Report Claims 95% of Engineering Students in India Unfit for Software Development Jobs

dgz said:
No, this is solely about shitting on the Indians. Are you surprised? I massaged my eyes preemptively just in case
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Unfortunately it isn't about that. This is just the reality of overseas indian code houses. There is a night and day difference between those and the ones who actually comes over here as H1b's. Sure I might get frustrated at the H1B's from time to time, but they are usually on par with most any other developer and just happen to cost less. The code houses that are strictly over in India are another thing entirely. Those are just cesspools of the bottom of the bottom of the barrel of coders. Honestly I wouldn't even call the people they hire coders as I'm pretty sure a monkey throwing feces at a keyboard could write better code. This is based on years of first hand experience trying to get a usable project out of more than a few of those companies.
 
Seems to oddly correlate to the percentage of BS resumes I receive from perspective Indian IT candidates. It says here you have more Degrees, Diplomas, Engineer certs and tickets than an entire department of faculty professors combined and you would like to relocate from your unverifiable prestigious position in Toronto to our college and be an entry IT tech? Yup. Sounds legit. You are hired :rolleyes:
 
I was curious, but the Automata company has no trial or evaluation versions, or even a place to purchase ..... just cryptic 'contact us'. Maybe it doesn't even exist, pure 'Fake News'?

Yes, I would like to see how I score, sounds like fun ;)
 
dgz said:
No, this is solely about shitting on the Indians. Are you surprised? I massaged my eyes preemptively just in case
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Well, a lot of coding gets outsourced to India and the stuff that comes back is pure garbage.

This helps explain why.

I do some side work with a software startup. They went that route at first. Wasted money and time on a local dev house that outsourced everything to India devhouses.

Not the first time I've heard that story.
 
VIC-20 said:
Seems to oddly correlate to the percentage of BS resumes I receive from perspective Indian IT candidates. It says here you have more Degrees, Diplomas, Engineer certs and tickets than an entire department of faculty professors combined and you would like to relocate from your unverifiable prestigious position in Toronto to our college and be an entry IT tech? Yup. Sounds legit. You are hired :rolleyes:
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Only a true racist would refuse to hire overly "educated" Indian applicants.

/s
 
Biznatch said:
The same applies to local developers from what I've seen working at software development companies for years. You would not believe the amount of developers we have to churn through to find someone who can write good efficient code that meets the requirements. And these were in 6 figure positions.... Typically have to go through 4+ people to get 1 good candidate.
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lol this reminds me a few years ago when I was still doing helpdesk level work. I got a call from a "software developer" we just hired and she was complaining about her computer being slow.

So I after I connected to her machine the first thing I did was open the task manager to see what was going on. She had 15 chrome tabs open using about 4GB of ram on a 8GB of ram machine. So I said maybe you should try closing chrome!

After I got off that call I said to myself they hired you to write code........
 
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Dekoth-E- said:
Unfortunately it isn't about that. This is just the reality of overseas indian code houses. There is a night and day difference between those and the ones who actually comes over here as H1b's. Sure I might get frustrated at the H1B's from time to time, but they are usually on par with most any other developer and just happen to cost less. The code houses that are strictly over in India are another thing entirely. Those are just cesspools of the bottom of the bottom of the barrel of coders. Honestly I wouldn't even call the people they hire coders as I'm pretty sure a monkey throwing feces at a keyboard could write better code. This is based on years of first hand experience trying to get a usable project out of more than a few of those companies.
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I get that. In fact, I've never met a single person with opposite experience. Thing is, though, how do they stay in business if it's indeed that bad? It's too crazy

I guess this reply would have to do for you too, Spidey329.
 
face2palm said:
Only a true racist would refuse to hire overly "educated" Indian applicants.

/s
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Yeah, that is an issue unfortunately. It appears racist to decline Indian applications to HR, but luckily we are a school and they understand that it would take 6 years to get a engineering Masters in India and 8 different candidates aged an average 21 years old wouldn't all have 6-7 of them each lol.
 
dgz said:
I get that. In fact, I've never met a single person with opposite experience. Thing is, though, how do they stay in business if it's indeed that bad? It's too crazy

I guess this reply would have to do for you too, Spidey329.
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Money and nothing more. Simply put it will eventually get done to a passable degree. It is the mentality of "I don't care if it takes 100 tries if it saves us a penny after it is all done".
 
Uvaman2 said:
isnt windows made in india? (not a joke question)
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How dare you! No, it's made right here in Redmond, WA. By Indians.

