
95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study - Etheryte
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-study/article9652211.ece
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aviraldg
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.

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threatofrain
Hard to trust a private study conducted by a company whose interest is in
convincing businesses that they can't effectively hire without their tests and
certifications.

Even if the figure is true, this is not the right starting point for
discussion. Also, we can do better with direct links to studies, rather than
bad journalism digests.

~~~
abeyer
It sounds like it may be worse than that. According to someone who took the
test[1] they then also offer students the chance to pay to retake for better
scores.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/66kb3c/95_engi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/66kb3c/95_engineers_in_india_unfit_for_software/dgj9pid/)

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holydude
If you hire a sweatshop you should expect a sweatshop quality. In a lot of
cases hiring these sweatshops (TCS,Wipro,Tech Mahindra etc) is just to save
money that can be then paid as bonuses to useless managers.

~~~
dolbysurnd
Having worked for TCS, I 100% agree (US base of operations in Milford Ohio). I
gtfo of there in 1.5 yrs, but holy hell was it a shit show. The thing I
learned is that many businesses will not respect the iron triangle. They will
hire the low bidder, expect it to be done quickly and beat the quality out of
them. TCS was all over that kind of work.

~~~
holydude
It's a sad thing because it's damaging serious businesses like
telcos,banks,insurance companies. But I guess the wheel is still in motion and
we can keep many people employed.

~~~
kogepathic
_> It's a sad thing because it's damaging serious businesses like
telcos,banks,insurance companies._

Doesn't matter if it's damaging to the business in the long run, it makes
their quarterly results look great, and that's all Wall Street cares about.
Headcount is down, profit is up.

Who cares if their business logic will be a hot mess in 2 years because
everyone competent got fired? Everyone high up will have already collected
their performance bonus.

Far too many companies are afraid to take long term decisions which are better
for the company but worse in the short term. This was cited as one of the
primary reasons for Dell to go private again:

 _" My partners at Silver Lake Management and I successfully took Dell private
a year ago in the largest corporate privatization in history. I’d say we got
it right. Privatization has unleashed the passion of our team members who have
the freedom to focus first on innovating for customers in a way that was not
always possible when striving to meet the quarterly demands of Wall Street."_
[0]

[0] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-dell-going-private-
is-p...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-dell-going-private-is-paying-
off-for-dell-1416872851)

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nkkollaw
I've worked with low-level Indian programmers, and they did write some crazy
code. There are also really good ones.

I refuse to believe this article, though. It seems very much a clickbait
title/article to get visitors to their website. Any study can prove pretty
much anything.

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dpratt
I'd be curious to see the success rate for US-based engineers as well. I
suspect it would be higher, but not by much at all. In my experience, outside
of the prestige companies and communities, most of the people in our field are
dangerously unskilled.

~~~
CodeSheikh
This is not a US vs India comparison. It is a "controlled" data set study done
on Indian engineers trained in India. I am sure a separate study can surface
interesting trends about US workforce as well.

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quakenul
No.

This is a case of molding a study around trying to substantiate a
predetermined (and financially motivated) goal.

Unfit to do what specific "software development" job? There are Indians
working this very vast field. Presenting them with a test they fail does not
change that fact.

If your study results in a claim that contradicts reality, you are at best
doing it horribly wrong and have at worst terrible ethics.

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manarth

      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.

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mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
zeusk
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..).

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marcgcombi
This would explain the poor code quality that often comes from off-shoring.

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rdslw
More and more software companies purely based from India deny this claim.

One of many examples competing (successfully) with (for example) California
companies (who pay around 2..4x their devs):
[http://enpass.io](http://enpass.io)

Disclaimer: I'm not Indian but European and not enpass owner/user/developer.

~~~
Klockan
5% of all engineers in India is still a sizable amount.

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XnoiVeX
This is not good journalism. Facts and figures about the study are missing and
the title is absolutely click-bait inspired.

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thyrsus
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.

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throwaway_45
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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krystiangw
I know many really great Indnian developers. I know even more really bad
Indnian developers.

I have an impression that there is huge social pressure in India to become a
developer. What makes sense is because it is a good profession.

Because many of these developers have too little capacities to become a
programmer, hence, there may be a stereotype of poor programmers from India.

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matteuan
It would be interesting to see at least the full article. Anyway, even if this
information is true, the 'study' is useless if not compared with other
countries.

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zac99
I doubt their claim without stats and facts, Company falsely claiming % for
promoting product

1\. have they reached 100% students? to claim 95%? no they have not reached
there are 500+ colleges in a single state 2\. From which engineering year
student given test, for first year most of the colleges have same syllabus for
first year 3\. Company itself mentioned using automata it was found that the
machine learning score was able to predict 22.6% good candidates

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manish7
I think you can read once. [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/indian-developers-
good-india-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/indian-developers-good-india-
when-reach-usa-become-google-pratap)

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neverminder
Related (accepted answer):
[https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/5088...](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/50884/how-
do-programmers-in-the-east-see-programmers-in-the-west)

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mibollma
I'm curious to take a look at the questions in that test. Would be interesting
to see how well they are aligned with the reality of software development.
Anybody got some of those questions?

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nv-vn
I'm confused. Is this saying they couldn't write code for machine learning, or
that the evaluation program used machine learning.

~~~
king_magic
I think it's this:
[http://www.aspiringminds.com/technology/automata](http://www.aspiringminds.com/technology/automata)

"Automata is world's most advanced and only programming assessment that uses
machine learning for grading programs."

~~~
dpratt
"It can be combined with our technology specific modules such as those in
Websphere, Power Builder and Java Swings, to form a powerful suite to test
candidates for different positions."

That pretty much sums up anything you might want to know about the nature of
the test.

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markhenderson
Has anybody here taken the automata test? Thoughts?

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

~~~
uiri
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.

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arturo-k
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."

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isarang
It talks about college grads!

