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Only 36 Percent of Indian Engineers Can Write Compilable Code, Says Study (itwire.com)
New submitter troublemaker_23 quotes a report from ITWire: Only 36% of software engineers in India can write compilable code based on measurements by an automated tool that is used across the world, the Indian skills assessment company Aspiring Minds says in a report. The report is based on a sample of 36,800 from more than 500 colleges across India. Aspiring Minds said it used the automated tool Automata which is a 60-minute test taken in a compiler integrated environment and rates candidates on programming ability, programming practices, run-time complexity and test case coverage. It uses advanced artificial intelligence technology to automatically grade programming skills. "We find that out of the two problems given per candidate, only 14% engineers are able to write compilable codes for both and only 22% write compilable code for exactly one problem," the study said. It further found that of the test subjects only 14.67% were employable by an IT services company. When it came to writing fully functional code using the best practices for efficiency and writing, only 2.21% of the engineers studied made the grade.
Looks like about what I see in the field.
What percent of Slashdot Editors can spot a dupe?
Among probably hundreds of examples I don't know about... Who knew? Nothing you haven't seen. Just a re-post =P
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/03/after-pink-slips-ucsf-tech-workers-train-their-foreign-replacements/
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/06/toys-r-us-forces-u-s-college-grads-train-h-1b-foreign-replacements/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html?_r=0
http://libertyunyielding.com/2015/02/06/california-fired-workers-train-foreign-replacements/
Does this mean I should be concerned with Dr Gupta's diploma from Cornercutt-, er, Calcutta Medical?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
We don't do batch processing anymore, people. You write the code, you try to compile the code, and then you fix the errors. It doesn't need to be perfect on the first attempt. Why do you think clang is so popular these days. With such fast compile time and such verbose error messages, clang practically writes your code for you.
I haven't written a single line of compilable code at my latest job. :)
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Again.
My code rately compiles correctly on the first attempt.
Sure, I could carefully inspect it before clicking "build," but it's faster to go through the build-fix-build cycle a few times than to scrutinize it for compile-time errors beforehand.
As for the rest of the test, I would fail too, especially since it is a one-hour timed test.
Now, show me a problem where the obvious/naive solution is something any decent programmer can get right in half a day but finding an ideal- or nearly-ideal solution will take a great programmer a few hours to find, a very good programmer a day to find, a mediocre one 2 days to find, and a lousy one a week to find if he could find it at all, and I will show you a problem that *might* be worth considering if you are trying to "rate" programmers on coding skill.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's good enough for the bottom line. Bad for everyone else.
100 percent of Slashdot editors can't do math.
Am I to infer that these are newly minted software people fresh out of college?
What's the comparison - how would a set of grads from US universities, or British, or Ukranian fare? Frankly, lots of people make it through educational systems without being able to do whatever their degree says - I'm not clear that the percentages here are any different than anywhere else in the world.
I'm pretty clear that without more context this is useless. And there's no mention of the report containing that context.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
It's not about writing code, it's about following the money.
Please do the needful.
I wouldn't worry too much about programmers, nobody really cares that a webapp wont compile, be worried that the doctor/surgeon you see didn't go to med school and just bought his qualifications just like these programmers did, in India its not even seen as a bad thing, try getting an Indian who fucked up to admit it, even faced with direct evidence they will lie.
its their culture
https://www.google.com/search?...
And it is much better than de mean programmer.
Where is the 36% stat based off of? ...
14% can write both
22% can write one of the problem
don't tell me they took 14% & 22% and added them up to 36%.
I could probably write better code — I don't even work professionally as a programmer.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
Indian software engineers and their "executives" are all terrible. Anytime you have an Indian who finds himself in some sort of executive role, you will have a front row seat to watching half or more of your native country men become unemployed and the amount of "needfulls" working on your project grow exponentially.
You can then look forward to sloppy, poorly written code coupled with craptastic documentation and more newly appointed Indian managers that think their shit doesn't stink because they can know squat somewhere in America and poo unlike their native countrymen back home.
Anytime you outsource to the 3rd world and import the best of the worst to run your organisations, don't be surprised when those products and services start smelling like a street in the middle of July in Calcutta.
These are the people taking your jobs when your company decide to outsource, remember that. You don't need to be qualified if you live in India to steal an american's job.
At the end of the 60 minutes if your program doesn't compile then you aren't part of the 36%. You could be finishing a statement or part way through a function or have just forgotten a semi-colon and you are part of the 64%.
