I think you'll get downvoted to oblivion because outsiders often don't realize the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

I will try to give some context.

To give an example, the CSE undergrad from an average Indian college would've done 500 - 1000 leetcode "problems" for practice. But have little to no idea on how to survive in a UNIX shell, or to troubleshoot an actual problem. Hell, half of them haven't written more than 1000 lines of code for single purpose.

People early in their career (which is most SWEs including yours truly) follow whatever "influencers" on youtube (the local term being bhaiyya-didis), who give them rough "roadmaps" to "crack DSA" or "get high paying remote job". The result is that average CS guy spends most of his time navigating this rat race than studying computer science stuff that matters for the job.

I see similar kind of competition getting created at senior levels too, in the terms of people grinding theory and blog posts on "system design" interviews. I am not old^H^H^H senior enough to comment on it, though.

But it was not all bleak. IIRC, We were producing quite few good OSS contributions through GSoC, LFX etc... until few years ago (not considering my own among good ones). There were talented 1% or so (I known a few very talented people in personally). Nowadays these "hustler" variety people have started "How to crack GSoC" roadmaps [sic] too, and the spamming quoted above see may be related to this. This sort of insane rat race is not good for talented people. It's not good for companies either. Recruitment is basically lottery at higher levels too; I have seen people use AI to shamelessly lie on their resumes and get hired etc... Some of these problems may be present in west but India's scale makes some of these problems difficult.