Comrade, You Are So Not Getting a Dell

theodp writes "At the World Economic Forum, Michael Dell's pitch to help Russia with its computers got the cold-as-Siberia shoulder from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 'We don't need help,' shot back Putin. 'We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity' (video — rant starts at 1:24). 'Our programmers are some of the best in the world,' Putin continued. 'No one would contest that here — not even our Indian colleagues.'"

Comments

It was a very mild rebuke

[MykePagan]

Did anyone actually watch the clip? It appeared to me that Putin gave a very mild rebuke to Dell, and then went on to do just as much marketing of Russian IT :-) It was not a big "F-You Dell, F-you The West" like the headlines imply.

Re:It was a very mild rebuke

[Darth Cider]

Yes, it seemed mild to me too, so I transcribed TFV, in the interests of honesty and fairness. (I'm not a sympathizer of any sort!)

Here's the transcript:

People with limited capacities should be helped. Pensioners should be helped. Developing countries should be helped. And help must not only be simply in the form of giving the money, perpetuating the circle of poverty. Why negotiations at the WTO (?) are at an impasse? Because rich countries cannot meet the needs of the developing economies...let's be frank about it and open... One must look for a compromise, speaking of Russia and our partners in Europe, our partners in Europe and the United States and Indonesia... one needs fully fledged equal partnership. In many respects, our economies are complementary. Indeed, we've managed to achieve a lot in developing informatization, as we say of our society. A few years ago, imagine a village in Siberia with a computer system and internet access. We did it. We made it. We have a government program for that. In every school, I stress, every Russian school has both computer rooms and internet access. In the Far East, in the Far North, everywhere. This movement of IT in the society will continue as dictated by both the development of economy and society... No one would ever think of doubting opportunities of information offered by (the) internet as an open source for information and for opinion sharing. You may like something, you may not like something. But complete freedom is the word here. Speaking of the intentions of the State, we have a program, a federal program - it is called Electronic Russia. We intend to continue this individual program in cooperation with our partners, and it is great pleasure that we will accept, as we have done before, investments into this sector and will continue developing our own products and presenting them to the global market. Many companies of Russia are major operators of the cellular services in a number of the developed economies of the world and we will continue facilitating such experts in the future. We have quite a few coinciding interests in these and in this area of course we will find a few more. Many companies (I will not name them) work in these areas. Of course, it doesn't only deal with hardware, as they say, but also and most importantly with intellectual products, the software, Here we have a few things to offer to the market, and I am grateful to you for this allusion. Traditionally, we have a very strong school of mathematics in Russia, and our programmers are among the best in the world, no doubt about it, and nobody would contest it here, even our Indian colleagues. I would say, let's do [with] the job. Thank you.

Proper translation of Putin's statement...

[Anonymusing]

Here.

âoeYou know, the trick is we're not someone in need of help. We're not invalids. Help is something that you should give to poor people, to people with limited capacities, to pensioners, to developing countries... As for Russia and our partners in Europe, in the United States, in some Asian countries, there should be a partnership of equals.â

Re:It may be a misconseption on my part but...

[Puchku]

In India, we have thousands (literally) of kids graduating with computer engineering degrees every year. Now, the thing is, a lot of these degrees are pretty useless since the college/university that issued them is basically a money making machine, and nothing else.

However, there are a bunch of good places that produce very good engineers. The Indian Institutes of Technology are the most well known, but there are some others that are equally good (some of the top Regional Enginnering Colleges, and so on)

I think it boils down to numbers. Say we have 30,000 comp sci grads every year. Now say 60 percent of them are hacks who know nothing much and are only good for repetitive code work and stuff like that. 20 percent will be quite good, easily as competent as a good programmer in the US or wherever. 10 percent will be skilled at code and other stuff like management, the types who end up heading into upper management, 8 percent will be very good, and 2 percent will be fantastic.

The 2 percent mostly heads off to MIT, or CMU, or $TOPSCHOOL to do an MS or a Phd, but that still leaves a pretty substantial number of good people.

Now, when you realize that 30,000 is a low estimate, since the acutal figure is 175,000 (source: http://www.timesascent.co.in/index.aspx?Page=article&sectid=2&contentid=20080930200809301249051997b5b53a, and http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/jun/09bspec.htm ) you begin to see that while we do have a huge number of terrible programmers, we have a pretty good talent pool too. It's all about the numbers!

Re:Full of shit you are, young Jedi

[ravenshrike]

The amount of corruption hasn't declined in the least, rather, the competitors have all been eliminated and now the source of corruption is coming solely from the Putin faction and also the Russkie mafia. Entrepreneurial corrupt politicians not welcome.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Cyberax]

USSR _did_ have successful computers using ternary math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

Unfortunately, it was abandoned in favor of copying foreign binary computers :(

OK, so oil prices went up

[junkgoof]

Coincidentally oil prices went way up shortly after Bush jr was elected, and went way down after he left. In the interim Iran, Russia, and a number of other countries made out really, really well. The economic gains were very much due to oil prices and very little due to anything Putin did. Still better than Bush's economic plan that involved claiming deficit spending as a GDP increase, giving money to rich people is NOT Keynesian, making them work for it is.

Putin has basically done a Lenin so far. He has taken power completely so he can help his friends and persecute his enemies. He has said a lot, especially about Russians being a great people and Russia being a superpower. He has not done a whole lot.

