The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - How many people have heard of IIT in the states?

How many people have heard of IIT in the states?

How many people on his forum have heard about IIT(Indian Institute of Technology), and how would you rate it?

Developer
Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Anyone whose has dealings with Indian engineers knows
it's where many of the top Indian engineers come from,
like Qinghua in China or other "best universities" around
the world. As an institution - meaning a reputation beyond
its graduates in terms of research, etc - I don't know much
about it on that front.

x
Wednesday, February 25, 2004

I'd be willing to bet that most people in the US have never heard of it.

Now a U.S. citizen
Wednesday, February 25, 2004

"most people in the us" is not a barometer for anything. 'Most people' are idiots. Anyone ever seen Jay Leno's Jaywalking segment? *That's* most people.

Now I'm depressed. :(

Mike Swieton
Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Which one of IITs. It seems that there is one in every major Indian city.

Pavel Levin
Wednesday, February 25, 2004

How many people have heard of Bulgaria University and how would you rate it?

x
Thursday, February 26, 2004

I've heard of it. Their stock price really took a hit yesterday:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=ESI&t=3m&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

Chris
Thursday, February 26, 2004

Being from Chicago, whenever I see IIT I always think of this: http://www.iit.edu/

It's a well known school, and at least around here it could be confusing if you don't specify which IIT you went to.

Oren Miller
Thursday, February 26, 2004

Most dilbert fans will know of it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3231561.stm

Stephen Jones
Thursday, February 26, 2004

The Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, is the most reputed engineering institution in India. Engineers out of IIT do not look for jobs; jobs look for them. The institution has chapters in four major Indian cities.

That said, I had an ex-colleague from IIT in my organization. An average programmer, a good trouble maker he was, who worked when he wanted to, and left at his own time. He made his own rules, chewed on tobbacco like a ruminant all the time, and was known for the frequent bio breaks he took. Gas problems, I guess. So much that he made lots of noise, and we've moved from indigestion to acoustics this time, about the great deal of things he knew about the craft of programming and actually got many of the credulous people in top ranks believe he was one of the smarter people amoung us, the lesser enlightened, semi-literate, wanna-be programmers. You'd have guessed he was paid through the nose.

One day, they chucked him out, the thinko eclectic melting pot of novel technologies, for his outrageous indiscipline. Today, he's in Russia, probably running a business he started from his eight months' savings.

Sathyaish Chakravarthy
Thursday, February 26, 2004

Sathyaish,

Sounds like IIT egos == MIT in the United States.

Hilarious story.

Years ago I had the misfortune of working with an arrogant dipsh*t from MIT who basically thought that he farted gold particles. EVERYONE in the department disliked him unanimously.

Bored Bystander
Thursday, February 26, 2004

...who basically thought that he farted gold particles.

Hee...he...he...ROFL...hee....

Sathyaish Chakravarthy
Thursday, February 26, 2004

Nope, never heard of it until now.

Let me turn it around now.

How many people outside of the US have heard of IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology)?

Cletus
Thursday, February 26, 2004

I've heard a lot of good things about IIT (India, not Illinois), and I know its graduates are looked upon very favorably by some of the big software companies. I've also heard that it's maybe the hardest university in the world to get into. I have no idea if that is correct or not, but I was told that it's a top 1% of top 1% kind of place, with admission determined solely by how well you did on a nation-wide standardized test. The people I've met who have graduated from there have been very impressive.

Cody Powell
Thursday, February 26, 2004

Interesting. I went to www.iit.edu (Illinois Institute of Technology) just to see what it was, and staring out at me on the home page was this beautiful young Indian woman's face.

Hmmm...

Karl Perry
Thursday, February 26, 2004

> I've also heard that it's maybe the hardest university in the world to get into. I have no idea if that is correct or not, but I was told that it's a top 1% of top 1% kind of place, with admission determined solely by how well you did on a nation-wide standardized test.

This, and the Dilbert mentions, show just how effective expensive PR can be. It's misleading for the IIT's to claim their selectivity is the same as that of Western universities. India has hardly any universities for its population, and its education system is not as good. So naturally they will have lots of applicants.

The disturbing thing is this: if the Indian firms manipulate reality on education, what else do they manipulate reality on?

Thursday, February 26, 2004

> It's misleading for the IIT's to claim their selectivity is the
> same as that of Western universities. India has hardly
> any universities for its population

Well, how misleading is it exaclty?
IIT's entrance exam is absurdly difficult by all accounts I've heard. MIT graduates have reported having a tough time with it. So is it really misleading to suggest IIT is kinda selective??

Immature programmer
Friday, February 27, 2004

You really believe that MIT graduates have trouble with the entrance exam of a university in a country where 500 million can't read?

Friday, February 27, 2004

Dear Blank,
Presumably you leave your handle blank so as not to discriminate against that 500 million. Of course if you put your question the other way round

---"You really don't believe that MIT graduates have trouble with the entrance exam of a university in a country where 500 million can read?"---

it would be just as meaningless. But then, the fact you can read doesn't mean you can think logically.

Perhaps the other poster could give us examples of the PR he talks of. The IIT's were founded by Nehru in the sixties, or earlier. They were originally intended to provide engineers for Indian industries. The reason their reputation has spread has been because of the large number of their graduates that emigrated to the States in the nineties.

The experts at PR are the Brits, and to a lesser extent the Americans. The result is that everybody has heard of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or the MIT, but equally excellent and elitist institutions in other countries, such as the "Grandes Écoles" in France for example, or until recently the IIT in India, have not seen their repuatation pass beyond their borders.

Stephen Jones
Friday, February 27, 2004