The most prized degree in India became the most worthless - <AUTHOR> https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/ <comment><USER2> > 3,500 engineering schools across the country, and about 90% of graduates do > not have the programming skills to work in software engineering, according > to one study.

The "study" is by 'Aspiring Minds' \- an Indian company that sells buggy web- based pre-interview filtering tests as a service. It is in Aspiring Minds interest to portray Indian graduates as incompetent to make Indian employers buy their pre-interview filtering services.

Aspiring Minds tested engineering students from all fields (including chemical, mechanical and civil) to make up the misleading '90% of Indian graduates are stupid' headlines. It worked. The headlines went viral and people still quote their misleading study. The coding part of the test was to submit compile-able Java code through an HTML input without any syntax highlighting or formatting. Needless to say most chemical and civil engineering graduates will not be able to do that.

I was a CS student at an Indian engineering college. I was forced to take an Aspiring Minds test. The test was buggy and had no feedback. I probably failed. But today I'm a full-stack developer in Denmark. Most of my graduating class have good jobs and almost half of us work overseas.

<comment><USER3> > But today I'm a full-stack developer in Denmark.

Would you mind sharing more details about this? Were your recruited or did you seek out overseas employment?

I'm Indian but in the US since a young age; I'll be finishing my CS education next year and would like to leave this country.

<comment><USER4> Europe is pretty welcoming. There is a huge shortage of software engineers (of acceptable quality) here.

<comment><USER5> Well it is also true that wage are lower than in the US. So if you are young without many families bonds makes a lot of sense to seek employment oversea.

If Europe started to pay better money, then there would not be such lack of engineers.

<comment><USER6> Gonna defend Europe a bit more here, I'd wager there are soft benefits which aren't as easily appreciated as cash. On Europe you make less, but you also get out of the meat grinder much earlier. If you are a median person (which most likely, we all are), then your expected value will be about the same, at most a bit lower cash wise than in the US. But even that is debatable, in most of (western) Europe we don't treat active shooters as a matter of normal life, the cities are made for humans not cars and employee rights are a thing. And looking at the worst case, Europe wins: a medical emergency will not bankrupt you, if you call the cops they won't shoot you etc. And on a political level, having more than 2 parties and a wider overton window is quote nice.

If you think of yourself as a human and social being, not a shark or worker bee, I think Europe isn't too bad. But I recognize that dollar amounts and funding for new ventures is still in the US, or China nowadays. And all the stuff I cited are things at odds with the pure capitalist system some people seem to want to live in, and so might not actually be desirable for all

<comment><USER7> I expected this kind of lazy analysis to appear on Reddit but not on Hacker News.

> If you are a median person (which most likely, we all are), then your > expected value will be about the same, at most a bit lower cash wise than in > the US.

In my experience wage offers were significantly lower in Europe when I was potentially looking about a year ago. levels.fyi seems to be pretty in line with my pay experience in the US and that's not anywhere close to the pay I was offered or researched in the EU.

> Europe we don't treat active shooters as a matter of normal life

People in the US certainly do not treat active shooters as a matter of normal life. Have you ever considered that it makes the new explicitly because it's a rare thing that people do not expect?

> the cities are made for humans not cars and employee rights are a thing.

I think you would find that most technology companies are in cities with walkability/public transit in the US. I think you would also find that software engineers are not treated poorly as well.

> And looking at the worst case, Europe wins: a medical emergency will not > bankrupt you

Medical insurance at tech companies I've worked for in the US are very good. For example, I pay $20/mo and the theoretical maximum I would pay for insurance in any given year is $3000.

> if you call the cops they won't shoot you

Again, I think you're treating news as proof that this is a common occurrence. It gets reported explicitly because it is not

————

I'm not saying the US is perfect because it certainly isn't. No place is perfect. But, I think that you would find that the US is a very nice place to live for the upper half of the middle class and above and software engineering would definitely put you in that category in the US.

<comment><USER8> Wow, just wow! Unfortunately I did expect your response from the HN crowd. You and I have very different ways of looking at the world.

The entitlement and privilege among software engineers in the US to have crazy high salaries and "perks" such as health insurance is exactly the reason why I will never move there. I think your last statement sums up the situation very well, but it baffles me how any decent human being would consider that to be a positive.

You may think I am crazy, but did you know that insanely high salaries of a select few is one of the reasons that directly or indirectly leads to income and wealth inequalities in the world, one of the biggest problems of our generation? While you may have excellent health care for $20/month, what about the barista at your local coffee shop? What about your disabled neighbor who got laid off for no fault of hers? How can you live with yourself while they die of cancer as they cannot afford to go to the hospital? And don't get me started on education. How that is viewed as a commodity rather than a basic human right astounds me.

I am very happy with my $60k/year job. I have more than sufficient for myself, and a decent amount to spare. I have excellent healthcare for free and independent of my job situation, and so do all my neighbors. I live in a city with no homeless, and no one desperately poor. I do engaging work for 7 hrs a day and religiously shut my computer at 4 pm, and pursue my many passions afterwards. I have 6 weeks a year of paid vacations, and travel to a handful of countries every year. I paid $50/semester to get educated at a top university, and so will my children. And I received a stipend to cover part of my living expenses. I love the fact that I do not have to worry about getting shot (as rare as that might be). I love living in a country with highly educated people all around with most having the skills of critical thinking. I love living in one of the most gender equal countries of the world (I am male). No offense to anyone, but I wouldn't trade this for a $250k/year job in the U.S. (as levels.fyi seems to suggest for my case).

<comment><USER9> I just find that Americans have little understanding on how things run in Europe. But same goes the other way around.

If you want to earn a lot - you go contracting in Europe. I used to save about half of my income when contracting 6 years ago in London. My rate was 470 GBP for 220 days out of the year. My expenses were taxes and 700GBP in rent. I saved 60k after tax... and I used to fly business class to Thailand, NYC and Mexico.

My income is technically higher, but expenses are through the roof. You sneeze here and it's $20 gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Churning out engineers as fast as possible and pressuring everyone to become one despite lack of interest just guarantees you will churn out astronomical numbers of crappy engineers.

And I hate to say it... but it possibly creates unintentional racial bias in interviewers because the sheer volume of crappy engineers being churned out from [Indian/Chinese/etc. universities] has preconditioned you to think _all engineers_ from [Indian/Chinese/etc. universities] are crappy, which couldn't be further from the truth.

<comment><USER11> I also have a problem with calling developers _engineers_. Heck, I would be offended if someone called me a developer rather than a programmer.

But unfortunately even the degrees themselves become less significant. A PhD in mathematics used to mean more than it does now. But another point is that with global literacy going up, scarse skills are now not based on the amount of people with certain degrees, but rather with inherent abilities that are uncommon. (Take Fortran coders as an example.)

<comment><USER12> Wait... so in your mind there is a distinct difference between a developer, programmer, and engineer? Because in my mind, they are all the same.

How are they different, in your mind?

<comment><USER13> In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you studied engineering in university and went through licensing.

It's not really enforced in tech, but for me the definition is someone who at the minimum studied an engineering degree. Calling yourself an engineer when you studied Computer Science is a bit odd to me.

<comment><USER14> I'm fully OK with the distinction because of the licensing process and strict requirements on engineer-certified work, but as someone with a CS degree from a Canadian university I can tell you with confidence that my friends in the software engineering pathway had probably 90% the same course load as I did.

Really the only major difference at our university (IMO) was that they had a capstone project they did as a group and took two semesters, while mine was done individually and took one semester.

<comment><USER15> The course load isn't the critical aspect, though, is it?

Licensing typically means professional standards set by a licensing body, continuing education requirements, insurance/liability rules, etc.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely, not disputing that. I just took offense to the "Calling yourself an engineer when you studied Computer Science is a bit odd to me" statement. I don't think the degree makes the difference, the licensing does.

<comment><USER16> I don't believe you would be able to get the licensing without the degree so saying the degree doesn't make any difference doesn't seem accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a well written article. For decades, the Indian society has tried to use engineering (along with law, medicine and IAS) as a template to success. Given the population numbers, it was bound to break sooner or later.

As an Indian CompSci graduate, I am excited for this bust to happen as soon as possible. Most people I know did not like studying computer science, are absolutely unhappy with their worklife and want to get out of it as fast as possible. Out of the 700+ in my graduating class of Computer Science, less than 70-80 are still associated with computers in some for or manner. Most fucked off to other fields, predominantly MBA. I hear similar stories from other Tier 2/3 institutions.

I can't wait for Indians to realize just how much easier it is to get employed today if you are willing to let go of the traditional path. Internet has unlocked so much opportunity and after 2016, pretty much all barriers to internet access have been lowered as much as possible. All you need is a computing device like a phone or laptop to get started. Doesn't work for the extremely poor still, but the opportunity for mass swathes of people have been widened much more than before.

<comment><USER2> > Out of the 700+ in my graduating class of Computer Science, less than 70-80 > are still associated with computers in some for or manner

'700+ graduating class' sounds more like a fraudulent diploma mill than a Tier 2/3 college.

Actual Computer Science and Computer Engineering grads from Indian Tier 1/2/3 colleges have no problem finding jobs.