Note: Reagan gets credit for a lot, but he was sort of all over the place as pres. Lower taxes, raise taxes, lower spending, raise spending, whatever. As for ending "communism," or, more accurately the Stalinist dictatorship (Lenin ENDED any semblance of communism in Russia, and started a totalitarian dictatorship, Stalin took over after a few years and continued for decades), it ended when Gorbachev told the East German leadership they could not shoot protesters, and if they did he would not send out the army to support them; the tyrants started picking up their gold and planning their luxurious retirements instantly.

Oh well, at least Putin has less secret police and executions than Lenin did...

Re:The Cold War Called ...

[MightyYar]

the federal budget deficit is downright terrifying and unsustainable.

Unsustainable, yes, but at the current interest rate they are paying, they'd be silly NOT to borrow. Now, that is all starting to change... yesterday they had to pay out more interest than expected to sell some 5-year treasuries. I expect that this will only get worse, so borrowing is about to get expensive.

As for Reagan breaking up the Soviet Union, give me a break. Communism never works, with or without Reagan. It was Clinton who was smart enough to reap the peace dividend by closing bases and bring a govt. surplus, which Reagan never would have done.

It's about being the right guy at the right time in history. Clinton NEVER would have won the election in 1980... and I doubt Governor Reagan would have won post-Cold War. Reagan almost certainly hastened the fall of the USSR, even if a fall was inevitable in the end. Also, Bush the first started reaping the peace dividends... Clinton carried this on. Bush I inherited about $480 billion (in constant dollars) and left Clinton with about $400 billion, so he knocked off about 16%. Clinton inherited the $400 billion and left with $345 billion, so he brought it down another 14% but in 8 years. Granted he had to deal with Republicans and a blowjob (in that order) the last couple of years, but you still have to give Bush I some credit.

Re:And Michael Looked Back

[Bearhouse]

They did not cut production. During 2008, a time of record high oil prices, in case you have forgotten, production fell by nearly 1%.

Historically, major increases in production had been achieved with the investment and expertise of western companies, working with Russian (OK kleptocratic) private organisations.

Putin then threw them all out / locked 'em all up. (By the way, where the money goes now is fairly obscure...Gazprom, for example, has subsidiaries in such oil-rich nations as the Caymen Islands, Cyprus...)

Surprise, surprise, production then fell. Was not reduced, just damn fell. Reminds me of, well, Venezuela, for example?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/venezuela/3183417/Venezuelas-oil-output-slumps-under-Hugo-Chavez.html

Re:The Cold War Called ...

[shutdown -p now]

AFAIK, "nekulturny" (literally, uncultured) is still the highest insult you can throw at a Russian.

I see that you've read Heinlein. However, that particular thing that he wrote wasn't true then, much less now.

Depending on the social class, the highest insult you can throw at a Russian is probably either "intelligent" (as in belonging to intelligentsia) when directed by a prole against someone he perceives as a smartass, or "bydlo" (this is a Polish loanword that literally means "cattle", and figuratively someone who lives to eat and copulate, and nothing above that) when it is the other way around.

Re:TopCoder

[shutdown -p now]

Any reason why the results are like that? I'm curious on why eastern europeans do so well. Better/different education system?

I think it's mostly strong emphasis on math and other hard sciences starting with high school, and the system of "advanced" (but still public/free) schools for bright students (you usually have to pass some fairly hard exams to get in) with even more emphasis. I've studied in two such schools in my last 4 years of school studies - we had about 8 hours of math and 4 hours of physics each week, and in the last two years math involved solving cubic and quadratic equations, dealing with derivatives, integrals and logarithms, functional analysis, stereometry (solid geometry) and so on. It helps to set the right frame of mind.'

That said, IT & CS education in Russia is still crappy, and mostly non-existent. I've yet to see any university offering a CS course, and IT/IS ones usually involve outdated technologies and incompetent teachers. All good Russian programmers I know are entirely self-taught when it comes to programming itself - most have engineering or math degree otherwise.

Re:TopCoder

[shutdown -p now]

That's not what I hear from friends at work who migrated from Russia to, on their words, "any country on the west that would accept me"

I am myself a Russian who migrated from Russia to "any country that would accept me" - which is Canada for now. What I told in my previous post was my personal experience, not hearsay.

It's all about need. Those eastern european kids really need to win these competitions. They can't afford to be "normal" because the job market for normal people was always a great mess at Russia.

That's just not true. First of all, regarding the job market - for software developers in particular, it's actually very good in Russia (or was until the crisis hit) - too few skilled people, too many opened positions. In my last 3 years of working in Moscow, I always knew that, at any given moment, I could walk out of my job and find a new one within 2 weeks. I've got salary which was several times larger than the average in the country. I've seen other people progress from junior to lead developer within 2 years because there were not enough properly experienced devs to fill all the lead positions. And that's not one particular company - that's the whole Moscow IT job market. Of course, Russia isn't just Moscow, but in practice most bright guys who can (and it doesn't take much) move to Moscow anyway because that's where the jobs are.

As for why the kids want to win competitions... I participated in some of the local/regional Russian ones myself at school, and it wasn't about getting job offers at all. It was because taking part in one was expected of all the bright students, and because winning one could help getting into a better university later on (they're free, even the better ones, but the exams are hard, and this could help). And yes, of course, merely the feeling of being the smartest kid on the block is worth a lot - but that's only if the culture you grew up in fosters that, which it does in Russia for some kids (not all of them, not by a long shot - but I think we still do better than USA with their overemphasis on physical sports in school).