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.
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.
yeah either that or the test was bullshit
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
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 think we shall consider also the abysmal skills of IT workers all around the world ... India is just having more issues than others.
India must have difficulties with initial training and there is not enough skilled engineers on the market to perform additional training later.
Manager are very keen to recognize the existence of individual performance when it is related to their bonus but completely blind when it comes to replace a skilled worker with a cheaper one (to get a bigger bonus).
You can get super discount when you buy single layer toilet paper compared to double layer but you have to use twice more to not end up in covered in sh... (this was our poetic intermission).
I remember when I first worked with colleagues from India in the 90's.
They were all IIT 1% ers, the very cream of the crop, and it was terrifying to me that a country with a billion people who were freakin geniuses would out-compete Americans in every job field.
Since then I have learned that America was receiving their very, very, very best, and that India had pretty much gone down the path that the Japanese had with their pilots in WW2, which is to say, they expended their very best without cycling them back to train new pilots (or engineers in the case of India)
This has resulted in a decidedly lower quality of engineers in recent generations.
India should do with their Engineers, what the US did with their pilots in WW2, which is to pull the best pilots out of front-line positions and bring them back to the states to train the next generation of pilots to be at least as good as they are.
Both mechanical, electrical and software systems are developed to higher standards to be 'man rated'. Not every bit of code needs to be that well tested.
Engineers understand the difference, software developers might not.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'