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Comment by blindwatchmaker | Hacker News Reader

One of the articles linking from this one (https://qz.com/964843/less-than-5-of-india-engineers-are-cut...) made me laugh:

> More than two-thirds of the candidates from the top 100 universities in the country were able to write “compilable code,” or that which does not throw errors when compiled into machine-readable code.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean? Most devs make typos or errors when writing new code at some point; the compiler spits out the reason (or your IDE helpfully points it out), you go back and fix it.

> One reason for the poor performance is the dearth of good instructors as well as misaligned college curriculums. “The school curriculum focusing on MS-Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc., rather teaching programming using elementary languages such as Basic and Logo is also the culprit,” said Varun Aggarwal, the co-founder and chief technology officer at Aspiring Minds.

Basic and Logo? What in the world?

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What is said is partially true. The curriculum wont get updated soon enough to catch up with industry trends. However Basic and Logo or Excel is not true. I graduated in 2004 and Java was the most prominent language we used, followed by C++ and then C. All of these are very relevant even today.

However it was upto the students to explore more outside of what is taught in the curriculum. Even if you are not willing to actually learn programming you can still get good enough marks in both theory and practical exams. We had four practical projects but most of the projects were widely "purchased" from ready-made shops instead of the students doing it themselves, and the instructors were not competent enough to figure out if the projects are copied or self-made.

What should be taught in modern day schools should be Assembly (to get the basics), C/C++, ML/AI, Java, Algorithms and Data structures (Can't stress this enough - even a full year can be dedicated for this) and have at least one project each semester and have all projects scrutinised by external faculties.

>>The curriculum wont get updated soon enough to catch up with industry trends.

No instituition. Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books every time something the equivalent of React or Angular JS comes along.

You generally teach the base skills from which much can be learned and grown.

Also I don't understand this thing about asking colleges to train people in the latest tech that is out there.

In almost all cases I have seen, you are way better off hiring good generalists than one trick ponies.

> Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books

The situation is different in India.. Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops. Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India. Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.

Did I mention Angular or React? I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of. React and Angular are just libraries and any one can learn them if they have solid programming base.

But ML/AI is a very different beast as they require you to have good solid understanding of mathematics, statistics, probability theorem etc, which is difficult to acquire outside without spending considerable amount of time.

>>Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops.

All schools/colleges are that way. Unless you join a PhD program. Also in the west, emphasis on taking skill based courses is high. They even have a term for the other type of courses, they call it, Underwater basket weaving.

>>Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India.

Thanks to our population numbers. And why is this wrong. STEM education makes a person think, at-least, comparatively, more rationally than other courses do.

>>Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.

India is already doing enough. But at our scale everything breaks.

>>I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of.

Why only ML/AI? Because they are in demand now? A few days back it was Hadoop etc. Before that Java...

>>Why only ML/AI? Because they are in demand now?

NO only that, but because it can be the new IT. Java, Hadoop etc are only languages and frameworks, that had at most a life span of a decade. But ML/AI is a whole new world. If things are going to be progressing in the current pace, then ML/AI could have a big impact on the world as the personal computers did and can be the next big thing of this century.

All this automation and job loss that the original article saying would be nothing if AI comes into full effect. There could be serious job losses all over the world. And with the biggest of population in the whole world, India would be the worst affected.. It is best for any country's interest to progress in AI so that they could have a say in future policy related to AI, not to mention getting more jobs related to that field.

Few of the several fields that could be affected by a combination of AI/Robots/Automation that I could think of ->

> Manufacturing / Factory workers > Defence personnel > Agriculture > Auto drivers (Taxi, Truck, Rail, Ship whatsoever) > Teaching (Virtual teaching) > Construction (Ready-made materials combined with smart machines) > Medical professionals (X-Ray diagnostics etc) > Doctors (though far-stretched but could be possible)

Why now? No body have solid answers when or will this happen, but if you look closely it's been only couple of years that machines got the ability to beat humans in at least few tasks we figured would require advanced intelligence, including accurate visual/speech recognition. That coupled with smart robots, and automation could replace a large percentage of existing jobs. Self-driving cars are a proof of this. This is little scary, but not alarming if there are proper policies in place. Any country need to be in the forefront of this technology or else can get sidelined really quickly.

