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Bangalore Beats Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes "The inevitable has happened. Bangalore, which grew under the shadow of America 's Silicon Valley over the last two decades, has finally overtaken its parent. Today, Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San Francisco and California, with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers."
It's amazing that during an election year that I've yet to hear one thing from Dean or Bush about this. Is everyone bought and paid for?
I honestly think that a lot of the current commentators are dead on when they say that this is a "fad" and this will eventually balance itself out. Wait until some corporations get a gut full of having their code halfway across the globe. Most companies aren't willing to let you work at home and yet they're willing to hire hoards of people they'll never meet to write their code? Heh. This will right itself eventually.
Name 5 great software products to have come out of Bangalore. Last!! It hasn't begun.
How many of you have dealt with these Asian techies and have been on the phone longer due to a misunderstanding between yourself and a techie?
Rather Frustrating!
Maybe there's a learning curve, but if I had my druthers, I wouldn't put up with it.
Is this an New Year's/April's Fool article?
I don't see the folks on Sand Hill Road moving to India very soon.
Also, the article is from India Times, so expect some bias.
Well, that would be wrong!
1.5 * 100,000 = 150,000...
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
A couple of years ago on a train journey to Mumbai I had a long conversation with an Indian software engineer. Once he'd got his University degree he got a job in Silicon Valley, but only stayed a couple of years because he realised that although salaries are lower in India he would actually be a lot better off in India because your dollar goes a lot further there. In India he could actually afford servants - a maid, cook etc. as well as a big house with a swimming pool and car. So if you read this type of story and think of hundreds of poorly paid Indians in sweatshops hacking out code, think again.
I'm sorry, but so what?
I'm not an American (Norwegian if you must know), but I have worked in Silicon Valley. Like the saying goes, it's not the size, but the quality. Yes, the best engineers in India is probably comparable to the best in the US and the rest of the world, but I find that the average engineer in India is worse than the average in the US.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Those jobs aren't ever coming back and neither will these.
Can I bum a sig?
Now would be a good time to put together a petition and send it to the various candidates and demand that there be some restrictions to all the tech jobs going overseas.
Good luck. Unless you accompany your petition with big sacks full of money, don't expect any results (other than a polite letter -- maybe). Those same candidates/elected officals didn't act when manufacturing jobs went offshore, why would they act now?
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
As long as the wages are low and the quality of code is at least acceptable (and, these people DO do good work), India will continue to get the jobs. Remember: The PRIME responsibility of the board of directors for a publicly traded company is to MAKE MONEY for it's stock holders.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Thanks Mr Bush! Lets take lot of jobs and move them overseas so that big companies can flurish here in the U.S. at the expense of the American worker.
Yes probably flamebait, but sometimes people are labelled that because they speak the truth.
So how many of their languages do you speak?
Which puts you in exactly what position complaining about other peoples foreign language skills?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
With the ability to get cheaper labor off short in the tech world, the prices for certain tech consumer goods (from software to DVDs to car computer brains) will fall, allowing prices to fall as well.
This will allow the average consumer to spend more of their money on other items, including entertainment, debt reduction, maybe even more money towards a mortgage or a new car. Jobs moving to other countries is only good news -- I can only hope we see more of it as it will allow people here in the States to find new things to do with their overpriced labor.
Maybe we'll even see that we don't deserve as much as we earn, and that we're not so special.
Tibor Machan has a great article on Job Security and why this phrase is false. If you can not produce a desired product at a price that the buyers are willing to pay, you are not really producing anything but waste. American techs are paid way too much for what really has become a blue collar job in many cases.
Just like tariffs on imported steel and imported sugar have destroyed jobs in this country (by making cars here too expensive, and even Fannie Mae chocolates has closed down today because sugar is too expensive), putting tariffs on imported tech software will do the same. Allow consumers of technology to decide what they are willing to pay. U.S. firms can even promote a "Buy American" program if people really care.
I know I don't. I want to see prices fall on technology so I can focus my spending on other areas -- more dinners are local restaurants, maybe more concerts or theatre.
