Why Google Put A Research Lab in Poland

I have a strong feeling that our country is producing less high quality programmers than the industry needs. I don't have a statistics on this but I do observe it in IT firms as well as from the feedbacks from IT recruitement groups.

More evidently, the global competition in the IT sector belongs to the Indians for sheer quantity and to the Russians for quality. Why can't we be among these?

Goolge has placed a Research Lab in Poland, a country that you seldom hear in this part of the world. Why is that?

Tomasz Czajka, a 2004 graduate of Warsaw University, became a national celebrity in Poland after winning three TopCoder competitions in 2004-2005, racking up winnings of more than $100,000.

"When we saw these trends, of people from Eastern Europe winning these contests, we decided to take a closer look," says Kannan Pashupathy, Google's head of international engineering operations. "People have a huge interest in software, and there's a much deeper grounding in mathematics in the curriculum in these countries."

USA TODAY [click on the article title for the full article]

There you have it: "People have a huge interest in software, and there's a much deeper grounding in mathematics in the curriculum in these countries." One of the culprit is our educational system -- which is not something new. But I guess we can't blame it all to the educational system. It has long been like that and with the way politics handle economic issues, it will stay like that for a very long time.

What our country can do is to encourage our local IT firms to support our educational system. That way the different universities and colleges will know what the industry needs. Build laboratories, sponsor a course specialization, share their industry experiences and knowledge! There are many things that IT firms can do. But above it all, belive in the local talents and hire them.

"If you invest in the university system and support research in areas of interest, students will naturally gravitate into those areas," says Mr. Pashupathy of Google, which opened its Krakow lab earlier this year. "It's a nice circle which ultimately benefits everybody."