<comment><USER17> Nope. Legit college whose students went onto excellent post graduate programs in US and Europe. 700 in a graduating class is chump change in India. Plenty of colleges whose annual batches are that size.

I never said they had trouble finding jobs. You jumped the gun. I said they were not happy with choosing computer science as a career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Indian universities outside of the top rung (IITs et al.) have been issuing worthless degrees for at least 3 decades. In my state during the 90s tech/outsourcing boom a lot of corrupt politicians realized that engineering education was a gold mine and opened degree factories all over the state. I graduated from a supposedly "reputable" university in 2004 and was basically unemployable on graduation.

Looking back here are a few memories of my college education experience that stand out:

* 1 computer "lab" with 15 PCs shared amongst 720 students. Only 1 PC had a dial-up internet connection that rarely worked.

* Majority of the courses taught by industry rejects who were unemployable.

* Hilariously we learnt standard _nix command line tools (sed , awk, filesystem commands etc.) by writing the commands and their outputs using a pen and paper never once using a real terminal + shell because the college did not have a single_ nix machine.

* "Systems Programming" professor walks in the first day and declares she cannot code in C and 8086 assembly which the course mandated. She encouraged us to seek external tutoring (coaching classes as they are known in India) instead of relying on her.

* There was small cottage industry that sold finished projects to students - including source code, project reports, electronic circuitry where applicable. About 30% of the class bought these "projects" off the shelf.

Thankfully my family was able to send me to an American university for a graduate degree allowing me to have a shot at a tech career. Now having lived and worked in the Bay Area for 15 years I can say that quality of education at an average community college in the US is far superior to the tier-2 / tier-3 _universities_ in India.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am an Indian and I have seen so many worthless engineering colleges. The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and very low incentives for someone to study well. I can't fathom how easy it is to pass a class in these engineering colleges and how widespread plagiarism is. When >50% points of the class is determined by a single exam that repeats same questions every year, it isn't hard to study for a day and pass the class. I am not kidding, you can buy an "all-in-one" of around 600 pages which is essentially enough to pass or even score 80% in "all the classes" in a semester.

I would say at most 10% of engineering students in India are properly taught and properly tested and rest of them just spend 4 years in college essentially learning nothing. When it is so easy to get an engineering degree, people who barely pass high school also enroll in these programs for "engineering degree" and become an "engineer" after 4 years of college. It's no wonder that most of these "engineers" can't do anything.

<comment><USER20> > The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and > very low incentives for someone to study well.

Another significant element I'd point to is outdated curricula. By way of example, many Indian CS course materials still require students to use Turbo C++ -- an IDE from the mid-1990s which runs under DOS. Needless to say, what ends up being taught is hardly representative of modern practices.

<comment><USER21> I don't think the curriculum is outdated. Those are tools you are talking about.

<comment><USER20> They go hand in hand. A C++ IDE from the mid-1990s implements C++ as it existed in the mid-1990s -- which is a rather different language from that which exists today. No STL, for instance. Without access to modern features of the language, it's inevitable that the course won't end up teaching those features.

Moreover -- the use of a 25-year-old IDE is _symptomatic_ of a more general problem in Indian CS (and probably other) curricula. Many instructors are teaching to a syllabus which was set in stone many years ago. If you look at some of the links I posted in a sibling thread or explore other universities' posted materials, you'll probably see signs of this -- Java courses which still cover applet development is another common one, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I joined Engineering in India (1994), my state had 2000 engineering seats. 120K people wrote the entrance test for the 2K seats.

Today the same state has about 250K seats. Anyone who writes the entrance test can get into some college or other.

Has the quality gone down? I would think so. But I definitely think qualified students is definitely greater than 2k even when I went to college.

I would rather prefer over supply rather than shortage of educational opportunities any day.

<comment><USER23> To play devil's advocate...

The value of an education comes as much from the group of peers (classmates who interact regarding experiences, plans, lessons, and ideas) as from the books and professors themselves. Like a critical mass of brains.

If you water the group down, then the most talented cohort benefits less than if they were the only people to advance.

<comment><USER24> As someone who got an undergrad degree from a top 40 school and is now taking courses at a state system school accepting a lot more students, I completely agree.

The difference in terms of work output and professionalism between students is massive. Presentations from other students lack depth and often fail to explain basic concept; they have very little educational value. Group work is a complete mess since a lot of people never learned how to organize themselves, have very little motivation or fail to explain their ideas properly. Simple things you usually learn in undergrad like putting a bibliography together or spell checking documents are lacking. You end up wasting huge amounts of time correcting other people's mistakes.

Another big difference I've noticed is that students seem to have little interest in the area of study; none of the ones I met have non curricular side projects. There's also a lot less discussion happening outside of classrooms.

<comment><USER25> You are not hanging out with the right people then. I think you will find the top students in any random state school are just as good as at an ivy league institution. Source: I've been at both.

<comment><USER26> I've been at both an average school (undergrad) and a top school (grad). I somewhat agree with your parent.

I don't doubt great undergrads exist in an average school, but the chances of randomly running into one are much lower. I did not run into any.

I'd also disagree with the characterization of "top" students. A lot of the top students at the average school, while great at academics, were still a lot less "well rounded". They had few projects that they worked on outside of class, etc. Not that they weren't interested - just that there was not enough "critical mass" of such people for it to become natural.

<comment><USER27> Or maybe they spend their spare time working so they can afford to stay in school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This article is all over the place, with some elements of truth. The essence is that Indian universities don't provide good education - that's been known for decades now. This is reflected in how many Indians have been going for higher education to Western universities for decades.

> There are currently more than 3,500 engineering schools across the country, > and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in > software engineering

That's because there are non computer science graduates as well?

> In India, you need a 'traditional degree' before you pursue your passion," > he said. "And that degree in almost all cases is engineering."

Not true, this depends on the region. Engineering is way more prominent in South India than the rest of the country.

> With programmers everywhere, annual salaries for entry-level jobs have > remained at around $4,500 for the better part of a decade

This is referring to the outsourcing companies I'm assuming. Ironically, majority of intake of the outsourcing companies are graduates whose major is not computer science. So the presence of "programmers" should not have an impact on the other engineers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Five years ago I was working at a software company in Europe that was willing to accept hires from anywhere, globally.

We managed to hire about one smart person a month, out of a torrent of perhaps 1000 applicants per month. The vast majority (like 85%) of the applicants were from India and Pakistan. And out of those, 95% used the exact same resume/personal letter layout and content, sometimes down to the exact same wording.

We tried to be openminded, so we set up a bunch of interview calls with especially promisingly people from this "pool". After about 10-15 of those calls we just gave up.

We did eventually hire two indian people and were very happy with their contributions, but only after they had made their ways to our little country on their own. Imagine being a talented developer in India, interviewing for a job overseas, against this background of overwhelming mediocrity?

<comment><USER30> Resume scanning/filtering is a real problem.

Generally I start classifying resumes into two piles: those that put everything they know on their resume, and those that include a handful of relevant, interesting pieces of knowledge with a few lines of job experience to back those up.

When "everything they know" fits on four pages, in my experience they aren't worth interviewing.

When "interesting pieces of knowledge" makes me want to ask more questions about what they did, in my experience they are worth interviewing.

Unfortunately the HR system scans for keywords, which makes the "interesting pieces of knowledge" resume less likely to get through HR and "everything they know" more likely to get through HR, which is the opposite of what I want to see. HR needs to either admit that they need to hire a developer to scan resumes instead of using automated software or just admit defeat and pass all resumes on, regardless of source or quality. They just are not capable of filtering software developer resumes in their current form.

<comment><USER31> Having an HR department filter resumes for qualification before the relevant manager/team sounds like an absolute disaster. If I heard that happened at the company I was at, I'd probably pack up and leave because I wouldn't want to work in a place where leadership doesn't realize how obviously stupid that is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The article draws mostly from this piece from a company that apparently tests prospective employees.[1]

 _Good coding skills (the ability to write functionally correct code) are possessed by 4.6% of Indian job applicants, 2.1% of Chinese candidates and 18.8% of the US candidates in the IT and software industries. However, if we consider only those candidates who can write correct code with few errors, the gap between China and India narrows (8.6% vs. 9.8%, respectively). Interestingly, while the percentage of Indian engineers who code well is greater than the number of Chinese engineers, a much higher proportion of Indian engineers (37.7%) cannot write a compilable code compared to Chinese engineers (10.35%). This means that India must do more to educate its general population in proper coding skills. By comparison, the US engineers perform four times better than Indian engineers in coding: only 4% of the US candidates cannot write compilable code despite the fact that the base of the engineering population in the US is approximately four times smaller than in India._

I wonder what their tests look like.

[1] [https://www.aspiringminds.com/thankyou/?url=2602](https://www.aspiringminds.com/thankyou/?url=2602)

<comment><USER33> The last sentence of this paragraph makes me distrust the whole analysis. Mixing percentages with population-dependent numbers makes no sense. And even if that did make sense, the conclusion is exactly backwards. If fewer people go into engineering you would expect the few people who do make it to be of higher caliber. Obviously as you widen your pool you will regress to something closer to the mean programming ability.

