A young man, a family, six lakh rupees, and a piece of advice I can't yet give.
A family came to me this week with a question I haven't been able to put down.
Their son finished his BCA and has been looking for work. So far, nothing. The question they brought me, plainly: should he do an MCA?
The cost would be five or six lakh rupees. For most of the people I work with, that's a number. For this family, it's years of careful saving.
I haven't given them my answer yet.
What my instinct says
If I had to commit today, I'd push the other way.
Don't spend the money. Don't enrol in another two-year programme. Take any reasonable first job — the kind a fresh BCA can plausibly land. Spend two or three years there. Learn how production systems are built. Learn what AI tools actually do in working hands. Build a portfolio of real things, however small. Then — if a specific gap remains — fill it deliberately. Not preemptively. Not with someone else's curriculum.
In the age we're now in, capability is overtaking credential faster than most curricula can update. A BCA graduate with two years of real work and fluent AI tooling is, in my view, better positioned in 2028 than a fresh MCA holder with no industry exposure. That's my instinct.
But the cost of being wrong here is not mine to bear. So I'm not ready to deliver this view as advice.
Why I'm asking out loud
Before I answer the family, I want to test that instinct against people who'd think differently than I do.
I've put the question to my CTO peer group. I've put it on LinkedIn. I've put it on WhatsApp. I'm asking here.
The question:
If this were your nephew, your cousin, a friend's son — fresh BCA, no job, family considering an MCA at ₹5–6 lakh — what would you tell him? What would you tell them?
Comments, DMs, emails — all welcome. I'll synthesise what comes back and update this page as the picture gets clearer. The family deserves better than one person's instinct, however confident.
What I'm hearing back
The picture is converging — but with nuance worth holding on to.
The dominant view: start with the job. Across LinkedIn and WhatsApp, response after response landed in roughly the same place — get him into a job first, learn on the work, layer formal education on top later if at all. Kanika put it plainly: no MCA, get any job, supplement on the side. Aparna's tip was practical: Naukri Premium can help. Reshma added a useful refinement — pursue the degree by correspondence later, once experience is in hand. Siva named something I've felt for years but hadn't quite said out loud: postgraduate degrees in IT, with the exception of strong MS programmes, have lost much of their weight in the market. The person who can build and sell and convince, he wrote, scales higher than the one with the heavier credential.
The nuance most respondents added: it's not either/or. Sujan and Subhendra both began with two words — start building. Subhendra added that an MCA can be done part-time in parallel. Bilu agreed: yes, plus an online MCA. Reshma's correspondence path made the same shape. Anant pushed it hardest in a longer note: build while learning. Regret about not having started earlier, or not having learned more, is something you carry either way. The smarter move is to accept the ground reality and act from there.
The false binary I had been holding — MCA or job — is dissolving in the responses into something better: job, with learning layered on, in whatever form fits the family's wallet and the young man's energy.
The sharpest counter-point came from Denzil. Why is he struggling to find the first job in the first place? If the underlying issue is employability, spending five or six lakh on an MCA may simply postpone the same problem by two years. That cut to the bone. It's not just a question of credential versus capability — it's a diagnostic question I hadn't asked clearly enough. What, specifically, is keeping him from being hired? Is it a portfolio gap, an interview-skills gap, a network gap, a confidence gap, a geography gap? Each of those has a different remedy. None of them is "another two-year degree."
Anant's wider point is worth carrying separately. The academic-industry gap is wide, he wrote, and widening. You are on your own — you have to probe, ask, push past what teachers will offer by default. Curriculum follows the world; it does not lead it. That feels true to me, and it changes how I think about any formal programme as a default response to "I'm not getting hired."
A second wave of responses sharpened the picture further.
The advice is harder to execute than it sounds. Praveen offered the most honest pushback of the day. He has given this exact advice to many — and it hasn't always landed well. The path needs grit, determination, a can-do attitude and the maturity to push past easy excuses (such jobs aren't available; the MCA will solve it). For a young person navigating real social pressure to look settled and credentialed, that's a tall order. The advice works, he said, only if the kid has the temperament. Otherwise it's just a nicer-sounding route to the same outcome. He offered a concrete data point too: a colleague who, after becoming a manager at Accenture, completed a three-year MCA part-time to qualify for the next rung. Education did its work later, on top of established footing — not before it.
The one scenario where MCA does make sense. Venkata named it: a bright, genuinely passionate student who clears admission into a top-ten-or-twenty programme. There, the credential opens doors the work-first path will not. Outside that narrow band, three years of industry experience by the time peers complete their MCA is worth more. So the right question isn't MCA, yes or no. It's which MCA, on what terms, against what alternative.
Ashok added a quieter, sharper observation. Most people who receive this advice don't accept it — because by the time they're asking, they've already convinced themselves the problem is one of insufficient credentials. The diagnosis has been made before the question is asked, and what looks like a question is really a search for permission. That belongs alongside Denzil's point: the diagnostic step has to happen with the family and the young man, not only inside my head.
Proof of work, not credentials. Varun and an anonymous voice both named the same shift, separately. Proof of work is the currency now. Degrees are admit tickets, not the destination. The kids who get noticed today are the ones who have already started building — small projects, public artefacts, things people can look at and respond to. That reframes the immediate task. The first move isn't get hired, or get more degrees. It's show your work — however small.
Where my thinking is now
My instinct hasn't moved. But it has gained edges.
Closer to the advice I'm now ready to give the family:
- Diagnose first. Before spending a rupee on more education, understand precisely why the first job isn't landing. Talk to people who have recently hired BCA graduates. Look at his CV, his portfolio, his interview process with fresh eyes.
- Get into any reasonable first role. The first job is rarely the dream job. It is the foundation everything else stands on.
- Learn relentlessly on the side. AI tools, real projects, open-source contributions, online courses — whatever closes the specific gap the diagnosis surfaces.
- If a formal degree still makes sense after that, do it part-time or by correspondence. Don't burn a year and a half of family savings preemptively. Let the work tell you what credential, if any, is worth chasing.
Three edges the second wave added:
- Test the temperament before giving the advice. This path needs grit. Grit can be sensed in conversation. If it isn't there, this advice won't help — and other forms of support might serve better.
- Make proof of work the first goal, not the first job. Even before applying, build something small and public — a GitHub repo, a working prototype, a Loom walkthrough. The first job tends to follow that, more often than it precedes it.
- Treat MCA as a serious question only if a top-tier programme is on the table. Outside that narrow case, the question itself is a misdirection. The work-first path becomes the only one worth taking seriously.
Where I land, for now
There is no right or wrong here. What works for this young man and his family will depend on things only they can see clearly — temperament, ambition, money, the weather inside a specific home. The decision is theirs.
But as tech leaders, looking at the working world we actually inhabit: real work experience now carries far more weight than a degree. That isn't a slogan. It's what the people who hire, build, and lead the teams he hopes to join will tell you, almost without exception.
The decision is theirs. The weighting is ours.
If you have a view I haven't yet captured, I'd still love to hear it.
Thank you, Vishay — for the kindness with which you try to help the people around you. Your question sparked real curiosity and real debate, in me and across my tech circle. May the boy succeed in the industry — he has good people in his corner.