Slashdot Mirror
95% Engineers in India Unfit For Software Development Jobs: Report (gadgetsnow.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Talent shortage is acute in the IT and data science ecosystem in India with a survey claiming that 95 percent of engineers in the country are not fit to take up software development jobs. According to a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, only 4.77 percent candidates can write the correct logic for a programme -- a minimum requirement for any programming job. Over 36,000 engineering students form IT related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata -- a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills -- and over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles.
...that we can discuss the abysmal skills of your average Indian IT worker, without being branded a racist, or using excessive PC language.
Completely validates that report. When my last employer decided to fire the American citizens (forcing them to train their "offshore" replacements in order to receive any severance) that built the products and systems that made the company a success, those of us that remained discovered that we had to rewrite everything they produced (with a much smaller staff, of course). The greed of executive management results in far worse products for the customer - but they got their bonuses, so they do not care.
What the numbers would look like in the US.
You can't publish stories like this about India!
Pretty sure my parent company still outsources to all of them. I hate making large broad statements, but I've never yet met one I was impressed by. Seems to whole business model for outsourcing revolves around everything being so cheap you can rebuild it 5x and still come out ahead on direct project costs. As for impacting the business with garbage software, that doesn't cost anything, right?
I heard that 3/4 of the people working on Windows 10 couldn't write code that compiles, so I understand why they are hiring from India. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
But many locals would also fail.
Being not able to compile can sort of be glossed over. One offs, or broken pointers, is normal for the Agile crews and pseudo IT managers.
I think the problem is the word 'Engineer' is abused and they really mean apprentice, junior, inexperienced whatever (but cheap).
Obviously the best have already left India, but 4.77% is still numerically a LOT. So cut or tighten H1B's by 95% and problem fixed.
I would say in a whole, true software engineering has been completely watered down and very disappointing over the last 10-15 years. From all the way down in school systems with STEM and all they way up with these 3-4 day crash-course 'bootcamps' and seem to manufacture quick hot-on-resume-paper skills without experience is really the problem. And even on top of that, how many people just 'google' their way into a job or solution? No one thinks anymore, we are in an age of just-give-me-the-stuff mentality. Don't care how or why, just blindly take the answer and move on. You don't grow as a competent and efficient engineer that way.
Coupled with the fact that any business, company or dev shop wants talent in our psychotic digital age, this reminds me nothing more than a massive amount of people doing nothing more than to try to get their foot into a hot job market and doing nothing more than trying to flip a huge salary for 6-12 months. And that's why I say it has very little to do with India.
Seriously, this rates up there with such bombshells as "water is wet" and "fire is hot."
Of course they failed. They tested the wrong engineers. Toot tooot! Chugga chugga chugga choo choo!
I am shocked! I cannot describe how shocked I am.
FUCK YOU!
Why would Engineers write code? Shouldn't those Engineers get back to driving the trains and leave the programming for the programmers?
/ Call me a Software Developer. Call me a Programmer. Call me a Code Monkey even. I am not an Engineer. Calling programmers "Engineers" is stupid. It's like calling janitors "sanitation experts" or secretaries "office administrators". Call a rose a rose and stop all this silly flowery job titles.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
yeah either that or the test was bullshit
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
The travelling salesman problem?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
And I'm an American with several decades of experience. But, I'm not worried because my compiler kindly points out my mistakes. Good thing there aren't any reporters around to tell the world that I left out a semi-colon here, misspelled the name of a class there, or forgot to remove one of the arguments to one of my own functions whose API I'd just modified.
Most of them simply have no proper logical reasoning skills. Even if they do, they are likely to have sub par English skills which makes the issues they write still seem like nonsense . Yet they manage to win contract after contract, simply because they are cheap
95% percent of Software Development employers unwilling to train people into the job.
From what I've seen in my grad program (mid-tier US university), I'd say the figure is closer to 99%.
They're expert liars, though.
I think there are many talented and smart developers in India (as anywhere else). The biggest issue is that they mostly want to work for very large companies (prestige), they are in a hurry to be promoted to managers (many are not good at managing anything but it's all about the title) and thus good developers become weak managers. This depletes the software developer pool so they have to hire people less and less qualified to do the coding.