<comment><USER34> And I don't consider being able to "write compilable code" as a good metric for programming ability. You can be a great programmer in many different ways: in optimising for performance, in optimising for testability, in increasing readability or in reducing the time taken to produce working code. Most people I know really heavily on an IDE to help them write compilable code because they want to use their brain power on solving issues the IDE can't help you with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would be interested to know if there is actually an oversupply of programmers or whether there is still a shortage of skilled ones in the labour force and they are just graduating anyone who pays their tuition.

We have that problem here in Canada and the USA. Plenty of developer jobs are open, but I also know lots of CS grads who never found jobs, even two years out of university. That's because most would struggle with FizzBuzz.

Sure, they are on paper qualified to do the work, but absurdly unqualified in actual skill.

<comment><USER36> A good CS program will touch on FizzBuzzesque questions early on as part of one of the introduction to programming classes, and in later classes do a deep dive on algorithms and their efficiency in pseudocode or real code.

I guess it's possible they didn't practice, but I have a hard time believing that they could get through an undergrad CS program and not be able to quickly remind themselves of some basic code logic beforehand if they don't already code regurarly.

Were they actually passionate about CS? Did they have bad professors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > The best jobs are reserved for graduates of the Indian Institutes of > Technology (IIT), the crown jewels of the country's higher education system. > Every April, over a million students take the Joint Entrance Examination > (JEE), the primary pathway to the IITs. There are fewer than 12 thousand > seats at the 16 IITs in India, and they accept one in 50 applicants each > year.

This is one of the core issues many people seem to ignore. The number of universities where you can actually become a good engineer is really small, apart from the IIT/NIT/BITS/IIIT, the rest can be categorized into mediocre to astonishingly bad.

I do have a lot to say about this topic, as I had go through this experience first hand, and I wasn't one of those who managed to get into a good university (in fact, I barely managed to get into a really shitty one).

Here's a short summary of what's it like to get a degree from shitty private university in India -

a) There's no focus on getting an actual education, people (including professors, students, their parents) are more concerned with getting a piece of paper which certifies that the student is an engineer now.

b) The faculty responsible for teaching rarely give a shit, not that they have an ability to give a shit in this case. Most of them barely know the material they teach. I've had lecturers who would literally write out Java code on a board and then explain the meaning of each word for the next hour.

c) Most of these schools have mandatory attendance for classes, so if you have assumed you'll just sign up and go through the material on your own, you're screwed. You will end up spending 8 hours everyday for 4 years doing this, then spend additional 2-3 hours everyday doing assignments which basically consist of copying shit from a textbook.

d) Exams are just an exercise in mugging up the textbooks. Even for subjects which involve programming.

e) Companies that hire out of these schools are usually service based like Infosys, TCS, etc on a salary of about $300/mo. So the next time you complain about the shitty Indian guy with a thick accent who writes spaghetti code, just remember that they're getting paid peanuts for doing so. Also these companies have a bond of anywhere from an year to 3 (which basically means if you leave anytime before this period, you pay the company <X> amount), it might be illegal, but then your lowly IT guy doesn't have the resources to take these companies to court.

There's lot to write about this topic, there are a lot of facets which intermingle with one another in absurd ways, perhaps I might write something more detailed some other day.

<comment><USER38> > The number of universities where you can actually become a good engineer is > really small, apart from the IIT/NIT/BITS/IIIT, the rest can be categorized > into mediocre to astonishingly bad.

I wonder why this is. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to teach basic CS well, nor would I think that India would lack for competent people able to teach this way.

Does this occur in other parts of Indian society? For example, is it like this in medicine? Or food processing?

<comment><USER39> > It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to teach basic CS well

Why do you think so? If anything it's harder than doing a regular programming job, because in addition to knowing CS, you have to know how to teach. And programming pays better than teaching.

<comment><USER40> > And programming pays better than teaching.

Let's quantify that since most people don't understand just how bad the discrepancy is.

A lecturer in CS _might_ get $4000 for a semester. That's 12+weeks at 40 hours a week of work preparing the lectures, grading, preparing tests, and answering student questions via email. Not joking.

That's right around minimum wage in most civilized places in the US (about $8 an hour).

I presume the discrepancy is much worse in other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nobody mentioned the problem of Indian "high context society". Individual developers may be very productive when employed by western companies but from my anecdotal experience Indian teams in India have very low real productivity due to the "cultural specifics", aka rigid hierarchy and people dynamics.

</comment><comment><USER42> Same thing has happened with college degrees in the US. Why are people always surprised by this? A credential only has value through exclusion.

<comment><USER43> The credential's value doesn't go down for the entity seeking someone with the credential. The value only goes down for the person who has the credential IF they were deriving value from the exclusivity of the credential.

In other words, the value one gets from the exclusivity of a credential is separate from the practical value of having the credential.

The value from the exclusivity is bound to decrease as a population recognizes that value and rush to claim some of that for themselves which in turn diminishes that value for everyone.

As the value of the exclusivity is removed, the true value of the credential is discovered.

<comment><USER44> If a credential gets less exclusive over time (meaning they relax the requirements on it) and the same company seeks someone with that credential repeatedly over time, the value that the company expects from that credential _does_ go down.

<comment><USER43> A credential becoming less exclusive doesn't necessarily mean the requirements are relaxed. Could mean the requirements stay constant and there are more people shifting their priorities, seeking to obtain it and succeeding.

Of course in the real world, supply will react to the increase in demand and those looking to make a quick buck will offer an inferior credentialing service. For example: the fairly recent glut of web dev bootcamps (Of which I am a graduate of one, it can work occasionally).

And then things get complicated and every firm tries to filter out unqualified candidates with wild interview processes which leads to countless blogs about the whole situation including the article featured here, which is, at least, tangentially related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's really interesting to see the bottom-rung schools closing. In the U.S. the legal field has been saturated for years and I'm not aware of any law schools closing. I wonder if the easy availability of school loans is propping up the lower schools in the U.S.

<comment><USER46> > In the U.S. the legal field has been saturated for years and I'm not aware > of any law schools closing.

There have been several mergers (I'm personally aware of one in my area), and it sounds like some schools have closed as well:

[https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/urge-to-merge- la...](https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/urge-to-merge-law-school)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Sounds like India's 'push against tech event'

The same around early 2000s where suddenly there were a large amount of surplus programmer and even my parents social circle which is about 3 level removed from any programming start talking about this 'surplus' and how starting a programming career or major is a bad choice.

Tech is still the biggest job creator and the best paying job for what we do. It's easy to be shortsighted over a couple of months about what you don't understand or can't do well, but this world is clearly marching towards an more autonomous future.

</comment><comment><USER48> The top story on Hacker News right now is how Twitter is allowing (some) employees to work from home permanently. The locational cost of living arbitrage (from an employee perspective) and labor arbitrage (from an employer perspective) available in the market is immense and companies that can succeed in overcoming the language and cultural barriers are looking at a massive opportunity.

<comment><USER49> The story goes into how 90% of them are unqualified even after training. It doesn't matter how cheap I can hire someone if they can't do the job they're a net negative.

<comment><USER50> OK, but what about millions of European devs who earn 50% what an American dev is earning? Or Canadian, or South American?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I felt similarly after a career change via a coding bootcamp regarding what perspective employers would really think about someone coming out of such a system.

I think bootcamps can work, but the incentives for those running them are off.

At the camp I'd look around the room and think that about half the folks straight up can't do the job, and "If one of these people interviews before me / or worse gets a job and bombs ... am I even going to get an interview?"

Fortunately I got a chance to prove myself with an employer and got my foot in the door.

But even so sometimes in casual conversation I just say "self taught".

</comment><comment><USER52> It's only worthless if you don't practice. There are tons of programming jobs out there but don't expect to get hired if you can't do the simplest algorithms. Many people who earn CS bachelors in India have barely even touched computers. There were some in my Masters courses who were hopelessly lost. Then there are some who are topcoders and into competitve programming, practice and experience are what really matter.

<comment><USER53> What do they do in their CS curriculum if they're not actually programming?

<comment><USER52> they just do the math and theory, many classes have hundreds of students and neither the students nor the universities have the infrastructure to support computing for all the students. Not all students can afford a Rs35k (~$500) laptop (or cheaper) when that's the price of admission for the entire year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've noticed something similar in the US university system. I was a Assistant Prof during my PhD in CS at a state college. Students from our program went on to directly compete and get jobs over students from Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc. Our program probably cost 1/4 that of other "prestigious" universities yet we largely had the same outcomes for students.

Personally, I'm glad there's been a leveling of the playing field.

<comment><USER55> But the article is describing the opposite phenomenon, it seems that in India only students from their Stanfords and MITs are qualified for and get the jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> A lot of this argument seems to rest on this premise...

 _" Good coding skills (the ability to write functionally correct code) are possessed by 4.6% of Indian job applicants, 2.1% of Chinese candidates and 18.8% of the US candidates in the IT and software industries"_

<comment><USER2> A wrong premise based on Aspiring Minds fraudulent studies.