Remember, the Living Wage is a MYTH.
There are 250 Million people living in the US. There are a limited number of IT people. Hence, higher wages and the extensive use of H1B Visas.
There are over 1 Billion people living in India. And, according to my Indian-born Co-workers, they have more college educated IT workers than any other Country in the world. Hence, the supply of skilled workers is much higher. Although the salaries will increase, I don't think they will explode to our level any time soon.
In other words, if you are waiting for an Indian version of the Dot-Bomb, don't hold your breath.
I've always wanted to post this in an "offshoring" /. article, but have always arrived late to the game.
Firstly, a disclaimer: good on India. I hold nothing against them for accepting, with open arms, North American tech jobs as fast as CEOs rush to send them over.
That being said, I believe we (ie. North Americans) are being fucking morons about this. We are willingly shipping them high skilled jobs so Mr. CEO can report a quick profit the next quarter. In the mean time, we are losing an entire generation of "junior" positions. I believe that will spell the end of software development in North America.
My current job is that of a software architect. It is a high-skill job requiring very specialised knowledge in the area where we make software. I got to my current job by starting as a junior programmer at this company. After 3 years I was bumped up to "intermediate" developer. After 3 more it was a bump to "senior" developer. Now they think I know enough to design the systems I build.
Two years ago my company opened an office in Bangalore (we have offices across the globe). All new hiring has been through that office, and they ship the programmers from India to various other offices for training on projects. In another years time, programmers in that India office will have performed enough implimentations to be considered "intermediate" developers. In a few more years they'll be senior, and in a few more they'll be in my position.
As this is going on in India, all our own new grads will be working at Starbucks serving lattes, and will be left out of the loop.
All for the sake of a quick stock boost. Good on India, shame on us!
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
We protect you from your nuclear neighbors to the west and north, and in doing so, supply your freedom. International shipping, which any exporting nation needs, exists at the discretion of the United States. Nations are free to compete via trade, since the military competition has already concluded.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
When we no longer produce anything of value here, what do we have to trade? One thing we can do is educate people, foriegn students continue to come to the US in greater numbers to learn. Another is tourism. How many Indian's want to vacation in Detroit? Our college costs keep rising to the point that it is becoming more and more difficult for the middle and lower middle class to get an education here. The middle and lower middle classes make up almost 70 percent of our population. Another thing we have is money lots of it. Not you or I, but the ones really pushing for globalization. The 1 percent of are population that controls most of the worlds wealth and now wants more. These people find a service economy great for them, the lower classes have and always will bow to their every need. In fact, if the cost of service employees gets to high, then they can always push for more immigration, it is especially easy to get haitian or mexican labor to replace those high priced citizenry. It helps to give them a california drivers license. Most of these individuals were born into their position. Do not think for a minute Bill Gates was born into a low or middle class family in the suburbs.
By moving to a service economy where most of everything is imported, the middle class is left to struggle to maintain their status. More and more that is done with debt, easy credit for a good life now. Pay the rich forever.
Globalization is great for up and coming economies, it was great for Japan, but they are now losing to Korea, Indonesia, India etc.
The rich 1 percent would have you believe that this is all for the benefit of poor countries, ignoring the fact that when the labor costs and living standards rise in those countries, they'll be in the same boat. It will be a long time till we see programmers whose native language is Tutsi. But eventually they'll be a source of cheap labor too.
So what we have in effect is the very rich deciding the middle class is not dependant enough so they have decided to take from the middle and give to the poor.
Not exactly what Robin Hood advocated.
hotmail.com
At least it was an indian guy who created it. Sold it to microsoft for $400 million..
Bash it all you want, hotmail was pretty revolutionary and is probably used by hundreds of millions of people..
Will code a sig generator for food
This brought to you by Tin, which in its foil for is the perfect hat to use when reading this drivil..
This hemoraging of jobs overseas has to become a prime election issue.
There was a good article on this topic in the Sunday L.A. Times pointing out it isn't only the Tech industry losing jobs overseas. All job levels and industries are sending services jobs overseas.