Another is that there are a lot of "software consulting" companies that handle outsourced work, they tend to have some good developers and a lot of "junior" developers, so when they sell themselves to a customer they can say they have a staff of 100 developers ready to go. This is compounded with the problem of developers trying to get promoted into management (again, title and status are very important to people).
I am not sure if 95% is an accurate number (seems a bit high), but the problem exists nevertheless.
I have read that a lot has to do with sociological issue of being used to a caste system, and while it's not as prevalent as it used to be, rank and status are very important. While this is also true in many other countries (I have worked with many Eastern European and Far East companies), India remains as the place where every developer seems to be looking for a promotion. Some companies placate the developers by giving them over-inflated titles like chief architect or senior staff engineer; but in a company with dozens of chief architects the title no longer has a significant meaning.
Anecdotal evidence: I worked with a developer who was young and his mom kept emailing him to get promoted to a manager so that when she went looking for a wife she could pick from a nicer "deck" because he was a manager ( a deck of pictures/bios is how moms and matchmakers and astrologists get together to determine who gets to marry whom, it's very complicated from what I have seen). I thought it was funny, but he was very serious that the "quality" of a wife his mom could get depended a lot on where he worked and what his title was. At one point he lobbied to get a temporary title and we put him on a short term support project where he was handling issues for one single customer and had a temporary title of a "Senior Customer Manager". He was married within 3 months.
It's a company trying to sell their assessment products that are more marketable the higher the number they manage to produce out of their "study". Extrapolating "36,000 engineering students from IT related branches of over 500 colleges" to " engineers in the country" seems a little generous as well. Most of the students in IT related branches I've met are also really crap at programming - because they aren't actually doing programming or because they are first years who haven't managed to learn anything yet.
That said most of the people I have interviewed for programming positions I would put in the "can't program" category too. Not 95%, but probably 60%.
And I would expect the Indian IT education system to have more than its fair share of really bad "colleges" compared with say the US (and note that the US has things like "ITT Technical Institute"). It's a bigger country population wise with worse infrastructure and government oversight. The good programmers seem far more likely to go and get a job overseas than they do to take up an academic career in an Indian college...
I have worked on many outsourced projects. So much so, that my position transitioned from being a software developer to one who provides development support. So I do the things they can't complete. Anything from browser interaction problems to performance to security. One might think I have a jaded view - and this is something I am always assuming that I have. I have seen everything from absolute incompetence to some "diamonds in the rough".
That said, I believe the issue in India is the way the problem is approached. Rather than let the gifted students percolate out of the system (a focus on quality), they encourage everyone to enroll and encourage the institution to graduate everyone. I can't comment on the quality of the education, but I suspect it spans everywhere from decent to criminal. The institutions are not schools - they are factories.
But I still think this report is BS. Perhaps I will change my opinion when my job is transitioned to India. This is in process right now.
The H1-B program allows us to snap up all of the good programmers worldwide, leaving their native countries with the dregs. But, The Donald is going to "fix" all that for us.
Is this just an Ad for Automata? Because that's what it looks like.
Recently for the first time I had experienced working with software developers from India. They were all recent migrants working with a consulting company. In my project team we had about 20 of these engineers that I had to manage and for the most part they were pretty good. On the plus side, they were hard working and keen to learn and best of all they were able to LISTEN and take responsibility on what was sometimes quite a stressful project. The negative side would be perhaps having the courage to take initiative and move the team in a new and better direction, but maybe that will come as experience grows.
Overall a pretty good experience. I would definitely work with some of them again.
Though I'd love to believe this is true, promising something you want to believe is the easiest marketing scam of all.
I've worked enough with Indian developers to know that although the percentage of incompetents is high, it is not close to 95%
Automata, the tool used for this, is a commercial job interview assessment tool.
This company benefits greatly from making it appear that most hiring candidates are unfit for the job; it creates a need for their product.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
existence of stackoverflow, google and tech blogs.
Code for compiler is not "written", it is copy-pasted.
