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95% Engineers in India Unfit For Software Development Jobs: Report (gadgetsnow.com) 453

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.
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95% Engineers in India Unfit For Software Development Jobs: Report

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:35AM (#54268765)

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

    • by Tukz ( 664339 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:38AM (#54268775) Journal

      Racist.

    • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @09:08AM (#54269347)

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

    • Re:I have a dream (Score:5, Insightful)

      by segedunum ( 883035 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @09:19AM (#54269461)
      I don't know why it has to be branded as racist and India is an irrelevance to the point. The fact is, when companies scrape the bottom of the barrel for least cost this is what they get.
      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        I don't know why it has to be branded as racist and India is an irrelevance to the point. The fact is, when companies scrape the bottom of the barrel for least cost this is what they get.

        While this may well be true, the headline has nothing to do with TFA. TFA (I know, I know) is about engineering students not workers employed in the field. Of course, if you go with the cheapest source of outsourcing, you get the company that hires from that unfit 95%.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ElRabbit ( 2624627 )
      I think we shall consider also the abysmal skills of IT workers all around the world ... India is just having more issues than others. India must have difficulties with initial training and there is not enough skilled engineers on the market to perform additional training later. Manager are very keen to recognize the existence of individual performance when it is related to their bonus but completely blind when it comes to replace a skilled worker with a cheaper one (to get a bigger bonus). You can get s
      • I have that problem with my cat. If you buy him the very cheap stinking cat food with more gelatine than meat in it, he just ends up eating twice as much. So just buy him the good stuff, and you are still OK

      • Re:I have a dream (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, 2017 @10:42AM (#54270163)

        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.

    • Label me what you want. I think there's still some room between "fascist" and "SJW" on the label pile behind me, just toss it there, I'll ignore later.

      In the meantime, let's get on with a sensible discussion. Content is what matters. If reality offends someone, I somehow don't think the problem is on your end.

    • by rhazz ( 2853871 )
      Your dream can't be realized until the same test results are generated for a western demographic. Until then you cannot draw conclusions as it would be assuming that your own demographic is inherently better.
    • [...] or using excessive PC language.

      Would that be C++ or Java?

  • My experience... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:38AM (#54268777)

    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.

    • Re: My experience... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pchasco ( 651819 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:58AM (#54268887)
      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.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:33AM (#54269121) Homepage Journal

        Doesn't sound like it's anything specific to India though, the same stuff happens in the west all the time. It's the standard case of they send the best people to meet you and write a spec, but the people implementing it have little knowledge of your systems or business and you want to pay the peanuts so they aren't interesting in doing more than the bare minimum.

        I've had products like that from western developers. Had some firmware written by a contractor where a CLI was specified. If you entered more than 64 characters it would overwrite the stack and crash in the best case, lock up in the worst. When asked about it he said the spec didn't say it needed to check buffer sizes or not crash if not used in the exact way that the manual specified, with no room for error.

        • Re: My experience... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by CODiNE ( 27417 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:50AM (#54269219) Homepage

          That's part of why I'm moving over to security instead of continuing as a programmer. The rush to bring in new people means untrained guys writing horrible insecure code daily.

        • As an engineer you need to measure things. Crap by USA: 20%. Crap by Asia: 95%. Crap by Management decisions: 99% (that may be low).

        • No, it doesn't have to be specific to India. Incompetence knows no borders. But there are large Indian companies who run their businesses in this way. Best and brightest in front of customers, bottom of the barrel talent that can be paid low wages offshore.
        • by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) * on Thursday April 20, 2017 @10:32AM (#54270089)

          When asked about it he said the spec didn't say it needed to check buffer sizes or not crash if not used in the exact way that the manual specified, with no room for error.

          I don't see a problem with this. You want specific levels of error handling? Put it in the spec.

          • by Orgasmatron ( 8103 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @11:16AM (#54270421)

            That's a good way to get into specification-paralysis: assume that the programmers have absolutely no idea what is reasonable and specify everything down to the absolute smallest detail. Might as well just write it yourself if you are going to assume that your programmer is exactly as dumb as the compiler.

          • by epine ( 68316 )

            I don't see a problem with this. You want specific levels of error handling? Put it in the spec.


            #include "no_abe_normal.h"

            If you're not familiar with this convention (it appears you haven't been in this business long enough to hear the pathetic whimpers of Forma L. val d'Ation sequestered away from public shame in an attic antechamber), the "h" stands for "head".