The Corporate CEO's and politicians they have in their back pockets only see improved operating costs, what they aren't seeing is they U.S. customers losing their jobs and won't be able to afford their products as time goes on.
Back when Alvin Tofler wrote _The Third Wave_ and said losing our manufactuing industry overseas isn't a problem, because America will become a Services based economy. Now we are losing our Services economy, but their isn't anything to replace it. The CEOs and politicians that cater to them need to open there eyes.
Outsourcing jobs overseas NEEDS to become a major issue in the upcoming elections. Every canidate needs to be informed of the issues and asked how they stand on it.
Whenever this issue comes up I always see somebody or the other clamoring for legislation or other forms of protectionism. But in doing this they make some serious assumptions, that are wrong --
a)American companies can be better off without any offshore development... No.
Reason 1... Not enough americans are getting into the engineering disciplines, and those that are do not get the grad degrees etc. Have you seen the university graduate school departments for Masters/Phd. lately? How many americans do you see? India already produces vastly larger number of Engineers/computer science degrees then USA. It had at the last count about 1200-1500 engineering schools.
Reason 2: Offshore/onshore combination development is a model that Indian companies have perfected as an art form, with the result that companies like Wipro, Infosys etc. are directly bidding for the contracts that US companies were outsourcing to them, because of lower costs. In fact IBM lists the Indian company Wipro as one of its most formidable competiters in future for its core services business. So, either US companies need to perfect the model, or start loosing contracts especially internationally
b) Stoping outsourcing for govt. contracts using legislation will help. False It would probably slow things down, but it would only mean taxing the common citizen more to pay another US citizen, i.e. redistribution of wealth, and not any creation of wealth. On the other hand outsourcing means more dollars in the hands of Indians, and what do they do with those dollars? they can do only one of the 2 things, i.e. either buy US products or invest back in US, and they do both. At the same time more wealth is created in US, because some customers save money,and the money that went out, came back again and bought more products creating even more jobs.
c) Indian companies are not creating any products.
False. Subsidiaries of US companies in India are creating complete products. See previous stories in slashdot. But even besides that India has been getting the largest amount of VC capital in Asia for last couple of years, and you will se products out soon. Some products are already there. For e.g. iflex In FY03, International Banking Systems (IBS) has ranked Flexcube as the number one selling universal banking solution in the world. Represented in over 50 countries through more than 30 corporate business partners, i-flex has gained the recognition of the first company in the world to cross the 100-installations mark for its product in less than 5 years. And there are other success stories.
Don't try to translate English to English. I'd be the first to admit that many people overseas could do my job, but while the quality would not be be an issue, logistics (getting things from here to there and there to here) and security (involves maintaining many many passwords and sensitive HIPAA-protected info) rules out outsourcing me overseas. So I have no reason to fear outsourcing. I'm just pointing out that outsourcing overseas is only a temporary band-aid to larger problems.
Think about it. An Indian or a Pak executive will work for a lot less...and they certainly won't screw up^h^h^h^h^h^h^hmanage the company any better or worse than their overpaid American counterparts. Anyone interested in starting an executive outsourcing company with me? :)
so what do you do again ?
"This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it--we're talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery"
(From Snow Crash.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The truth is that an education does not make you what you are educated in. In my experience, having a degree has very little to do with being a good programmer. Good programmers have a drive that pushes them to master their trade. "Pretend" programmers may learn the concepts behind programming, and even understand how to make code work. However, they lack a true understanding of what the code is doing and why. They have no concept that the data structures and OS design courses they took, have a real purpose and are not just background.
For the record, I do not have a CS degree myself. It worked out that obtaining actual experience in the field got in the way of getting a degree. I started with a very high opinion of those who had CS degrees, but as I gained real-world experience, I learned that a CS degree really doesn't mean much. In the hands of someone who has coding in their blood, it tempers them like a good sword. In the hands of a "wannabe", it is as useless as a fifth wheel.