I wish I was joking, but not really. Some of these guys are actually pretty bright, and some of my night shift counterparts are Indian (in India) and seem to be good chaps. However there is a world of difference in the experience base. I don't work for MS - got told I was the wrong color - but I used to live right next to the campus, and the whole area has tons of Indians. I wouldn't have a problem if it was organic, but most of these guys are H1B, and that's not about anything else but control. I know some English, Irish, and Swedish H1Bs too.

Maybe prevailing wages would be higher without H1Bs, maybe not. But I will tell you that the majority of the ones I know, the costs are borne by the company due to the level of control they have over these people.

Imagine you work for a company, and not only can you not job-surf over to a competitor, but if you don't want to work 70-80 hours a week you have to pull your whole family up, sell all your possessions, and move back to Hyderabad. And you know this, and they know this, and you know they know and they know you know they know. That's control. That's power. You don't get that if you hire an American who can tell you to pound sand and walk if he/she doesn't like the working conditions or compensation.
 
flashoverride said:
Imagine you work for a company, and not only can you not job-surf over to a competitor, but if you don't want to work 70-80 hours a week you have to pull your whole family up, sell all your possessions, and move back to Hyderabad. And you know this, and they know this, and you know they know and they know you know they know. That's control. That's power. You don't get that if you hire an American who can tell you to pound sand and walk if he/she doesn't like the working conditions or compensation.
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...but they know this coming over, right? And they still come?
 
IdiotInCharge said:
...but they know this coming over, right? And they still come?
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All day every day, with thousands (millions) more waiting in line. If you're from the US and haven't lived elsewhere, maybe you don't understand the appeal of the US to people all around the world.
 
Sonicks said:
From the article: "Over 36,000 engineering students form IT related branches of over 500 colleges "

At the University of North Texas, all IT engineering degrees (that weren't Computer Science) took at least enough coding class hours to learn more than the basics. And it makes sense that the students would have a more well-rounded idea of what they were doing even if they wouldn't be coding the rest of their life. So this statistic is still pretty worrying. The percentage should not be that high...
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Did a semester before saying 'fuck this' and going business route but you are exactly right - it's the same process in New Zealand.
Seems India is missing something out. What exactly do they teach these 'Software Engineers'? Pajeet can often be more troublesome than the savings, same goes for China if you don't know what you are doing.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
...but they know this coming over, right? And they still come?
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There might also be other factors for them to tolerate the working condititions, such as:

1. The money (IE they'll tolerate it, as even with lower wages, it might make them more than they'll ever make back home)

2. The working conditions, god forbid, might actually be better than back home.

In a high population density country like India, job competition can be very vicious.
 
flashoverride said:
All day every day, with thousands (millions) more waiting in line. If you're from the US and haven't lived elsewhere, maybe you don't understand the appeal of the US to people all around the world.
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chenw said:
There might also be other factors for them to tolerate the working condititions, such as:

1. The money (IE they'll tolerate it, as even with lower wages, it might make them more than they'll ever make back home)

2. The working conditions, god forbid, might actually be better than back home.

In a high population density country like India, job competition can be very vicious.
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Look, I get what you guys are saying; thing is, the US isn't the only place that has better working conditions than a developing nation like India, and yet they're choosing to work in what they know is a compromised position with very little bargaining power. Put another way, this is on them, for accepting the position, not the companies for 'abusing' their power.

(I'm also of a mind that we should tighten up H1-B's, first to make underpaying these people versus local population as untenable as possible, and second to afford them some protections so they have a little more leverage)
 
I think one major part of the problem is that it is possible to graduate by cheating your way through the degree.

Not sure if that is the case everywhere in India, but one of our scholarship students who got a B.Sc in computer science from India said that if you had to write a paper or essay for some university course, you would just go into the next print store and choose one from a wide selection of topics. Then pay the normal photocopy price, submit, receive perfect grade.
bugleyman said:
What is the difference between pass-by-value and pass-by-reference?
What is the difference between the assignment operator and the equals logical operator?
What is the difference between the heap and the stack?
What is a pointer and why might I use one? What are the downsides?
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Why is it a bad idea to parse HTML with regular expressions?
Should you use floating point math to deal with decimal currency subunits (e.g. represent $1.50 as the floating point number 1.5)?
Do integer math operations always satisfy algebraic properties like commutativity or associativity?
 
bugleyman said:
I would (and have) been far more inclined to ask questions that would tell me if the person understands basic programming concepts.

Like:

What is the difference between pass-by-value and pass-by-reference?
What is the difference between the assignment operator and the equals logical operator?
What is the difference between the heap and the stack?
What is a pointer and why might I use one? What are the downsides?