So there is probably a lot of truth in the reporting, but the shock value of the story comes from the numbers. 95% you say! Oh my! We cannot have any Indians write code! The details, in this case, matter a great deal, so lets take a look at some of the unanswered questions that may impact the accuracy of that number.
* What does "...not write code that compiles" mean? Were the people being tested provided an IDE? I'm an expert Java programmer, but if I were to open up a text file and type Java code, odds are pretty good that my code won't compile on the first try. That's what IDE's are there for - to fix the inane syntax issues. But lets say that the IDE's were provided. What sort of languages were used in the test? Were the test takers familiar in the language being used? Was the measurement really meaning that they ran out of time to make the program compile or that they were incapable of making it compile because they really weren't a programmer? I note that the "cannot even compile" statistic is 2/3 - not 95% according to TFA. Still bad, but details are needed to see what was being measured.
* What does the sample mean? TFA says that the sample size was 36000, but how does this compare to the universe out there, and who made up the sample? Were these graduates in computer science or first year students or people already working in the field? What was the level of quality for these universities? Where did the 5% who did good come from, and did those 5% come from the really good schools? Was the sample size structured to represent the real world distribution of quality in educational institutions?
* Bias: who is aspiring minds, and what is their motivation? Are they tied to a particular agenda? Is there a competing country that wants their programmers to be hired over Indian programmers pushing these stats? I will point out that there were numerous doctors pushing the agenda of the tobacco industry, and numerous scientists pushing the agenda of the oil industry (global warming). So, yes, the affiliations need to be clear.
I will also point out that in the silicon valley, Indian engineers are present in high numbers. And a lot of the clamor for getting Indians into the US comes from companies in that area. If 95% of them were useless, I can't help but think that there would be less demand.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Programmers program computers. Engineers... toot train whistles.
We have been battling for four years on a project that is now hopelessly overbudget and still a smelly pile of crap that hardly works. When asked to fix a tap washer on a home faucet, they first want to inspect the dam where the water comes from. They happen to all be from that big company that is possibly going to be swallowed by that big database company. The first guys that came out were sharp and very clued up, but they soon left and we got the backup crew. Hell I have even learned to code in Java out of pure frustration to show them how badly they are cocking up!
My company brought in H1B visa types from Tata Systems and I got to train 2 such Indian imports to replace me. Prior to getting laid off, I reviewed work by Indian engineers from a different "consulting" company. The task was to convert a prototype in Excel to working code in TSQL. The variable names they used were hard-coded cell locations from the original Excel spreadsheet.
95% of enigneers in America aren't fit for the job either
So far the company work for have had multiple interactions with outsourced 'developers'. I can't even use the word "incompetent" because that implies that they have at least some skill at their job, and that's patently untrue.
Every. Single. Project. that they were involved in became a nightmare. The time and effort required for babysitting them, and correcting their (sometimes incredible) mistakes was greater than our own work.
While I'm sure there are exceptions, in general I would say that this article is completely correct. I wouldn't trust these people to flip my hamburger correctly let alone operate something that uses electricity.
the article which I read was unclear about what they considered an engineer in this survey - do they mean ALL engineers, many of which probably never code, or just software developers?
Engineer != Software Programmer.
Duh. Do you expect an Petroleum Engineer to write code daily? Mechanical? Aeronautic? Astronautic? Chemical? Electrical? No. Those and most engineering disciplines use computers programs as tools. They may create input files which appear to be code to the lay-person, but as an ASE myself, I can promise you that most engineering grads learned only minimal coding.
I've meet computer engineers who couldn't code too - and Computer Science grads with advanced degrees whose code was crap.
I'm a perl programmer for the last 20+ yrs - I know crap code.
Soooo, a "machine learning" system made this evaluation. I'll bet other machines got perfect scores. Bias much?
really it is no problem at all, microsoft will hire them to work on the next windows 10 iteration.
The remaining 5% is more than enough to replace the 200% of you. :) Your game is through, computer weenies. The gutter awaits.