Aspiring Minds is an Indian company that sells buggy web-based pre-interview filtering tests as a service. It is in Aspiring Minds interest to portray (Indian) college graduates as incompetent to make companies buy their pre- interview filtering services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Tagnetially related. Because of COVID lockdowns, many consulting firms are shutting down. I hired an engineer with 2 years experience to teach me HTML/CSS/JS for one month. So fa I am satisfied with him compared to what I learnt on Udacity frontend nanodegree. I am paying him $100 for 30 hours of classes. For people wanting to learn stuff, this is the best time. If you want to contact him, email is in profile

<comment><USER58> Who in the world would be willing to teach for 30 hours for $100? I would be much better off spending those 30 hours looking for the few available jobs that are out there or do the old r/cscareerquestions "learn leetCode and work for a FAANG"

<comment><USER57> Err. The kid is awake for 16 hours a day. He is applying for jobs in 15 of those hours. This one hour is extra money for him. Also, it is at the same rate as as his full time job pre covid.

There are just not enough new people hiring in India right now. So any extra little money helps.

To your question, who in the world is willing to teach for that low, think of it as his first teaching gig. Through this, he is discovering a new market for himself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Just want to make 3 quick points:

1/ Society should provide the courses that people _want_ to study. Not everyone wins the lottery when they are young. So to to limit engineering to X number of slots and lock the rest of society out of engineering degrees. That's wrong. That's not freedom. And that's why bootcamps and diploma serve important roles. They give people a _choice_. As for the quality of graduates, that's up to the filtering process of companies.

2/ Computer science is far too broad and should obviously be broken up. Yet it hasn't. People focus on different things. Some focus on security, on web dev, on robotics, on machine learning. You can't throw a frontend guy into the backend and 1 month later call him "a terrible coder". That's unfair yet it happens.

3/ Programming is clearly on the path to becoming ubiquitous. My prediction is that the trend will move towards having more domain knowledge. So yes, the degree is becoming useless because just being a programmer isn't going to be enough anymore in the future.

</comment><comment><USER60> Pretty damning " _There are currently more than 3,500 engineering schools across the country, and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in software engineering, according to one study._ "

That said, I'm curious how you could talk to someone about programming for four years and at the end of that 9 out of 10 of them could not actually do it.

<comment><USER61> I taught intro web dev courses at a "highly rated" college in Canada in a program that was specifically for a post-grad, international audience. It was 99% people from India who finished 4 year university degrees in computer science and the like.

Out of a class of 35 students who were already in their 2nd, 3rd or 4th term of this program, no one knew to press F12 to see the console in a browser. This was a web development program. I basically had to teach these kids as if they just walked off the street. No matter which new batch of kids I had, it was like this. I asked them how they could know so little about anything development wise if they took 4 years of CS, like literally what did they do. They'd always just answer that they learned "Theory" and something about learning out of a book, not actually developing or anything.

I still didn't understand how 4 years of theory or book learning couldn't teach you the most basic programming concepts. I'm pretty sure the schools were just mills or scams or something, it was sad.

Most of the students had no real interest in actually learning how to code or doing any learning either, they seemed to believe that just by showing up they'd pass, get a degree and a good job, which was bizarre, especially in a university town and tech hot bed. The amount of cheating, copying, lying, begging, etc. didn't help. A few folks were genuine, but the program seems like it's just a legal loophole to get into the country where if they get at least a technical support job after 2 years of grad they can legally become citizens. This is the fastest growing and most profitable sector of this college.

<comment><USER60> Ouch! That is so sad on so many levels.

To be fair, I can understand when someone doesn't know that the shortcut key for the dev console is F12, but I would hope they would at least start at the "hamburger" menu to see if they could find it.

Your anecdote reminds me of the dot com days when I was trying to hire some network engineers. Their only qualification appeared to be they passed some certification test on Cisco gear. The only questions they asked about the job were "how much stock will I get?" and "when do you think the company will go public?" It was easy to not hire them, even when we were really in need of people.

<comment><USER61> I don't even think they knew what the console was...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Peter Thiel talks about how the "4-year degree" has obtained a similar status within the United States.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly. It is much more common than it was a couple decades ago for jobs to require a bachelors degree as a minimum. You can argue that the intrinsic educational value of a 4-year-degree has become diluted, but the (unfortunate) reality is that having a degree is a baseline requirement to even get an interview.

That's different than a computer science/engineering degree being devalued to the point where it's no longer more attractive than any other college degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> The article and the thread are horribly mixing at least three different things under the word Engineer. Actual Engineer degrees B. Eng., 'programmers' which I guess could be B. Software Eng. and something called IT Engineer which I presume is a sort of two year network admin thing. No wonder there's so much confusion about the value of things and people being surprised not to have the status they expected when the person telling you you need to be an engineer meant a substation designer and you thought it meant tech support.

<comment><USER64> In Canada, the term "engineer" is protected, but in most places the term is used loosely. Eg, in the USA, if you email Unity about a licensing question, you get a response from a "customer service engineer"

<comment> 52-6F-62 Only with regard to certain industries.

I believe software engineer is pretty free-for-all. Just don't try and represent yourself as a P. Eng. Then you're in trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I know clickbait, hyperbolic titles allow for more, hmm, clicks, but they rarely help make the case for your article.

Since he uses the word "worthless", how does that compare it to folks who graduated in History or anthropology or (running joke in the US) graduated in English?

Think of this: People in poor country, need to do what it takes to better their prospects. So they go for the one industry that pays relatively better. Nothing illogical about it and seems perfectly rational to me. And I can see similar trends in the US too. A lot of lamenting on "how I wished I learned to code, major in CS, etc.", given how drastically better the tech industry pays. [https://levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) ICYMI. Oh, the poor worthless English majors.

Also the lack of empathy was quite striking given the author himself is a recent "worthless" graduate of a technical degree - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilesh- christopher-20831784/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilesh- christopher-20831784/) Maybe he comes from an upper-middle class background and was able to pivot into journalism, but the fact that he didn't mention his own background meant that I couldn't take this article seriously.

On a more meta topic, does education always have to "worthful"?

</comment><comment><USER66> Change 'engineering' to 'law', and you have a similar situation in Brazil. There are 1,500 law schools in the country. Most graduates today never end up practicing it.

</comment><comment><USER67> Tangential question (which has been on my mind) related to this:

I don't have a CS degree. Background in something completely unrelated. But I've been able to make a living programming doing my own thing (bootstrapped online stuff). As a result, I never bothered to apply for jobs at established CO's.

For those who work in established tech start ups or tech companies, what proportion of your software devs have an actual CS degree vs self taught? And is there some glass ceiling as a result?

<comment><USER68> Most of our developers either have a degree unrelated to programming or hold no degree. Of our top three programmers, two are dropouts and one has a degree in physics. Two of them started with us having dropped out undergrad (unrelated), and the third we hired after decades of experience at other companies. The common theme I've found with all three is a passion for programming and learning in general. If they didn't do this as a job it would be their hobby, this is what makes a good engineer or developer. Forget the experience, if a person is driven they will learn what they need to know.

But my viewpoint is skewed, there are only about 25 of us at our company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> This is precisely why most top tech companies in India only hire from the top colleges (IITs, BITS Pilani, IIITs, NITs, etc). It's usually not worth their time to even interview someone who did not graduate from one of these.

This is also evident in the compensation for new grads. CS grads from lower ranked colleges typically make $5k-$10k per year, while those from these good colleges make $20k-$40k per year(gross). Exceptions exist of course.

</comment><comment><USER70> I graduate in 2009 ( BE - EIE ). But I got my first software company job in 2015. It was hard for me. And during college days I love reading CS books and playing with computer. After doing Non technical job including Call center and printing machine service engineer finally I got a job. I learned programming myself.

</comment><comment><USER71> 3 Idiots is a remarkably inspirational Bollywood movie depicting the problem; one of my all-time favorites. [https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/3_idiots](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/3_idiots)

<comment><USER72> "3 Idiots" is just a name of the movie. Just have started to watch it and it looks pretty relevant to the discussion, so far. I presume that downvotes to your comment are unwarranted.

I have a question to Hindi speakers: they say a word that sounds like "futur" meaning literally "future". Is that a borrowed word? Or is it something native to Hindi?

I am quite astonished that I can grasp a bit of it. The language kind of reflects some European languages. For instance, I can understand a tiny fraction of what actors are saying in Hindi. Never learnt it before, but that lingual link is interesting.

<comment><USER73> I don't know the specific etymology of that word, and I do recall that there is a lot of english in bollywood films, but the linguistically the languages are actually related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo- European_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". A famous quote, can't remember by who and too lazy to search, but it also can be reversed to summarize the article:

"Do it for money and you'll be crappy at your job"

</comment><comment><USER75> A degree is supposed to be a guarantee issued by an organization that someone has met that organization's standards for some dicipline. In theory, those degrees are valuable to businesses because they assure some baseline competency from prospective hires.

It sounds like many organizations in India have significantly reduced their standards or are awarding their degrees to unqualified people. So why do businesses continue to value degrees issued by those organizations?

</comment><comment><USER76> I wonder if India faced a problem similar to the for profit college system in the us, where a lot of the programs were fake.

<comment><USER77> > for profit college system in the us, where a lot of the programs were fake.

The programs in the US weren't fake ...

