Your Krazy Karl: Competition is intense in Indian schools... No bell curve or mandatory promotion. Their kids don't have access to 1/100 of the tools and opportunities we have here. They have the daily reminder of flat out poverty in their face to motivate them.
That is entirely untrue. It is a cost of living arbitrage that has nothing to do with "skill sets" "desire" etc. The end game will be America sinking towards a third world standard for most Americans who are not Government employees or Entrepreneurs.
Please stop with the absolutism. Things are never that simple. I have lived and worked in the Silicon Valley for most of my life, and while H1B visa holders are generally cheaper and more obedient than their American counterparts, the Americans are far and away better at the "soft skills" and tacit knowledge that really makes companies successful. It's unfortunate that large, bureaucratic companies like Adobe and Cisco tend to hire primarily on what appears to be a price-based decision model. My impression is that they are under pressure from Wall Street to lower costs in the short run. But in the long run, they are making themselves vulnerable to nimbler startups, who focus more on value. I have a small startup myself and know quite a few other entrepreneurs, and we by-and-large steer WAY clear of H1B visa applicants. They really are clueless when it comes to integrating technology in a creative way that wasn't taught to them in one of their certification programs. Large companies can sort of use these people to hack away at some low-level for a behemoth project, but they never know enough to see the big picture. I'm not saying that Americans aren't without fault - I wish I could find more people INTERESTED in some of the technology and research we do - but they do have the skills. It's just they lack the motivation. I would say it's more on the Americans to raise their game if they want these jobs, which I don't see much evidence for, rather than blame immigrants.
All the computer softwares have been invented/written by Americans or Russians or other rich country people. Indian and chinese people learn the softwares and they make changes to it. How can learners be better than inventors?
In UK software engineering circles, we jokingly refer to him as 'Bob Shawadiwadi' his moto is 'Much quickness, plenty cheapness'.
And what, exactly, has that environment produced? Where is the Indian competition to Intel, AMD or NVIDIA? Where is the Indian OS that can compete with Windows, Linux or BSD? At the very least, where's a more advanced GUI that builds on the metephore along the lines of failed implementations like BeOS or OS/2? Where are the telecom protocols from India that would render CDMA, 3G and 4G obsolete? What about wireless a/b/g/n? IMHO, from personal experience working with and having managed Indian engineers they all exhibit the same weakness -- the lack of applied creativity to compliment their rote memorization of a given technology. Japan and China suffer from a predominance of the same. Technical innovation, for the moment, still is by and large the domain of the U.S.
That's all well and good, but the curriculum isn't near as difficult. Im not talking pee-on hillbilly state-schools in the US, but our avg-tier engineering schools. Part of the reason it's less difficult is because they don't have all the tools. Hard to do large volumes of multi-varrative calc without mathematica/matlab. edit: i've interviewed h1b holders with doctorates from indian universities for some of the projects i've worked on. I know there are some really talented people in india, but these people i've interviewed aren't it regardless of their credentials. When i asked about the coursework for their doctorates it was on-par with my undergrad, which also included a thesis.(yes, for my undergrad. 110 pages APA.)