[agentgt]

GT grad here (1999-2003). While I'm not Indian I do have a ton of Indian friends and yes GT does have a large Indian percentage (by observation from when I was there).

I can't speak if the CS degree has been diluted but I will say there is an enormous amount of extremely undeserved selective bias against Indian people for technology jobs. When US citizens even see Indian names there are less likely to hire (known as name bias).

Again I can't speak for the programs but my Indian friends that went to tech were at the top of their class both in MS and BS. Highly qualified. Extremely humble, ambitious and hungry.

Just my experience (and I run a recruiting software company so I see it at scale).

I compare this to the apathetic divas that I have met from Stanford and MIT (I live in Mass so I have met many MIT grads). I would hire a GT grad over them any day.

[hiram112]

Indians have a stigma for a very good reason: the 5% top engineers are drowned out by the 95% posers used by body shops (Infy, TCS, etc.) that have literally taken over numerous industries in the US tech market.

I worked in India for one of these BPO companies and know what I'm talking about. If the good engineers from India want to reclaim their status, they need to push back against the flood of H1Bs from these companies.

But instead, the majority of HN (or at least the guys who do more hiring, less coding) keeps pushing for more and more visas when we should be urging Congress to reform the system to allow the talent to come in (with Green Card), while disallowing US companies from using it to lower wages for all US engineers.

[agentgt]

I have no doubt about the stigma... but one should be careful about letting stereotypes into their decision process particularly when it comes to hiring and race. It is not just morally wrong it is against the law (at least in the US).

I'm sure the hiring manager who posted earlier will say it doesn't affect the decision but the subconscious bias is a real thing.

[kapilkaisare]

I concur, but I'd rephrase it like so: It's not just against the law, it is morally wrong.

[uptownfunk]

CMU has done this too unfortunately with their online MS degrees.

[assface]

Those degrees are not CS. AFAIK, CMU only has a software engineering online degree.

[uptownfunk]

Sure, but... We have clients hiring individuals looking only at cmu and see an online ms tangentially related to analytics then they associate that with cmus world class ml program and then touting them in our faces as the latest and greatest in machine learning. When we interview folks from the same program they don't make it past our first round because they don't know technique or programming

[yarou]

>When US citizens even see Indian names there are less likely to hire (known as name bias).

You're doubly fucked if you have an Indian name and you were born here. White hiring managers automatically assume you're incompetent, and Indian H1B hiring managers are threatened because they fear for their job.

When I was younger, I found it odd that many of family members of mine would Americanize their name. Now, I've experienced the reality of it.

[uptownfunk]

Damn. I'm a second gen Indian and this makes total sense. I may do an experiment and go with a western name just to see what happens. But then I'm reminded of all the other Asians who do that and think isn't it a little odd for an Asian to be named Winston Chang and more normal for something like wu Xi or something. Or maybe that's too nomenclature-normative and we should be more agnostic to the orientation of someone's chosen name