I work for a university here in the US and have an opinion about why this seems reasonable. It is a sociological problem like someone here already mentioned. I was one of the few developers on my team back in India who really knew their shit when I worked back home. I think this stems from how I got into my programming career. I wasn't trained in programming by my company or college. I graduated in Electronics and picked up programming to make games and got good at it because I liked it. A lot of people who work in IT in India just simply shouldn't be working in IT - Not because they are not capable enough (It is, after all, a skill that you can learn with time) but because they are just not interested in their career. Careers in India, if you want to earn good money, are very limited. IT is a field that gives you the best investment to return ratio(4 years of college and a cushy job at an IT firm). Familial pressures encourage young men and women who have no interest in the technical side of things to pick up careers in IT because they can pay well in a short time. This leads to a lot of people who would frankly be better off in other people-oriented careers to slog in something they have no interest in. It is also a personality issue. This may seem like generalizing but I have experienced it. I tend to get along well on a personal level with the people working with me here in the US. Call it the "birds of a feather" phenomenon. Working in computer science, you tend to pick up a certain type of personality and social skills. I like games. My coworkers like games. I like talking about technology and memes. My coworkers like talking about technology and memes. I find I get along better with other "nerd" types. Working in India, even in college was a nightmare because I shared my time with people who are just a different breed. People who fit other social archetypes that I don't tend to get along with. I didn't understand the humor, wasn't interested in their discussions and felt that most of them were generally people I wouldn't get along with. So people who are just not wanting to work in IT and just want to be managers end up spending years in this career. It is frustrating and pushes off the kind of people who should be programming. Just my two cents
Best Programmer I ever knew was Indian.
Also, most of the worst programmers I ever knew were too. Just like everywhere, they produce quality and low quality programmers.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Then they should exercise more!
Unfortunately I am not surprised. But it's not an India specific problem. I interview people from all over and end up rejecting very high percentages of them.
Where they come from (school, country, degree level, etc) has so little to do with how well people do that I just ignore all that. You can either think a problem through and code up a solution or you can't.
I would really love to take their test. Knowing what they ask and how well I got graded on it would definitely help me judge if this test has any chance of accurately measuring skill.
This happens more often when you have different teams of programmers that are not in the same location. The further the teams are from each other the harder it is to get them on the same page. At once place I worked in the 90s, the decision was made to use Java over Visual Basic 5 to run operations across multiple sites because VB5 was Windows only and not really enterprise capable. Well one of the teams at a site only had experience with VB and fought it at every single turn.
There were weekly emails from that team about how Java couldn't do this or that. These were always CC'ed to the VP of IT of course. However the VP and Director knew it wasn't that Java couldn't do it but there was something else going on.
One example was how the ShippingContainer class didn't allow a ShippingContainer to be cloned to have the same ID as another. Logically the lead programming team (my team) designed it that way as no ShippingContainer was re-used and had to be unique. Well the other team wanted to change the clone() method that would do that. The lead programmers (us) were not going to change the class for all sites and advised the other team to create a new class and inherit ShippingContainer. But the other team fought against the idea wanted to change the official classes to suit them. The emails went back and forth.
Despite multiple queries as to why it was necessary in their systems to re-use the ID, other team refused to divulge anything more than their demands. Luckily their site was only a few hours by plane so we could send our best programmer to see what was the real problem. In their legacy VB spaghetti code, that's the way it was done. Inheritance and the basics of object oriented programming were beyond them. They were afraid for their jobs so they fought change. Unfortunately it highlighted that none of them were suitable to be programmers going forward. After the conversion, they would have to move do different departments.
My supervisor at Cisco had me sat in on a conference call with the developers in India trying to convince them that they didn't fix a crash bug and incrementing the build number by one didn't fix the problem. The developers tried to get me involved to go against my supervisor. I pretended to have phone problems and played dumb.
programmers can't program, it is also true that very few programmers on their first try can get a program to compile and run correctly. The important thing is can they eventually do so in a reasonable amount of time. Sturgeon Law is that 90% of everything sucks or aka the normal curve. Programming is so hard that 90% of programmers suck, not just South Asians but everybody.
Can we please stop calling software developers Engineers. Engineering is something that has been taking way out of context by Silicon Valley. I mean every person you hear being hired out there is an engineer... marking engineer, social network engineer, public relations engineer. That IS NOT engineering.