      • ...the work churned out by the offshore team was abysmal. Inefficient, convoluted, and just plain dumb in many cases...

        I think it is possible to talk about these things without being unkind, and we ought to make the effort, in my view.

        I have worked as part of global teams for about 16 years, including large teams in Bangalore (as well as most of Europe, the States, China and others), and I do recognise some of the problems you mention, but I don't think it is lack of skills. I get the impression that it is more a question about lack of motivation, due to factors like very poor management practices - if you are regarded by

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      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).

      But somehow you managed. Which suggests to me that you did not have to re-write EVERYTHING. I am sure there was a lot of bug fixes and re-work but the off shore folks mush have produced some useful code, at least "framed up" the application successfully enough that your reduced team could fix it. Which suggests to me that under the old model there were lots of people in your group doing work that was far below their talent level / pay grade. It sounds like management has made the right call here, they g

      • by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @09:12AM (#54269383)

        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.

        • You can't fix framing that is out of square once it's up. Somebody on the crew has to be clueful.

          If you want a _brain dead_ building trade, that would be 'painter'. Even there, the good ones can plaster flat as glass.

    • It's happening in "traditional" engineering (i.e., not software engineering) also. Offshored work comes back and has to be fixed by minimal staff who don't complain because they fear for their jobs.
  • I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:40AM (#54268783)

    What the numbers would look like in the US.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It sounds like the test was designed to produce this result, so probably the same. TFA claims that 60% of candidates couldn't even write code that compiled... Well, that seems exceedingly unlikely, doesn't it? I mean, maybe it doesn't do what it is supposed to do, or maybe it is crap quality or whatever, but 60% couldn't even get it to compile?

      Maybe they got them to write the code out on paper and didn't allow them to test it against the compiler and make corrections. A single typo and it fails to build kin

      • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        When I have problems with outsourced developer not even able to read specifications and get the intent of the specifications written I know that the article is telling the truth - and may even be whitewashing the actual state.

      • Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Informative)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @09:00AM (#54269291)
        I was somewhat skeptical of the numbers as well, and found a previous year's version of the same survey: 2016 Report (PDF) [aspiringminds.com] It seems that part of the problem is that it looks at any type of engineer, whether computer, electrical, software, or mechanical. It also measures employability in fields such as civil engineering, chemical engineering, and other fields that have nothing to do with software development. The numbers for some of those fields are higher than the number quoted in the summary, which leads me to believe that a reasonably chunk of the engineers surveyed have no desire to program at all or pursue a career in it.

        There are some other interesting figures in the report, but it's quite large. Seems like this is another case of a reporter not understanding a study and making a bad headline.
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I think you are too generous, the author of the article is deliberately distorting the facts to make a point which confirms the reader's prejudices.

      • Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @09:06AM (#54269327) Homepage Journal

        We've got a lot of experienced programmers here, and a lot of good and intelligent people. They've managed to create a colossal fuck-up and still believe it's well-designed and functional and doesn't need any real architectural rework. The one guy who's a giant nerd and actually studies beyond the ok-plateu is correlating all the fires to real understanding of architectural flaws; and of course the non-programmer (me) who studied project management is looking at the spread of expert knowledge and coming to the conclusion that that guy's right.

        So probably 95% of programmers are idiots who found a chainsaw and think they know what they're doing because they can hit a tree with it.

      • In my experience as a team lead/hiring manager:

        * We had a simple test that any developer should expect to pass.
        * Hiring with highly competitive wages and benefits in one of the top tech markets in the US
        * We only interviewed people with a degree in computer science
        * We had a lower than 20% success rate at candidates writing working code (even ignoring syntax problems and semicolons, and just looking at logic flow)


        What was this massively hard test?
        1) Write a function that uses recursion to output
        • We had a lower than 20% success rate at candidates writing working code (even ignoring syntax problems and semicolons, and just looking at logic flow)

          This statement makes me believe that your candidates were asked to write program without a compiler handy. That's not really a useful test.

      • It sounds like the test was designed to produce this result, so probably the same. TFA claims that 60% of candidates couldn't even write code that compiled... Well, that seems exceedingly unlikely, doesn't it?

        It's why the fizz-buzz test exists. A surprising number of "programmers" can't write a simple program from scratch in their language of choice.

        It just smells of total BS to me, I mean if it were true then no-one in India would be hiring those people and their university system would collapse.

        In some se

    • My guess would be that at least 15% of US engineers would be fit to produce software by the Indian criterea. The other 85% can do website development or, if unfit for even that, can get an MBA and become managers.

