Hacker News Books

relevant:

"Bessen argues that during times of technological innovation, it often takes years before workers see higher wages from productivity increases. Bessen stresses the importance of the standardization of education on the job as workers adapt to new technology."

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...
James Bessen on Learning by Doing

Companies have an incentive to make their employees more productive, but other things being equal, you'd prefer to teach your employees non-transferable skills rather than transferable ones, since non-transferable skills can't be used on the job market to bid up wages.

There's a comment here about how conferences are great to help your developers make connections in industry. That seems like a mixed bag -- why should companies help their best developers to find their next job somewhere else?

There's an interesting Econtalk episode on the book "Learning by Doing" where this came up:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...

[To summarize: when the textile mill was invented, skilled individual labor became much more valuable (because skilled workers were much more productive), but wages didn't rise much over a period of 50 years. This finally changed with the introduction of interchangeable parts in machines, which made job skills transferable, which allowed skilled employees to demand higher wages from their employers.]

To me, this seems closer to Arrow's Learning by Doing theory. He had the quite intuitive idea that unit costs fall with total historic output and found some empirical evidence for this with statistics from world war 2 factories. The future benefits here are supply-side (productivity) related and often captured by the specific producer.

Keynes' ideas have been adapted to a range of different forms, but are more about circumstances where the economy is in a deep recession and there is some restriction preventing the economy from utilising all its resources. Here debt financed spending may have demand-side benefits by stimulating yet more demand. This only works at the aggregate economy level, so Elon would have to launch a lot of satellites to benefit from it!

As somebody who has experienced the education system both in India (Bachelors in CE from a decent, but non-reputed school) and US (Masters in CS from a very good school), here are my thoughts on the article:

First off 24/7 is a terrible, terrible company to take as an example, being and ITES company the only skill they require is the skill of communicating in a non-native language, which unsurprisingly is not a strength of most of the college (some of them being Hindi Medium) graduates. If we consider real programming work (which is language neutral), there are absolutely brilliant programmers in India. In fact Indian students were the second highest fraction in GSOC last to last year.

Secondly the point that the curriculum is outdated is totally ridiculous, the books I studied during my Masters and those during my Bachelors had a big chunk in common.
One big difference I found was the quality of teachers is top-class here in US, while not so much in India, and the argument from the article about low pay scales for the teachers, being the reason, stands water.

But the biggest difference is in the teaching methodology and the grading system. Here in US there is a great emphasis on 'Learning by Doing' and a majority of the grades depend on the homework even at college level. While in India, as the article mentions, it is almost solely based on end of the term exams, which encourages cramming and discourages daily learning.

But as an encouragement to the Indian students, I would like to add that if you wish to pursue a field in today's world, there is no stopping you back, specially with the advent of places like Khan academy, MIT open course-ware etc. All you need is will and a little persistence.