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Zoho Don't Need No Stinking Ph.D. Programmers
theodp writes "When it comes to tech academic credentials, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has The Right Stuff: a Ph.D. in EE from Princeton. But Vembu has eschewed Google's Army-of-Ph.D.s approach to software development in favor of tapping into the ranks of high school grads who would not normally go to college for Zoho. Seeing his youngest brother succeed at programming without a college degree convinced Vembu that others could follow that example with the proper training and guidance. And studying the best employees in his own company led to another epiphany: 'What if the college degree itself is not really that useful?' thought Vembu. 'What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?'"
Many, many people have gotten themselves trapped into paying off student loans for the rest of their lives for a degree that is inherently worthless.
On the other hand I got a 4 year electrical engineering degree from a respected university for a grand total of about US$500. Thats what you get growing up in a country where the government thinks that education was important. I have no idea what student loan is and I think made my money back about 25 years ago.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Last I heard, the USMC had disbanded the 4067 field, and has since moved all programming requirements to out sourcing companies like MCI and other major military contract players.
The USMC's Comp Sci training was a 8+ hour/day 8+ week crash course. Everyone in the room was a GT110 or better, so the pace was decently fast, but I wouldn't have claimed it to be anything like a university experience. It was effectively like cramming 2-3 tech college style CS course classes into every single day.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
My current employer did a background check that included my high school records. Sadly, the cuniform tablets had crumbled.
Almost every employer will veryify that you in fact worked at each place that you claimed on your resume, and most large companies now have automated systems to facilitate this. Claiming that you worked somewhere that you didn't is a very stupid way to pad your resume.
Just because they're not askinng you for proof means nothing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Roger Corman mostly directed (and later in his career, produced) films that, for all their faults, weren't knockoffs. He directed about a dozen a year at his peak, some over a mere weekend. His job was to produce movies quickly and cheaply, and not only was he one of the best at that, he also made them good enough that many became fondly remembered cult films. As a producer, he was mostly known for giving opportunities to upcoming talent, including Coppola, Scorsese, and Cameron. He's no hack, and no poor-man's substitute. He's the real deal. A better movie producer analogy would be David Rimawi, responsible for dozens of knockoffs in the last decade, including "Transmorphers" and "The Day the Earth Stopped".
We have plenty of funding; in fact, the USA enjoys one of the highest funding-per-student levels in the world. We've thrown lots of money at the problem, but throwing money at things doesn't generate results.
Part of the problem is poor teacher pay. How is it that teachers get paid shit, while we have high per-student funding levels: the answer is administration. Administrators are paid handsomely, while their teachers are paid poorly. For some reason, we think following the corporate model (CEO paid millions and employees shafted) is somehow going to create quality education.
The other part of the problem is that the entire system is totally broken. Textbooks are politicized, schools are required to cater to students in their native languages rather than English, teachers have to spend their time dealing with unruly students who don't want to learn, and bad teachers are retained because of "tenure" and unions and good new teachers are mistreated and become disillusioned, and end up leaving the profession. I have a friend whose wife was a public school teacher briefly, right out of college. Her education was in Classics, so she knew Latin. They hired her and immediately (to her surprise) made her a Spanish teacher, even though she didn't know Spanish at all. They said "Latin is close enough to Spanish". She quit after about 6 months.
Throwing more money at schools isn't going to fix these problems. Many of these problems are totally political, others are just results of stupidity. Why should students who cause violence and don't want to learn be forced to stay in school? They should be expelled; this is one of the main reasons private schools are so much more successful: they're allowed to kick out the stupid kids who aren't interested in learning, and public schools aren't.
It also doesn't help that they've pretty much eliminated all trades education, such as auto shop, for all the kids who aren't really college-bound but would do great as tradespeople.
I gotta disagree a little bit. A lot of a college CS program is not outdated in 5 years. Consequently a lot of it does not apply at all to most jobs....
Operating Systems -- The underlying principles are mostly the same
Algorithms -- New ones are constantly being discovered but the most popular ones have been the same for 30+ years mostly (the undergrad level ones are generally not newer things)...
Networking -- Some changes with wireless but most of the TCP/IP protocol that is taught in undergrad courses is the same
Discrete Math -- Again mostly the same for the past 30 years
Computer Organization -- Mostly this is the same (assuming the course on digital system design/k-maps/binary number systems/etc...)
Some Intro Programming Class -- The underlying concepts apply, although the specific language is changing all the time. Although they are not that different...C#/Java/C++ all imperative languages
The rest is all math (Calculus...not changing, Linear Algebra, etc...) and electives (Compilers, Databases, etc.). A lot of the electives are mostly the same at an undergraduate level. Although there do seem to be more fad of the minute classes, ie iPhone game design or state of the art classes...ie Video Game Design..... But they are in the minority and in 1998-2002 when I was an undergrad they didn't exist...in my school (today they do)
What seems to change hourly are the various libraries/programming language of the day/framework of the day. And my college didn't teach any of those. It focused on the core CS concepts, not specific technologies. Although we did use Oracle/MySQL a bit in database class, we did not learn Oracle/MySQL, we just used it as a vehicle for expressing concepts in class. Programming assignments were mostly straight forward algorithm implementations which just used programming concepts and easily can be ported into any language. We didn't get crazy into C++/Java specific things.
