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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?
I haven't written a single line of compilable code at my latest job. :)
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
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.
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.
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?...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Just pointing that out.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
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
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
... only 36% of American/European product owners are able to produce consistent, implementable specifications?
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.
I write code in C, PHP, Python, Pascal, VBA, Common Lisp, Prolog, Assembler (z80, 6502, x86). I can help people with their code in C#, C++, Java, Smalltalk. From a language user point of view I am a Jack of all trades, master of none. I am very reliant on the compiler/interpreter to highlight me where I made syntactic errors or passed the wrong parameters to a function or API because in that language, the order of the parameter is different than all the other languages.
But you will not get me on the evaluation of the complexity of an algorithm. I have written programs/libraries from a wide range of domains (robotics, biology equipment, domain specific compilers, pay, stock management and ordering, automatic packing of orders, display of industrial process parameters, expert system, machine learning). You can really thrust me in software design and algorithmic, but I am still very reliant on my IDE and the compiler/interpreter to help me about typos and showing me that the construct I use is not the correct one for the language I am currently using (my black sheep is the switch/case/select construct).
Some composer were bad at playing instruments like Mahler, Berlioz, Schoenberg, Ravel. Mahler and Berlioz were just good enough to play their own composition to help them in their creative process but not in public. Schoenberg and Ravel used the help of assistants to play them what they have composed.
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.
clang practically writes your code for you.
Indeed? Is this clang thingee cheaper than Indians?
Asking for a friend with an MBA.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
[raises eyebrows]
That's exactly the kind of think^H thing you'd hope the compiler would catch. Luckily I'm such a clumsy typist that my mistakes aren't usually a valid identifier.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That always kind of bugs me whenever I read foreign resumes - I’m sure that my own resume has been tossed right in the trash because my undergrad was at Valdosta State University and not MIT. But nobody here knows the difference between the University of Moscow and the University of Leningrad, so it’s like everybody not from the United States is automatically on a level playing field.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
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.
Beethove became deaf during his work. He was not deaf when he started to compose ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
...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