Coding is not itself engineering!
Source, I went to real (mechanical) engineering school.
It isn't limited to just India either
The report undershoots the number in my opinion. I personally see the number closer to 99%. There is usually 1 decent person and 19 other warm bodies tossing in spaghetti code or questionable usefulness.
FTFY! The majority of "software engineers" are unfit for their job. That is why the majority of software is crap.
So, by "forcing" you mean that they were offered a bunch of extra money in exchange for the unusual unpleasantness of labor, above and beyond the usual paychecks that they also received during that time?
You have the weirdest definition of "force" that I have ever seen. Were you forced to write something that dumb?
But people with experience tend to cost more so they are the first to go. So you give the rookie mechanic the job of maintaining the million dollar racing car. That is how things are done in IT.
.. who wrote the software that ran this test?
Major UK com's/data firm bought in 70+ Indian "network" engineers,after complaints from staff,managment set up some traps for so called engineers,in the end,it turned out I knew and understood more about networks and switches etc than so called highly qualified engineers..
(i was the groundsman/gardener,just with a working brain and an interest in what I was working around)
64 of the Indians were sent home and legal action started in India for fraud..
To quote the great philosopher R. King, why can't we all get along? Indians feel entitled to jobs in the west since the Brits and other Europeans and came and built Europe using free south Asian resources plus slavery. I mean if you gave India 200 years of free slaves imagine how built up it would be? Look at what Dubai has built with just 30 years of cheap labor. Yeah so basically Indians want that back. I mean, I don't agree with the logic but think how the ancestors of the current Indians felt when the Brits and Europeans came? Probably the same feelings. I think what's needed is a US version of Gandhi, basically someone who will beg the Indians to leave the US so that the US can build stuff using its own citizens. This time without free or cheap labor/resources.
One thing though, the price of tribalism may end up as war. The lesson the third world learned in the European "age of exploration" is that when someone wants something and have the means of transportation they will come get it. Envy and greed are powerful motivators. Why did Europeans go establishing colonies in places that already had people? They wanted things. The Indians coming here, they want things too. Unless you are black, the chances are high that at some point some of your ancestors had enough of their present country and situation and decided to go somewhere else rather than improve their original country. They heard there were jobs and resources elsewhere and wanted to compete for those.
Who needs correct logic?
Cut-and-paste, baby!
Other key skills include begging others to do your work in support forums.
Why is this a problem? This is the perfect qualification for an H1-B, or an outsourcing company job. Everybody wins! Yay globalization!
. . . . I had to deal with outsourced services to India, back around the turn of the century, when I was working for a Dot-com. We were experimenting with outsourcing. The boss had contracted some Indian services firm to take 1000 Material Safety Data Sheets, in scanned PDFs, and type the contents of each into a Microsoft Word file. As I recall, he paid 500 bucks for it.
Average results were 20+ errors per page. Spelling, words missing, whatever, it was there in the results file.
This compares to a similar contract, same task, somewhere in Flyover Country. Zero errors, and notes pointing out mis-spellings in the ORIGINAL PDFs. Cost 5 grand, but worth it. . . .
I have interviewed a bunch of Indians in the UK. Some of them had a whole list of experience - much of it in India, but they couldn't do even basic development tasks. Their experience just didn't seem to match the knowledge they claimed to have. However, I don't know if they are actually worse than native UK developers, maybe there are just more of them, or maybe more are floating around looking for jobs because they are inept. Indian universities generally seem quite dismal, with a few exceptions. There are also a few excellent Indian developers around, but in the UK they nearly always seem to be the people who spent time getting a PhD or masters here, but they are the exception, and have always already been employed when we've recruited them.
A Computer Engineer is a subset of Electrical Engineering. Instead of taking all that analog and RF classes, they take digital classes and maybe an extra programming class or two - assembly language, embedded programming and maybe even a C class.
On the other hand, the CS degree with a hardware specialization is a CS program but two of your electives must be digital electronics.
Software Developer or whatever title one likes calling oneself doesn't make them an engineer.
I had the title of "engineer" at this old stodgy company because that was the only pay grade they had (from the late 1800s) that they could put me under. Programming didn't exist when the company was founded but engineers did.