But one of my complaints has been that I really don't use any of that... I use some common sense things from algorithms about linked lists/arrays/hash tables and the various orders of magnitudes of common applications, but mostly I use libraries that implement them. And I knew that stuff before algorithms class. Mostly in business program you are using the STL/Java Library/C# libraries and all the collections are implemented. For building a quick GUI to a database it really doesn't take the advanced math/concepts of a CS program.... Admittedly if you were building video games or working for Google then sure computer architecture and advanced knowledge comes in handy. In a Google phone interview they took everything into consideration, the memory hierarchy, the swap space, disk access times, etc... With a job like that it is good to know the PC to wring out performance... Or video game programming because games are constantly pushing the envelope. But those are the exception, not the rule.
Where I have failed and a lot of companies are failing is that for the first job it is important for a lot of grads to learn how to organize big programs and program with an eye towards maintenance. That is where you really learn how to program (or working on an open source project). Colleges don't teach that. Most assignments are short, maybe 1,000 lines of code or less. Also you usually don't need to maintain them, so you can throw a bunch of garbage together that runs correctly and then wash your hands of it. Implementing a Hash Table, or maybe your own database class that writes to a file is not the same thing as taking over some 10,000 line accounting package....
Sure it was paid by taxes. But once I had that degree it was never incumbent on me to have to earn money to pay it back
You keep digging a deeper hole.
Good for you, you got a taxpayer funded education and (apparently) it was a good investment for us. Want a cookie with that too?
The taxpayer funded educations that turn out to be BAD investments are arguably a worse situation than what the GP said - people with only personal debt. I don't know, maybe you LIKE the idea of free government handouts with no strings attached?
Same here. I pay well over 25% of my income in taxes, and I think most in the middle class who have real jobs do too. If I quadrupled my taxes, I would be well in the red.
Texas by the way.
Any other reason? Perhaps they are a bit cheaper?
Thank you. Finally somebody gets it.
Indian college educated programmers are cheap. Really cheap. I am an Indian and I can tell you that the reason Zoho does not get good programmers is because they pay ridiculously low compensations.
Sridhar talks about people not being willing to join because his company is not a big name? I'll give him the benefit and say he is being naive. There are tons of startups (or small growing companies like Zoho) in India that get fairly good people. Some I know get outright brilliant people. The trick is to pay people on par with the industry standards and hire the best people you can get to create a good work culture.
As a developer, I do not want to work at a place where people who couldn't even complete their degrees are running riot.
I lived in England and traveled around Europe for 3 years. Great beer, old/ancient cities, and gorgeous women. Everything else pretty much sucked ass though.
Let's see a 25% sales tax rate, $8 for a gallon of gas, houses for 3 times the price at 1/2 the size, electronics, clothing, food, and cars that are nearly twice as much, oh yeah did I forget the cronic 10-19% unemployment rate among adults and 75-99% unemployment rate among teenagers.
Get me a plane ticket I want to move right now!
Most college degrees in the US are pretty much not worth the paper they're printed on. Euro degrees even more so. I think the concept of hiring young people the moment they are legal to work and then train them according to their skills is a long missing concept in society.
All the rest of a "well rounded" education can easily be filled in by watching the discovery and history channels and reading a few books.
US employment rate has consistently been higher than the UKs over the last decade (currently USA 9.3%, UK 7.9%). The youth unemployment rate is 19.1% (2009 figure, latest I could find), almost exactly the same as the USA rate for the same year year. Sales tax (VAT) is 17.5%. Petrol is currently £1.14 per litre = £4.31 per us gallon = $6.53. Food is not double the price - its very hard to compare basics like bread and milk are about the same, other things are a little more. Cars are a lot more, but I think 1.5 times as much for most common models. House prices is hard, £250,000 could get you a large 4-bed house in Inverness or a studio flat in Chelsea. Houses are generally smaller, but certainly not three times the price unless you compare the city of London prices.
Slight problem with that is it probably fucks around with some of the freedom of movement rules within the EU and would be illegal since it would be very similar to fining people for moving.
But just for arguments sake- why not a similar system for primary and highschool? can't have people leaving before they've paid off the whole cost of their education.
Or medical care.
You get your cancer treatment for free but actually log 'virtual' costs of a treatment onto a 'virtual' debt card for each patient.
The same amount as if you were admitted to a a 'private' Hospital.
If your debt is not paid and you want to work out of country, you have to *really* pay your debt. i.e. the virtual debt get's turned into REAL debt.
Also there's the point that the government, thanks to it's better bargaining position, can get better prices from the universities.
My university degree was 4 years long.
I got it for free(or close enough, had to pay a few hundred in fees).
If it had been my second rather than first degree or if I was repeating(ie the government didn't pick up the tab) it would have cost me approximatly 7000 euro per year with a grand total of something like 30000 euro for a 4 year university degree.
Now, taking a quick google for the prices at american institutions with a lower ranking (www.topuniversities.com) than the University I attended, only one was similar in cost, one cost more than my whole degree every year and most were merely significantly more expensive.