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I have seen 10-years industry experience persons fail in writing basic library functions. I meet them face to face after their CV is shortlisted and they have cleared the telephonic round. After they fail it is exchange of pleasantries and showing them out. Some even come back to the hiring manager and tell they did well.

BTW, I have also seen how they work. They search online for code snippets and try to plug them in. They request/plead other folks for help. When something gets critical, there is always someone in the company to help out. This is on technical tasks. Of course, there is always non-technical stuff going on, which occupies the time.

I have wondered what they are doing their current companies. My guess, as a ball-park figure, in a regular IT company team, if 1 in 5 is able to contribute, then they can easily stay afloat. Rest can slack around.

Great post! I am well into retirement (!'m 68) and live a reasonably comfortable (but frequently boring) life. Your post is a pathfinder for many who are starting out. I wish I had had your clarity of thought about yourself!

Did anyone hear about the Lady who was an M Tech Computer science who could not answer what an Error 404 was on KBC? She had to use an audience poll to answer it!

I can tell you that it is still better than most non-IT sectors.
Perhaps it has stagnated because there are exponentially more people in your market every year and that is keeping the prices (salaries) down.

That is because they have access to easy money of their parents. So most don't realize the time, dedication and some kind of sacrifice/compromise required in order to excel and hence keep jumping ships at the least hint of discomfort.

I heard from my cousin doing his engineering that Accenture has hiked the salary for freshers. Any idea about the other companies? To give a ballpark figure, they offered a 3.3L CTC in 2014, which in my passing out batch was revised to 3.5L :D But now I hear that they have made it 5Lpa. Though it is quite average, I wonder why the sudden jump.

Means they are going to fire experienced folks doing the same job for 10-15 L salary:).

Not sure if this is true in general. When I started my first job with a reputed IT company in Technopark back in 2000, the pay was INR 78000 per year. But then there were significant hikes given, and our salaries almost tripled in the next 2 years, fresher salaries also saw an good increase.

If I run this figure of 78000 through an INR inflation calculator, it is equivalent to 2.5 lakhs as on today. Most of the starting salaries of IT firms are now 3.5L or above.

If we are talking about starting salaries for the last 15 years, then it is probably a different case, as the fresh graduate salary in 2005 (adjusted to Inflation) might be more closer to the current starting salaries in most IT companies.

Came across this article in today's Vishwavani paper. The one I marked in Red is very much true of the IT folks today.



Summary of the article for those who do not know Kannada:

• Irrelevance of committing everything to memory.
• Rote learning of stuff in schools which has no value addition in life.
• Students do not understand the concepts but rather learn just for the sake of marks.

Incidentally the writer was an MP from Chitradurga in Karnataka who worked for many Silicon valley companies.

Link

A very relevant article and reiterates the sad state of affairs of our education system.

I realized long back that a person with good Education need not mean the person is intelligence Intelligence.

Last week was an eye-opener for me in terms of our premier institutes.

I was interviewing for internship a B.Tech CS ( IIT ) final year candidate. The person did not know about Trees at all. Had no clue about pointers in C++ though they had done their course assignments in C++. But guess what, an old large "Database" company has already made an offer of 18 Lakhs per annum to join in July 2022. The interview results were very similar for candidates from one of the IIITs as well.

I am not sure if its the pandemic, but I would have expected these students to be familiar, if not experts in the above topics. The highlight of the resume was "Nth rank in JEE among 1.5M candidates" or some such. Somehow, these days, what matters is just the rank to get into IIT and not learning the basics of the subject.

It is depressing to see the way +2 students "prepare" for the professional courses these days.

There are two sets of colleges - the regular ones which teach subjects and also conduct practicals. We as youngsters studied in such college decades ago. Physics/Chemistry/Biology labs were mandatory along with journal submissions. Now even the regular colleges are skimping on lab sessions.

The other set which call themselves as colleges but are actually "institutes". These institutes have no laboratories. The kids studying there do not have any practical knowledge in any of the science subjects. They do not even know how a prism looks like in real world - yet they solve problems on refraction !! They do not know how a burette / pipette / conical flask looks like - forget conducting experiments. Journals - what are those?

These institutes teach the students how to "approach" a problem and "solve" them and get the 99.9 percentile in JEE. These will eventually end up in "premier" institutes. Sadly kids aged 12+ have started preparing for JEE.

Not blaming the poor students though. When I can get 18+ lakhs p.a. why burn my hand in Chemistry lab? Why bother how the light bends?

End of rant.

^True that.
Another point, almost all these students had done their 12th from either of the 2 "techno" schools in a specific region. I am sure all these students would have additionally enrolled in one of the Kota institutes as well. I personally have nothing against the schools. They pushed the students to get admission.

I was of the opinion that atleast in IITs, NITs and IIITs, we would be maintaining the high standards. Sadly, thats not the case anymore. My initial guess was that these students are the bottom of the class and not placed. On following up, was shocked that they are in the middle of the class in CGPA and already had offers from companies.

Now the question is how did these companies interview? Maybe they just took a few people based on the college they got admission in? Or is it that I am expecting too much from a IIT CS student?

This seems really odd. How did someone pass online test if they don't even know Tree ?

Even a first year student now knows that DSA is the key. And the skills (I.e. work ethic) that gets JEE rank is the same skill one needs to prep for DSA.

That was the surprise for me as well. Here is how it went on DSA.
Me : What DS have you studied/come across?
Candidate: Stack, Queue, Graph, Tree
Me : What are the different trees?
Candidate : (Blank)
Me : Have you heard of binary search tree?
Candidate : (A bulb goes on) yes yes yes! Left node smaller and right node larger value.
Me : Where are trees used?
Candidate : BS Tree can be used for search.
Me : OK. I have a BS Tree of integers. I want a descending ordered list of those integers. Can I get it?
Candidate : Blank.
Me : Familiar with inorder, preorder traversal?
Candidate : Yes. Studied some time back.
Then went on to mix up the traversals.

After a gap of 5 years, I was hiring freshers again... Which means I have to resume contributing to this thread.

Have things changes in these 5 years? Yes, mainly buzzwords in the resume. Now everyone has AI/ML, tensorflow, numpy and what not in every paragraph of the resume. Every project and mini-project is about AI/ML. They would have also completed additional courses on AI/ML and wish to be Data Analyst or Data Scientist.

So, I asked the meaning of standard deviation to couple of such candidates. They both admitted they have heard that term but didn't know the meaning or the importance of it. How can we ask anything further?

When you test the programming skills of fresh CS grads, it gets worse. Even if you explain the logic to them, they don't know how to implement it in language of their preference.

Meanwhile, we have a 6th semester CS student doing paid internship with us. He was chosen because he could code well. I asked him how many people in his class can actually code. He said 3... out of 67 students. I found it very believable.