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95% Engineers in India Unfit For Software Development Jobs: Report (gadgetsnow.com)

Posted by msmash on from the meanwhile,-in-India dept.

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.

11 of 453 comments (clear)

  1. I have a dream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...that we can discuss the abysmal skills of your average Indian IT worker, without being branded a racist, or using excessive PC language.

    1. Re:I have a dream by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 5, Funny

      If you don't like using excessive PC language maybe you could try excessive Mac language?

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    2. Re:I have a dream by Billy+the+Mountain · · Score: 5, Funny

      Irony: Like Goldy or Silvery but made of iron.

      --
      That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
    3. Re:I have a dream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. My experience... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re: My experience... by pchasco · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Similar to my experience as well. We hired offshore teams to help migrate away from some mainframe systems. Of course, the few guys they sent over to work on site were incredible: Professional, knowledgeable, and excellent communicators. On the other hand, the work churned out by the offshore team was abysmal. Inefficient, convoluted, and just plain dumb in many cases. For example: I was working for an insurance company. The company was developing the software to sell a new type of product. We had a database already with all the tables necessary to support the existing product. The offshore team, in some cases literally just added columns to existing tables for this new, unrelated product. I'm not talking just a few new columns. Entire tables' worth of columns. There were no shared keys or anything between the two data. It was like building a table for payroll, then adding more columns so that you could also store warehouse inventory.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

  3. I wonder... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What the numbers would look like in the US.

  4. 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.

  5. All that glitters is software. by achacha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.