Etc.

Of course, my POV is very C-centric and I haven't programmed in at least fifteen years.
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And I think that's the problem with most western interviews. The CS interview is completely screwed up and not really useful for judging quality candidates. For the most part, it's usually just a way for the interviewers to knock down a candidate and brag how they're good, rather than see how good a candidate is. White boarding, asking esoteric questions about functionality almost no one ever uses, etc. are all common themes companies use. Even the "simple" logic question above, as you pointed out, is just not needed, as you pointed out. I mean, professionally, I have a couple decades of C++ experience, but I'll admit I've grown so comfortable with modern IDEs, that very simple questions can catch me. And often these interviews are asking questions I haven't even had to touch since I was in college (and even at the job itself, I'll never need to ever worry about it).

I mean, even when it comes to pressure, having 3 people stare at you to make sure you didn't forget a ; is completely different than the pressure of a deadline. My boss doesn't stare over my shoulder while I'm working, and I doubt he does you. I'll fully admit, I'm not a great public speaker, but I didn't claim to be on my resume, nor did I interview as one. And yes, I use Stack Overflow and the MSDN Library quite often. I'm (not really) sorry for my total nubishness.

Right now, the art of the interview is an additional skillset you need as well as knowing how to actually get work done, and people tend to fall into one category or another, but seldom both, and companies wonder why even their hires are just not performing.
 
Parja said:
Yeah, it's pretty sad. The developer positions I've hired for don't require a huge swath of coding knowledge, but they require at least a solid understanding of the fundamentals and a general understanding of logic.

I've given the "Swap the values of two integer variables without using an intermediate temporary variable" challenge in many interviews, asking the interviewee to use any sort of programming language or pseudocode they're comfortable with, and have had so many blank stares it makes my brain hurt.
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1) You could concatenate one variable using ^10 into the other and position shift, not writing the code for that.


2) You can use addition/subtraction.
Starting with a=10 b=5
a=a+b (a=15, b=5)
b=a-b (a=15, b=10)
a=a-b (a=5, b=10)

3) Use a stack, technically it is NOT a "variable".
Push ax
Push bx
Pop ax
Pop bx


4) or the cheater way using ASM: xchg ax, bx


What do I win?
 
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American study finds 95% of university graduates only learned getting drunk and partying all nite. 95% of High School students only good at throwing a football or passing notes. 95% of technical college students well educated .
 
Ahh, finally some proof that the H1B Visa program just allows companies to screw themselves with cheap but crappy labor. "Penny-wise, pound foolish"
 
A few things here, since hey, as lead dev at work I am in on the interviews with future devs :)

1) I never care if you get 100% of the hard core technical answers correct. I'm not perfect, I damn well don't know everything off the top of my head. That said, if you put on your resume that you've built WebApi RESTful services, then yes, I expect you to tell me what HTTP verbs you used, how you went about setting it up, describing how WebApi works, etc.

2) I can share the sentiment that offshore tends to be less than stellar. We're trying very hard to help ours learn, but sometimes I think I'm just pissing in the wind.

3) I agree 100% with the sentiment of Software Engineering becoming a SERIOUS engineering discipline. This is coming from a guy WITHOUT a degree. The sheer amount of lazy, half assed code I deal with on a day to day basis is *extraordinary*. I saw this coming 20 years ago - as the world gets more and more interconnected, software NEEDS to be held to a higher standard!! We've passed the point of a piece of software causing real damage in the real world, yet Software Engineers aren't held to the same level of professionalism as a Civil or any other Engineer. It's aggravating, to an extreme level.
 
TordanGow said:
I know the other questions, but I never really used html.

My guess would be some type of issue with matching special characters/tags?
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HTML is context free, and regex can't handle all the different ways of representing html. It's just nearly impossible to do :)
 
VIC-20 said:
Seems to oddly correlate to the percentage of BS resumes I receive from perspective Indian IT candidates. It says here you have more Degrees, Diplomas, Engineer certs and tickets than an entire department of faculty professors combined and you would like to relocate from your unverifiable prestigious position in Toronto to our college and be an entry IT tech? Yup. Sounds legit. You are hired :rolleyes:
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Well, India is the place some other IT fields go to get their certs, since well...you don't have to study or know anything to get your cert in India. Go there on vacation, leave there with 50 certs under your belt. The same services is also available from China.

Had a couple ppl go there for vacation and when they came back. Miraculously, they had a bunch of new certs they did.
 
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