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Recent Software Programming Contest Provides Example of Flattening World

BusinessWeek Online:

Duke wasn’t the only U.S. school to be skunked at the prestigious computing contest. Of the home teams, only Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked among the 12 highest finishers. Most top spots were seized by teams from Eastern Europe and Asia. Until the late 1990s, U.S. teams dominated these contests. But the tide has turned. Last year not one was in the top dozen.

WAKE-UP CALL
The poor showings should serve as a wake-up call for government, industry, and educators. The output of American computer science programs is plummeting, even while that of Eastern European and Asian schools is rising. China and India, the new global tech powerhouses, are fueled by 900,000 engineering graduates of all types each year, more than triple the number of U.S. grads. Computer science is a key subset of engineering. “If our talent base weakens, our lead in technology, business, and economics will fade faster than any of us can imagine,” warns Richard Florida, a professor at George Mason University and author of The Flight of the Creative Class.

Software programmers are the seed corn of the Information Economy, yet America isn’t producing enough. The Labor Dept. forecasts that “computer/math scientist” jobs, which include programming, will increase by 40%, from 2.5 million in 2002 to 3.5 million in 2012. Colleges aren’t keeping up with demand. A 2005 survey of freshmen showed that just 1.1% planned to major in computer science, down from 3.7% in 2000.

This really isn’t news is it?  I mean, we all see this coming, right?  We all clearly see the pros and cons in the leveling of the playing field.  We know anyone can access global software programming talent at sites like oDesk, RentACoder, Elance, etc. (For more complete list, see list of Outsource Marketplace Providers on this site).

Have you read the “The World is Flat” yet? (Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk)  I know some people think this book is a bit far fetched; I’d love to hear some kind of rebuttal to the points presented in the book. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 10:55 am and is filed under China, Hungary, India, Industry, Planning, Ukraine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.