This brings up an interesting point. All during the 20-th century, engineers, scientists have always been kind of "voting with their feet". During the 1930's, the exodus of top calibre talent from Germany, Austria , Hungary and other Central European countries became even dramatic. During the 1960-70's, it was not exceptional in leading US industrial research establishments to find that 60% or more of the PhD's empoyed were foreign born. As to the movement of "programmer talent", the same pattern seems to prevail. Way back at the origins of Unix/C at Bell Labs, it was acknowledged that some of the ideas came from England. Stroustrup of C++ came from Scandinavia (Denmark?), Linus Trovald: linux from Finland, Guido Van Rossum: Python from Holland. I wouldn't say it is at this point yet, but you can be assured that if conditions in the US wouldn't seem very interesting to these people, they will quickly find greener pastures elsewhere. Why shouldn't they? Western Europe certainly doesn't seem to be a place much liked by true talent.
Flight Capital : The Alarming Exodus of America's Best and Brightest (Hardcover) by David Heenant a changing tide.
Hmm..... the really excellent program ,Amibroker created and supported out of Wroclaw. No keyloggers there for sure. Most of the CQG programers and developers sit in Moscow. Financial institutions have much of their work now outsourced to developing firms in Eastern Europe. Much of the work can get done faster, cheaper and even better. Under some conditions, contractors to the US government (ie. US Printing office, GOA) source much of the work out to Eastern Europe. I know....been there and done that.
One of Google's founders may be from Russia, but it isn't coincidence that they wrote the original Google search engine technology at an American university (Stanford), instead of a Russian one. The American system fosters and rewards creativity and original thinking. Wasn't the purpose of this thread to indict the American education system for it's failure to produce top programming talent? Bringing up an Eastern European who achieved his success inside one of America's top universities doesn't exactly support the thesis of the original post now does it? So Eastern Europeans are doing a lot of cutting edge stuff? The examples you have shown are mainly the low paying "infrastructure plumbing" type of contract for hire work that doesn't pay very well, which I'm sure is why they are winning the contracts. Excuse me for not being impressed that Eastern Europeans are landing a few government contracts. The real money in software development is made in application development, not contract for hire work. The advantage of original application development vs. contract for hire is this. When you're doing application development, you specify the problem and solution and then sell it to your customers. You are creating new intellectual property that you own and get paid a premium for. When you do contract for hire work, the customer specifies what is needed and then shops it around for the lowest bidder, since the bidders are providing essentially comoditized services. The customer then usually owns the fruits of your labor. Furthermore in original application development you can sell essentially the same code base to multiple customers so your original investment in development time is more highly leveraged. In contract for hire work, although it is true you develop tools and methodology that can be leveraged across multiple clients, each client is essentially a completely new job with a new code base. Each customer requires considerable unique and expensive investments in programming resources. It's the favorable leverage that results from the "write once sell many times" business model that really makes original application development such a superior business to doing contracting work, and that is why the biggest, and most profitable software companies in the world aren't contractors. Contracting and IT really is shit work, and that's why the best programmers usually are found in original application development instead. If Eastern European programmers are happy doing shit work then more power to them. I'm sure the rote learning and drilling that gives them the edge in programming contests is a good "education" for a future automating municipalitys' record keeping systems (or whatever it is contractors do, I don't even know.) Making the real money will always require cross-discipline creativity, and you don't learn that from practicing for programming contests, which is why I am glad to see American's fairing so poorly in these contests. They are a waste of time.
Overall, I really agree. "cross-discipline creativity" is the key. And it is this flexibility in the US system (especially in higher education) that gives big results, however you want to measure it -- money, recognition, innovation. However, its myopic and unfair to blindly trash developments, skills, advantages, that exist beyond the boarders of the USA. When you look around there is lots of great stuff going on all over. Embracing it instead of getting caught up in a small minded, judgemental and opinionated mind set moves us forward. If your mind and eyes are open everyone learns from everyone else and we progress.
Over the long run, things like "intellectual climate", "university prestige", "research mindedness" carry little weight. This is clearly demonstrated by recent 20th century history where many examples abound of highy qualified persons holding positions at prestigeous institutions don't hesitate to leave everything behind dear to them (if they still manage to escape). What matters: (1) standards of justice - things are often NOT what they are touted to be; (2) rule of law - opportunism and cronyism are more often the rule; (3) earnings vs. taxation - raw earnings don't mean a thing if effectively you are paying 85+% back to your government - the fable that you get a lot of "social services" in return is plain BS. nononsense
Not to water down the victories of eastern european programmers, but it is the average levels that one should be more interested. In non-US systems, more emphasis is on the cramming and memorizing theories and when you talk to the graduates of cramm universities you can make out that they think in very closed box memorized type manner. Their minds are not trained to think out of the line. No wonder, most of the inventions come from the western societies. I knew of an economics professor who had mastered his subject, but was an adamant opponent of free markets being applied in China....saying that it will not work. Guess several years later all his crammed theories in economics were proven useless when he could not, let alone predict, even identify the one of the major trends of the next 50-100 years.
In addition to raw talent and creativity, a motivational and opportunistic environment is important to the development process and new technology. Right now those things are perhaps best here in the US, which isn't to say that will not change or that it may not be doing so already. -jmho