The title is very misleading by saying such a low number can write compilable code. Through any other group of students at it and I'm sure that you would get similar results.
Anecdotal, but still: "A significant percentage (20%+) are dead wood that literally do NOTHING for the firm. They will never type a line of code - and are there solely for marketing brochures and sales pitches. When you combine, 'We have 50 devs ready to work for your project,' with the lower prices for their services, that pitch sounds pretty good to naive managers looking for reasons to pick one company over another."
When you have practices like that going on, you're going to have a LOT of rotten apples in the Indian dev barrel.
Because the outcome would be worse if it did.
coded by Indian engineers!
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
what's the stats that say American's can code? 1 in 10? Of course, I don't see American's jumping over themselves to code. I like to code. Coding is fun. Been at it 35 years. ever since commodore 64 and harris 500 and only 60 minutes of cpu time on the main frame. doh!
Neither can I with all the crazy layers our new stack has. I either have to ask for help or spend hours googling and fiddling.
I suspect all these layers will byte the org in the ass 5 or 10 years down the road. Some layers will be outdated and stop working with others and/or new browsers, have newly-discovered security holes, and/or nobody will remember how they work and/or how to fix them.
I'm sure in 5 to 10 years some newfangled stack/tool will be "the in thing" and everybody will have forgotten about this one.
It's nice when the layers work because they can take care of a lot of nitty gritty details and (in theory) protect you from future UI fad changes, but they also can create a Failure Sandwich when they "rot" over time.
I'm all for frameworks, but this a Dagwood Sandwich of sub-frameworks. I have a bad feeling about this, but I'll just have to ride the Titanic to its conclusion. At least I get a paycheck (for a while) and free violin music.
Table-ized A.I.
Screw just compiling. Far more realistic criteria are that it has to actually work, be reasonably bug-free, well-designed and easily supportable by others.
I've worked many years as a software developer, frequently alongside Indians, and after 35 years I've still never met one that is capable of producing code to even that basic minimum standard.
In college all my CS exams were paper and pencil; had to purposefully stop using an IDE. It's jarring how many errors syntax highlighing, autofill, and intellisense smooth over.
Imagine what the forum would look like without spellcheck.
The post was bad the first time it made it on Slashdot. It feels even worse the second time. Why don't you test the average moron out of a US university? He was dumb enough to mortgage his future for a shitty education, I'd be surprised if he can write code that works.
There is a reason why 0x7F is "DELETE" in the ASCII table, because in the days of 7-bit punch cards, if a "typo" was made, punching down all 7 bits was the way to clear it!
That makes perfect sense, fits with how a programmer would think, and I've never heard any competing theories. Thus, it's most likely totally wrong.
;)
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
I can't even do that . . . and I work from home!
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
...said no one who has ever had to work with or provide support for a group of outsourced "developers".
Just pointing that out.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of a low price.
The report says that it "is based on a sample of more than 36,800 students from 500+ colleges across India". It doesn't say what degree they're in, how much experience they have, or a variety of other factors to conclude the 36% of Indian engineers can't code. This is just a racist hit job piece.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
See, it's not discrimination, these Powerpoint slides prove that women can't program.
Write Once, Regress-fail Everywhere
'nuff said.
how would a set of grads from US universities...fare
Well considering I could do this BEFORE my CS degree, and all of the people I know majoring in CS are the same way - I'd say pretty damn well???
You have got to be joking that you seriously doubt someone can get any kind of CS degree or the like without knowing how to compile code! My program was extremely theoretical and I still was compiling real executables in many, many classes...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've worked (and work) with talented Indian developers, and ones who are frigging hackmasters, not in the good sense.
When you hire a team of developers into a position where you treat, pay, and support them (in terms of infrastructure, equipment, etc.) like cheap drones, the devs you attract (or at least the ones who stick around) will tend to be ... the drones.
I'd like to see specific examples of what was considered compatible code, what was "best practices" and what failed.
Because the moment I saw "Advanced AI grading" I was sure this doesn't really rate quality of code, but conformance to whatever contrived rules the authors thought of. Brace placement, variable naming convention, tabs vs spaces, choice in distribution of problem segments between classes, and all kinds of "flavor" decisions that don't affect quality of code, but will be picked out as "pattern mismatch".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I an not indian and I have no relationship to any people from India. I was rewuested by a potential employer to take a test using automata and I can say that the tool is not good.