What's really interesting though, is that programmers who wish to become true masters, will not let the lack of a degree stand in their way. While not all of them have the opportunity like myself to read college level texts as children, those that don't will seek out these materials as soon as they feel a need. And in the end, you can hold an amazingly coherent technical conversation with degreed and non-degreed coders. The only ones who feel left out are the ones who saw their degrees as a way to make money.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
>> Tax incentives? You want other people to be forced to subsidize your paycheck?
As opposed to other people being forced to subsidize that paycheck being taken away, hell yeah, I do. As it stands, corporations get a tax incentive to outsource to the third world. Therefore all unemployed people obviously are unemployed by their own choice and preference, right? right?
>> If you can't compete with the indians, tough luck, get another job. That's how capitalism works. That's how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, to hell with all those lazy b*stards in Flint MI, and those stupid pillotex people. Dammit, just because theres not enough jobs for everone is no excuse not to go have a job. Obviously if your GED isn't getting you a job, it's you're fault that the world economic trend has screwed you over. After all, you could have stolen a presidential election, or leveraged junk bonds to a hostile takeover. Phbt. Only stupid people are poor, and Capitalism is referenced over 8800 times in the King James Bible.
>> That means better prices on the products for everyone.
Especially people who can't feed their families anymore. They benefit a whole lot.
Listen you conservative dingus - Capitalism is neither inherently good OR bad. What IS bad is people who use loaded words and tricks to ram their agenda past all cogent discussion for their own benefit. WITHOUT DEBATE THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY. THAT'S why I am so disgusted with the conserative party. You're destroying this county for the benefit of the highest bidder/buyer.
>> Lowering the overall tax rate is the only good tax incentive
Define "good"... you're obviously using it in some way other than the dictionary.
>> I've had it up to here with whining special interest whom are all uniquely deserving of other people's money in their own heads
Then Stop Corporate Welfare A-hole!
Do you have any idea of the HISTORY behind such laws? It's because employers would pay below subsistence wages to unskilled workers (as in not even really enough to live off of...) so that they'd have to work 12 or more hours in a day just to make enough money to barely live.
Not a pretty sight, really.
Now they're exporting that misery to the third world countries because they can and it nets a profit short-term for the businesses.
It amazes me how many "get a job" people are so clueless- because they're NOT IN THE SITUATION AND NEVER HAVE BEEN IN THE FIRST PLACE. They don't understand that many of these people that are "too good to work a real job" (By the way, define "real job" for me... If it's manual labor, then you don't understand what many actually did in the Tech fields- not all of them were "web developers" that got laid off, etc. Many of the people that got laid off had "real" jobs that were worth what they were getting paid for them until the Great Downsizing...) actually have obligations like houses and the such that many of what you'd consider "real" jobs won't even pay for an efficiency, let alone the obligations like car payments, insurance, etc.
If you've not been there, PLEASE do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I have grown up. Its time for software engineers, programmers, program developers whatever the fairies want to call themselves to grow up.
EVERY other type of engineer has to go thru some sort of a certifying process to instill the base levels of competence except for software engineers. Its ridiculous. And we're supposed to just put up with it.
I'm not asking for programmers to be perfect. But to earn anything over $20 an hour for creating the type of software we all use today is a crime in my mind. From Windows to Mozilla to Real Player to Adobe Acrobat, to corporate web apps such as online banking software IT SUCKS.
It all sucks. There's no excuse, no fucking excuse. Building bridges is hard. But its done right. Building planes is hard but its done right. Wiring homes, constructing sewer systems....etc its ALL HARD but it gets done the proper way. Otherwise people don't get paid or at the very least are sued for their money back. But software engineers? The little princes who sit in cubicles and think their fecal matter smells pleasant because they type on friggin keyboards...oh no critisize not these precious souls lest you rouse their ire! They just keep pumping out crap after crap after crap and hardly if ever suffer any negative consequences.
