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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.
That's complete bullshit. Screenwriters don't need to be able to act. Actors don't need to be able to write. Beethoven was deaf. Einstein couldn't do simple arithmetic. RFC authors who design protocols don't need to be able to implement them. Coders who implement algorithms don't need to able to invent them.
This is a problem I typically have with programming tests. To be perfectly honest, I test horribly. The problem for me is that the way one takes programming tests is always vastly different than the environment in which one normally codes. For me, the worst are whiteboard-type tests. I can't remember when I've ever written actual code on a whiteboard at work (diagrams plenty, code no). The point is, unless you're working in an environment you're accustomed to, the difficulty of the problem is artificially magnified.
More to the point, I don't recall being in many "high stress" programming situations at work, perhaps aside from tracking down some maddening bugs, which requires more patience and doggedness than anything else. No one is going to die if some feature doesn't ship in the next 60 minutes. I do my best coding when I can take my time and calmly think about the problem, rather than giving snap answers. In the working world, if I don't know something technical, I just look it up and do my own research, or ask a colleague if that leads nowhere. And I'm terrible at coming up with the "clever programming tricks" that people seem to love to put on programming tests, but which typically have little value in actual production.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Not just a dupe, but a dupe of a HELUVA shady report. 1: it tests ALL engineering students, including Mech-E and EE, not just software-engineers. As far as I can tell the test doesn't include Computer-Science students. 2: it's not peer reviewed or published in a 3rd party publication of any sort, 3: the information is released by a company that sells the test both to engineering schools and to perspective employers, and sells training material to teach their tests to aspiring employees and to schools to pass on to students. As a result, it is in their best interest to scare the entire industry with low scores like this, and everything I can find indicates no effort was made to circumvent this bias.