A big scam has entered the Indian education sector where companies tell you to get enrolled in their courses and pay after you land a job. How much ? 2.5 L + rupees (~4000$) just for learning DSA etc which is all available for free on youtube.
They can patch-up with any unknown company and then give you a job of 4-5 LPA after which you are bound to pay them the huge fee, even if its a fraud company which hires you , to fires you so that they get the fee.
Primarily tier-3 college students are becoming the victim of these scams. I recommend not to take these course and would urge to spread awareness about this mega scam.
I would say even if you want to enroll, you should do proper research about it beforehand
In the US, we have similar schemes where huge groups of scammers get together and steal government money to promise to teach kids super basic CS stuff, except you have to pay even if you don't get a job. And it's like 10x-20x more money too, often closer to $50,000 in certain places, all for information that's available for free online.
But over here, we just call it "college"...
Atleast you gain the ability to make sick burns after getting into that scam, so it is not that bad.
Yeah, end the college scam!
Btw if you're told up front that you have to pay for something, you get that something and then you have to pay for it, that's not scam, that's market. Scam appears when there are fine print details about how you have to actually pay more, in different ways, different situations etc than you were told up front.
Exactly.
That is correct, but things have gone too far away now.
Example 1: Such companies collaborate with other companies to give their students a job with any random profile and adding stocks or bonus in the ctc, which will be given only if you work for X years(in most cases you never get that).
Example 2: These companies hardly provide you the Job Description, Job ID and the Salary breakdown of the companies they are referring to, everything is a black box and in the end if you get the offer, you are bound to pay.
In short, there are many things which they do not state in the starting and there is a lot going on between them and the hiring company and in the end the sufferer is the candidate.
Real Example : A candidate was given a job of X but he had to pay to the company only if he gets X+Y, so when his offer letter came the CTC was X+Y, stating that Y is the joining bonus, but that was not informed to the candidate earlier. As a result the candidate was bound to pay.
Unfortunately, ICPC is closed if you are not involved into these schemes
I guess you don't know the current condition of colleges in India in which they make you pay $1500 for pdfs and ppts with no use in name of online classes.
$50,000!! This is my father's 4 year income here in India !!
That would be some of my friend's 10 year income in TCS/Infy here.
you are a rich guy hackerbhaiya
While I agree with the other stuff on this blog. I just wanna casually point out that "free on youtube" content would never help anyone get a job due to a game theory concept called "Prisoner's Dilemma"
And yes, I'm saying this despite having a youtube channel of my own.
EDIT: well of course this doesn't mean you should stop watching cp youtube videos, read my subsequent replies for more info.
I don't see any similarity to Prisoner's Dilemma. Do you mean that everybody has access so nobody will gain anything? It seems unrelated to PD.
I believe the prisoner's dilemma applies in advertising etc as well, I see a similarity here.
See this Sport Doping example from Wikipedia.
It can easily apply here as well... It is better if people on the large scale co-operate and not study using a freely available resource (if getting a job is their only motive). Using the resource gives them an upper hand, but if everybody uses it, the benefits cancel out and everybody just wastes a lot of time and effort in studying.
I don't see how I'm wrong here.
You are wrong where you assumed two things:
1: Paid resources are better than open ones. I personally think it is totally opposite as far as Computer Science goes.
2: Every person gains the same skill/knowledge from studying the exact same resource.
I'm saying a less-accessible resource would be more beneficial to the user, obviously private tutoring by a good teacher would be the best resource.
every person gains different amount of knowledge, true, but slow-learners would perform even worse without resources and quick-learners would still do ok, so it doesn't affect the overall situation.
Marketisation of educational stuff may make the tutors and managers some chunks of money, but it shatters the quality of education and motive of studying. It is true that everything cannot be made available for free everytime, but...
Things already available for free as open source on the internet (case with competitive programming) should not be marketized like this.
Free resources are actually sufficient, so no one is left without any resources.
And if we try to consider the paid resources as the drugs in Prisoner's dilemma, it becomes the same case when we weren't doing so (i.e. were considering free resources as drugs). So it's all about the perspective we choose.
And the better perspective is not to marketize competitive programming. Let the sweet community be as it was before COVID lockdown.
Obviously studying will objectively raise skill and allow someone to do more things. It's not like studying will punish you as in the prisoner's dilemma.
What about stratification of skill that will come from learning? Not everyone is going to become red after 1 year of solving codeforces problems. But someone who is red is slightly more likely to land a job.
In addition, if everyone "cooperates" in your scenario, tech companies will die off because the pool of new employees sucks and in the end nobody will get a job.
The view expressed in the analogy seems to assume money only comes from taking a cushy job at someone else's company. What about self-employment?
You really have to twist reality in order to get it to conform to the prisoner's dilemma scenario. I don't see any link at all.
depends on whether things we learn in CP are actually required at jobs... i have no personal experience but I've heard that most of the CP knowledge is useless outside CP.
You mentioned free content on youtube, I assumed it meant everything. Plenty of interview questions are not just algorithm grinds after all.
It does, obviously free content would be beneficial to people who just like being good at CP for the sake of it... I am only talking about people who only want SDE jobs (like the people buying the course mentioned in this blog). I have 100s of people asking me the secret to getting a good job at a multinational company. Even if there was such a secret, revealing it would nullify its value, and that's how I came up with my idea that resources aren't really helping people who want jobs.
I think the right conclusion is not "resources aren't helping people who want jobs" but instead "people always want a get rich quick ticket".
