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95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

thehindubusinessline.com

21–30 of 42 posts

Re: 95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

#21

I don't believe this. I have worked with many offshore teams in the last 15 years, and the teams in India have been roughly on par with teams in Eastern Europe. The only advantage of European teams is that they seem to be better educated in areas outside of software engineering, like mathematics.

I'm an Indian, and the article is factually correct in that most engineers are unfit for software development albeit I wouldn't quote an exact figure.

Perhaps your experience was such because most of these "engineers" remain unemployed, take up another profession or join the Indian sweatshops (ie, TCS, Wipro, HCL, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Accenture etc..).

Re: 95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

#22
While the 95% claim might be somewhat accurate, I would not trust any studies by Aspiring Minds, which conducts the AMCAT employability test. My college's training and placement department recently forced everyone to answer it ("for practice"), and the quality of the questions was surprisingly poor, from English questions that were grammatically incorrect themselves, to computer science questions with all options incorrect and the worst: computer programming questions about obscure C# APIs (along the lines of "what are the parameters and the return type"), a language which pretty much no one answering the exam has ever learnt.

It's also almost exclusively used by the kind of third-grade mass-recruiting consulting companies that have given Indian developers a bad name. Which is not a surprise, since colleges (including mine) have picked up on this, and now specifically train students for such exams. Even for technical roles (supposedly, although I think spamming StackOverflow hardly qualifies), the online test rarely contains a computer science / computer programming component, and new recruits are commonly expected to undergo year-long training at their own expense even after being hired.

My dislike for Aspiring Minds is hard to put into words. It's strong enough that I would refuse to work for a company that uses them, out of fear of the unchecked incompetence of my future coworkers.

Re: 95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

#23
Meh. "write code that compiles" means to me the ability to do zero defect keyboarding. That's not so important - being able to interpret the compiler output to say - Oh, I typoed that variable name/I missed that semicolon/etc. - that is what matters.

For me, the more problematic evidence comes from the interaction colleagues and I have with actual Indian engineers. Westerners are far from perfect, but I've had a lower success rate with Indian outsourcers. As I understand it, Indian cost of living is at most 1/2 that of western countries, so I would expect a 1/2 price differential for the same quality. But that doesn't seem to happen. I'd guess it's due to upper management failing to see the difference between the Indian quality at 1/2 price and Indian quality at 1/10 price, and choosing the latter, making the former scarce.

Re: 95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

#26

  36,000 engineering students from IT related branches took [the test]
  over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles
The information missing from the report is:

1. What stage in their IT education were they in?

2. Was the test given in a language the students were meant to be familiar with?

I've been programming professionally for over 15 years, yet I wouldn't even be able to write "Hello world" in Haskell without having to look up a tutorial - because I've never used Haskell.

Re: 95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

#28
Very annoying clickbait title. Article mentions engineering students only. "Over 36,000 engineering students from 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."

Re: 95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

#29
post #24

Disgustingly irresponsible reporting. All this can do is encourage racial discrimination in hiring.

The original article is from an Indian news site targeted at Indian business people. This is relevant to that audience if they are looking to hire local developers. The study is, not coincidentally, put out by an Indian company whose products are employee tests and certifications.

I'm not sure where race/national origin factors into this if all the participants are Indian. Perhaps you could point that out? I am vaguely aware of India's caste system but I don't see any mention of it in the original article.

Re: 95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

#30
I think a lot SWE in India might not even like writing Software. It mainly provides a way to get out of the country or at least make a decent living. A lot of these Outsourcing companies will hire pretty much any College grad and just teach them how to program.
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