When we redesigned the Netrino.com website late last year, we thought it’d be fun to challenge our more than 20,000 monthly visitors (mostly embedded software engineers) to a skills test. So we developed a ten question multiple-choice quiz (http://www.netrino.com/Embedded-Systems/Embedded-C-Quiz). And it has been a popular feature of the new site, with a couple hundred participants just in the first two months.
And now the results are starting to come in. We analyzed the early results a couple of ways and discovered something worth talking about: Quiz takers from India did about the same as quiz takers in the U.S. But the rest of the world lagged behind these two groups quite a bit.
There are ten questions in our quiz, and we consider a passing score to be 8 out of 10. A handful of quiz takers have scored 100%, but most score in the 30-90% range, with an overall average at 60.4%. (A little scary, huh?)
Statisically speaking, there were three significant groups of quiz takers by geography. The average score of those taking the quiz from the United States was just shy of 64%. The average for India was not far behind at about 61.2%. However, the rest of the world scored an average of just 55.9%.
What does this say about the state of the profession of embedded software development? Offshoring? The quiz itself?