Ukraine Holds 4th Largest Programmer Population

andrewuoft points out this BusinessWeek article on the budding technology sector of Ukraine; the article points out that Ukraine has -- "after the U.S., India, and Russia -- the fourth largest number of computer programmers in the world" and that "Even today, scientific institutes each year churn out some 50,000 science or technology graduates. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians don't see why their country can't become a big player in the global technology market, like India."

Article text in case someone actually reads it

[a.different.perspect]

and the server goes down.

Building The Muscle To Be A Tech Player

Ukraine has a bunch of cornfields, a bunch of old steel mills, and not much else. Right? Well, Ukraine also has a budding technology sector, and -- after the U.S., India, and Russia -- the fourth largest number of computer programmers in the world. It was a main center of the Soviet programming industry. The first computer built in continental Europe was made in Ukraine in 1951. Even today, scientific institutes each year churn out some 50,000 science or technology graduates. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians don't see why their country can't become a big player in the global technology market, like India. "We want Ukraine to become a technological country again, not just a country with agriculture and tank production," says Yuri Sivitsky, chairman of Softline, one of Ukraine's largest software producers.

What are the chances? While Ukraine isn't likely ever to rival India, it certainly has the potential to become a player. Just look at Softline. Founded by mathematicians in 1995, it has 500 employees, up from a dozen in 1998. Revenues are set to hit $10 million this year, up 70% from 2003. Its clients include Ingersoll-Rand Co. (IR ) and Hugo Boss.

The offshore programming industry, although small, is growing fast. According to Market-Visio, a research firm in Moscow, Ukraine's software exports will grow 43% this year to $100 million. Around 10,000 programmers are employed in the industry, working for customers such as Boeing (BA ), DaimlerChrysler (DCX ), General Electric (GE ), Citibank (C ), and NASA. Much of the work is customized business software. But gaming is also growing. Kvasar-Micro, Ukraine's largest info tech company, recently landed an order to develop a computer game for mobile handsets.

Ukraine's main selling point is the quality of its mathematical education. Another is cheap labor. An average programmer in Ukraine earns $500 a month, not quite as low as India, but half the level in Moscow and a fraction of programming salaries in the West. But the edge Ukraine gets from high education and low wages is offset by other factors. Around 90% of all software on sale in Ukraine is pirated, so domestic makers can't get the revenue they need to grow. Other problems are a lack of business skills, venture finance, and government support. But things are looking up. Management skills are improving as Ukrainians gain Western experience and earn MBAs. The government is mulling tax incentives for tech investment and starting to tighten piracy laws.

Some of the biggest names in the global technology industry have started to wake up to Ukraine's potential. "Ukraine is building up quickly," says Gerard J. Kleisterlee, CEO of Dutch electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics (PHG ), which makes an array of high-tech goods there. Flextronics International Ltd. (FLEX ), a Singapore electronics powerhouse, recently set up a software design lab in Ukraine, and CEO Michael E. Marks is enthusiastic about the nation's potential as an engineering and design power. If he's right, Ukraine has a digital future.

Re:Corruption

[luvirini]

Well, the fact is, corruption is a matter of fact in large parts of the world.

India is among the quite corrupt contries, like number 90 of 146 in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2004 http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2004/cpi2004.en.ht ml#cpi2004 [transparency.org]

So corruption it itself does not seem to be able to stop tech-business, though Ukraine is way lower at #122.

Re:I rolled 6 sixes!

[Anonymous Coward]

The US certainly has the military power to take over a lot of countries, but it hasn't done it. Sure, the US invades countries from time to time when there's a perceived threat, or to stop genocide, or to prevent civil war, etc. But in the end, the US never "takes" anything even though it could. The last thing the US took was Kingman Reef [fws.gov] in 1922. There wasn't a war over it. It's an unpopulated 1 sq km land mass in the Pacific Ocean. Most of it is under water.

Re:ASK SLASHDOT: What language to learn

[vipw]

Everyone in Ukraine speaks Russian, many of them don't speak Ukrainian; this is because the Ukrainian language was surpressed during the Soviet era. So learning Russian makes much more sense especially because you can speak it in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and it's also fairly well known in many of the former Soviet satellites. Knowing it will also give a big head start for learning any of the Slavic languages. However, it's extremely difficult to learn, from my limited experience studying it.

German is a good language to know in Europe, but it's usefulness doesn't go much beyond the German speaking countries. You might also want to consider Portuguese, knowing it would be useful for learning any of the romance languages later.

Re:Corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

So corruption it itself does not seem to be able to stop tech-business, though Ukraine is way lower at #122.

You realize that the list is in ascending order, right (least corrupt to most)?

Re:Contradicting the popular opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

The factual assertions presented here are, for most part, wrong. In particular:

• Ukraine does have quality engineers, does have better economics and less corruption than other CIS countries, and has been a considerable supporter of US interests (e.g., they dropped one of the highest levels of troops into Iraq for support.

I don't see any difference to other CIS countries here. And "supporting US interests" is mainly a synonym for prostitution. Popular opinion in Ukraine is no more pro-US than in any other European country. Post-Soviet Ukrainean goverments have kissed Uncle Sam's *** at every opportunity -- and US rewarded them with economic sanctions.

This is for those who need yet another proof that a deal made with USA hardly ever increases the value of the paper it is printed on. I have no idea why time after time people try this strategy; the fact that 'white man [USA] speaks with a forked tongue' has been common knowledge for ages now.

• They are a society with European heritage, a large number of the population understands English, German, French, Italian, etc.)

Based on personal experience: simply not true. Even highly educated people in Ukraine, such as university professors, mainly don't speak English. Perhaps 20% do. A few more speak German. But all of them speak Russian. Situation is basically the same as in other CIS countries.