The US government (VA, etc.) didn't like paying for schools that had low graduation rates, or had high student loan defaults, so closed them. In some cases, legit trade schools were closed, like Wyotech:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WyoTech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WyoTech)

Ironically, this being HN, private investor groups trying to monetize education were behind a lot of the closed schools.

<comment><USER76> Maybe the term "fake" is over-used, but I meant something along the lines of selling people an expensive training that leaves them in debt and unemployable. Some of those schools also made hyperbolic claims about the career prospects and earnings of their graduates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> The saddest quote in this article was this: "I majored in computer science but realized I wasn't cut out for a coding job. Dropping out wasn't an option, so I stuck to the course,". At lease _he_ appears to have landed on his feet.

</comment><comment><USER79> First article I've seen from what looks like a newly launched site. Seems like a neat niche--tech stories outside of the West. Any existing sites/newsletters already on this beat?

</comment><comment><USER80> In the Indian context, what matters today is not _what_ the degree is, but _where_ the degree is from.

Some historical perspective as I recall it: even as late as the late 1990s, there were very few engineering colleges in India, and a B.E. or B.Tech was a prestigious degree to have. For example, Uttar Pradesh, which is a state that has about the population of the entire US, had 5 or 6 state engineering colleges (+ IIT Kanpur + Univ. of Roorkee + Banaras Hindu Univ, which were national level institutions).

The AICTE which controls technical education in India, mandated that no CS department should take more than 65 students in a year.

I think what changed was Y2K. I suspect under pressure from NASSCOM, (led by the charismatic Dewang Mehta [1]), B.Tech in CSE got doubled in number by creating a second department called I.T. thus working around existing norms. In the 5 years following, engineering education itself got "liberalized" by allowing a large number of private for-profit colleges.

The impression was that they will become places like Harvard and MIT, just because private is better than public sector. Many of these colleges still do not want to employ qualified teaching staff - the faculty are mostly people with just a B.Tech degree from similar colleges, who did not get a job in the tech sector, hence are willing to pay for dirt pay, and under draconian corporate-style management.

The situation is true to this day.

An inevitable result has been the deluge of people ill-trained, but holding a degree, tarnishing the reputation of Indian engineering education.

TLDR: 20 years ago, there were very few engineering colleges in India, the degree was prized, and the graduates were kind-of well-trained. Then there was a huge and unregulated explosion in graduates from for-profit colleges. Today, the graduates who are assured of good jobs and whose degrees hold value, are still those from the pre-1990s engineering colleges.

Doctors have resisted a similar dilution of norms. But recently India achieved a significant "number" \- one can only hope that the doctors are better off than the engineers. [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewang_Mehta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewang_Mehta)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6259525/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6259525/)

</comment><comment><USER81> I am currently pursuing a CS Degree in one of the top schools of India (top 0.01 percentile) and I also have some friends in Tier 3 colleges. CS education is only good in top 15 colleges in the country i.e. around 10k CS graduates every year. The rest 50k - 100k graduates are of much lower aptitude. The reason for this is that learning in Indian colleges is mostly peer learning and the top students all end up in the top colleges.

</comment><comment><USER53> How much of the problem is too much supply, and how much of the problem is poor quality of the supply?

</comment><comment><USER82> I want to emphasize one thing: all the graduates from IITs I've worked with are truly top notch.

</comment><comment><USER83> I am an Indian student studying in freshman year in one of the so-called "top" colleges and there are just too many problems.

* First of all, the system is very rote learning oriented. The questions in the exam will be exactly same as those solved in the class. That means people without proper understanding of concepts can still get A+ grades by memorization techniques. But it is PITA if you actually have some interest in subject. You may not get good grades if you write right answers in exams but they aren't like what is in the book.

* Too many people enter Engineering, especially CSE in hope of getting a Job. Entrance process is based completely on basic sciences and while better than other exams, people still game the system by studying four years for entrance exams. This and management quota in Engineering colleges leads to huge influx of students out of them somewhere like 2% - 5% actually have interest in the branch of engineering they take.

* Talent gets no recognition many times. Rote-based exams make it easy to distinguish average from absolute low. But average and talented appear to be at same level because a talented person can be as good as an average but hard working student in these rote based exams.

* Since there is huge influx of students and huge number of engineering colleges, most faculty is underskilled and better we could have robots teach us. We had a teacher who doesn't appear to indent C code, but also has a "qualification" in "distributed systems" and "computer networking".

* Something that has been a problem to me: I was pretty good in basic sciences, passed entrance exam with good marks without any tedious "coaching", and I took up CSE because I was interested in computer science. The first year of engineering syllabus consists of same common subjects to all branches, like Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics (Calculus) and introductory courses to other engineering disciplines (C programming is only CSE related thing they teach us). That's improperly using one year. However relevant those subjects are, they aren't as relevant as teaching programming/CS related subjects in practice. We will have campus placements in 7th semester and due to this, we only get 2nd and 3rd year to actually study CSE. Even those subjects wouldn't have been a problem apart from being waste of time - but they are too rote learning based and uninteresting - As in teaching some methodologies to solve some kind of numerical problems and asking them in exam. Today as I am writing this I have an online exam some hours later. I never thought I would be grades in 7/10 range but the uninteresting and rote based nature of these exams doesn't motivate me to study anything.

And this "interdisciplinary" kool-aid has another effect. I have seen even toppers of my class not understanding recursion and algorithm complexity. Because algorithm complexity is not taught in first year. We only get to learn C programming (No 'advanced' concepts like malloc / free, file I/O) in first year. This is huge waste of resources because all these rote learned physics fundamentals don't be useful for most of these people in practice. They will be forgotten after exams. If they had taught something related to CS, at least it would be useful to do side projects and have something more on our resumes, and would be perhaps useful as an engineer.

* Perhaps as a result of the above, Syllabus is far behind the actual advancements in technology. Git? Apparently only members of college's coding club know what that is. Docker? What's that?

I am frustrated. It is just pointless. Especially because all this is too costly for a middle class rural student and we have to get education loans. If it was not the societal pressure / norms, I could have self studied and could have become a better engineer. The system is so screwed up - perfect one to churn out enterprise droids anyway.

</comment><comment><USER84> Great solution to "economic inequality". We should do it here too, increase admissions in ivy leagues by 100 fold. Will solve the inequality problem the television pundits and grifter politicians breathlessly blabber about.

</comment><comment><USER85> I interviewed some "Masters" level students from India. They couldn't do FizzBuzz.

        if(i % 3)
            ...
        else if(i % 5)
            ...

</comment><comment><USER86> There are 23 IITs

</comment><comment><USER87> tl;dr oversupply. nothing unexpected here

</comment><comment><USER88> Strangely enough east european outsourcing is skyrocketing, so demand is out there. Most companies coming here complain about their negative experience with outsourcing to India, and are willing to pay far more than outsourcing there, albeit still less than in western europe. So the issue is not necessarily numbers, but the quality of those numbers. Indian programmers are great, this is honest feedback based on what i heard.</comment>


Ask HN: How to monetize a niche search engine? - <AUTHOR> I have a niche search engine with pretty decent activity. What are some good ways I could monetize? <comment><USER2> You could sell it to me....or you could add me as a co-founder and I will monetize it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Charge money for it.</comment>


Beth Noveck: The Peer-to-Patent Project - <AUTHOR> http://fora.tv/2010/03/04/Beth_Noveck_Transparent_Government#chapter_04

<comment><AUTHOR> Links to the project discussed and the white paper [pdf]:

<http://www.peertopatent.org/>

[http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v20/20HarvJLTech123...](http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v20/20HarvJLTech123.pdf)</comment>


The Limits of Neuroplasticity - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-limits-of-neuroplasticity/

<comment><USER2> I would agree that the media do jump on anything that sounds like it is the fountain of youth and hype it up. Obviously everyone over 40, like me, would love to think some pill is going to give them youthful characteristics such as improved learning ability.

But...I also blame the academic journals. Why is it published in the current form when the study was only completed by 18 people. How come the peer reviewers did not insist on toning down the over hyped conclusions. Maybe they should have gone further and refused to publish until a more extensive and reliable follow up study was performed.

In short, the academic world has to stop publishing such marginal results before we blame the media for picking them up and adding another layer or hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER3> This study is the biggest bunch of pseudoscience I've seen in ages. 18 participants, of which 17 knew which group they were in. Even if that was 10000 participants, that ratio means that the test is _completely invalid_!

<comment><USER4> For what it's worth, that's a problem faced by many drugs with side effects, especially psychoactive ones. Sometimes active placebos are used, as in the magic mushroom studies at Johns Hopkins (I believe they used a stimulant). But even people who've never used psychedelics can probably tell whether they've taken speed or hallucinogens.

I didn't read the study in depth, but the problem you describe is widespread and well-known. Well-known doesn't mean solved, so perhaps you have a better solution?

One option might come from clever experimental design, in which subjects do not know the hypothesis you wish to test. The problem is that this is often guessable - i.e. here subjects might not have known that AP was being tested, but they might have believed mental performance was, and if they thought they were in the treatment group they might have extra confidence, which could confound the results. That's hard to design around in practice, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My lifepartner is weaning off depakote after two years of taking fairly large doses. She's doing that because her doctor thinks it might contribute to her low white blood cells count.

