Some Little Known Facts about Russian software engineering talent

Russia has:

• More than 1 million highly educated IT professionals
• St. Petersburg University programmers won the 1st prize in 1999, 2000 and 2004 in the International programming competition organized by IBM (13,000 teams participated). For comparison, MIT won the 7th, the 10th and the 5th places respectively in those years

Russian software products are in:

• Palm Pilot hand-writing recognition program
• US Postal Services hand-writing recognition program
• Google Search Engine

Appreciation of the Russian talents by the major competitors is the best evidence of the capabilities of the Russian programmers:

• "Russia has caught up with the rest of the software development community with the advent of Internet. In fact, owing to the better communication infrastructure, the reach of Internet is much larger there compared to India," says Manoj Srivastava, director, Information Technologies (India) Ltd.
• Ravi Sangal, president, IDC India, expects more threat from Russia than China. He says, "Russians have an edge because they deal with the same kind of low-end coding and software testing."
• While India churns out thousands of software programmers and engineers every year, Russia has physicists and mathematicians who have traditionally worked on satellite communications and nuclear power systems.
• An Indian programmer, Forbes says, earns on an average $7,000- 8,000 a year, the same as Moscow techs tend to earn. But the same level of talent can be purchased in Russia's outlying areas for about $3,000-4,000, Forbes stresses. "And the heavily populated areas of Russia are much closer to the West than India is, making it easier to do business," it says.

Sources:  Russia threatens India in outsourcing market, New Delhi, August 24, 00:54 by Kavita Kaur;  Watch out India, Russia is competing with you in IT: Forbes magazine.