Over 80% of engineering graduates in India unemployable

To be honest the IT workforce arent engineers at first place, I take it these 80% mostly comprise of that very IT/CS crowd because of mushrooming engineering colleges, my small city has 6 engineering colleges.
I have been hiring freshers every year from engineering colleges in my city, its so surprising that none of them seem to be having a working brain, dull as hell, All they want is a job and dont want to use brain or like to learn or explore or create anything, Yes they can be good with infosys and accenture to add more heads but for startups they are tryly useless, they do not know any coding, they dont learn anything at colleges but only 1.5 months courses in java or some other thing at some high rise institute, woah. This doesnt makes you a programmer to be, it needs brain, enthusiasm and love for life to become a successful employable person in IT sector atleast.
 
95% of indian firms are filled with egoist a$$*** too!! DONT GIVE BULLSHITS LIKE THESE. If a person like MODI can become prime minister of india then what is being discussed here is irrelevant. I know what happens. I know many people & their depth of knowledge too but still they are working in big firms in big posts & they take interviews!!! what a funny show! These days contact system is going on too much you have higher & better contacts you get the job it does not matter how you are. Another thing these guys say they need someone extraordinary but the salary they will pay is less than ordinary. That's why many good students get our of this country. Yes fundamental is important & many people knows them too. in india & its 121 crore population you cant find any person is just BS.
 
^^ You are missing the point. The article says that 80% are unemployable, not unemployed. It means that even when there are opportunities, these people do not have the skills worthy enough to get employed. The only companies which have no problems hiring are the IT services biggies which focus on quantity and cost rather than quality. Companies that focus on quality (with remuneration to match) are having a very hard time filling vacancies. My company could not hire a single person after visiting over 25 Engineering campuses. I myself could not find a single person good enough in close to 100 off-campus interviews that I did over last year and not to mention that I wan't the only guy doing the interviews.

To be honest, IT services biggies are in part responsible for this situation by being lax and irresponsible about the quality of their hires. They have been offering jobs to a lot of unqualified people and they almost never fire them and so, there is no incentive to skill up or perform unless they are trying to move to a company with better pay. I was actually horrified by the skill level of the people in these companies often despite 8~10 years of work experience.

Unfortunately, the business model of these companies is also tuned for that kind of mentality. They take a 1 month project, put 50 or 100 people on it and turn it into a 1 year project so that they can bill the client for all that head count and bloated duration. Further, if the work delivered is ridden with defects, they can possibly score a maintenance contract as well.

Overall, this is not going to bode well for the software sector in the country or for any of the other engineering disciplines if this is going to continue like this.
Well said! I also feel our education system has to contribute to this to some extent. The courses are not updated; they are redundant. Plus, they are structured in such a way that there is no true scope for industry engagement. I also feel that re-skilling is very slow as by the time students graduate, industry has moved on already!
 
actually, it is a foolish statement.
because you can even be employed in the USA if you don't have a good degree.
and you will be fine.

 
actually, it is a foolish statement.
because you can even be employed in the USA if you don't have a good degree.
and you will be fine.

That may be true. But it is an exception and not a rule. If you don't have a good degree, you have to have proven skills. What I am talking about is not limited to jobs in USA as that is not the end goal for everyone. I am talking of quality of education.
 
if you look at the industry of India, they have bankrupted the Indian banks.
NPA stood at 10%.
As of June 2016, the total amount of Gross Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) for public and private sector banks is around Rs. 6 lakh crore

today news came that banks in Jharkhand have 13 % NPA.
The same story is for India also. They are just hiding it for now.
So whatever workforce Indian industry have, is also not performing good enough.

a lot can be said . Question is what do you want me to say.
 
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Yes fundamental is important & many people knows them too. in india & its 121 crore population you cant find any person is just BS.

Sorry, In about 400 odd interviews I have done in my career, only 4~5 people have had good enough basics to get selected. While there were a few who got rejected for not being good enough for the position, the problem is that a significant majority made me wonder how they even have a job at all. There are people with 8~12 years experience that I would not deem eligible for a entry level software engineer role. There are two positions at my company that are unfilled for nearly 2 years now due to not finding suitable people even after doing 100+ interviews. So. yeah, regardless of how much population our country has and how may degrees our colleges churns out, it does matter at the end of the day when you can't find people suitable to hold the jobs.