>>But ML/AI is a whole new world.

For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it. The real math behind all this stuff is quite old. There are already courses available to do that. Indian statistical institute offers beginner to advanced courses in statistics which you can take, they have been available for decades now.

Anything that you will likely do with ML/AI will likely involve using a framework today.

>>All this automation and job loss that the original article saying would be nothing if AI comes into full effect.

We don't even know if that kind of AGI is possible, let alone achieving it anytime soon.

Heck we haven't even come close to defining what AGI is.

>>For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it.

Frameworks only provide part of it. In the case of AI, they just provide a general way to represent neural networks. Each use case need a different type of network with hundreds of parameters fine tuned and trained. Of course you can download pre-built algorithms and model zoos, but they are at best couple of years old.

Also do you think that the best things will be available under a framework? There are open source frameworks (like Tensorflow), but you will be surprised at the amount of research under progress and what portion of it is available for public. For e.g. look at the amount of work that China is doing in the field (And available for public scrutiny) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhp47v5OBXQ.

India (or any other Country) could do proper research in the area or end up buying these stuff from other countries, provided they give state of art technology to others. Just imagine a drone or an army of drones equipped with such AI technology can survey 24/7 and instantly take down your enemy even across a country.

There was a HN post about that “study” ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156547 - be sure to read the how it works at Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/66kb3c/95_engi... ). There were some very questionable aspects to it and using it as a reference doesn’t reflect well.

Wow. I'd fire anyone who used these people to assess candidates.

When I was in college, back in the late 1990s, my university hired a new professor in the Computer Science department. He had 2 PhDs. In addition to wanting us to copy and paste all of our C++ code into Microsoft Word, blow the font up to 32 point size, and print it out in order to hand it in, he taught us the incorrect way to use cin, assigned homework to use it, and then informed the class that if you looked the answer up in the book and your code worked, you would get an F for not following his instruction.

Needless to say, I and a group of my fellow students went immediately to the department chair. He was fired shortly thereafter. He was an astounding example of total incompetence. I decided to look into these "2 PhDs" he was supposed to have. Both were from Bangalore University. It didn't take much to find their CS department website (which looked like it had been built by an elementary school kid) and the academic requirements necessary to get such a degree. To get a basic CS bachelor's degree you needed high school level math and 2 classes about CS. To get a PhD you needed a full year. As far as I could tell the school had a good medical program, and decided to open a Computer Science diploma mill on the side. I was stunned.

Some good came of it, though. After that, every prospective candidate to become a new professor had to give a presentation to upperclassmen on a topic of their own choosing and submit to being questioned by the upperclassmen. To replace the inept man with 2 PhDs we hired a guy who only had a Masters degree but who had several years experience in the industry, so he could bring some manner of "this is how its ACTUALLY done in the real world" to things. Worked out great, at least from a students perspective.

This is plain BS. I don't recall any CS department in India (and I know 100's) teaching, MS-word, Logo, Basic, Powerpoint, excel etc. However, I did TA'ed at Rice University, TX, Excel course for freshman.

Here school means elementary, middle school,high school etc. where they teach MS Word etc. In India, CS departments are in “colleges” also called “schools” in US so this may not be bullshit for the reason you stated.

Fair observation. I missed that part. My bad!

they don't teach excel in the comp sci department at Rice.

You might want to check out their course catalog: https://www.clear.rice.edu/comp100/17-spring/

COMP 100 teaches students how to use common software for organizing, searching, and computing on information, with an emphasis on business-related tasks. It introduces engineering design via a medium-sized team project. The course examines

databases — Microsoft Access spreadsheets — Microsoft Excel

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