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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.'"
Actually, ex-soviet computer scientists apparently where not happy with the former governments choice to use non-soviet produced computers and protocols. They felt that it dampened the ability for them to make their own technologies.
Check out the history of Soviet computer technology on wikipedia sometime, its interesting. Most of it cuts off in the 60s and 70s and then they just started using IBMs and stuff.
Exactly. Most of the best Russian programmers are currently either making botnets or breaking DRM. During the late stages of the Cold War, they spent most of their time buying or stealing code from the West. A fact that the CIA once exploited to cause one of the largest non-nuclear man made explosions.
While you might like the DRM breakers, nothing here is much to get excited about.
Not a typewriter
Don't give them too much credit. Now that the petrodollar tap has been turned off, Putin is terrified of any real decline in standard of living. Like China, authoritarianism works on a population accustomed to it and enjoying a rapidly rising standard of living. Manufacturing brought this to China, and oil exports (and some raw materials exports) brought this to Russia.
With the collapse in oil prices and raw materials demand, Putin is in a tough spot. His currency sucks and they've wasted a ton of money trying to defend the ruble, pissing away a lot of their foreign currency reserves in the process. The stock exchange has been closed down a number of days due to declines.
If a bad global economy wasn't enough, the little tete-a-tete they had with Georgia made a lot of nervous investors even more nervous and they pulled a lot of resources out of Russia fearing all the usual problems that come with a nationalist thug like Putin.
We've seen what the USSR could accomplish as a go-it-alone economy, and it wasn't enough. Having a nominally capitalist system will help, but Putin needs to stop with the saber rattling and the blind nationalism.
According to the TopCoder algorithm competition stats:
1 Russian Federation 2930.06
2 China 2843.33
3 Poland 2842.79
4 Ukraine 2557.06
5 Japan 2483.83
6 Canada 2426.56
7 United States 2320.98
8 Slovakia 2291.73
9 South Korea 2226.98
10 Belarus 2206.81
Let's just hope the next war isn't fought with robots.
I've worked with a few H1-B's, and that's generally the impression I got. We had one guy who had a CS Masters from some Indian university, but after 6 months of trying, he still couldn't write a simple text processing app. At another job, we had hired a Crystal Reports 'expert' to create some reports that none of the staff had time for. For a couple of days the guy would ask how to make the numbers round down, rather than just rounding off. On the second day I took pity on him and showed him the joys of the Floor function. I had never programmed anything in CR, but I knew that there had to be a floor operator in there somewhere.
I'm sure there are good Indian programmers. I'm also relatively certain that most of them are here on student visas, working on their grad school degrees. Those not in school most likely expect the same level of pay as their American counterparts. Never forget that you get what you pay for.
He's got a point. Building computers is simply not a terrifically difficult business.
I was in St. Petersburg (Putin's hometown) a few months ago visiting in-laws, and I helped them pick out their first computer from a local vendor. What they got was a pretty nice machine for the money. The selection was good. A fine consumer experience, overall.
Do they need a foreign corporation in that market locally? Would they benefit immensely from that? Not really.