To do so, I look at why millions of graduates in India cannot find work,
Because they sent million upon million to third rate universities with fourth rate teaching staff?
To do so, I look at why millions of graduates in India cannot find work,
Because they sent million upon million to third rate universities with fourth rate teaching staff?
Dunno, let’s ask Steve.
…. because when people get a call from “Robert” who works for Microsoft telling them they have a virus on their computer everyone knows it’s a scam so the bottom has fallen out of that employment opportunity.
I got one of those calls when I was waiting for my wife to get ready to go out so I thought I’d play dumb and string him along to amuse myself.
As soon as she was ready, I said that I had to go and thanked him for his time. He was quite pissed off and I’ve never had a call since.
Two years ago, I was in Greece when I got a call from some Indian Johnny telling me I had a problem with my Windows which he offered to fix. I pretended to think that he was offering window repair and replacement. I strung him along for 20 minutes…Never had a similar call since.
“Never had a similar call since.” – again, not because of anything they did or did not do.
“ I’ve never had a call since” – that won’t be because they have removed you from any lists.
When I get a call from said “Bwob,” I tell them my name is Kirit.
Much the same problem as the UK, then.
Well, they’re all coming over here aren’t they!
I do a fair amount of interviewing for my U.K. based company and what I see is that we receive very few U.K. applicants for specialist engineering roles. Instead, we get endless applications from overseas, particularly from India and Africa. Many CVs appear AI-generated, are riddled with inconsistencies, contain clearly padded work histories that are difficult or impossible to verify, and often demonstrate little to no domain knowledge despite listing postgraduate qualifications, usually one-year conversion Master’s degrees from U.K Polys who are all milking the foreign student gravy train. Their right to work in the U.K. is something HR deals with, so I don’t get involved in that.
Because management decided a few years ago that we needed to improve ‘diversity’, err, why??, HR now pushes a huge number of these candidates through the process. I reject around 90% at CV stage, they shouldn’t even reach me but HR are absolutely bloody useless, I manage to reject another half of those remaining after the first Teams interview but then it’s beyond me.
The frustrating part is that HR’s recruitment process is so rigid that we’re often required to interview candidates and progress them to second interview who are clearly unsuitable. We have prescribed questions, strict timelines (for example, a ridiculous marking system that means even complete failures are only 2 points shy of a great candidate, interviewing candidates within five days of application regardless of my existing workload), and process KPIs that seem to matter more than finding the right person.
The result is that, for highly specialised roles, we’re under pressure to progress candidates simply because there aren’t enough genuinely qualified applicants. It seems as though management believes anyone, from anywhere, can walk into a complex engineering role and be productive within weeks, when that’s simply not reality.
When I graduated in the U.K in the early 90s it was incredibly difficult to get a job and from what I can see it’s becoming increasingly difficult for young British graduates again. Yet at the same time, companies seem more focused on meeting recruitment process targets and diversity KPIs than on ensuring they’re hiring people with the experience and technical ability the role actually requires.
That seems to be a common problem, where HR is running the company rather than supporting it.
I remember a tall, ‘elegant’, Indian student on a geology field trip from a civil engineering course refusing to get out of the bus because it was raining. “I’m studying for an office job,” was his explanation.
It’s things like that make me wonder whether subjects like engineering should be university courses at all. At some point with the application you’re going to bump up against real world problems.
Like architecture. Is it buildable? I had some “clever” architect wanted a walk-onable one piece sheet of glass let into a flat roof of an existing building. He got told the price would would be around £100k. It’s not the glass.It’s cost of putting a crane up in a major Central London road including paying the police to set up the traffic diversions or a heavy lift helicopter & getting a permit to fly it over London. You simply can’t handle a sheet of glass of those dimensions & mass up through a building. There no way of getting enough people around it.
If he’s anything like Renzo fucking Piano he’ll have forgotten what guttering is for, as anyone who walks past the Shard during a rainstorm will soon find out.
No. His weak point was the downpipes. The downpipes from the guttering drained straight onto the pavement. He wanted them in copper. I suggested not a good idea in Whitechapel High Street. He insisted. We put them up. They were gone the next morning.