      • by ruir ( 2709173 )
        I am really curious to know... How many do you guess would be able to write criterion or criteria?
        Indians are a bunch of idiots.
      • If everything fails, break his fingers and retrain him as a consultant.

  • by conquistadorst ( 2759585 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:42AM (#54268799)
    Pretty sure my parent company still outsources to all of them. I hate making large broad statements, but I've never yet met one I was impressed by. Seems to whole business model for outsourcing revolves around everything being so cheap you can rebuild it 5x and still come out ahead on direct project costs. As for impacting the business with garbage software, that doesn't cost anything, right?
    • Pretty sure my parent company still outsources to all of them. I hate making large broad statements, but I've never yet met one I was impressed by. Seems to whole business model for outsourcing revolves around everything being so cheap you can rebuild it 5x and still come out ahead on direct project costs. As for impacting the business with garbage software, that doesn't cost anything, right?

      I think when these companies initially court you, they typically have some very talented people help make the sell. These people can talk the talk and walk the walk. Once there is ink on paper, even before the signature dries, they're off to the next sale.

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Its basically the same as manufacturing in China. It can be done well, but for the most part since the primary motivation is cost corners will be cut.
    • Remember that most of the countries where work is outsourced to are big on (often dubious) 'credentials' and are rarely cultures where asking questions is encouraged. Not to mention traditional corruption levels in those countries (but I suppose the west is catching up in that regard). Hey - Technology and Cultural Transfer / Exchange is a good thing, isn't it?
  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:47AM (#54268831)

    I heard that 3/4 of the people working on Windows 10 couldn't write code that compiles, so I understand why they are hiring from India. ;)

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:50AM (#54268845)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It is well past time for "engineer" to be made to mean something in programming. Engineers code to standards and use best practices. Programmers bash keyboards until code appears that more or less works. I am in the latter group to the extent that I am even qualified to call myself either of these things, and have only respect for people who do things the "right" way. (Sometimes bashing will produce the desired result, I'm not here to bash bashing.)

      We need programmers in certain disciplines to be held to ce

  • by Ihlosi ( 895663 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:51AM (#54268857)
    I am shocked! I cannot describe how shocked I am.
  • Engineers? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:53AM (#54268867)

    Why would Engineers write code? Shouldn't those Engineers get back to driving the trains and leave the programming for the programmers?

    / Call me a Software Developer. Call me a Programmer. Call me a Code Monkey even. I am not an Engineer. Calling programmers "Engineers" is stupid. It's like calling janitors "sanitation experts" or secretaries "office administrators". Call a rose a rose and stop all this silly flowery job titles.

    • by Ihlosi ( 895663 )
      Why would Engineers write code

      Because management is too stingy to pay for an engineer and someone who writes the code? Just an example.

    • Computer Engineers, Software Engineers....how that Potsy....
      • Computer Engineers, Software Engineers....how that Potsy....

        It's changing a title of a job from one that is functional and meaningful, to one that is meant to stoke the ego and sound grandiose at the expense of being accurate.

        The problem is, just like "Janitor" became "Custodian" became "Sanitation Engineer", the same thing is going to happen to programming. Give it a few decades a programmers will be called "Software Surgeons".

        Personally, I would rather just be called what I am, and not given some stupid title. I'm not so shallow that I need some flowery title ap

  • yeah either that or the test was bullshit

  • The travelling salesman problem?
  • From what I've seen in my grad program (mid-tier US university), I'd say the figure is closer to 99%.

    They're expert liars, though.

  • by achacha ( 139424 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:05AM (#54268935)

    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.

    • I think there are many talented and smart developers in India (as anywhere else).

      That's probably true, but this statistic doesn't tell us anything about that. It only tell us that only 5% of the people you might have writing your code if you outsource to India are people you might want to have writing your code. Of course, talent is not evenly distributed. You could wind up above that baseline. Or you could wind up below it.

  • by nedlohs ( 1335013 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:06AM (#54268945)

    It's a company trying to sell their assessment products that are more marketable the higher the number they manage to produce out of their "study". Extrapolating "36,000 engineering students from IT related branches of over 500 colleges" to " engineers in the country" seems a little generous as well. Most of the students in IT related branches I've met are also really crap at programming - because they aren't actually doing programming or because they are first years who haven't managed to learn anything yet.

    That said most of the people I have interviewed for programming positions I would put in the "can't program" category too. Not 95%, but probably 60%.

