Want a job at Oracle, Salesforce.com or eBay? The statistics appear to be in your favour.
A new study released by GILD, a professional and social networking platform for developers, found that Indians “outshine” their American counterparts in math and logic, skills that tech companies like Oracle, Salesforce.com, and eBay put at a premium.
On the flip side, American programmers were tops at web programming, which is highly sought after by companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
[caption id=“attachment_33977” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“A new study suggests that Indian engineers, with better numerical skills, are rivalling their counterparts in the US. Krishnendu Halder / Reuters”]  [/caption]
The study analysed 1 million skills tests taken on the GILD web site by nearly 500,000 developers. According to the research findings:
• Indian developers bested US developers in terms of analytical skills like math and logic by 11%.
• US programmers performed about 9% better on programming languages including C, JAVA, and SQL.
• US developers scored higher on various web programming languages. For example, Americans fared 53% better on PHP, and 27% better on advanced HTML.
The study “shows the dramatic advances coming out of India, where in some cases engineers are clearly rivalling their counterparts in the US,” Sheeroy Desai, CEO of GILD, said in a statement. “America still holds a strong lead when it comes to web development, but I suspect the gap will narrow over the next few years.”
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe research should provide a “clear guideline for what type of skills companies should outsource to India, and what they should continue to source in the US,” she said.
Writer’s remorse
A summary of this study was recently posted on the popular US tech blog ReadWriteWeb, and Klint Finley, the author of the post on this subject, subsequently wrote that he regretted writing about the GILD report at all. “I should have known that it would end up being a sounding board for racist comments and confirmation bias [against Indians],” he wrote. (We won’t fan the flames of outrage here, but you can find said comments here.)
Finley continued: “What can we conclude from this? Not much. We can speculate that it means that Indian schools do better at teaching the fundamentals and that US schools do better at teaching specific tech skills. It doesn’t tell us whether any one individual programmer is better than another, or even whether a particular outsourcing firm is better than another. … What I do think it does, which is why I posted in the first place, is challenge the notion that one particular pool of talent (local talent vs. foreign talent) is more skilled than another.
Do you think this survey reflects reality? If so, why are there such differences between Indian and American skill sets?