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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.

16 of 453 comments (clear)

  1. It'll get better, maybe someday by conquistadorst · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:It'll get better, maybe someday by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      And I am getting tired of clueless execs whining about the amount that they have to pay a qualified engineer. These decent salaries are cutting into their bonuses and yacht payments damn it. Large companies have a really hard time understanding the worth of an employee other than an exec. In their world if you are not on the exec team than you deserve minimum wage. In most cases you get what you pay for. Reminds me of an interview with an exec at NBC in the 60s when asked how could they possible justify paying Johnny Carson 2 million a year. His response was well he make us 30 million a year so it's an easy decision.

    2. Re:It'll get better, maybe someday by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is a direct result of the extreme overpaid status of the American tech workforce.

      Well, no. It's the direct result of us not closing down trade with countries which use slave labor. We talk a good game on the subject of slavery, but then we completely fall down when it comes time for the rubber to meet the road and make shit happen. Instead, the wheels spin and there's a lot of smoke and stink.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Re:My experience... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    In my opinion the real greed happens when engineers agree to train their own replacements in order to receive a brown handshake. It's like the jews who helped kill other jews during WW2. It's absolutely disgusting to think anyone would agree to an arrangement like that.

  3. I don't think it's just India... by adosch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Engineers? by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:My experience... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's like the jews who helped kill other jews during WW2.

    This is what racism looks like. Not the fact they were Jews. The fact you assume there exists some sort of loyalty based on race.

  6. Re:My experience... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not even remotely the same. C-Suite generally have parachutes and bonus in the six to seven figure range. Add to that a hefty salary and it's quite likely they have a decent nest egg.
    Today's engineer/cs is suffering flat wage inflation and are competing with throngs of indentured workers from around the world. Some, as I have experienced, having mortgage payments, family, retirement goals (no pensions), random layoffs, and a poor job market barely have enough left over to say that they have a disposable income. Many end-up having to use there 401k savings to get by.

    They have little choice in the matter. They don't get golden parachutes. They don't have pensions. They have families and payments to make. I can't blame them. And, I'm certain they don't like it either.

  7. Re: My experience... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Doesn't sound like it's anything specific to India though, the same stuff happens in the west all the time. It's the standard case of they send the best people to meet you and write a spec, but the people implementing it have little knowledge of your systems or business and you want to pay the peanuts so they aren't interesting in doing more than the bare minimum.

    I've had products like that from western developers. Had some firmware written by a contractor where a CLI was specified. If you entered more than 64 characters it would overwrite the stack and crash in the best case, lock up in the worst. When asked about it he said the spec didn't say it needed to check buffer sizes or not crash if not used in the exact way that the manual specified, with no room for error.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  8. Re:In other words... by arth1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    95% percent of Software Development employers unwilling to train people into the job.

    Programming isn't an assembly line, where you can train people in the steps and they just repeat it. You have to have an ability to think, and come up with new solutions to new challenges. And when faced with alternatives, be able to pick the one that's the best for the task at hand, and understand and be able to explain why.

    Training means very little. Someone who requires training is near worthless as a programmer.

  9. Re:My experience... by mysidia · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's absolutely disgusting to think anyone would agree to an arrangement like that.

    Don't blame the workers for a shoddy system that doesn't protect them from being held hostage to agree to do something they don't want to do.

    Until programmers organize into a National or International union, there's no co-ordination of people choosing to refuse..... the individuals that refuse are just shooting themselves in the foot. Often their personal finances are such that the Severence offer and a few weeks or months extra pay is an offer they cannot refuse --- As it allows them the ability to survive and the best chances of getting a new job (Easier to get hired while still employed).

  10. Re:My experience... by mysidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You only need guys with basic skills to nail 2x4s together every 14".

    "Framing a house" is a more static job than programming, because you can make plans, Your requirements for framing are Not likely to substantively change within a job or from one job to the next. Also, you can tell your guys with basic skills exactly what to do, And you can even make sure the nails and 2x4"s they are given to use are all the same and the exact right kind for the job, and rated appropriately.

    Programming does not fit that model, because every programmer needs to make strategic decisions about what kind of code to apply to the parts of the problem they're assigned to complete. In programming, the distance between metaphorical 2x4"s is dependent on the fine business requirements and can change from one iteration to the next, Also, each nail is different, the worker needs a bag of 1000 different kind of nails and the general knowledge of which one is the correct one to use on each board based on its type and location, and not all the boards are 2x4"s, and the programmer needs to work out what kind of board is a safe and best fit where. The boards and nails need to be put in an appropriate place that cannot be planned in advance, the Right nail has to go to the right kind of board, otherwise there will be an obscure problem that may causes random unexpected failures of boards on the opposite side of the building, with no definitive quick/easy way of tracing exactly which nail was hammered in of the wrong type or inserted incorrectly, or to a board not at the correct precise spacing or angle.

  11. Re:I have a dream by segedunum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know why it has to be branded as racist and India is an irrelevance to the point. The fact is, when companies scrape the bottom of the barrel for least cost this is what they get.

  12. Re:I wonder... by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, the correct answer to a request for a recursive Fibonacci routine that returns the Nth element is "I refuse to do that on basis of it being immensely stupid, unless I can do it in assembly or a language that allows stack-free re-entry and short-circuiting".

    fib 3871934874 is what?

  13. Re: I have a dream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    PC is fascism pretending to be manners.

    -- George Carlin

  14. Re: My experience... by Orgasmatron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's a good way to get into specification-paralysis: assume that the programmers have absolutely no idea what is reasonable and specify everything down to the absolute smallest detail. Might as well just write it yourself if you are going to assume that your programmer is exactly as dumb as the compiler.

    --
    See that "Preview" button?