Young Indians more likely to be jobless if they're educated | Hacker News Reader

Young Indians more likely to be jobless if they're educated

bloomberg.com

12 pointsaby719 comments

I see reports like this and think of my dad when we first came to America. He had a degree from IIT in India (like getting one from Stanford or MIT) and it meant nothing when he looked for a job here those initial years. (In the US we basically don’t even recognize international degrees for jobs which is why you so often find the stereotypical immigrant taxi driver that has a degree in chemical engineering or something).

So he always used to make the distinction between looking for a job and looking for work.

Looking for a job is what you do with a degree. You look for a steady 9-5 job usually with one paycheck.

He ended up just looking for work, like pizza delivery, was a car salesman, bus driver, etc. He had trouble finding a job but never had trouble finding work. Some of it required putting aside your ego and thinking “I have to support my family by any means” rather than saying “im an IIT grad, I won’t do work beneath me” - something I only appreciated about what he did when I was older. (When I was young I also appreciated that he worked hard but thought he was just making things harder for himself)

I suspect some of this high rate discrepancy is that people with degrees look only for jobs because they can qualify, but those are harder to find now.

But people that are illiterate or without college degrees are just not even qualified for most “jobs” but they constantly find “work” instead and find it more easily.

one of my acquaintance moved from Egypt, where he was head of department for dentistry, to Canada and because Canada requires exams to be completed before being allowed to practice dentistry he drives uber here.

The exams cost a ton and between saving up for the exams, rent, supporting his family and inflation it looks like he will drive uber all his life.

I was very saddened when he told me "I used to be respected back in egypt and now I am getting water bottles thrown at me while driving uber".

He can't go back because he sold everything including his house to move here and his kids are settled here.

When we talk about effective use of subsidies, I often wonder if subsidizing these kinds of things would help things way more than just handing out money in various entitlement programs.

The Indian education system is such a mess that the ones who come out of that system are unusable.

I had some folks from IIT (their premier tech institute) apply for jobs at my companies and they were worse than a random person from a random university in the US.

The trick though is to hire someone from India who has done things outside of the education system and is self taught. It is so hard to think originally in India that anyone who has done it is almost guaranteed to be really good.

Care to elaborate? Not saying you are wrong, I am interested in how does the "unusability" manifest?

It depends. Something like 50% of the $1 billion startups in India are started by IIT alumni.

The bar is low there. Also many are fake. None of them can survive even against Chinese startups (look at the mobile phone market for example), forget American.

It’s hard for many billion companies to be fake. Do you have any sources for your claims?

Byju's to begin with. Adani was another recent one. And the ones which aren't fraudulent most are copycats with no innovation. Flipkart etc.

Byju’s is downsizing, it doesn’t mean they’re “fake”. Is Meta fake by that metric? Adani is already back to where they were stock wise since Hindenburg. Flipkart literally has tens of millions of customers.

Adani literally does stock manipulation and are friends with the government. Byju's will shutdown because of fraud, they are not downsizing. Flipkart is a literal copycat.

It is a shame because India has a lot of talented people but the whole education system and cultural aspects need to change drastically to even compete with China, forget rest of the world.

Being a copycat is how you kickstart your ecosystem. Everything in China was and for the most part is a copycat of western companies.

China definitely does it better than India. That's my whole point. The Indian education system and culture around business is really poor.

There’s no doubt there but India has had a late start and is a democracy, not an authoritarian state. It will get there, it’s going to take a lot longer than China.

Lol. I don't know why this is such a meme in hacker news. I would be highly skeptical of anyone (from anywhere) who doesn't have a degree. Trying to make a rule from some one in a million type person is such a misguided way to go about things.

But it is equally silly to make a blanket statement like yours about people that don’t have degrees.

Why not treat a degree as one signal, as one datapoint among others? It can be a stronger signal in certain circumstances of course, but still just one signal.

It’s because in the latest labor report that came out this week, it’s mentions that 55% of the workforce are self employed in India. These are mainly small scale entrepreneurs running restaurants and small shops. Educated folk are usually looking for employment with medium and large scale businesses which there aren’t enough of yet. The good news is startup unicorns in India are exploding, I think there were 100 $1 billion+ companies in India as of 2022, so the situation might improve.

Free link https://bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/youn...

I am from Russia.

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