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.
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.
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.
I am shocked! I cannot describe how shocked I am.
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
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...
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.
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.