Just get a B.Tech.
That’s been the advice in India for the better part of three decades. And for most of that time, it was right.
B.Tech was a consistent enough category that the degree did the signalling work. Getting one from a reasonable college got your child to the starting line for a software career. The specific programme you picked, within the broad middle of the Indian market, didn’t make as much of a difference as it does today. The hiring market ran on the signal. You got the degree. You got a job.
That assumption is under pressure now.
Not because B.Tech is the wrong path. It’s still the right path for most students who want to build a career in software. But the advice “just get a B.Tech” assumes the category is more uniform than it actually is in 2026. That assumption is harder to hold.
What the advice was built on
The advice made sense when the gap between programmes was small.
When most B.Tech programmes ran the same mix of theory and lab, started capstone projects in year four, and assessed students through end-of-semester written exams, the degree carried real information. It told employers that a candidate had spent four years in a structured engineering environment, could absorb technical material under pressure, and had cleared a set of academic gates. For a hiring market that was mostly screening on that signal, the degree was enough.
The hiring market changed. The programmes diverged.
The advice didn’t catch up.
What changed on the hiring side
Employers in software started shifting from screening on degrees to screening on what a candidate can actually do. The interview process changed to reflect that. Technical rounds got more practical. Companies started asking candidates to show work, not just describe it. Portfolios started mattering alongside transcripts.
This shift didn’t happen overnight. It’s been building for years. But it’s further along now than it was in 2015. The expectation that a B.Tech graduate can write working code end-to-end without weeks of on-the-job training is now more common than the expectation that they can’t.
A programme that didn’t prepare students for that expectation used to be fine. The employer would train the gap. Now the employer expects the programme to have closed it.
What changed on the programme side
Some programmes changed their design in response. A smaller number moved production code earlier. They started capstone projects in semester two instead of year four. They built partner-company integrations into the programme instead of leaving them as optional internships after graduation. They started tracking what students actually shipped, not just what they scored.
Most programmes didn’t change.
That’s the divergence. Both types are still called B.Tech. But by the time a student from each type of programme reaches their first job interview, they’re carrying very different evidence.
Rajesh and I previously co-founded FACE Prep. We spent fifteen years inside engineering placement-prep, working with more than 2,000 colleges and 60 lakh+ students. We were sitting at the very end of the B.Tech pipeline, three to six months before graduation, watching what the four years had produced.
What we saw, year after year, was a gap.
Students from programmes that built from early on arrived differently. Students from programmes that taught for three years and asked them to build in year four arrived with grades, a transcript, and a gap. Both sets of students worked hard. The gap wasn’t about effort. It was structural. One design produces engineers who can build. The other produces graduates who studied engineering.
Both are called B.Tech. The difference only becomes visible when you ask what someone can show you.
Where the advice breaks
“Just get a B.Tech” is advice about the destination, not the journey.
That used to be fine. The journey was consistent enough that the destination carried most of the information. That’s less true now.
The four years matter. They’ve diverged enough that which programme your child picks determines what they’re capable of when they finish. A student who finishes a programme built around production code in year two arrives at the job search with a portfolio of real work and hundreds of hours of tracked output. A student who finishes a programme built around theory in years one through three and a capstone in year four arrives with a transcript.
Those aren’t the same starting position.
The advice says: get the degree. That’s still right. What it doesn’t say: look at what the four years actually look like before you decide where to get it.
The sharper question
The binary “should my child get a B.Tech?” nearly always resolves to yes.
The “which B.Tech?” question is more useful, but it still stays at the level of brand, location, and fees. Those things matter. They don’t tell you about the four years.
The question that actually gives you information about the four years is this: What will my child build by the end of year 1?
Not what subjects they’ll study. Not what skills they’ll get “exposure to.” Not what the brochure says about industry-oriented learning. What will they actually build, ship, and be able to show by the end of the first year?
Ask it directly to every programme you’re considering.
Some programmes will give you a specific answer. They’ll name the projects. They’ll describe what students ship. They’ll tell you what a normal week looks like in semester two, when things get harder. They’ll be able to say “by December of year 1, students have built X and can demonstrate Y.” That’s what a concrete answer sounds like.
Other programmes will answer at the level of brochure language. “Comprehensive skill development.” “Industry-oriented curriculum.” “Real-world exposure.” These phrases are real phrases that appear in real brochures. They don’t tell you anything specific about the four years.
The answer you get tells you more about the programme than any fee table or placement brochure does.
If you want a fuller framework for comparing programmes, the how to choose a B.Tech CSE programme post breaks the comparison into five concrete questions. The year-1 question is one of them. The other four are worth asking too.
What Kalvium’s answer looks like
I’ll tell you what our answer looks like. Not as a sales pitch. As a concrete example of what a specific answer sounds like in practice, so you have a benchmark for evaluating others.
Year 1 at Kalvium: front-end web development, back-end development, working with databases, problem-solving using programming, and daily coding practice through DOJO, our belt-based coding system. Semester 2 is when capstone projects begin. From year 2, students work on production code with partner companies at roughly 30 to 40 hours a week. That happens across nine partner universities for Admission Year 2026-27. By graduation, it adds up to over 4,000 tracked hours of real work with real teams.
Batch 2026: 82.4% placed as of March 2026, with the batch not yet graduated. Median package is ₹16.5 lakh per year.
That’s what the four years produced. Not what we promised. What we built for.
I wrote about the design decisions behind this in why we built Kalvium the way we did. The short version: we spent fifteen years watching the end of engineering education. We built Kalvium to change the beginning.
Whatever programme your child is considering, ask for the same level of specificity we just gave you. Ask what they’ll build. Ask when. Ask what shipped work looks like in year 1. See what comes back.
If a programme can answer that concretely, that’s a good sign. If the answer stays at the level of brochure language, you’ve learned something important about those four years too.
The advice still holds. The question got sharper.
B.Tech is still the right path for students who want software careers. That part hasn’t changed.
What’s changed is that “just get a B.Tech” is now incomplete advice. It’s advice about the destination. You also need to ask about the journey.
The destination is a B.Tech CSE degree. That’s the same across programmes.
The four years are not the same. They’ve diverged. The programme your child picks determines what they’re capable of when the degree is done.
Ask the question.
Ask what your child will build.
Ask for specifics.
If a programme can’t answer that, you already know something.
Onwards.