Meanwhile no superpowers were observed.

</comment><comment><USER6> _" I would also note that valproic acid is a serious drug with serious side effect, including sedation, weight gain, and foggy mentation. As an anti- seizure drug it also carries the possibility of withdrawal seizures if stopped suddenly. I doubt it would have a net cognitive benefit if taken regularly, which is another reason why I am suspicious of the findings of this study."_

Yes, this is what made me boggle when this was posted on LessWrong. l33t mindhacking with valproate without close medical supervision is a Darwinian move.</comment>


"Ode to a College Education" - <AUTHOR> http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=867193

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, the security implications; just... wow.

(That poem also needs to be read with a healthy sense of sarcasm.)</comment>


Mini: The Minimal Language - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@minilanguage/mini-the-minimal-language-3f3710e28166 <comment><USER2> Beautiful. To clarify for others yet to read the article, this is about an artificially designed human language, along the lines of Esperanto and Toki Pona ("a micro-language of 120–125 words created by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang").

My favorite section:

> Speaking Mini means speaking like a caveman. Precise terminology is replaced > with crude physical description. Words like bird, tower, or salsa in English > are Minified as animo selo (sky animal), loke baton (cylinder place), or > vasa veji fogo (fiery vegetable liquid). People are not beautiful or > intelligent; they merely ave e mira bon (have a good appearance) or pensa > bon (think well). One cannot run or cook; one can only kamino velo (walk > fast) or fogo e manja (fire the food).

> Despite these limitations, Mini still functions as a speakable language and > has been battle-tested in a way that most constructed languages have not: by > being continuously spoken by myself and my (unfortunate) family members and > acquaintances. The vocabulary and range of discussable topics may be quite > limited, but the language works: people can successfully communicate in > Mini.

I see some similarities with programming languages, in that the ones most likely to "succeed" in terms of usage, are the ones that were dog-fooded by the creator and associates, used in production over time to make it practical.</comment>


Show HN: My first startup - So Yummy - <AUTHOR> http://soyum.my/ after months of baking with my girlfriend, we decided to launch our first startup together: SoYummy.<p>I got the inspiration when she first got a subscription to Birchbox and i thought, there must be 'bakery/sweets' version of Birchbox. After some research, i discovered that there really isn't anything like this. This wont make me a million dollars overnight, but we wanted to give this a shot and really try to make it work. Let me know if you got any questions! <comment><AUTHOR> after months of baking with my girlfriend, we decided to launch our first startup together: SoYummy. I got the inspiration when she first got a subscription to Birchbox and i thought, there must be 'bakery/sweets' version of Birchbox. After some research, i discovered that there really isn't anything like this. This wont make me a million dollars overnight, but we wanted to give this a shot and really try to make it work. Let me know if you got any questions! would love some feedback!

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice idea. I look forward to seeing the kind of cookies you will provide and the price of the subscription.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickable:

<http://soyum.my/></comment>


Ask HN: Please Review My Project (The Social Cooker) - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
I haven't posted on here before, but I read the site regularly.
I have had the idea of The Social Cooker in my mind for a while and decided to execute on it.
The idea is to create a site where everyday people who cook, can share meal ideas; like a facebook for food, and I'd really love your feedback.
I launched a beta version at:
http://www.thesocialcooker.com/
There are two use cases:
1. Select or type in the ingredients you have at home, then choose from a selection of recipes based on the ingredients you chose. Then you could edit the recipe to add your own touch or keep as is. Finally, you can post the recipe on homepage and get feedback on what other users think of it before you start cooking. When you make the dish, you can proudly post a pic of the final product and socialize with others on tips, how it went, and just get social.
Or
2. For someone wanting to be more creative, they can skip the first 2 steps and post their own recipes from scratch to the homepage and get automatic feedback from other Social Cookers and critics and once you take into account your peers' advises, start cooking and post the end product.
Taking the train home on a workday, the one thing that's on the minds of almost everyone is "what am i going to cook for dinner as soon as i get home." With The Social Cooker, you can log on, and get your meal planned and not have to stop at the store to get ingredients that untailored recipes demand…I mean c'mon who has vanilla extract or Peruvian almonds ready at their fingertips?!
I'd like the good people of HN to weigh in on the idea and provide some feedback to improve the idea.
Abdul. <comment><USER2> The idea looks good, but I am afraid people have tried to execute this earlier. I personally like Bakespace.com, and I am sure there'll be other players also.

My two cents.

But, you can always take away their market share by having innovative ideas. One I can think of is along the lines of <http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/> If you can integrate this in a way so that it recommends what to make for dinner based on what your friends cook, it might be interesting. Like Paul is making an 'Indian Beef Curry' and Angela is cooking 'Butternut Squash Penne', so why don't you try one of these?

Also, you can try tying up with same day grocery delivery services like Instacart so that one can choose the plan for dinner while in office and order the ingredients so that it'll be there at home once they get back.

<comment><AUTHOR> great feedback, the recommendations part can be part of the social network, with top contributors (head chef, sour-chef) based on your activity on the site.

Good idea on the groceries too! will take those into consideration. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Engineers turned into marketing people, how and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Oh wow. I feel like I just asked the reverse of this question 3 min after you posted this.

I was a mechE at Caterpillar for 4 years before I decided that my position was a local max in the organization. So I studied, took the GMAT, and applied to b-school. Ended up at NYU and did lots of internships in branding / publishing / marketing and eventually found a route into tech marketing via account management at an ad-tech company that needed someone with solid excel skills & was willing to get on the phone.

Good marketers are eager to talk to people and figure out what their product can/should be doing for others. Then they feed that back to Product. I think Product/Marketing are two sides of the same product development coin.

One way to position yourself as a marketing candidate is as an excellent SME on tech -- you get tech better than your colleagues, so you become invaluable to the team.

<comment><AUTHOR> hehe, nice!

I'm actually an engineer who likes to create products but who really sucks at marketing. I never looked at marketeers over the shoulder but now that I am trying to market my own products I realize what a hard and important work is.

I think I did a good job up to the point of finding a real need that people are willing to pay for a solution, but one thing is to get the early traction and a whole other is to actually be able to live from it... the struggle is real :P</comment></comment>


Announcing Message Unicorn - <AUTHOR> http://www.messageunicorn.com/

<comment><USER2> You might want to play with the alternative font choices. NoScript defaulted to blocking the Google-hosted font, and the Arial fallback is a lot wider and makes the page look bad (it turns the button into "MAKE MES").

</comment><comment><USER3> How does it deal with multiple people having the same name? I could see John Smith getting either very excited, or very annoyed. Do you have a strategy for that?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a feature. It makes life more interesting to see what messages people are sending to all the other John Smiths.

On a more serious note, it's probably going to be most useful for people with moderately uncommon names... middle name support is possibly on the horizon.</comment></comment>


SQL for the Rest of Us - <AUTHOR> https://technically.dev/posts/sql-for-the-rest-of-us.html <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this Joseph! I wrote this post after a few years as a Data Scientist watching other teams struggle to work with the data my team was producing. SQL is probably the easiest "language" to pick up, but being a good data literate teammate takes more than technical chops. Getting good at finding bugs, writing informative tickets, answering your own questions, and optimizing query performance can go a long way!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is a great breakdown on the WHY of SQL.

giving clarity as to the what / why of SQL empowers those that don't yet know it how to make better asks for data in their organization.</comment>


Marvell Cranks Up Cores and Clocks with "Triton" ThunderX3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/03/16/marvell-cranks-up-cores-and-clocks-with-triton-thunderx3/ <comment><USER2> This announcement is lacking a lot of specifics, which means it's worse than N1 / Ampere and more of the competition.

TNP always annoys me by its wordiness and lack of tables and numbers. It's incredibly low signal to noise compared to Ars and Anandtech.

<comment><USER3> Here's the Anandtech version: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/15621/marvell- announces-thund...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15621/marvell-announces- thunderx3-96-cores-384-thread-3rd-gen-arm-server-processor)

 _> If we use the TX2 figures we have at hand, this would mean the new chip would land slightly ahead of Neoverse-N1 systems such as the Graviton2, and match more aggressively clocked designs such as the Ampere Altra._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without HBM or more memory channels, the top SKUs will be rather hard to feed considering the (claimed) at least ~3-5x increase in instructions/s/socket while only increasing memory bandwidth by ~20%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe they mitigated that by increasing cache sizes, but there is no information available about that yet. I would expect that, since they support 4 threads per core and that may drive up cache usage (even though one thread may be able to be useful while another is waiting for a cache miss to clear).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has there been any mention of MSRPs on these new arm chips? As a home server enthusiast, I'd love to have a serious arm driven system to play with...

<comment><USER6> The ThunderX2 model isn't in stock, but the Ampere model is.

Base config with Ampere eMAG 8180 32 core 2.8GHz 3MB L3 is about $3,000

[https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm- workstatio...](https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm- workstation.html)

<comment><USER7> (That's not the new generations, which are not released yet, and there's no price info yet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has the ThunderX family shipped in "mere mortal" hardware, or is it all supercomputers and custom FANG servers and the like? I seem to remember that when ThunderX first launched, there was some noise about "ARM servers" being a market that exists, and the company I worked for at the time was looking into using it for a new product but gave up on it for some reason.

