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Is this also why there are so many low quality videos on technical topics by people which seem to be from India? A way to pad their resumes? Or is this a result of a course requirement or something else?

You must have been looking at the wrong places then (Youtube is not a good indicator). Here is "National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)" which publishes a lot of high quality courses from various top-ranking universities in India - https://nptel.ac.in/

You misunderstood what I meant. I did not say that there are no high quality tech topic videos coming from India, I am sure there are as I have watched a few myself. What I said was that there is a lot of low quality content and I was wondering if the reasons for that were related to what the parent mentioned.

No it's not. "Youtube" is still perceived as "time wastage" by most conventional parents. In fact creators are kind of rebelling against the norm.

I checked a few of the videos on that site and they are anyway located on YouTube.

I think you are referring to the Youtube gurus teaching stuff.

Its actually 2 fold, the short term goal of raking up some youtube views and getting the youtube ad money. Second is to pad the CV as an "advanced developer with lots of knowledge to share", it helps to put on CV and also be considered for some training positions which is demand as many are rushing to get into tech where "even kids are minting money".

I know a guy that put up some coding videos on youtube to be a "youtuber" and one of the big tech firms in India hired him to train their new recruits.

> The flywheel then spins ever faster as every decision you make thereafter is about getting closer and closer to this vague goal of “success/wealth/societal perception”. You pick universities based on rankings, large tech companies over startups, management over individual contributor work

I feel as though I've read numerous parables like this, except describing modern America.

We don't tend to choose our careers so early, but is it really so different? In New York City you typically have parents/children competing for spots in the "best" preschools, and throughout the country high school is basically a big competition to be accepted into the most prestigious college. Only among a certain social group, of course, but I'm sure that applies to India too.

The example you picked - NYC - has by far the highest population density in the country.

This was one of the major factors cited by the article here; it would seem to lend credence to the "why".

I find the obsession with certificates interesting. One of my past school used to hand them out like candies. It costs like a dollar for 10 and made everyone happy. Same with trophies and medals. After some questioning and feedback from a lot of people indirectly, I concluded that it's one of the best investment any school can make. It results in lot of good PR, recognition, talks, feel good, etc.

It's useful to target and engineer certain behaviors in students. Many of them conflate their value and status with those papers.

You can make money by holding competition to handout these and charge for chairs, food and other stuff.

Many students won't talk about certificates and medals with their classmates because they will be aware of how easy it is to get one but they will boast about it to kids from other schools and their parents. Ha, better conversion rate if someone is looking to transfer their kid to a better school.

I don't understand how not enough schools are doing this and still cheap out on $100 total spend every month at best.

That's interesting because I've always found someone being "certified" for e.g. Microsoft something is a huge turnoff for hiring.

Agreed -- and an especially big turnoff is a "cert collector", most of which have done the absolute minimum required to get each of them, i.e. mostly rote memorisation. It's a very Quantity over Quality mindset.

On the plus side, at least you know they knew it at some point in time.

In my experience it’s a turn off for HN types of commenters, but out in the “real world” it’s a big deal.

My current employer has a goal of X% of all consultants must be cloud certified and bringing these certificates to pre-sales meetings with clients helps a lot.

I largely agreee, with the exception of CAD design certificates for Solidworks, etc. I don't even have one, but everyone I've met who has are actually functionally better at CAD than those without, so I acknowledge it.

On the flip side, knowing someone is AWS certified tells me they at least know their way around the console.

>and of course America over everything else

Ha, Ha, Ha! Very funny but true.