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."

Globalization

[FiReaNGeL]

With the economical globalization these days, the trend (strategy?) for some countries seem to overspecialize in one specific area (in this case, IT) to outperform competition on a worldwide scale. Risky for sure, but it seems to work right now (at least for India, who reap the profits of investing massively in IT).

hold on

[DNS-and-BIND]

I wouldn't think that emulating India is really the way to go. The entire economic output of India is less than the state of Illinois. In addition, India's call center business is almost 100% U.S. customers. Ukraine has some, ahem, moral issues that make it politically difficult for American companies to outsource there.

more to it

[Quixote]

There's more to becoming a global player than just the number of programmers. The infrastructure is important: not only the physical infrastructure like roads, trains and powerlines, but also the governmental infrastructure (like courts, government offices, etc.). Plus, a stable government (not a one-man show like in many other places) is necessary: money flees uncertainty.

It is unfortunate, but Ukraine has gained notoriety for being the base of a lot of the "east european bride" scammers. Plus, the general perceived lawlessness of the fUSSR republics is not conducive to investment. Face it: post communism, there were a lot of problems with foreign partners of Russian businessmen being bumped off and strong-armed.

Things may be different now, but a good reputation takes time to develop.

As far as India is concerned: there are many Indians in high places in tech companies in the US, and the natual tendency is for them to favor India (a known commodity, to them) for outsourcing their operations.

I'm shocked, so shocked.

[loraksus]

Not surprisingly, Ukrainians don't see why their country can't become a big player in the global technology market, like India."

Because of the massive amounts of corruption at all levels of government? Organized crime bosses who refuse to let companies set up shop without bribes?

Re:I'm shocked, so shocked.

[bestadvocate]

how about population alone giving them the edge?

Ukrainian programmers

[slavik1337]

the next Doom3/HL2/Far Cry killer that THQ will publish next year, STALKER: SHadow of Chernobyl is developed by a Ukrainian company called GSC gameworld. They also developed Firestarter if you played it :)

dont underestimate...

[Jimmy The Tulip]

dont underestimate about the upcoming rivals like ireland and china. who can offer cheap outsourcing than india. but i guess software-outsourcing industry will take 2-3 years more to mature well... and to decide where to put money.

Re:hold on

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly sure what he means by that, India has loads of different languages, but a big part of India (West, I think) does use English as its' primary language dating back to the British empire. A lot of Indians in these certain regions are deeply immersed in British culture, which is a large amount of Indians who move to the UK settle in easily, because back home they watched/played the same sports, went to the pub and were Christian etc.

Something that does perplex me about call centres, though, is that a lot of these Indians, though they do speak english, are extremely difficult to understand, especially bad for things such as IT support where the customer may not even know the most commonly used IT-lingo, let alone a very deep accent on top of that.

Re:Corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

For those reading the table, realize that the lower the rank, the higher the corruption. The score is on a scale of 1 to 10, with countries leaning towards 10 being the least corrupt. Nigeria, with a rank of 144, is one of the most corrupt. Finland, with a rank of 1, is the least corrupt of all according to this data.

In regards to the topic at hand, the Ukraine is a very criminally influenced country. I have a number of contacts in the Ukraine and they're all trying to get out before they drown in the country's corruption. One reason Russian/Ukranian/other Eastern European women are willing to do the "mail order bride" thing is to get out of their respective countries and go somewhere with less criminal activity. A would-be bride said that a rich, successful husband in Russia or the Ukraine doesn't last very long, so she'd rather marry someone stable from the US and live there. It's sad, but it's no different people from Mexico hopping the US-Mexican border to the US for a better life.

Ukranian guy won a software competition

[AndreyFilippov]

Last winter I've got an idea of trying a software competition to develop a video streamer for the network cameras developed by Elphel [slashdot.org] (both software and hardware are GPL'ed). I decided to try Russian software developers (I'm Russian myself) so I wrote an article in a Russian online magazine "Computerra" and offered a $3000 prize for the best streamer to use with the camera (the code was to retain author's copyright and be released under GNU/GPL). I did not expect many participants and thought I'l sacrifice 3 cameras. But it turned different and I've sent out 9 of them - 4 to Russia, 3 - to Ukraine, 1 - to Germany and 1 to India (the article was in Russian - that restricted participants to Russian-reading).

Of those 9 participants 6 reached the finish line and the winner is Ukrainian Alexander Melichenko. What amazed me was that I've got the first version of his steamer in just a couple weeks after the announcement _before_ he received the hardware! Hi used my online camera to download his application over the Internet and made it working. And the camera uses Axis ETRAX100LX CPU - something he never programmed before.

