95pc engineers in India unfit for coding jobs: report

As per a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, 95 percent of engineers in India are unfit for coding jobs. Owing to the shortage of talent in IT and data science, the majority of them are unfit to pursue any software development jobs, according to a report by PTI.

The report further adds that a meagre 4.77 percent of candidates are capable of writing the correct logic for a programme—which happens to be the basic requirement of any programming job. 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 two-thirds could not even write code that compiles.

While more than 60 percent candidates cannot write code that compiles, only 1.4 percent can write functionally correct and efficient code. Aspiring Minds CTO and Co-founder Varun Aggarwal said,

Lack of programming skills is adversely impacting the IT and data science ecosystem in India. The world is moving towards introducing programming to three-year-olds! India needs to catch up.

This dearth is equated to the gap in educational methods, like the widespread use of rote learning as opposed to the practical application of concepts. The lack of good teachers for programming is another reason the report mentions. Programming skills are said to be five times poorer for tier-III colleges as compared to tier-I colleges.

Sixty-nine percent of candidates from the top 100 colleges are able to write a compilable code versus rest of the colleges where only 31 percent are able to write a compilable code, the report said.

Busting the myths of engineering in India, a YourStory article talks about the misconceptions of the field and why the younger lot follow the herd. The writer analyses how most students who graduate find themselves struggling to land a job, that is of course, after having foregone the dream of a good job. Why is this?

All engineering colleges promise 100 percent placements at the time of joining. But only the most esteemed institutions (a handful of the over 3,000 approved colleges in India) bag companies that offer the ‘dream job’ that every student is promised. The rest of the students are forced to settle for low paying jobs by mass recruiters in the IT sector, regardless of their subject. For instance, most mechanical engineers work as software engineers for lack of a better option.

The IT industry takes in 50 to 75 percent of engineers—a large number—for one reason: with the mass production of engineers, there is more supply than there is demand. So going by the basic laws of economics, an engineer’s value is highly reduced. This is the main reason why most engineers—about 30 percent of the 15 lakh graduates every year— are unemployed (or underpaid), which is a depressingly large number.