Silly cunt then, like just about every other architect I’ve ever met. They know how to make money by producing inadequate stuff, mind.
Nothing to do with his subject.
Apart from 6 weeks in the school holidays when I was 16 I’ve been stuck in office jobs all my adult life – doesn’t stop me walking through the rain when I need to.
Very much to do with this subject. Presumably the engineering student on the geology field trip should learn something from it or what’s the point? But this guy thinks sheltering from rain has greater value than acquiring knowledge. Say, when he’s a civil engineer, he takes the same attitude to on-site inspections? I don’t believe they issue civil engineering degrees that are only valid for indoor use..
That’s exactly it. If there’s one profession where you never stop learning, it’s engineering. How you learn depends on the role but the engineers who really excel are usually the ones who take responsibility for their own development rather than waiting to be sent on a course.
The ones who tend to plateau are those who won’t touch anything unless they’ve had formal training first. Unfortunately, those people often still climb into fairly senior positions over time. They’re frequently the most obstructive, the hardest to work with, and ultimately the most expensive employees a company has. Not because of their salary but because the moment a project throws up something unexpected, they can’t adapt. Instead of solving problems, everything grinds to a halt while they wait for someone else to tell them what to do.
Simple answer is don’t train them at university. Do what they used to. Start at the bottom, work your way up, learn as you go. You don’t behave like that because you’ve had the experience of being on the receiving end.
And I think this applies to about 95% of degree courses. Note: There never was a Worshipful Guild of Grievance Studiers.
A bit like being a session musician. In the UK there was nowhere to go to study this in my day (the USA had Berklee) so everyone was self-taught in the ways of sessions. You only called back and made your way up if you were flexible and said “yes” to stuff. If I’m proud of anything I’m proud of that.
The engineering does require a degree – or lots of tuition – it’s architecture that doesn’t. Where I worked, Civil Engineering was 3 hard years, Architecture 7 easy ones. I was on several review panels, and if the Architects had the intensity of tuition that the Civil Engineers had, they might have finished in 7 weeks! Also, they had year 7 and year 1 students attending the same lectures!
The big problem with engineering is that any course covers lots of things the student may never cover in a whole career, and the subject they need most will probably never be taught to cover all the eventualities they are likely to meet in that career. The degree is the start, not the totality of what one needs to learn.
Sandwich courses existed to introduce the student into the sort of experience you would get in the real world, but they had the defect that it often made the student blinkered about what they’d meet in four decades or so of work afterwards.
I have degrees from a Poly before it even became a Poly, and from the best University in Britain. The former had the best lecturers, the latter had the most prominent subject celebrities.Fortunately, the best lecturers gave me the grounding to understand what the celebrities were talking about!
I think I’ve posted before that I was recently skimming through the CompSci coursework I’d done in the 1980s, and in long hindsight wondered how they strung out a course over three years that I could have completed everything they asked of me by Christmas first semester, and have been off earning money. The who “yooni” thing seems predicated on only doing half a day’s work every fortnight.
One notes that Isambard Kingdom Brunel did an apprenticeship
The big problem with engineering is that any course covers lots of things the student may never cover in a whole career, and the subject they need most will probably never be taught to cover all the eventualities they are likely to meet in that career.
Then one might hazard that students are being taught they don’t need to know & not being taught things they do. It seems a crazy way of educating people. You spend 3 years & you’re not actually capable of doing anything. Although I’ve no doubt it suits universities.
What’s wrong with learning what you need to know when you need to know it? A process of continuous education. After all, that’s pretty well what most people, apart from university grads, actually go though in their lives. We seem to manage.
You’ve no idea what is needed to do the job of an engineer – there’s more to it than sizing up how big an RSJ you’re going to need over that doorway. I don’t think we want flight control systems or chemical plants designed by school leavers who’ve ‘learnt on the job’ – which isn’t to say that there’s no learning needed beyond gaining a relevant degree, as EM points out.
Indeed, I’ve no idea. But since people do it, it can’t be too hard, can it?
On the the other hand we’ve had flight control systems designed by people didn’t know was was involved in flying a plane & chemical plants designed by people didn’t really understand what goes on inside chemical plants, haven’t we? Unfortunately the victims didn’t just get a disapproving look from their course tutor.
since people do it, it can’t be too hard, can it?
