[rorrr]

My impression (and I might be very wrong) is that both Indian and Chinese education is concentrated on memorization rather than understanding. That's why so few people from both countries can solve problems (at least in my work experience).

I've interviewed a lot of people in the last 2 years, and I never look at the education level. I only care about your ability to solve problems. We've had people with masters in CS from good schools who could not solve trivial programming problems. We've had completely self-taught guys with a high school diploma, who aced the interview. HR cares about your education level, but if we want to hire you, they can't really say "no" to us. So if you're into IT, you're already light years ahead of all the mindless drones who got a degree just because IT pays well.

Smart people are always in demand. Keep educating yourself, in whatever field you choose. Become a pro, and you will always find a job. Do some contracts, or some open-source work, get your name out, you will make more and more money every year.

[magic_haze]

Sadly, as SingAlong mentioned (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412393), the hiring system in India is based on grades (except for big name companies like MS or Google, that, from what my friends say, are still unfortunately doing that 90's thing of asking stupid "why are manhole covers round" type puzzles. Warning: Anecdotal Evidence. (I seem to be typing this a lot lately, I guess I need to get off HN for a bit.) But yeah, I agree - open source contribution is the best way of increasing programming proficiency.

[Stormbringer]

Based on the description in the article, they need the manhole questions more than we do :D

Which is to say that since the Indian education system as described in the article doesn't teach problem solving, and since you want people who have some problem solving ability, you must ask them to solve a problem in the interview.

But, I find the article confusing, it is about how a call centre company is struggling to find people who can't think outside the box... why the heck does a call centre company want people who can think? Aren't they just going to follow the same script day in and day out?? Wouldn't the ability to think for yourself actually be a curse at a company like that???

[zhivota]

I read it as them looking for people who can read, write, and converse in English. And that even with many technical graduates, they could only hire 3 out of every 100 that came into the office just to do those tasks.

Besides that, I know from living in the Philippines for six months that a call center job can be like striking gold for people who came up poor. Poverty here is so much different from poverty in the US that it's hard for Americans to understand the motivation of people here. A call center job may suck, but it could be the difference between life in a slum without basic sewerage, and eating at western chain restaurants while texting your friends on your new smart phone. What's basically a birthright in the US is highly prized here.

[wyclif]

Very true about the Philippines. However, a crucial difference is that most educated Filipinos have very good English language skills compared to many other SE Asian countries I've been to.

[tesseract]

I'm reminded of Feynman's critique of Brazilian physics education.

[contravert]

The ACM ICPC suggests that Asian universities do quite well at programming:

http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCFinalResults2010

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_Pr...

[babar]

Do people think these kinds of competitions provide a good correlation with what makes an good developer for a software company? I feel like solving a well-defined problem in a limited amount of time is a very different task than, say, architecting a system that will be worked on for years by a team of people, or refining a vague set of business requirements into something that can actually be built, or finding an unreproducible concurrency bug in 1000s of lines of someone else's undocumented code.

[ideamonk]

You mean, Chinese do great ?

[rorrr]

By no means I meant that every Chinese developer is incapable of solving problems. I'm talking about my average experience at work.

ACM competitions are in no way indicative of the overall picture. I went to a few of these competitions myself and got my ass kicked by some younger Asian kids. ACM finals represent the top of the top fastest thinking developers you can find. When you have a billion people, you will produce some brilliant ones regardless of how broken the education system is. Plus I bet that

1) Almost none of the finalists went to average schools.

2) All of the finalists practiced solving ACM Archive Problemset day and night (unlike the rest of the students), and probably skipped a lot of the regular classes.

[anonymoushn]

2) All of the finalists practiced solving ACM Archive Problemset day and night (unlike the rest of the students), and probably skipped a lot of the regular classes.

Both times I attended ICPC world finals our team had only practiced once a week for 3-6 hours, but we were much worse than many teams that did not qualify from more competitive regions. The people who are the best at these things really do spend a lot of time practicing, though. The kid who beat Neal Wu at IOI practices 3-4 hours a day.