<comment><USER9> I think I've used one of these Gigabyte rack servers:

[https://www.gigabyte.com/us/ARM-Server](https://www.gigabyte.com/us/ARM- Server)

I'm not sure offhand what the pricing is, but my guess would be less than $10,000, depending on the configuration.

<comment><USER10> So much more than an equivalent x86 box.

<comment><AUTHOR> There aren't many 384-thread x86 boxes around, certainly none below US$ 10K

<comment><USER10> 384 threads at which SMT level again?

What's the clock speed, and what's the IPC compared to say a 64 core 128 thread Threadripper? You'll find it won't compare favourably for 99.9% of workloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 240W, 96 quite beefy ARM cores, I'm not sure about SMT. All that in 1U. The density is becoming mad.

<comment><USER12> > The Triton chip will have eight memory controllers supporting memory running > at 3.2 GHz, which is the same number of controllers in the Vulcan chip, > which maxxed out at 2.67 GHz memory speeds. That's a 20 percent increase in > memory bandwidth, and the question is how that will balance out against the > high core counts in some of the Triton SKUs.

96 cores, seems like it would be tricky to keep them busy with modest memory throughput increases.

<comment><USER13> Do they really mean memory running at 3.2GHz? What memory would be running that fast? Isn't this HBM2E and it's 3.2Gbps bandwidth?

<comment><USER14> DDR4 easily runs at 3200 MHz (DDR) though I don't know if that's common yet for ECC RDIMMS.

<comment><USER13> Doh! yes, thanks, that makes a LOT more sense!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of this article from 2011 blowing my mind... 12,500 cores for Pixar's Cars 2

[https://www.cnet.com/news/new-technology-revs-up-pixars- cars...](https://www.cnet.com/news/new-technology-revs-up-pixars-cars-2/)</comment>


The Dogs of Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/d8j6je99gnx65bk?ref_=doa_red <comment><USER2> Who let the dogs out!

sorry I could not help it</comment>


HN Feature Request: Submit anonymously - <AUTHOR>

Anonymity is (sometimes) a need. This feature would at least reduce the number of temporary accounts created just to preserve privacy or anonymity. Maybe only add this feature to users with karma > x ? <comment><USER2> I would assume that most HN users would know how to hide their identity if strong anonymity is needed. I'd _never_ trust a 'post anonymously' button from my logged-in account.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's wrong with temporary accounts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Digital garbage? Wasting usernames?

<comment><USER3> I don't see that wasting usernames is a problem. New users are surely far more likely to be able to register their preferred username on HN than on, say, Gmail or Xbox Live.

What do you mean by "digital garbage", and why is it a problem?

<comment><AUTHOR> By digital garbage I mean information without any useful purpose, only filling up space. I assume that temporary account are rare at HN, thus this isn't really a problem.

However, I ask - shouldn't this use case (anonymous posting) be accommodated by the system, instead of relying on a hack?

<comment><USER3> Even with anonymous posting, it is useful to know that the anonymous comments in the ensuing discussion are from the same person who made the original anonymous post. So I think pseudonymous posting is valuable, more so than truly anonymous posting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube forgets to count views - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSTLDel-G9k See "302 views" number. It's sitting there for quite some time. <comment><USER2> If this is a phenomenon present on x % of youtube videos, it is news worthy.

Why otherwise? While on the topic,can anyone shed light on how the counters on youtube work- number ranges? Are the counter increments non-probabilistic?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Notice "302 views" -- that number stuck on there for hours.

<comment><USER3> YouTube doesn't show view count in realtime but in bulk.

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like that bulk size is pretty big. It took hours before view count changed. Not only that -- I think 1871 views / 353 comments ratio (only six to one) is quite unusual. I think YouTube significantly underreports views.</comment></comment></comment>


Should Entrepreneurs Lie? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/04/is_it_ok_for_entrepreneurs_lie.html

<comment><USER2> Hyping, shading and puffing are normal in entrepreneurial circles and, properly limited, are probably expected to some degree. People discount the statements accordingly.

Misrepresenting material facts or omitting to disclose something major (like the loss of your major customer the day before a funding) constitutes securities fraud and can get you in a heap of trouble, notwithstanding how it may have worked out in a particular case such as that cited in this piece.

There are also limits to hyping if it amounts to misrepresenting material facts. I was once approached by an entrepreneur whom I turned down as a client and who later got busted for securities fraud for having done a demo claiming that certain of his company's whiz-bang technology was in fact doing something stupendous when it was in reality just a rigged demonstration designed to simulate what he claimed his technology could already achieve. Having raised $7 million based on such demonstrations, mostly from gullible investors, he went to jail for his "over-hyping" of his product.

When it comes to issues such as lying, there are moral issues and there are legal ones. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to avoid serious problems, the rule should always be: never lie in a way that amounts to fraud or misrepresentation (legally speaking), no matter what the supposed benefit. It is _not_ worth it.

Concerning moral issues, the issue for me is one of integrity. Just as we all can stretch something when it helps us, and just as we all do so to some degree, so we can stretch it to the point where it amounts to a pure fabrication. Mild stretching might be considered a gray area. Fabrication is a character issue that can reflect badly on the entrepreneur. Of course, this depends on context as well. If it is clear you are speculating (such as about growth rates), that is one thing. If you are knowingly misrepresenting facts, the natural thought that occurs to people you are dealing with is, "If he will do that once, how can I trust him not to do it again." You might think it is innocent in your mind, but crooks make a living off such misrepresentations. And there is no percentage in aligning yourself with that which is unseemly. I have repeatedly seen the consequences of such activity in courts of law, and they are not pretty in cases when things do blow up.

<comment><USER3> Another test is: Would the victim be annoyed if they found you had lied? I doubt a VC would get annoyed at inflated sales forecasts (they know it's part of the game), but they would be annoyed if you lied about the feasibility of your project.

<comment><USER4> I think the best VCs appreciate an entrepreneur who is able to squeeze all possible value from the available facts without resorting to deception.

The sharpest people can back up everything they say. Avoid making ridiculous claims and you appear smarter.

Lying is often an indicator of laziness and a lack of the right kind of creativity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was talking with one investor late last year. Things were going pretty well in one direction with my company and I decided that it would be a good time to fund additional growth. Just before I closed the deal, however, some key relationships that I had been counting on fell through. Ever the optimist, it didn't cause me personally to doubt what I was doing and didn't think it was a big deal in the long term.

One thing that I think is true of technical people is that we are comfortable disclosing difficult things. We tend to view them as just bugs to work out and expect that everyone involved will have enough belief in the end goal to find workarounds to any challenges. So, perhaps naively, I told the investor what was going on and how I planned to proceed.

He (being a certain type of investor) took this as an opportunity to try to completely change the terms of the deal we had agreed upon. So, I ended the talks without taking any money.

I wondered for a few months afterwards if I had made the right decision in being so honest and came to the realization that some investors do expect you to only paint a rosy picture.

At the end of the day though, I realized that I don't to work with that kind of investor and, as things turned out, it was a very good thing to not take money from him. Since then, some unbelievably good things have happened and couldn't have taken place if I was tied to some investor in Japan who didn't believe in me.

So, the lesson for me was, be honest and be yourself. The people who believe in you as an entrepreneur will be there through the ups and downs. And the truth is a great way to weed out those of little faith.

<comment><USER6> This has been my experience in life as well. Doing the right thing, which may cost you in short-term gain, usually leads to long-term gain.

You had the opportunity to find out about this man's character that he wanted to take advantage of you. Better to find this out sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No, but look at YC's bio page at <http://ycombinator.com/people.html>

"Robert Morris is an associate professor of computer science at MIT, where he is a member of the PDOS group. He has published extensively on wireless networks, distributed operating systems, and peer-to-peer applications. _In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public._ He has an AB and PhD in Computer Science from Harvard."

Emphasize the positive.

But it only works if you have a lot of positive to emphasize, and if whatever you're downplaying really isn't important.

</comment><comment><USER8> Even though I've been in business for 20 years I'll bet the number of people who have knowingly, intentionally deceived me is very low, probably in single digits. Maybe none.

That sounds naive, and maybe it is. But psychological and neurological research all points in the same direction: that people perceive the same situation radically differently, and even remember the same incident differently. There are even physiological artifacts that accompany or cause these divergences. So most of the time when people are 'lying' to me they probably believe what they're saying.

That doesn't answer the original question, but it challenges the assumptions in the article, that lying is commonplace and a constant temptation. It also changes the way I (and I think others) should respond to a 'liar'. Assume the person isn't lying, even if you think they're wrong and should know it. Accept the data, evaluate, verify, and move on. Ascribing motives or morality might be satisfying, but it's unhelpful. Worse, emerging science suggests it may be a mistake.

<comment><USER7> _when people are 'lying' to me they probably believe what they're saying_.

One one level yes, this is true. More than true, it's wise. The problem is that we can deceive ourselves into holding self-serving beliefs... _sincerely_. Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is very hard to make a man understand something, when his job depends on his not understanding it."

