A recent article in the New York Times began; "Why must Bell Industries, a computer services company in El Segundo Calif., go all the way to India to hire programmers? The company's co-chairman, Theodore Williams, thinks it is because America doesn't have its priorities straight."

The article goes on to state that Mr. Williams belongs to a group called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities. The group's claim is that the US has its priorities wrong, that it spends too little on education and wastes too much on military spending. Members of the group include Ben Cohen (Ben & Jerry's Homemade), Paul Newman, Ted Turner and a list of executives and business owners all wanting more spending on education and less on the military.

It appears to me that the "Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities" might be exhibiting a knee jerk reaction and solution to a problem that is not as simple as: More money for schools and less money for guns will produce more US bred programmers.

Before coming to simple conclusions, possibly they could study some of the evidence that exists regarding education systems and programmer production. If we look at the money spent on education we will find that it varies drastically from state to state. Connecticut leads, paying its teachers an average annual salary of $51,700. At the bottom end is South Dakota with an annual average salary of $27,800. Does Connecticut produce more programmers than California ($44,600) or Minnesota ($39,100). I don't think so! The concept that additional money for schools should come from reducing military spending is bewildering. Military spending should not be linked to education requirements. Military spending should be based on a safe defense system and not what the average score is on SATs. .

One might ask; "Why Indian programmers? Is there some special educational trick that the Indian school system uses to train so many programmers? Do they spend more on educating their children than the US?" I don't think so!

The fact still is that after the United States, India has the largest number of programmers in the world. Bangalore is called the Silicon Valley of India.

What is wrong is that the conclusions reached really have no basis in fact, other than it seems to make sense. I have traveled to India a number of times and my daughter Susan spent her Junior year of High School in Bombay, I can report that the Indian school system is nothing special regarding money spent per student or on computers. The poor infrastructure makes Internet availability impossible for many schools.

The system of higher education in India came from the British. In the time of the Raj, the British built a large number of universities that taught in English. That tradition is still true today. Higher education in India is taught in English. The teaching does not encourage creativity, memorization is the way students are taught to pass tests. So why does India turn out so many programmers?

I would say that the first hint is that an Indian student seeking a higher education must first be fluent in English. Can you imagine if US students entering college had to be fluent in Sanskrit? Learning English though is not really a problem. Indians are used to learning many languages. There are no fewer than nine languages (spoken and written) across India. Typically a person growing up, say in Bangalore, would speak the state language which is Kannada. He also would be fluent in Tamil the language of the adjacent state of Madras (Chennai). He would know Hindi, as that is the national language, and if he goes on to higher education he must know English. If we remember that programming is actually learning to articulate in another language, we can see that it might be a breeze to learn C++ or HTML after learning the first four.

Americans on the other hand can barely speak English, never mind another language. Email has revealed how poor our spelling is. Today, spell checkers are required for email programs in order to avoid embarrassment. Meanwhile some politicians are trying to stop people who speak English as a second language from being taught in their native language until their English is acceptable.

This is another knee-jerk reaction! Having a large school population that speaks Spanish could be used as an advantage for a school system. What should be done, is to teach Spanish to the English-speaking students. Soon all the students would be able to talk to each other fluently in both languages.

The fact that school systems are failing to deliver the quality of students needed to face the challenge of the new millennium is true. Obviously spending more money to reduce class size and improve the quality of teachers will certainly help, but until we learn that we must demand more effort of students and be able to gauge their progress with national tests we will not have the results we desire.

Even if we do spend more we cannot guarantee that it will produce more programmers. The high number of US job opportunities allows students a large number of career choices and programming does not make the short list for most. Programming requires intelligence, creativity, patience and tenacity. Programmers are self-taught. Actually as a programmer you must be capable of teaching yourself new languages as they appear. This decade has produced C++, Java, Visual Basic, and HTML. Were they taught in 1985? I don't think so!

Military spending on the other hand should not be linked to educational goals. Would anyone want to cut school funding to finance a war? True, it should not be bloated by spending huge amounts of money for obsolete or unnecessary weapons just because they are produced in a congressman's home district. Still we must remember that many of the technologies we take for granted like satellites, Teflon and even the Internet came from government sponsored programs. The domination the US now has in technology is somewhat a direct result of the cold war.

The new mantra today is "Globalization". Allowing India to handle our excess programming exemplifies this. The world has shrunk drastically due to the Internet. Optimizing the location of a job based on available talent has become easier in the software industry, as programmers can send their work anywhere via the Internet. Today we are part of a growing world economy. We also are providing the tools and jobs to make it so.

Frank Greenhalgh
June 24, 1999

About the Author

Frank Greenhalgh has been working in power supplies and systems for 38 years. He has many impressive accomplishments and patents. Over the years he has made significant contributions to Trio Laboratories where he held the position of Chief Design Engineer and was then promoted to Vice President.