Hacker News Reader

Comment by timwaagh | Hacker News Reader

it's kinda sad european programmers get pushed out of entry level positions by typically more experienced indians willing to work for some premium above indian wage. this ensures programming is not a very well paid job in west europe. europe has problems in the education system which makes sure people only start programming after college further putting eu workers at a disadvantage versus indians and russians. which isn't to say i'm against economic immigration completely, but if countries are going to be imposing migration restrictions, they should not make an exception for programming when they do for similarly paid professions, like chefs or hairdressers.

View on HN

I see you have very high opinion about India's engineering education. Being an Indian CSE undergrad student at one of 'top' colleges, I'd say it is crap unless you climb the ladder on your own.

1. Till 10th grade you are not likely to know anything about programming

2. In 11th and 12th there is huge competition for getting into medical / engineering colleges. You study physics - chemistry - mathematics for acing that 'entrance exam'. Very few people try to learn outside syllabus. I did try to learn some C programming & linux stuff out of interest. But somehow happened to study well also and got into my province's #1 or #2 college by everyone's norms.

There it just began.

3. We have 4 years Bachelor of Engineering degree for CS. CSE is most prestigious branch because of relatively high salaries. Every kid who topped the entrance exam in entirely irrelevant subjects (Phy-Chem-Math) ends up taking CSE without any idea or interest about it. Most of your classmates will be such bookworms who just study for exams.

4. Worse, they don't teach considerable amount of CS / Programming in first year. Instead put same physics - chemistry stuff -- pretty much rote learning and scoring good at long-essay-answer exams. They do it saying "students should have interdisciplinary knowledge" etc.. refutable excuses. The purpose just seems to be providing jobs for graduates in chemistry / mathematics.

5. Even if you will get relevant CSE subjects in future, teaching quality is subpar. some teachers don't even know to indent code. In C programming lab exam, I was told not to use command line editor and use gedit because they thought using vim / nano may give different results :D..

Thanks for hearing my complaining here ;-) but we are stuck in a subpar quality system because of high influx of incompetent people into CSE degrees, and job-oriented and rote-learning based mentality prevalent here in every field. I wanted to get into an US university. But costs were prohibitive even to write SAT, and coming from rural area, I didn't have much facilities. There needs to be big change in people's mentality here to see any change.

Also, pardon my English.

What I mean is that Indians typically will actually study for CS. Most European programmers get into it as a second choice. This is because people are taught to follow their heart without consideration for the labor market. Indians typically graduate in time. Europeans don't because the education they are getting is supposed to select suitable candidates for research and people are encouraged to do all kinds of things outside of class. That's why an Indian programmer age thirty might have ten years of job experience. A European might have five years and a difficult route to start. It has little to do with the quality of education.

I teach in CS and engineering in a US college. The biggest proportion of our MS students are from India. And I completely agree with what you say about the education system in India. Indian graduates can't program unless they had a job that trained them after they graduated. I have no idea what CSE students are supposed to be able to do, it seems they just memorized a lot of facts about technology with no deep knowledge about how to do anything with it. That would be a two-year degree in the US. In the US you have to be able to solve problems, write programs, etc to graduate a CS or engineering program. In India you clearly don't. That's why we get so many graduates from India and not enough from the US. The bar is just lower...

> europe has problems in the education system which makes sure people only start programming after college further

In Romania (Eastern Europe) you can start to learn programming from high school. Not sure what it's like in Western Europe.

Same in Germany, but not everywhere/every school.

I had the same experience in Belgium in the 90s.

Had lessons in Pascal when I was 14, VBA at age 15, and moved on to a specialized (not very popular at the time) computer studies program at age 16 with about 15 hours of week of IT (VB, Pascal, C++, ...) per week.

yes, not having information science in high school is one issue. unfortunately, it's only where the list of problems starts.

The romanian education system is grossly overrated by people from that country. From experience, the quality of engineering there is only marginally better than that of india and statistically speaking the education system is the second worst in europe. Universities are ripe with corruption as well. There are some good engineers but overall it is horrible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com