I am a competent programmer who can site compilable code, however the tool does not understand modern c++ nor has good terror messages. It was a pain to get anything dine with it. I manager to produce compilable gode by using all the hacks in the book, but the result wasn't pretty.
Other thank that I have not enough data to say something about the quality of people who got rejected by this tool.
... only 36% of American/European product owners are able to produce consistent, implementable specifications?
Come on guys, stop making stuff up.
Food for thought.
Even if only 2.21% of Indian new college graduates made the highest grade, Indian universities graduate about 1 Million engineers every year. In contrast, in the USA, we get about 100k engineering graduates every year and 100% of them don't make the highest grade.
On the other hand, this company Aspiring Minds has a specific agenda...
However, the need of the hour is to find these pockets and scale them up to make an exponential impact on employability. This is crucial for India to continue its growth story and achieve the vision of India becoming the human resource provider for the whole world.
Interesting to note that one of the sales pitches they use to sell this testing product seems to be bringing up the spectre of a shortage of Indian talent causing salaries for talent growing out of control decreasing the advantage India might have in this area.
Although I understand the Indian culture seems to worshiping testing, but if I were and engineer asked to sit for this, I think I would simply just be offended by such a company. Not just because of the fact that they are trying to create a test whose end goal is to keep salaries down, but also by the audacity of a company to think that a computerized test could substitute for employment screening and job aptitude.
Then again maybe I have options. If I didn't I might just suck it in and take the test. After all, Einstein when his back was against the wall and no professorship was forthcoming, signed up to be a Patent clerk. Compared to him, in a pinch I probably should be happy with a job as a Walmart greeter, so taking this godforsaken test wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
This summary does not mention how people from other nations fare in the same test, so it is impossible to tell whether the results are particularly bad - they could even be better than average, for all we know. Of course, the reason for bringing it up here is not to present a real, scientific result, but only to confirm people in their already well-established prejudices.
So think about the scenario - you have 60 minutes to produce a program that compiles and runs, and the test tries to evaluate "programming ability, programming practices, run-time complexity and test case coverage" - that certainly sets a minimum level for the complexity of the problem; this is well beyond the "hello world" type of programs. How long would it take a person to first understand a moderately complex problem, then decide how to design the code? This depends heavily on whether you have done something very similar before, but I know that I don't in general understand the complexities of any given problem straight away and then rattle off a good design - I prefer to think out the concepts, try to put it into a context and build a design that is open ended enough to be easy to extend etc. I would have spent 60 minutes before I even got ready to write a bit of code.
Then there is the writing of code - which language are we talking about? Most compiled languages that I have worked with - and I have worked with a lot - require more than just the code; to take C as an example, there's all the includes, for one thing. How many people remember off the top of their head exactly which header file to include for every function they use? I certainly don't, and I don't need to - I look it up in the man pages. I have been presented with some of these automated tests from time to time, and I have walked out of the interview every time, because I simply don't work like that, and I refuse to work for a company where the level of understanding of what code development is as crude as that.
So, all in all, is it right to judge the skills of any engineer based on this sort of test? I have lived on my skills for several decades, and I have proven over and over that I can produce compilable code - and very good code too - but I would certainly not do well in a test like that, and I doubt many American or European programmers would fare much better than the Indian ones in this sort of test. All it can test is whether you happen to have a ready cooked solution to the problem they present you with; if you don't, you fail. It is about as reliable as using a horoscope.
And this is one of the many reasons why we shouldn't have to CARRY the rest of the world on our backs, until they have finally reached sufficiently high numbers in OUR countries to have dragged them down to the same level of poverty and misery that they created in THEIR OWN countries.
Why aren't millions of white people moving to Africa, India and China every year, if we want to live around other races so much? And if we want to become a white minority so much (which is the inevitable result of endless mass immigration INTO white countries, and ONLY into white countries, every year) - why aren't we all desperately moving to Africa, China or India, so we can become a white minority NOW?
Crappy blog spam that does not list even bare minimum to understand what's happening on that test. Yet it produces stupid ethnic/racial implications.
Burn this type of crap with fire, mods.
"Nice job", beauHD
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I think we need to know figures for other countries, to understand how good or bad it is.
#include
main()
{
printf("There you go");
}
Quality, Time, Budget
choose 2 the other one is mine to set
5/10/17. I assume it's just ignorant reporting, or maybe not, but it's the wrong criteria: hardly *anybody* can write compilable code; compilers routinely flag errors for the first draft, and programmers fix them, running from typos to function argument mis-match & etc.
