, how many random buzzwords one can speak, and not based on the actual skills one has learned during college or picked up at work. People 'learn' things by reading nuggets from interview prep sites, they memorize things and repeat like a tape-recorder during interviews. No wonder their 'understanding' is non existent. At one end of the spectrum are people who come from 'premier' colleges (term invented by HR folks, I guess), like the IITs and NITs. Although these institutes produce some brilliant minds, the majority of graduates have no skills whatsoever. Most of the skilled ones go abroad while the'unskilled' ones get hired in India. So it's not uncommon to come across people, who have fancy titles, get paid insane salaries (by Indian standards) and who have been selected through 'rigorous' technical interviews to fumble when writing a simple application program. At the other end of the spectrum is a huge number of people graduating from private colleges. The quality of teaching and learning at these colleges is abysmal. Most of them end up at one or other 'IT giants' doing menial maintenance work and earning a pittance. The salary varies a lot across the spectrum but the quality of work is equally bad. Their approach to programming, and problem solving in general, is trial-and-error combined with some Googling. As the author points out the code that is produced by these 'engineers' and 'programmers' is compiler-ready not production-ready. Of course there are exceptions too. A small minority of people who stay back in India working for startups or as freelancers are amazing at what they do irrespective of which college they went to or how they learned to program. When you're sampling from this pool, your hiring process has to be ingenious or you end up with insurmountable technical and financial debt.