And such people aren't lying or dissembling. It's just much cheaper, in terms of mental effort, to develop beliefs that the world is the way you would like it to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No. Dishonesty (not limited simply to lying) is as impractical with your customers and investors as it is with family and friends.

Context: assuming that you are dealing with civilized situations in which neither party has initiated or threatened the use of force against anyone.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hopefully, this article will be counter-balanced at some point by discussions with successful entrepreneurs who had open, candid, and honest relationships with their VCs and customers. In my experience, telling the truth builds relationships and lets people focus on problem solving.

If being honest with your VC means losing funding, it may still lead to funding of another, more viable idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Fake it till you Make it" has become quite a popular mantra in this context. Is this lying, stretching the truth, marketing your "brand", or something else? It is for the individual to decide, no strict rules IMO...

</comment><comment><USER12> Entrepreneurs obviously need to spin their situation in as positive a light as possible, see all the chatter around the monitization of twitter as an example, but I doubt outright lies are going to be a winning strategy. (it may work for Jobs, see woz-atari story, but is it worth the risk?)

I think it's important for the Entrepreneur to understand that VCs lie all the time however, it is just their nature, despite how open they look, they're especially good at lies of omission and manipulation of fund performance.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your most valuable relationships are with people who are smarter than you.

So, by all means, go ahead and lie to them. They'll know right away, while everyone else will only know eventually.

</comment><comment><USER13> Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

</comment><comment><USER14> Playing the game, hyping or as some called it marketing is part of being an entrepreneur. You always have to encounter that the information given to you is often fashioned in that way. As long as the facts are not misrepresented or blank wrong information which can get you in some serious trouble it is part of business.

I personally stay away as far as possible on stretching the truth because of a simple fact. When you start it you have to remember, what you said to whom, how much you said and so forth. At some point it starts to catch up on you and people start to remember it. Despite all the thinking it just gets messy and integrity in business in the long run is key. Therefore I stick with facts and truth which keeps it simple. That might sometimes mean that I do not get the deals I wish, but I have a good sleep and no headache and for sure I will survive.

</comment><comment><USER15> Lots of complex answers here.

Legal analysis aside, it's risk -vs- reward decision.

Best outcome - you Lie for strategic reasons, nobody ever finds out, and your company is a success, everyone makes lots of money, everyone is happy, and even if they find out you lied, they may not care if you've demonstrated nothing but good behavior since. Maybe.

Lie, and then fail, and get found out - that may follow you around forever doing untold damage to your credibility for the rest of your life. Trust is an easy thing to lose and a hard thing to gain.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you leave aside the moral/ethical issues (which are very real, and which we each need to deal with for ourselves.) the usual rules of marketing apply; do you expect word of mouth? do you expect repeat business? If so, a reputation for dishonesty is going to kill the rest of your marketing.

(Of course, if you expect to encounter each customer once and only once, and if you don't expect your customers to talk to potential customers, the rules are clearly different, and you are mostly back to the ethical question I glossed over.)

</comment><comment><USER17> I think his point about holding startups to the same standards of truth that we do "the most mature public companies" is actually a good one. We expect a _lot_ of lying from the marketing departments of mature public companies.

But we feel worse about it when there are so few people that lying means it's Bob and Frank lying to us, not fifteen faceless people in a large department who we'll never meet, and never assign blame to.

</comment><comment><USER18> No.

Especially if you're a software entrepreneur.

Even more so if you're an internet entrepreneur.

We don't make products that our customers can touch and feel. We make ones and zeros. All our customers have is trust and implicit promises from us.

Lie and we have nothing.

<comment><USER19> What about this scenario? VC wants to know how much interest there is in your company. You claim to have 3 leads from other VCs although you have none.

IMO there is nothing wrong with this lie, because it doesn't lead anyone to make a bad decision. If you're a good investment, you get funding faster and on better terms. If you're a bad investment and the VC is any good, you'll get rejected even if you have 1000 leads.

Or another example... you're 30 and have a successful track record but you failed out of college at age 21. A VC is sizing you up and wants to know why you didn't finish. You're a different person at 30 than you are at 21, so it shouldn't matter, but you fear admitting the truth will kill the deal; VC's a bit of an Ivy snob. You say, "I ran out of money, 6 months later had an opportunity to do <X> and made a lot of money, and haven't had any need to go back". Is anyone hurt by this lie? Absolutely not.

<comment><USER9> VCs can just talk to each other and figure out that you're a fraud, which alone is a great reason to not deal with you.

Don't lie! Morality is not just some arbitrary thing that you can make up as you go along if you want to achieve anything. The proper standard of morality for you and me and everyone else is _not_ what will help or hurt the other party, it's what will help or hurt _you_ and your long-term rational self- interest. Lying will necessarily prevent you from succeeding; see chapter 4 of Tara Smith's book, "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics", which is on honesty.

<comment><USER19> _VCs can just talk to each other and figure out that you're a fraud_

That's the danger: getting scumbagged behind your back.

How is that "fraud"? Claiming you have customers you do not is fraud. Promising to deliver a project that you cannot or will not is a fraud. Claiming that other VCs are interested in you is not fraud; it's just the kind of thing you have to do if you weren't born into connections.

The only people who have a problem with that are silver-spoon assholes who want to keep doors shut to people who didn't hang out with them in high school.

<comment><USER9> People that are in business and successful because they were in a high school clique?

Just how many people does Steve Jobs hire because he knew them from school? Zero, because his way of doing business is to hire the best. To the extent that people are like Jobs in this regard, their businesses are successful. People that hire friends, regardless of their ability will never rise to great heights in business (or any endeavor).

Do you want to work for someone mediocre, or someone great? Even if you were successful in your lie, lying would only get you the mediocre job. A great employer (someone of high caliber) would figure it out, or would be principled enough to fire you when they figured it out.

<comment><USER19> _People that are in business and successful because they were in a high school clique?_

I never said this. Obviously, it is not true.

I said that the people who'd consider it some kind of moral transgression, rather than a strategic move, to tell a VC that you have other VC interest are the kinds of people who want to keep "the doors" closed to the hoipolloi, because their worst nightmare is outsiders getting into their club, so they have to throw into place a moral "consensus" that judges such moves to be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People lie because they want more power in a social situation. In the "$10 million of VC investment" scenario, lying about the multinational customer gives the entrepreneur more power than he otherwise would have had in the deal with the investor. An investor-entrepreneur relationship works best as a collaboration. So why would you want to start that relationship with an obvious power play _against_ your would-be investment partner?

</comment><comment><USER21> The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made. -- Jean Giraudoux

</comment><comment><USER22> i find a very helpful concept here is the 'appropriate level of abstraction'- when making some assertion, make sure that the language you use and the claims that you make are specific enough to be compelling, but abstracted enough to be 'not a lie'.

</comment><comment><USER23> Everybody lies. But you have to be careful since your reputation is very important.

<comment><USER20> "Everybody lies."

Gandhi.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. I'm pointing out that it's simply not true that everybody lies, at least not in the "intentional misrepresentation of facts" sense. Anyone who has studied the life of Gandhi knows that he would've never materially misrepresented a fact to anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> no.

</comment><comment><USER19> Tough call, but here's the reality of business: everyone ends up "lying", even the people who do their best to be honest (those tend to fall into the overconfidence camp). Some people are just overconfident or have sunny reflections on the past, but everyone lies, and mostly about things of no consequence-- why they left their last job, who they know, their relative rank and responsibility in previous companies.

I generally assume that it's okay to lie if it doesn't lead the other person into a decision that will bring them harm, so lies to inflate one's social standing are generally okay, but promises to deliver a product that one cannot I'd consider very unethical, because the other person is going to get burned when it doesn't come through.

An obvious example is engaging in "creative career repair" with respect to previous job changes. Anyone who has spent 28 minutes in the professional world knows that most people do this and that it's generally innocuous. Everyone has a certain degree of the right to reinvent his or her own history. General rule: it's unethical to claim skills you don't have-- and it's also terrible for you because it means you're likely to fail at your next job; it's fine to upgrade titles, relative performance, terms of leaving, status within the group, and compensation to a reasonable degree (up to the maximum given to someone of your standing and seniority, e.g. claiming top bonus).

Also, although I think it could be a tactical mistake, I'd have no problem with someone lying about having more VC interest in a venture than there actually is, in order to get better terms. This "lie" makes a good deal more attention-getting, but it's not going to make a bad deal look like a good one, except to a VC who doesn't do his own homework. (The danger is that the VC will scumbag you and, behind your back, call up the VC you said was interested.)

<comment><USER25> "I generally assume that it's okay to lie if it doesn't lead the other person into a decision that will bring them harm..."

Humility is knowing you're not smart enough to know when other people are better off being lied to. Once you start justifying your lies as being helpful to the victims, you've crossed from malice to delusion.

Further, you've just admitted on a public forum read by many with deep connections in the startup world (and others bright enough to crack whatever anonymity you think you have), that you're _okay with lying to investors_. This doesn't bode well for your career as a master fraud.

With skills like these, the Dark Side doesn't have much to offer you. Please consider switching teams.

<comment><USER26> "You're deluded and have ruined your entire career for good." Really? How kind of you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> No. EOF [End-of-File, meaning "period!"]</comment>