I see way too many code monkeys who take their "engineer" job title seriously.
BSCS == Code monkey.
"only 4.77 percent candidates can write the correct logic for a programme -- a minimum requirement for any programming job."
I thought, knowing that computer programs are never called programme, neither UK English, nor US or Australian English is different in that way.
http://www.dailywritingtips.co...
Each year about a million students graduate from indian engineering colleges. 5% of a couple of million (say students who graduate over time) are good enough to supply both Indian and American firms with decent programmers (even if you assume 5% of this 5% do more than write a program that compiles). And consider adding to this list people who graduate out of elite institutions in India (IITs: they rank 4th in creating the most billion-dollar companies). And not to forget that American Indians are the most educated of all racial/ethical groups in America. I guess there are few bad apples (how many indians replace american workers every year?) still I think America still gets a pretty good deal.
You don't employ a cabinet maker / master carpenter to frame your house. You get one to supervise the work of others. You only need guys with basic skills to nail 2x4s together every 14". Similarly you have the more expensive talented guys do the finish work because you want the miters on your moldings to match up perfectly, your doors plumb so that don't fall open or closed or stick, your drawers to slide easily, etc.
The problem is that you needed guys to nail 2x4s together every 16". But your idiots nailed them together every 14" and now the whole project has ground to a halt because you ran out of 2x4s.
Later your project will slow to a crawl again because the guys nailing the sheathing, roofing and sub-floors have to eyeball each joist and stud as the panels aren't marked with a 14" nailing schedule. Worse, each panel will need to be cut to a multiple of 14" in order to support the ends, with the maximum panel length now being 84" instead of 96". You've just added about 12.5% to the material cost of all those panels, and a bunch of additional labor cost too. Disposing of all those 12"x48" offcuts isn't free either. Don't forget to buy 12.5% more nails.
What are you going to do about the windows? They were ordered as standard windows so are 30" wide to fit in the 30.5" gap across two stud bays, leaving .5" for shims to plumb them up. But for some reason those gaps are only 26.5". Will you return the standard windows, eat a 15% restocking fee and wait a few weeks for custom 26" wide windows to be made? What does that do to the aesthetics that your customer cares about? (Narrow windows suck.) Your other choice is to rework the studs for each window to allow for the standard windows anyway. More 2x4s needed, more time and head-scratching. BTW, don't forget that the building inspector is going to need to sign off on those mods; he stamped the original design at a standard 16" OC but you have deviated from those construction plans, and he needs to ensure that the actual construction is to code. More delay as you need to draw up revised construction plans for approval.
That 12.5% cost overrun keeps coming back to bite. Insulation typically comes in 14.5" widths to fit in one 16" OC bay. Your bays are 12.5" wide and insulation doesn't come in that width. Every roll or slab of insulation needs to be cut to size because overstuffed insulation doesn't perform to its rating and the building inspector will insist. You now have to buy 12.5% more insulation than you'd have needed if you'd nailed at 16" OC. As an additional bonus what should be a simple 1-2 day insulation job now takes several times that and one way or another you're paying those salaries. More disposal to pay for.
Eventually you get to drywall or plastering. Back to the 12.5% material cost overruns you go on boards and screws. Back to the landfill with 12"x48" waste offcuts.
I get it; in your head it all sounded so simple to justify laying off the skilled workers and replacing them with drones. Sure your drones can raise their game and put a house together. How hard could it be? It's just nailing, right? The problem is that drones cannot prevent idiots in management who apparently don't have the first clue about construction from totally screwing up the project. Your skilled workers would have pointed out all the problems with your 14" stud nailing schedule before a stud was cut. Your drones just went to work and killed your profit doing what you told them too. Your framing guys really enjoyed getting chewed out by the roofers, insulation guys and plasters as each of them in turn realized what a pig of a job this house is. Nobody was really happy when you fired the skill workers before, but now you really have a staff retention problem.
Thanks for providing a great analogy.
