Referencing the subject: "Where are the software engineers of tomorrow?" I would be inclined to say, "Not in the USA."
My reasons are simple. The USA has only a recent history (roughly since WW II, if one neglects the political giants of the revolution) of serious interest in intellectual issues. Programming is intellectual work and is most likely to thrive in a culture with deep intelelctual roots and great respect for intellectual work. India has 5000 years of history of treating intellectual work as a serious matter. They have a deep tradition of linguistic study and a reasonable mathematical history. All of this suggests a culture that is a natural for the nurturing of software workers. They also have a large population (over 1.1 Billion people) to draw talent from and a low cost of living so time is cheap. Intellectual labor takes time. So cheap time is important to the more creative aspects of the work. One must have time to think about the puzzles posed. The Chinese mandarin bureacracy provides another model for finding and utilizing large numbers of talented people. I do _not_ see the USA as having these same attributes. What particular advantages does the USA have in this game? BobLQ BTW. This is not a new thought on my part. During the mid 70's while at Princeton I had a number of discussions along these lines with Swadesh Mahajan, an Indian, now a research physicist at the University of Texas Institute for Fusion Studies. Much of what has happened since then has tended to reinforce my earlier view. -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
