TopCoder chooses China over India
Bruce Einhorn
Rob Hughes is in a good position to judge the merits of China’s
software engineers compared to their counterparts in India. He’s
president of TopCoder Inc., the Connecticut company that relies on
a global group of freelance programmers to do outsourcing work for
customers like Google, America Online and Merrill Lynch, TopCoder
divides projects into small bits that it puts on the Internet and
invites programmers anywhere in the world to solve. As I report in
this new
BusinessWeek story
about the
Chinese software industry, Hughes says that he’s impressed by the
quality of software engineers in China, which accounts for over
40% of the total number of programmers taking part in TopCoder
competitions. As a whole, China ranks third in TopCoder’s software
rankings, behind Poland and Russia - but the two European
countries have far fewer programmers taking part in competitions.
And what about India? The country doesn’t come close to China,
says Hughes. “The talent is much better coming out of China,” he
says. He thinks one reason is that the talent pool in India is
getting diluted. Since the software services industry started
taking off in India, the number of students becoming engineers has
zoomed, Hughes argues. And the quality of India’s engineering base
has suffered as a result. “Some people are surprised” that India
isn’t a bigger source of talent for TopCoder, “because of the IITs
and the strength in India,” he explains. However, “over the last
five years there has been such a growth of outsourcing of U.S.
companies to India, there has really been a push to get as many
people through [the schools], to get them some kind of technical
degree.”
China has been pushing hard, too, with the opening of three
dozen software colleges, designed to train engineers for jobs in
the industry, since 2002. But Hughes remains a big believer in
China, where TopCoder is opening its first overseas office. “I
think that the talent is much heavier and better coming out of
China,” he says. Of course, one reason that it's harder for
TopCoder to find engineers in India is that the best ones go to
work for one of the companies - Indian or foreign - that has set
up shop in Bangalore, Hyderabad or Bombay. China just hasn't had
that sort of big wave of investment. But if wages continue to rise
in India and top programmers become harder and harder to find,
don't be surprised if more companies start following TopCoder to
Beijing.