All that software is now on our Sourceforge project page - https://sourceforge.net/projects/elphel [sourceforge.net].

Re:hold on

[Anonymous Coward]

English is descended from Indo-European languages (Latin and High-German) and Sanskrit is the archetypical Indo-European language, at the very
bottom of the tree from which all other Indo-European languages come from. Sanskrit is techincally called "Proto Indo Aryan (PIA)".

So, yes, being Aryans (by definition), Indians certainly can speak English better than non
Indo-Eurpean peoples.

Lots of pascal in Eastern Europe

[cold fjord]

I've gotten the impression that there is lots of pascal development still going on in Easter Europe, including turbo. That seems to be something of a dying / lost art in the US. I wonder if there is a viable business in maintaining / updating pascal code.

Re:This is not serious!

[cuteseal]

You need to take into account affordability in terms of outsourcing software development contracts to. In Australia, where I'm from, the big thing at the moment is outsourcing stuff to India, as their rates are somewhere between a third and a half of our local rates - and that's after factoring in travel expenses and the like.

China might be a viable alternative, I don't know about the rest.

Re:I can see why...

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think the only road to success is outsourcing from USA? They can just as easily become successful crunching out their own products. Or even with outsourcing, they can cater to Europeans and East-Asians. In case you haven't noticed, the american dollar is going down the tubes and will continue the trend for the forseeable future (with Bush at the helm), while the Euro and Yen are becoming much more desirable.

Re:I rolled 6 sixes!

[Ohreally_factor]

Speaking as a fellow Californian, you're full of shit. California was never "emptied" of Mexicans. Hispanic people have lived continuously in California since the days when the missions were founded.

What's funny is that most of the anti-immigration people are probably descendants of the Oakies, the refugees from the dust bowl. I guess being poor white trash isn't so bad when you have someone you can treat like a nigger.

Re:I'm shocked, so shocked.

[tomhath]

"Because of the massive amounts of corruption at all levels of government? Organized crime bosses who refuse to let companies set up shop without bribes?" Are you referring to Ukraine or India? Corruption is a way of life in India. http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/96/0216/ed1.html/ [asiaweek.com]

Re:I rolled 6 sixes!

[ZenFu]

"But in the end, the US never "takes" anything even though it could." Except, you know... half of Mexico.

The USA did not "take" anything from Mexico. Mexico used to be associated California, et al, but Mexico seceded from the western half of North America over the issue of joining the USA. Please check your facts next time. :)

Outsourcing my personal project

[patternjuggler]

I kind of resent the fact that all these huge multi-billion dollar corporations get to save all this money with cheap overseas labor, when there is no parallel opportunity for me as an individual. I hear that there are programmers who will work for $5/hour (I don't know about the Ukraine)- it would be really great if I could jumpstart my sourceforge project by getting say 20 hours of programming time from someone for $100, or if I could do the same for art assets or anything else. Hell, if all the programming in this country is going to be outsourced while the management stays here, having this outsourcing management experience is going to look a lot better on my resume than if I had done all the coding myself.

Seriously, I realize that Sourceforge has the paypal thing which probably is more for rewarding work that has already been done, but there also needs to be some kind of micro-contract agency that allows me to get a set amount of work done in the future.

Re:Correlation?

[ConceptJunkie]

Yes, it is. My brother-in-law married a young lady from Russia and she's really good-looking.

That's my wife's brother, BTW. I'm not saying my sister is from Russia.

Unfortunately, it's not working out too well yet because Natalya has had some unreasonably high expectations with regard to material wealth, but she's a nice person, and did I mention, she's HOT. We're all hoping things improve.

Re:Ukranian guy won a software competition

[notany]

I have worked/friend with some east European programmers/scientists/ohterpeople and here is my humble opinion.

Basically east Europe is culturally/mentally 30-50 years behind western europe. Many people with my age (~30) have something common with my parents or other older westerners. And I mean that in good sense.

It has something to do with old fashioned education plus better general self discipline in all areas.

Some personal data points; (consider them as general observations)

1. They don't generally suffer from AHDH (as sickness and general mentality) like many western counterparts.
2. They don't eat too much.
3. They don't use all these sleeping pills/prozac/etc. combinations I have noticed many my North American friends do (we western europeans are not that deep in shit yet).
4. They don't have severe email/web/slashdot addictions.
5. They can concentrate.
6. They have good mathematical background.
7. They can do even painful and not so fun projects if they must

And don't think that I'm saying that we westerners are some kind of degenerate bunch of people. What I'm saying that our culture has some drawbacks that can knock out big % of our potentially talented people into slacker mode.