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As an Indian there are reasons you can point out for this. Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated. And due to a work-just-enough-for-month-end-sa
by entha_saava 6y ago
As an Indian there are reasons you can point out for this.
Education:
Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated. And due to a work-just-enough-for-month-end-salary mindset, professors are against being up-to-date. As a result, everywhere but in top notch colleges, quality of teaching is piss poor.
The "Rat Race":
There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses don't have any interest in computers. They enter because they scored well in entrance exam (which can be games by studying some books relentlessly for some years), and since Software is still one of the highest paying fields. And quite some of them continue their relentless pursuit for a good "package" by grinding Hackerrank / leetcode. It is literally a rat race.
The same mindset will create an impression that being a manager is superior to being a programmer. Because you are "managing" people. These people do all kind of office politics to become manager, and spend rest of their life ruining someone else's life.
You can't expect these kind of people to love their job or even do it properly.
Hierarchy:
Related to above point, in India, you don't oppose or even question an upper officer or elder's decision, because ELDERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT HERE IN INDIA. That's why so many people want to be manager.
Lack of interest in improving education:
In many Indian engineering colleges, one year is wasted teaching theoretical subjects like chemistry and physics. No computer science related subject except basic C Programming (Lol not even malloc() and free()) are taught. This appears to be purely done in order to provide jobs for people who had studied these subjects. While teaching these subjects may have marginal benefits, they are outweighed by pure rote learning oriented assesment sysem and wasting one year of CSE programme. That's a bad trade-off for someone interested in CS. All entrance exams are based on Math/Physics/Chemistry and we have learnt enough of that. STOP the old age tradition.
If the chemistry they teach in last two years of high school (called pre university here), which is quite high level, qualifies for entrance exams, Computer Science should too. No I am not telling this because it is a programmers forum. But CS taught in pre-uni (optional subject) is more essential and often more helpful than chemistry and half of physics taught to these grades. But chemistry is compulsory for some legacy reasons. There is no interest to change that.
- blocked_again 6y agoYour generalization of Indian colleges is not right. India has a lot of Engineering students. There are around 60k students joining Tier 1 colleges every year in India (IITs, NITs, etc funded by the Central Government alongside some private colleges like BITS). Very few students from Tier 1 colleges join these consultancy companies. Most of them studying CS from these colleges join product companies like Flipkart, Swiggy, Paytm, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber etc. Consultancy companies get students mostly from 2nd and 3rd tier (mostly private) colleges. Pretty much all these colleges are in a very bad shape. I think there are over half a million students enrolled in these colleges every year. Students still go to these engineering colleges since the education is not as expensive as in the USA and it's what pretty much everyone do after high school. If it was USA they would have just left college altogether instead of wasting money on a terrible college. Sure, the quality of education of Tier 1 colleges can be improved a lot as well. But generalizing the entire Indian engineering education as the reason why these consultancy companies are doing poor is not correct either.
- lloydatkinson 6y ago"As an Indian"
- newen 6y agoYou can be Indian and still be wrong about aspects of your country. In GPs case, he was generalizing too much about Indian universities.
- viig99 6y agoStaggering over-generalization
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- entha_saava 6y agoHow many of us get to study in IITs?
- GordonS 6y ago> The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses don't have any interest in computers. They enter because they scored well in entrance exam (which can be games by studying some books relentlessly for some years), and since Software is still one of the highest paying fields. I've seen this a lot, especially in ODC parts of Capgemini, TCS, Cognizant etc - it felt like only a very small number of people actually wanted to be developers or even architects; everyone else just wanted to be "a manager". I'd asked about this strangenes, and Indian friends told me that managers were seen as superior, and even their families would push them to become managers.
- caymanjim 6y agoYou see this everywhere in the world. I've worked with a huge number of Americans who went to school for anything but computing, would rather be doing anything but computing, but realized that a six-week crash course in web development would literally quadruple their salary. Many of them go on to embrace computing, many of them turn out to be good developers, and some even become passionate, but they all start out by abandoning their dreams and chasing the quick buck. Tech and finance eat all the smart people. There are unlimited tech jobs, but only so many jobs for physicists, chemists, professional musicians, teachers, lawyers, etc. And the vast majority of them pay a lot less than tech and finance.
- GordonS 6y agoDifference is, a lot of these people wouldn't get jobs as junior devs in the west, and if they did, there just wouldn't be so many "natural" opportunities to move into management. Whereas in India, the big outsourcing firms need such a large quantity of people every year, that thousands upon thousands are hired and placed in junior dev or test roles. And because these orgs are so large, there are many layers of middle management, and plenty of opportunities.
- TheColorYellow 6y agoI don't think this is true at all. The tech bubble in the West is huge and claiming junior devs in the West are anywhere less afflicted by the rat race syndrome than India is outrageously false.
- triceratops 6y ago> ELDERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT HERE IN INDIA. That's why so many people want to be manager. I think it's because managers get paid more money and have more respect. People wanting to be manager (or chief, captain, general, shaman, headman, minister, consul, cardinal, king, nobleman, judge) isn't a unique feature of any single culture or organization. It's a universal drive across every culture throughout history.
- jackcosgrove 6y agoRegarding the lack of secondary level CS education, it is a problem everywhere. You have to be passionate about teaching CS because practicing it is so lucrative. There's a global shortage of CS teachers especially at the secondary level.
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