Of course, you can give a job to anybody, but its important to understand what kind of value they are going to add. The worst case scenario is not that you hire people who don't make any difference, but hiring people who cause negative impact. For example. when you add a person to a project with 4 people working on it already to finish in 25 days, the expectation is that it would now take 20 days ideally. But sometimes, it also happens after adding a certain person, the project takes 50 days to finish. Those are the kind of resources you can find a lot in our job market and why I am very picky when recruiting. our IT services sector doesn't mind hiring them because they see every one as a head in the head count against which they can bill a client.

Our education model is partly a reason for this, but it is not really an excuse for at least the IT streams where there is plenty of opportunity for self learning.
 
One big problem is bad healthcare in India.
one thing it affects is the brain development. So even a student want to perform, the unrepairable damage to brain and health has already been done.
This is one big reason for bad performance in India.
 
I have more than 2 degrees from almost different fields & from my experience I can say the discussion is completely irrelevant. Yes strong fundamentals are required for strong posts where you have a higher responsibility like research head etc. For other posts you don't require that much knowledge. Also people are exposed to different fields in their jobs then you should ask questions only regarding their field & strictly mention that you only require people with those skills. Like I said before making the argument by considering a small portion is not good,

Regarding the education system then yes I agree in india the colleges are not that good to extract the excitement from the students. Unless you are madly in love with it. Practical approach is zero all theoretical.
 
http://www.gadgetsnow.com/jobs/95-e...t-jobs-claims-report/articleshow/58278224.cms

According to a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, only 4.77% 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. The study further noted that while more than 60% candidates cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4% can write functionally correct and efficient code.
 
The ability to write code that can compile is not an indicator for programming skill.

No, it is not an indicator of programming skill. It is an indicator of something much more fundamental which is whether they are even qualified to be programmers. Somebody who cannot even write code that compiles is essentially not qualified to be called a programmer and it won't matter whether they can copy code from online sources if they do not have enough skills to put it in place, correct minor issues and make the code compile.

The problem is colloquially referred to as the jugaad mentality which is due to the lack of discipline. Because we lack the infrastructure present in first-world countries we've become too complacent, finding shortcuts to solve problems. The most common example of taking a shortcut is using a thick piece of paper to balance a wobbly table.

There is nothing bad about finding jugaad solutions that work as long as they have a solid basis. Jugaads is what I call out of the box thinking and its a highly desirable trait even among skilled programmers. In everyday professional programming, you often need those kind of solution. Bill Gates is supposed to have once said that he would give the hardest job to the laziest person because he would find an easy way to do it. There is nothing wrong with that kind of jugaads. For instance, if I need to write a program to find sum of first "n" odd numbers, I can write a program with a loop to generate and add n odd numbers and give the result or I can use my knowledge of basic high school math and arrive at the more efficient and shortcut solution of just giving the result as n*n. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with just copy pasting code from some online code as long as you are not violating some copyright and you understand what your copied code does. Nobody is asking you write everything from scratch all the time. but you need to be able to write it from scratch if required.

One embarrassing (and rather ironical) example is when Indian interviewers continue to, even after hundreds of interviews, assess the skill of a candidate by testing their knowledge on data structures and algorithms. The problem lies in the fact that most Indian developers do not know where data structures/algorithms end and where large scale software development (maintainable, testable) begins. I agree that at some point, though the occurrence is rare, developers will find themselves discussing how to optimize O(n log(n)) into O(n) runtime.

There is a reason for that practice. Everyone doesn't need to know how a B+ tree works, but the bare minimal fundamentals of DS and algorithms is essential for even the JavaScript Web developer. I have interviewed people with over 10 years experience who claimed to have never heard the term "time complexity". In fact, they can't name an efficient sorting method algorithm and some can't even differentiate between searching and sorting. One guy even questioned me why algorithms even matter for every day work. I simply asked him how he would maintain a leader board of scores and how he would customize it so that new entries can be added to the board on the fly. In fact, leave alone knowing the internals, many of these people cannot write a solution with standard library functions.

People without the fundamentals make for lousy programmers. Even if they write code that works, they usually end up with badly written and inefficient code full of multi level nested loops. Such code is always a liability. A service that should handle the necessary load with a single instance will require 10 instances to handle the same load. Imagine the cost of hardware and other resources like electricity and bandwidth and maintenance.

In the early stages of my career over 12 years ago, I was given an issue to resolve. The application that we worked on was hanging while opening a document made in an earlier version. The document has to go through a conversion process which was working fine for small documents, but this one had over 2000 pages with lots of different formatting styles. The issue was looked at by several senior level programmers before it it was assigned to me. The first thing I noticed was that it was not hang, but just the conversion process taking time. I let it run till it completed and time it. It was taking nearly 26 hours to convert and open the document. I checked out the code there was a 4 level nested loop with time complexity of O(n pow 4). It took me about 20 min to write the code to O(n log(n)) and the conversion process which was taking 26 hours came down to under 2 minutes. It all boiled down to knowing the basics of algorithms and time complexity.