I understand what you are trying to say but your wording is quite wrong. Besides, Actually the content throughout the internet is so vast that no one can cover it all. So, it is pretty evident that someone is not forced to increase his efforts just by the existence of channels like yours. So the example that you gave as a reply to Errichto does not fit well. Watching Youtube videos is not "that" important that anyone who wants a job is "forced" to do it. Besides I think it makes stuff easier, for eg. you may say that the participants who earlier had to spend a lot longer time reading editorials from problems and reading concepts from books have to spend lesser time. So, since it is replacing the effort that they would have put earlier with a lower effort activity, the benefits do not cancel out. It is like instead of the more harmful drug(larger effort) participants had to consume earlier, they can now consume a less harmful drug(smaller effort).
I think what you are saying is true for machines . But it is not true for human . How a person gets benifited from a course is completely on him . And there is a case of real time implementation also , if you are nervous during the interview(or any practical scenario) even with all knowledge in head you will fail
I'm slightly inclined to disagree for the following reasons:
Everyone has access to good online free content, it's more about how you use that knowledge for yourself. I know of quite a few people who didn't pay for private lessons and yet landed a good job (and/or did well in competitions). In my opinion, the bottleneck for most people is really how you train and how determined you are, and not the lack of good resources, and this is precisely where most people fail. It might be different for jobs in India, given that the university a person attended is taken into account as well.
I don't really understand how prisoner's dilemma applies here, isn't that about people cooperating?
Note that I'm not saying that paid courses do not help you; a well-curated paid course should ideally pay off really well because of a good structure and explanation of things in a manner that benefits the people who do it. What I'm saying is that given the content available on the internet, it might be hard but it's not impossible to train well enough to get a decent job.
My whole point is, they would've performed really good even if the free resources didn't exist. In a competitve setting like "getting a job" where the bottleneck is "number of jobs", freely available resources don't reward the ones who use it, they punish the ones who don't use it.
Consider a simplified example... There's an exam with relative grading, there's only 1 book, you study it and get good marks, now imagine if there is 1 more books in the market, now if you don't study that also, you get worse marks, but since everybody can use it, nobody has any advantage.
This feels like a bit of an exaggeration to me. The set of "topics" needed to be prepared for a job (talking about a CS-related job here), as well as the contents covered by them, are relatively limited, so there is a very high chance that two resources teaching the same topic are in fact teaching the same thing (and doing enough problems ensures you can solve similar problems somewhat reliably). This is in contrast with academia, where there is much more to study and know.
As for your example, I think it's more like a half-full-half-empty argument, and it's merely what we perceive as a disadvantage rather than there being an actual disadvantage for everyone. Since the grading is relative, it's roughly a zero-sum game, so a quantifiable advantage for someone would be a quantifiable disadvantage for someone else, and vice-versa. You can obviously study the other book to get better since learning from good resources is correlated positively with having a better knowledge of the subject, and I don't see an issue with it. Everyone in your example has the same amount of time to prepare for the exam, so it's only fair that people who put in more effort get benefited more. This combined with the previous paragraph convinces me that it's always better to have more resources to study from, even though choosing which ones to actually use is a hard problem which also takes time and might outweigh the benefit.
Again, there are always fluctuations, so anything might happen; all that matters is that there are positive correlations, and you can only try to maximize your chances. To me, it seems like the best strategy is not worrying too much about what others are doing while preparing since it does more harm than good.
That was my dad while i was preparing for IITJEE :)
This couldn't be anymore wrong, there are many friends of mine who cracked off-campus jobs, there are many people who don't have degree are working in reputed companies.
Anyway, Prisoner's dilemma has nothing to do with this , but yeah you could call this like "High Supply, Less Demand", hence many deserving people are not even getting google interviews,even after achieving good ranks, unless they are lucky.
Aree bhai, itne coding mat kara kar.
Now he is a true Demoralizer ..XD
Unhealthy comment :(
Drinking is not Healthy.
This is just my theory which I came up using THE PRISONER'S DILEMMA and :insert some other fancy words:
I think demoralizer is thinking of working for these type of companies or start his own company which provides placement related courses. This is just him laying the groundwork for his future plans. He is just justifying why paid courses are better for everyone(typical marketing).
He also have a youtube channel and I have seen many youtubers(not necessarily related to coding) following this path, they first make free videos on youtube(or any other similar platform), once they gain a certain amount of audience they announce their paid courses.
Nice try but I keep telling people that I couldn't get shortlisted by Google and Microsoft, why would I do that if I wanted to sell something to get into those companies?
You shouldn't say like that instead say this "I rejected Google's and Microsoft's job offer to follow my passion of teaching" this will attract more customers
Or something like "I am guiding others to treasure I cannot possess"
well that is exactly what a dalal would do
well that is exactly what is going on now a days ,you first somehow crack any company then give an interview to any other youtuber about how you prepared it,then gain popularity ,then open your youtube channel and become more popular and then join some teaching company or start your own placement program and convince people to take it to get an awesome job at any mnc.
Are these your words or Unacademy's?
well we all have seen these paid courses are bull s#!t. i have seen free courses and they are just like a collection of links organised at one place ,not even their original content that you can find online just googling. if they can cant even provide original content why are they paid.
It's fine: when you pay these companies, you get important IRL skill: a knowledge there is a scam in the world.
very true!! thanks for informing.
We had same pfp.
XD
Yeah, true. I too was enrolled in such a course by a "Vector" academy. With the god's grace, I was able to quit at the right time.
vector gives direction of success, but scalar doesn't...
People don't pay for knowledge, since it's free on internet. People pay for structured information tailored to their requirements.