At a previous job, I was the principal architect on a project that was implemented here in the US by a US team initially. They followed my designs and templates for everything. It worked, and it meant that since the code all re-used modules designed by a very small team (me and a few others), that everyone on the team followed a single vision and was able to work on other parts of the solution without much ramp up time. As time progressed, more of the dev work went overseas and I moved into a management/PM role. I would do the requirements gathering and when I had to come up with time estimates, I would think of how long it would take me (or any member of the initial team) to do it and multiply it by 2, figuring that there would always be a bit of initial ramp up time from a new team, but that would level out and disappear in subsequent phases. When I would do so, the team in Bangalore would push back telling me that it would take at least 50% more time that I had estimated. I spoke with my counterpart there one day and told him that My estimates were already twice what I would estimate for my team in the US. His response. "So we take 3x longer that your team there. We are still only 1/4 the cost so the company comes out ahead. " When I pointed this out to those above me, it was "suggested" that I revise my timeline up to more closely resemble the estimates that the Indian team gave. Reluctantly, I did. When we started receiving bug reports from the end user at a rate almost double what use had gotten during the initial phase of development and I pointed this out to those folks who has "suggested" I revise the time estimates, it was pointed out to me that even though they took 50% longer (at 25% of the cost) do do the initial work and too 50% longer to handle 200% the number of bugs (at 25%) the net cost to the company was lower than with an American dev team (the bugs worked out to basically a wash, but initial dev was cheaper) so they would continue to do things this way. It did not matter to them that development times and testing times were twice what they had been with the American team. It did not matter that the initial phases of development had built and enormous amount of good will with the customer that had completely eroded by the second or third phase of expansion using the Indian team. On a project basis, the cost was lower so it was going to be how they did things. I did try to point out that the project came is cheaper than the American team would have done, but that it tied up resources for twice the amount of time so we were probably going to be able to do less work. The response was that these were not like American workers, there was no shortage, if they need more people, they just tell the folks in India that they needed more and the team could double in size in a few days.
This is what is wrong with the whole outsourcing ideology.
To be fair, I am not a fan of outsourcing or H1B. But, as written, this article and study is grossly targeting Indian developers. There is no control group. And, the sample is limited to one group. It is not scientific in any way other than to say they used statistics.
Let's see how those of other nationalities and the products of their education system fare in a similar test.
Very few people can write compilable code, right off the bat. All you need is to forget a single semi-colon, for example.
However, this other statistics is *orders of magnitude* more damning:
Getting something to compile is easy. Making it do the job it's supposed to do is significantly harder. Having to rewrite someone elses code because they mangled it so badly as to be unsalvageable potentially wastes the time of other people who should be doing something else entirely.
Even worse than that, would be if the code the wrote just barely satisfies the requirements so people don't notice an issue... until the right circumstances causes the entire system to go nuts, corrupt data, etc. Browsing the website "Worse Than Failure" has more than plenty of examples of how bad this situation can be.
You know, following morons like you is making things worse. Your theory of how reality works is broken.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"It uses advanced artificial intelligence technology to automatically grade programming skills."
Too bad, less than 1 % of Indian graduate students are able to design and implement advanced artificial intelligence technology such that it will judge and grade programmer's skills precisely.
We have a large contingent of India-based devs.
- They do agree without understanding.
- They do agree and passively ignore.
- They CC the universe at the drop of a hat.
- They lack an understanding for even the most basic best practices. No idea what loose coupling is? Check! Piled on classes the reach 10K+ lines of copy pasted code? Big check. Arguing about the need of implementing interfaces for single implementation classes? Even bigger check.
- They will ask the SME to solve their problem before the ever check Google.
They. Are. A disaster.
And India-based managers that oversee them will invariably prioritise features over quality, let alone improvement, or *gasp* addressing tech debt that's not a crash bug.
For every 1 competent, active dev, you get 49 total automata muppets.
In India, most colleges have reservations for various category of people and this ranges up to 70%. Many of these students zero tuition and need 0 marks for admission. No company in India hires them. They mostly lend into government jobs. So 36% people can write a compilable code without access to compiler is an excellent thing. Almost all the engineers in outsourcing firms and on H1 and those who come to US for higher studies are from the non-reserved category.
...that if you had all software devs. from North America take the same test, you'd get comparable results.
Failing to include ANY measure of how this compares to performance HERE - marks this as just so much xenophobic propaganda
And I cannot lie!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ImZTwYwCug
Spoken like a true Trump supporter.