So now we're seeing a situation where people in another country are going to get paid 1/5th to 1/6th the salary as a US programmer to produce the same quality work and I AM GLAD. I can't wait until only the absolute cream of the crop western coders earn anything above $20/hour. Plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, chimney sweeps shall make more than you and somehow you fucks you losers who spent tens of thousands of dollars and 4 years of your life on a "Computer Science" degree will either have to accept your new lower wages or find another line of work and actually become GOOD AT SOMETHING for a change.
I know my comments have been sacriligeous here on Slashdot but I just can't pretend that the overwhelming majority of software produced today is very substandard.
Do with my statement what you will.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The answer to that statement is "That's just silly. To a manager cost cutting means cutting YOUR job, not his. Havn't you been paying attention?"
It's amazing that during an election year that I've yet to hear one thing from Dean or Bush about this. Is everyone bought and paid for?
The answer to that question is "Of course they are, havn't you been paying attention?"
Sadly, this appears to fall into the "globalization" groupthink. It's a "free market economy" therefore it must be good...right?
The answer to the last statement is more complex. The plain truth is that our government has done this to us on purpose. Rather than cutting back on spending they simply spend more and more and more. How do we pay for that? Well, last week Greenspan printed another $5 Billion in fiat money that has no gold or assets to back it up. In the same week the Fed issued an addition $17 Billion in debt. And that's just one week! How about a month of $17 billion weeks? Think about a year of $17 billion weeks. How about a decade of $17 billion weeks. What will that do to our economy? Throw in ridiculusly low interest rates and it's a recipie for disaster. Allow me to elaborate:
Here in Southern California we have 15% of the jobs and 10% of the nation's population. If you count Southern California and the San Fransisco/San Jose are we have nearly 15% of the population of the entire country AND a bit more than 20% of the jobs. (This data comes from Claritas, a demographics company that I use to work for)
People need to live where the jobs are. Yes, you can say "Go live in Indiana where you can buy a house on 2 acres of land for $200k" but then reality sets in and you realize that in general, you must live where the jobs are. People need to buy houses where they live. The artificially low interest rates have made it far too easy to get cheap money in the form of home loans. This access to easy money has artificially increased the price (not the value, but the price) of homes. In Mission Viejo in Orange County a house next door to my niece sold for $440k 4 years ago. It sold last month for $1.2 million. In my area of San Diego our home prices have doubled in 5 years.
So how do people pay for that house? They need higher wages. Now follow along because this is an important concept: To purchase the same house they could have had 4 years ago they need almost twice as much money. In other words It takes more money to purchase the same amount of stuff That ladies and gentlemen is the very definition of inflation. That is the inflation that Allan Greenspan says does not exist
So our government has made it far too easy to get money which has caused housing prices in the areas where the jobs exist to skyrocket. In the mean time they are printing money like maniacs which also deflats the value of all the existing dollars AND they're going deeper and deeper into debt at a such a rate that they seem determined to utterly destroy the country and it's entire economy at the fastest rate possible.
Our government does not represent us, the middle class. Republicans, Democrats, it doesn't matter. We don't need an election, we need a revolution.
Now are you paying attention?
Here here!
An excellent post in a sea of xenophobia. I for one would like to congratulate Bangalore on this triumph. I think this kind of thing should be spread to other places around the world, to raise the standard of living and make the more empoverished peoples of the world self-sufficient. It doesn't matter where you are from as long as you do good work. We are all humans, perhaps we should be happy that our brothers and sisters in India (and China and Russia) have been able to find this kind of economic boost that doesn't involve bending over so the IMF can screw them.
Keep it up India!
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Moreover, it is found out that the Americans are shying away from the challenges of math and science. A recent National Science Foundation Study reveals a 5 per cent decline in the overall doctoral candidates in the US over the last five years.
One way to look at this is that we Americans are just lazy compared to Indians, Chinese, etc (and there is probably some truth to that). But from another perspective, why should we Americans bother to get advanced degrees in Math and Sciences when we're constantly bombarded with the message that we won't be doing the sorts of jobs here which require those degrees?
This gets me to my main point: we're not only witnessing the export of good paying jobs from the US to various 3rd world countries (and the associated economic effects), we're also witnessing a huge transfer of skills and knowlege out of the US.