Final sting - Your customer is pissed too. Not only did he need to push off his moving date because of the delays, but heating and cooling costs are about 10% higher than they should be because about 12.5% of the R38 insulation has been replaced by 10" of R1 wood. He's going to a competitor for his next house.
what a clusterfuck of whining and mediocrity
The ability to attract a 'trophy wife' because you can code a bubble sort in only 100 lines of code; can rewrite an algorithm to double the speed of something; or can understand Assembly language.
I could have told them this 10 years ago when our company off shored a lot of work. Since then the CEO was fired and we're still recovering.
The current trend in software is to distribute a problem to a bunch of commodity servers. That is a good strategy for extremely large data sets, but it can also be a crutch to compensate for bad algorithms and inefficient code. Rather than focus on getting the algorithm right and solve the problem using 80% fewer instructions; you just get more cheap computers (and electricity, and heat, and...) involved. I wonder how much this strategy has spilled over into the headcount equation. Don't get one great employee that can solve the problem by himself on a $150K salary...instead get 10 programmers that can try to do the same thing collectively at $15K each. It might look the same on the corporate balance sheet, but almost guaranteed that the solution by the one qualified engineer will be much better than the code cobbled together by the team of 10 mediocre or incompetent programmers.
So let's keep hiring them!
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
First this is a claim about a proprietary test from a company earning money from it, information about what it actually does is not available without paying AFAIK.
Also I've read here and elsewhere how new employees can't code no matter where they come from or graduated. Some even claim that almost everyone interviewed didn't even have basic skills.
A moron that earns money by selling the test the article is about. But I agree with you, even skilled programmers make trivial errors that a compiler will complain about - in the real world they fix it in a few seconds, depending on how the test is designed that may not be possible.
Firstly, is their work ethics...lazy and too much elitism and bureaucracy.
Then comes their limited command of English; and the English mistakes, that come either due to laziness and lack of practice.
They are also yes man by nature, and do not know when to say no...ask them something impossible, and they will say yes.
They also underestimated their projects.
They also have a mysterious gift of over-complicating the simplest of the problems.
Furthermore, they twist the truth more than we are used to.
Most of their CVs are fabricated; their knowledge and experience is sub-par.
They also exaggerate the actual experiences they had in the past.
And they do not respect women...
Finally, to hit home: if I pay big bucks, and you put me talking not with an actual local expert, but with an Indian guy, why should I pay big bucks, and why should not I cut the middle man, and pay them rupees?
>most of the people I have interviewed for programming positions I would put in the "can't program" category too
Mitsubishi, which owns now bankrupt Westinghouse, has admitted they can't find enough competent engineers for completing several Eastern U.S. power plants.
The failure of the San Onofre plant was recently re-attributed with over-pressure now being the cause. Try finding programmers that are top-notch with industrial control systems. Those never have trouble once set up... or do they???
programme is wrong; it's program even in UK english; programme is only correct in non programming context.
6t5h 5
Was the test done using Windows .net? Did they have to know Visual Studio?
What programming language was used in the test?
Was the programming language up to date like what you might find on Linux or BSD?
Which 100 of the programming languages was used in the Test?
** This is not support/against. Just asking educated questions.
Gramer, gramer:?? Grammer is expected skill with a salary of $0.00.
Grammer is an expected skill that every employee is supposed to have. That's Billions of people with language skills.
LOL
The report is available at (http://www.aspiringminds.com/research-reports), and was published by Aspiring Minds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspiring_Minds)
Why are we giving software engineering tests to IT workers again?
... Theodore Sturgeon's estimates on the quality of everything, i.e. "“Ninety percent of everything is crud"
Some of the software I developed has been safety critical and had the rediculous amount of testing that entails. Most of it was not. Was I only acting as an engineer in those cases that were safety related? Seems an odd distinction. Most mechanical engineering designs for actual engines would be hard pressed to fail in a way that would harm the driver but that is engineering in every sense of the word. I do get what you are saying. I knew a man who "programmed HTML". Right, not an engineer or a programmer. Is it the level of rigor in the form of reviews and testing? Is it how much math is involved? There are vast swaths of web programming that don't seem to make the cut, but then you hit the odd medical website that is safety critical, or something particularly mathy. What if someone tests the business app really well because it would cost too much for it to go down?