Same with brain surgery. But if I ever need it, I’ll take a trained surgeon with a university degree every time.
I’m with you on lots of stuff for which a degree is simple credentialism, but there are some human activities that really demand it. I’m not sure about accountancy, for instance – but with engineering you’ve really chosen the wrong target for your ire.
We still have flight control systems that will push a plane straight out of its performance envelope and crash it if set in the wrong mode (Toulouse A330 prototype; any number of stall in cruise accidents), or quit and hand the aircraft straight back to the pilot in manual if sensors fail or it gets pushed beyond parameters (Roselawn; AF447, et al).
Of course, the pilot can miraculously fly the plane in the dark, in cloud, on the same lack of information that made the flight controls quit.
They were designed by engineers. Normally I venerate these people, but even now, flight control systems are really not what they ought to be.
I did a Level 3 bicycle maintenance course and had to answer questions on how to handle nuclear waste because it was an accredited engineering course.
My Dad’s wife was a rarity in doing a specialist nursing degree in the 1960s, and she would regularly be enfuriated by modern nursing graduates who refused to do “manual” stuff. “I’ve got a degree, why should I change a bedpan?”.BECAUSE THAT’S YOUR JOB! Youngsters with lesser qualifiactions than she had at their age seeing what she did at their age below them.
So, Spud is now an expert on India.
Of course. He believes he is omni-competent.
There is an online forum called StackOverflow. It’s the go-to place when you’re looking to figure out how to get over some hurdle in your software programming. If you know what you want to do but don’t know how to do it you go there.
There’s a noticeable difference in the way Indian programmers ask questions. Most people say, “Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish. Can someone point me in the right direction?” Indians, though, will ask for someone to figure out their problem and do the work for them.
I suspect it goes back to what Timmy said about fourth-rate teaching. They’re just not taught how to solve problems.
It’s entirely possible, Indians are culturally incapable of solving problems. Looking at India, entirely possible. It is does require a particular mindset.
I’m thinking about try to deal with the Spanish workmen here. Something fails. José arrives, changes the component, doesn’t test it, pisses off. Odds on, it either doesn’t work, fails immediately or turns out not to be the problem. It’s not the way I do things like that. First I’d try & work out what was actually wrong? Maybe the component wasn’t the correct solution needed. Why did it fail? Take it to pieces if necessary. Replace & test the entire system in operating conditions.Maybe test it again but stressing it, this time. All takes longer but my failure rate approached zero. And it costs a lot more to go back & redo something.
José might not be a practicing Catholic but the religion’s all through the culture. The deity influences what happens. So maybe the deity was responsible for the component failure to give Jose the work. And the deity’s responsible for whether the component works. So it doesn’t need testing does it? Jose’s failure rate’s about 50%. He spends half his time correcting previous failures. And it’s not just Jose.Last week we had four power outages. It’s obviously some clown keeps resetting the circuit breaker without finding out what’s causing it to open.
I mean, power was out, I reset the breaker, power came back on – *obviously* that was the root cause;)
It’s like the thing I’ve posted before, it’s the “if God wills” culture, and BiS has posted about the same Latin American Catholic thing. Why put in effort, if it happens it happens, nuffink to do with me.
Don’t forget the praying.
Purely grade inflation. Every single interviewee from India has at least 2 masters degrees.
Surely given the aircon bans, you lot in the Sarffff could all use punkawallas to keep you cool?
I’ve an oak tree, open windows and a through draught for that, thanks. We’d only need aircon if the temp was above 30º for days on end and the building’s ambient caught up with it. Even now that’s pretty unlikely to happen, and the through draught keeps the wet bulb temperature sane. It’s also not particularly humid and we have two dehumidifiers to deal with that if it were.
‘Course, I realise I’m lucky not to live in a diversity hutch where none of the above is possible.
If only.
Umm, this is almost purely about getting a government job, sinecure, rather than the actual quality of the teaching/university, isn’t it?
s/India/UK/ get same answer.
Because they’re doing it wrong.
You get yourself a student visa, come to the US to study, then upon graduating you grab an H1B to fill a spot that is empty because you took an American’s spot in the American education system.