• There aren't that many CIS countries that can say they are trying quite as hard to embrace the Westernized world by cooperation and with as little grandstanding as Ukraine is doing.

There is no 'Western world'. There is USA and Europe. And there is not so much common between them. For an insightful opinion for this topic, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1345790 ,00.html [guardian.co.uk].

Unfortunately, my experience says that on this (and almost any other English language) board on the net any dissidece will immeadiately be rated as flamebait. So much for 'freedom of speech' in USA.

Re:hold on

[DNS-and-BIND]

Well, like the fact that the Prime Minister of Ukraine was caught red-handed on a tape selling huge radar systems to Iraq in 2002?

Went to Ukraine...

[stibles]

I actually went to Kiev in 2001 to start an outsourcing company. It was a FASCINATING if not profitable experience. Kiev is somewhat cosmopolitan for an Eastern European city though not Paris. We started a joint venture with a CompSci department at the University of Kiev. The first class of recruits would probably have gotten a B as a group with a couple of A students and a bunch of Bs and a couple of Cs. The educational system for tech there is very rigorous. These guys were ready to go in C++ but we had them all take certs in Java to have things covered. Sadly, we were underfunded and when the bubble burst, trying to sell a software service contract for a startup in Kiev to someone in the US was nigh impossible. One year and the team took their terminals as severance. Helluva learning experience.

Re:ASK SLASHDOT: What language to learn

[Vitus Wagner]

Learn Russian. People who live on Ukraine typically speak Russian or Polish better than Ukrainian. And most of Ukrainian programmers know Russian. Because there are a lot more technical literature published in Russian than in the Ukrainian.

Ukrainian language is more or less invention of nationalists politics from West Ukraine. And most educated people are located in the East part (Kharkov region) where Russian was always native language.

Expensive...

[KontinMonet]

A few months ago, we tendered for some work in the region of US$2m to be outsourced. The best prices came from Poland and Bulgaria. Then Ukraine, then India. We did site visits to all but India (their quote was off the radar) to determine their capabilities. We were not impressed with the infrastructure or general atmosphere in the Ukraine although their guys seemed good - it was too much of a risk and we could see it costing us money. Poland looked good but Bulgaria was cheaper. What to do?

And then, of course, the inevitable happened - the project got cancelled...

The first computer built in continental Europe ..

[vilbel]

was build 1936 in Germany (Zuse Z1) and not 1951 in Ukraine as BusinessWeek claimed.

Re:ASK SLASHDOT: What language to learn

[rxmd]

Learn Russian. People who live on Ukraine typically speak Russian or Polish better than Ukrainian.

This is not quite right. It depends on where you are and whom you hang around with, and there is a large Russian-language minority, but still Ukrainian is the majority language in Ukraine. And you're completely wrong about the Polish; even in the West Ukraine, the dialects of Ukrainian are not mutually intelligible with Polish at all, even though they share some features.

And most of Ukrainian programmers know Russian. Because there are a lot more technical literature published in Russian than in the Ukrainian.

That's true. Which is why I'd agree with you and recommend learning Russian; most Ukrainians tend to speak it, even if many of them don't particularly love it, and generally Russian is a much more useful language in the world than Ukrainian, because you can use it in Russia, too.

Ukrainian language is more or less invention of nationalists politics from West Ukraine.

This, again, is completely wrong. In debunking Ukrainian nationalism as a whole, you're spreading another nationalist myth, from Russia this time. (Since I'm neither Ukrainian nor Russian, I think I can say this.)

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language of its own. Dialects from East Ukraine are mutually intelligible with Russian to some extent. I've learned Russian as a foreign language (I'm German), and when I listen to Ukrainian speakers from East Ukraine, I understand about a third.

However, literary Ukrainian is far less close to Russian, and I don't understand it as easily. The literary language is also quite old; the first grammar of Ukrainian was published well in the 1830s (about twenty years after the first modern grammar of Russian), and the center of Ukrainian nationalism in the early 19th century was Kharkiv (or Kharkov in Russian), not the Polish-influenced West.

And most educated people are located in the East part (Kharkov region) where Russian was always native language.

Wrong again; the center of education is probably the capital, Kyiv (Kiev in Russian), which is in an Ukrainian-speaking region, and Lviv in the far west has an extremely good university. Even in the East, Russian isn't and wasn't "always" native language everywhere; my girlfriend is from Dnepopetrovsk, which is about as far east as it gets, and she's a native speaker of Ukrainian.

Re:I rolled 6 sixes!

[Guppy06]

"The USA did not "take" anything from Mexico."

Not familiar with the Mexican-American War, are we?

"Mexico seceded from the western half of North America over the issue of joining the USA."

It looks like you're talking about California and Texas, whose white, English-speaking population suddenly decided they wanted to be Americans (again), similar to what happened in Hawaii. They both became states practically overnight, while other parts of Mexican lands ceded to the US that didn't have so many American transplants (such as Arizona and New Mexico) had to wait until the early Twentieth Century before statehood. Even Mormon Utah was admitted before them.

The US Army occupied most of Mexico's key cities including its capital by the time the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. The Mexicans were also dealing with a cesession of states in the Yucatan that was partly supported by American filibusters (the original meaning of the word). Mexican independence today relied perhaps less on Mexican unity and the Mexican military than it did on the US Senate (who had to ratify the treaty), including such powerful senators as John C. Calhoun:

(W)e have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race--the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of all the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against a union as that! (...) The greatest misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equality with the wite race...

If we're ever going to make good on the ideals of the American Revolution we first have to accept the mistakes of the past instead of denying they happened.