Inside The IIT Race: JEE, Placements & Future Of Engineering | Vishwa Mohan | FO508 Raj Shamani
Vishwa Mohan, founder of upGrad School of Tech and IIT alumnus, critiques India's education and career system as a 'scripted' cycle of cracking exams, job-switching, and EMI-driven living. He argues this script leaves professionals unprepared for AI-driven disruptions like mass layoffs. He proposes a new model combining accredited degrees with Silicon Valley-style, industry-practitioner-led learning.
Summary
Vishwa Mohan opens by framing India at the cusp of an AI revolution, warning that the US dominates AI (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Grok are all US companies) and that India risks becoming a 'permanent slave' if it fails to build foundational AI models. He identifies this as potentially the last generation with a wealth-creation opportunity if action isn't taken now.
He then walks through what he calls India's 'scripted success book' — a multi-phase life script Indians follow. Phase one is 'Crack': crack 10th, crack 12th, crack JEE. He controversially calls JEE 'one of the longest running scams of the country,' arguing it is a self-proclaimed toughest exam where no one else is competing, and that IIT graduates consistently fail to place in the top 50 of the global ICPC coding competition. He notes Indian education remains stuck in 2006-style physics, chemistry, and math while the world has moved to AI and specialization.
Phase two is 'Switch': once employed, professionals are pressured by peer comparisons to keep switching jobs every two years for salary hikes, driven not by genuine need but by social pressure. Phase three is 'EMI': after switching enough to afford a home and car, life becomes entirely structured around paying EMIs. He argues this entire script has no chapter for what to do when AI disrupts everything — as seen in mass layoffs at Google, Oracle, Block, and other companies, including a tragic case of a techie couple who died by suicide after being fired.
On hiring at top tech companies like LinkedIn (where he had 7 interview rounds), Amazon, and Google, he explains that companies like Netflix receive 3-4 lakh applications for a single job posting and auto-reject 97% because candidates send generic resumes mismatched to the role. Senior roles at companies like LinkedIn test hands-on coding, system design under hypothetical unknowns, real use-case deep dives, and culture fit in team collaboration sessions. Top companies like Google and Amazon hire for language-agnostic software thinkers, not Java-only specialists.
He outlines three jobs that will disappear in 2-3 years: operational/record-keeping/content-writing roles already being replaced by AI, simple API/code-writing junior roles being automated, and any role held by someone with a fixed mindset who refuses to upskill. Conversely, three high-paying future roles are: AI foundational model architects, quantum computing engineers (as quantum will disrupt all current cryptography and software within 3-4 years), and interdisciplinary roles combining tech with other domains.
For self-auditing AI readiness: a software professional should be able to do in 1 day what previously took 10 days, using AI coding tools. A final-year student must have built and deployed at least one end-to-end application leveraging AI; otherwise, no company will hire them. Non-tech professionals must have moved beyond generic ChatGPT use to domain-specific AI tools.
Finally, he describes upGrad School of Tech as his solution: a UGC-recognized BTech degree (so doors remain open for UPSC, foreign masters, etc.) delivered across tech-hub campuses in Bangalore, Pune, and Hyderabad, with Silicon Valley-style practitioner-led teaching (no textbooks, MacBook from Day 1, code-first), industry partnerships where companies bring real problem statements into classrooms, lifetime career assistance, and a startup-building curriculum with seed funding facilitated by Ronnie Screwvala.
Key Insights
- Vishwa Mohan argues that JEE is 'one of the longest running scams of the country' because it is a self-proclaimed world's toughest exam where only Indians compete against themselves, and IIT graduates have never placed in the top 50 of the ICPC global coding competition in any recent year — proving that exam-cracking ability does not translate to world-class engineering.
- At LinkedIn, Vishwa Mohan experienced 7 interview rounds where the hiring bar was explicitly set so that every new hire must be better than at least 3 out of 4 existing team members — a deliberate 'bar-raising' philosophy that continuously elevates team quality and explains why top tech companies are so selective.
- Vishwa Mohan reveals that a Netflix hiring manager told him that for a single technical job posting, up to 3-4 lakh global applications arrive within a week, of which 97% are auto-rejected immediately because candidates send generic, mismatched resumes — meaning the hiring problem is not talent scarcity but candidate irrelevance.
- Vishwa Mohan warns that quantum computing will arrive in 3-4 years and will render all current software, passwords, and cryptography insecure — everything will need to be rewritten — and identifies this as a massive, underexplored opportunity since only a handful of Indian startups (about 100+) are working in this space.
- Vishwa Mohan describes a systemic corruption in private university placements where placement heads carry gold coins on visits to mass-recruiter company HR officers to build relationships, and large universities gift iPhones to HR recruiters during Diwali — while simultaneously advertising inflated placement statistics to prospective students.
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