    And I would expect the Indian IT education system to have more than its fair share of really bad "colleges" compared with say the US (and note that the US has things like "ITT Technical Institute"). It's a bigger country population wise with worse infrastructure and government oversight. The good programmers seem far more likely to go and get a job overseas than they do to take up an academic career in an Indian college...

  • I have worked on many outsourced projects. So much so, that my position transitioned from being a software developer to one who provides development support. So I do the things they can't complete. Anything from browser interaction problems to performance to security. One might think I have a jaded view - and this is something I am always assuming that I have. I have seen everything from absolute incompetence to some "diamonds in the rough".

    That said, I believe the issue in India is the way the problem is a

  • by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:27AM (#54269075) Homepage

    Though I'd love to believe this is true, promising something you want to believe is the easiest marketing scam of all.
    I've worked enough with Indian developers to know that although the percentage of incompetents is high, it is not close to 95%
    Automata, the tool used for this, is a commercial job interview assessment tool.
    This company benefits greatly from making it appear that most hiring candidates are unfit for the job; it creates a need for their product.

  • by Kenneth Stephen ( 1950 ) on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:29AM (#54269095) Journal

    So there is probably a lot of truth in the reporting, but the shock value of the story comes from the numbers. 95% you say! Oh my! We cannot have any Indians write code! The details, in this case, matter a great deal, so lets take a look at some of the unanswered questions that may impact the accuracy of that number.

    * What does "...not write code that compiles" mean? Were the people being tested provided an IDE? I'm an expert Java programmer, but if I were to open up a text file and type Java code, odds are pretty good that my code won't compile on the first try. That's what IDE's are there for - to fix the inane syntax issues. But lets say that the IDE's were provided. What sort of languages were used in the test? Were the test takers familiar in the language being used? Was the measurement really meaning that they ran out of time to make the program compile or that they were incapable of making it compile because they really weren't a programmer? I note that the "cannot even compile" statistic is 2/3 - not 95% according to TFA. Still bad, but details are needed to see what was being measured.
    * What does the sample mean? TFA says that the sample size was 36000, but how does this compare to the universe out there, and who made up the sample? Were these graduates in computer science or first year students or people already working in the field? What was the level of quality for these universities? Where did the 5% who did good come from, and did those 5% come from the really good schools? Was the sample size structured to represent the real world distribution of quality in educational institutions?
    * Bias: who is aspiring minds, and what is their motivation? Are they tied to a particular agenda? Is there a competing country that wants their programmers to be hired over Indian programmers pushing these stats? I will point out that there were numerous doctors pushing the agenda of the tobacco industry, and numerous scientists pushing the agenda of the oil industry (global warming). So, yes, the affiliations need to be clear.

    I will also point out that in the silicon valley, Indian engineers are present in high numbers. And a lot of the clamor for getting Indians into the US comes from companies in that area. If 95% of them were useless, I can't help but think that there would be less demand.

  • So far the company work for have had multiple interactions with outsourced 'developers'. I can't even use the word "incompetent" because that implies that they have at least some skill at their job, and that's patently untrue.

    Every. Single. Project. that they were involved in became a nightmare. The time and effort required for babysitting them, and correcting their (sometimes incredible) mistakes was greater than our own work.

    While I'm sure there are exceptions, in general I would say that this article

  • Soooo, a "machine learning" system made this evaluation. I'll bet other machines got perfect scores. Bias much?

  • I work for a university here in the US and have an opinion about why this seems reasonable. It is a sociological problem like someone here already mentioned. I was one of the few developers on my team back in India who really knew their shit when I worked back home. I think this stems from how I got into my programming career. I wasn't trained in programming by my company or college. I graduated in Electronics and picked up programming to make games and got good at it because I liked it. A lot of people wh
  • Best Programmer I ever knew was Indian.

    Also, most of the worst programmers I ever knew were too. Just like everywhere, they produce quality and low quality programmers.

  • Unfortunately I am not surprised. But it's not an India specific problem. I interview people from all over and end up rejecting very high percentages of them.
    Where they come from (school, country, degree level, etc) has so little to do with how well people do that I just ignore all that. You can either think a problem through and code up a solution or you can't.

    I would really love to take their test. Knowing what they ask and how well I got graded on it would definitely help me judge if this test has an

  • My supervisor at Cisco had me sat in on a conference call with the developers in India trying to convince them that they didn't fix a crash bug and incrementing the build number by one didn't fix the problem. The developers tried to get me involved to go against my supervisor. I pretended to have phone problems and played dumb.

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