There were numerous instances like this through out my career. I have found O(n pow 3) loops in server code that resulted in 10 tens of thousands of dollars in costs due to poor scaling. I would rather pay more for a programmer with good fundamentals who can write decent code than pay less for a crappy one without fundamentals and waste thousands or even millions in completely unnecessary continuous maintenance costs.

It is not even a matter of discipline. People these days don't even seem to have the fundamental curiosity of learning the in's and out's of their chosen subject. Not having good teachers is not even close to an excuse. Especially not for Computer Science/IT. Most people these days have access to computers and internet. what else do you need apart from some curiosity. Back when I was still doing my B.Tech, I had a junior guy who didn't have a computer, but still practiced programming on his Texas Instruments graphing calculator.
 
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The issue you mentioned clearly indicates poor design or more clearly the lack thereof. The written code was never intended to handle a 2000 page document. The code could not anticipate that someone would feed it a 2000 page document. So even though you optimized it down to O(n log(n)), it's not the fault of the code. You (and the guy before you) did what you could do best given the limitations of your respective positions at that time. I'm glad you brought this up because it exemplifies the importance of understanding large-scale software development.

No, its just an implementation problem, not a design one. The software was always meant to handle huge documents.It is after all an enterprise publishing software that costs $1500 per seat license. It is a vast C/C++ code base and has been evolving since 1985. Apple's pro user market share in the 80's was majorly because of this software. A vast majority of books, magazines and news papers across the world use this software for their workflow.

Opening a 2000 page document is such a basic use case that its part of one of the unit tests run before every code commit. The problem is that this particular document which was written in Arabic also contains a lots of style sheets (over 1000) and the fact that it was made in a older version of the software which btw had no problem opening it. It was the document format conversion logic that was the issue. The programmer (who happens to be my lead at the time) simply went with the brute force approach of doing it. The logic was all good in that it works, but the use of a 4 level nested loop without care towards termination conditions was a grave mistake. In fact, I could achieve better performance just by reorganizing the 4 nested loops She could write code that works, but writing efficient code was not her forte. I asked for took up issues that nobody else wanted to work on. Many of them ended up being of this kind.

It ways pays to have a grip on fundamentals. Sorry, but anybody who has no grip on fundamentals is hardly fit to be working on large-scale software development.
 
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It is not even a matter of discipline. People these days don't even seem to have the fundamental curiosity of learning the in's and out's of their chosen subject. Not having good teachers is not even close to an excuse. Especially not for Computer Science/IT. Most people these days have access to computers and internet. what else do you need apart from some curiosity. Back when I was still doing my B.Tech, I had a junior guy who didn't have a computer, but still practiced programming on his Texas Instruments graphing calculator.

It's not the fault of the students alone. They have no time left if they are supposed to study for the college syllabus as well as learn the fundamentals properly. Having bad teachers might not be an excuse but finding time for studying college syllabus as well as fundamentals properly leaves no time for social life or extracurricular activities.
I dropped out of college because I was fed up of travelling in two boats. I used to study each subject quite extensively. That involved studying from 3-4 different sources and then practising the same concepts via solving problems. I used to have such clear concepts but that meant that I was only able to prepare 2-3 subjects properly while there were 5-6 subjects per semester. My teachers were equally shocked when I used to get good marks in half the subjects and flunk others.
You can call it bad time management but that didn't mean I wasn't a good programmer. In the end, I decided to drop out as I had enough of being made to study for tests and not for knowledge. Unfortunately, it also was the end of my programming journey as earning money became a priority and has now resulted in me becoming a farmer.
Thankfully, my brother had more perseverance and he is now enjoying life as a video game programmer. It was equally tough for him, but he saw his BTech through before studying properly for becoming a game programmer. He had that liberty because of support from home but not everyone does and many of his friends became employed in our IT industry despite having poor skills.
I hate that our IT industry goes to such poorly run colleges and give away jobs. They are the primary reason why average students don't feel the need to gain proper knowledge. Our college didn't even allow students having below 65% score to sit for placements, no matter how strong that person's programming skills were. So I can't put the blame on students when the whole system is at fault at not putting enough emphasis on proper learning of fundamentals.
 
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