As there are fewer tech jobs in the US it means that fewer engineers will be employed. When an engineer has no work for a year or two their skills will stagnate. Most engineers pick up new skills 'on the job' and without a job, they won't be picking up newer, in-demand skills.
Of course this has a ripple effect: your nephew Johnny who is in highschool wanted to follow in your footsteps and get into engineering, but now he sees that you've been out of work for a couple of years and you're considering a different field altogether. You sit down with him at Thanksgiving and tell him to go into dentistry or auto repair so that he can have a steady, decent-paying profession... Well, you get the picture. Whereas math and science education is already pretty poor in many parts of the US, this trend will not encourage it to get any better. No, we'll be offering pre-law classes in highschool instead of calculus soon.
I certainly don't have a problem with a globalized economy. That's not the issue. The issue is that local experienced workers are being replaced by remote inexperienced workers. It's the same dot.bomb stupidity where seasoned software engineers with more than a decade of experience were replaced by junior college dropouts who managed to have taken a summer class in Java.
The current fad is to ship off the core innovative work to people with absolutely no stake in company. It would be like Ford and GM outsourcing their automotive design work to Mexico instead of just the manufacturing. Software engineering is not manufacturing, it's engineering.
The problem is that companies really don't understand what software is. They think it's a manufactured product, so their Harvard MBA playbook says to ship off manufacturing elsewhere.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Anybody can start a storefront white box operation... but making it scale to a national level can't be done without external funding and may not be possible even with it.
While I labeled outsourcing as a management fad, there is no reason to believe that the fad won't last long enough to destroy most technology industry in the USA or persuade kids going into college now NOT to get degrees in technology-related fields.
Without tech industries in America, welcome to the Third World. You've presumably read SnowCrash. It's predicated on a "race to the bottom".
Tech Public Policy stuff
India is a cheap country to live in and I know it because I lived there. Yes you can say that you get very less pay than what you get in US but then you should also look at expenses. You spend more than half of your salary into taxes, rents, and payments of other kinds which is not the case in India. The saving there are tremendous. And you can end up saving more than here. The reason jobs keep on moving to India are significantly many some of which are: 1) 1 US Dollar = 50 Indian Rupees (approx) 2) You have to pay there much less than here in US. As for e.g. If I get paid here in US 5000 bucks a month, this translates to nearly 250,000 Indian Rupees. A salary of more than 25,000 Indian Rupees a month is considered more than excellent. 3) Excellent cheap labor. There are many educated people there whose primary language is English and can effectively deliver the goods. The economic condition is improving drastically and it does not surprise me why companies want to move jobs to countries like India and China with the very reason why we are seeing such a jump into Jobs @ Bangalore.
I think people like you who say that education doesn't matter are full of it.
Education matters, degrees don't. Please don't confuse the two. An education is something that can be obtained at a school or with other resources (such as industry research). A degree is someone else certifying that you supposedly know something. I have an education. I know and understand more than 90% of the CS PhDs you'll find. If you want to ask how did I do that, you should ask how did the founders of the computer science field did it. Or for that matter, how did the professors who teach Comp Sci do it?
Computers in their modern form (i.e. mainframes forward), have only been around for a few decades. Think about it.
THe truth is if you want to survive CS programs are GOOD CS schools you either have to 1) know your stuff and be smart or 2) cheat. So a degree does, to some level, guarantee some degree of expertise.
Does it? Are you SURE about that? If you are, perhaps you'd like to explain the number of people I've met who've passed through the masters program, without even an idea on how to code Pong, much less an operating system? Companies have put a great deal of pressure on Universities to put out programmers that could "code in the popular languages". The Universities have been bowing to this pressure and dumbing down their ciriculum.
I can't even tell you how horrified I am when I see textbooks that say, "We'll teach you C/Java because it's the most popular thing on the market right now." NO! They should teach EVERYTHING! Core concepts. Everything from how the computer does it (aseembly) through the evolution of procedural to functional to OO language and design. And if the students can't handle it, they should flunk until they can.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade