This myth is a dangerous parasite which, as any other parasite, must be exterminated in any possible way. But this parasite is very tenacious as it feeds from delusions:
- we supposedly have an excellent technical educational system remained since the Soviet times, and it prepares first-class engineers, programmers, electronic specialists;
- our specialists are supposedly in demand and highly valued in the West. And not only in the West – in all countries all over the world!
This is all full crap!
Our educational system has not been the best for a long time. If there had been some greatness earlier, I managed to see only the miserable leavings. Nowadays the programs at the technical universities are dragging behind the market needs, giving the students only out-of-date or being out-of-date technologies.
The teachers often parry: we give basis, and which is the most important, we teach how to think! But this is just another myth, too. First, teaching how to think is a great business, but not every university manages with this task. Second, in our world with its extremely rapid rhythm the ability to think is just a part of necessary skills. You have to be ready to work on real projects. And these days ‘the able to think’ meet in job descriptions the abbreviations of technologies that are known only by hearsay, copy them to their resumes and hope for the off chance.
The Ukrainian specialists really work all over the world, but they are needed not because they are the best of their kind, but because they ‘cost’ less than their western colleagues. For the same reason IT-workers from India and China are called-for too.
I have worked among Ukrainian, Indian, Chinese and German developers, and I know for sure that our programmers are not the worst. But unfortunately not the best either. It is without a doubt there are remarkable, and even genius specialists who I was lucky to work abreast. But on the whole, there are both unique professionals and perfect fools among representatives of any nation.
A friend of mine – Tatyana, the head of a software company in Great Britain – told me that for some time past she had tried not to take for a job the Ukrainian specialists. It is explained by the fact that our countrymen set too high demands for salary at a medium quality level of their work. It is more convenient for her to hire representatives of other countries (India and China) who work not worse but cost in accordance with their skills.
Similar comments I heard from other managers who complained about steep demands of the national IT-specialists and unreadiness to work in commercial projects.
That is why the myth of first-class Ukrainian specialists is so harmful. In some cases it deprives of motivation to development, fixing perception of oneself at the level ‘everyone around is an idiot, I am alone a count Monte-Cristo’. Instead of rest on your laurels you have to bite, dig and plough, no matter how trivial it may sound. It is necessary to study what you are not given during educational process but is required during the battle. If we speak about the developers, it includes design patterns, methodologies of software development, system of version control, methods of protecting the applications from cracking, examples of the best practices, and many more.
At a certain stars combination in the sky, the Ukrainian sector of information technologies may become a noticeable occurrence on an international scale. What has been done for this by the government, and what is necessary to be done, I will tell you some other time.
