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I work at a software company that makes programs for doing higher mathematics. Got my first programming job 20 years ago. Day I walked in they said "we will be programming this one in C". I had never heard of C - this was the mid 80s and I was still in college. In a week I was writing code in C. In three weeks I was improving the code of all the other junior programmers in the office.

Smart people learn what they have to and can do so on very short time scales, when they are allowed to. That is what makes the real world so much more efficient than academia, as a matter of fact.

As for the IBM story, who is the director of corporate strategy at IBM who maps such things out? Might he know anything about it?

The Indian genius will move to London and make 100,000 pounds a year and have a much better life.

And companies not only look past the current quarter, they look past the current generation. In mine we look for talent still in college and occasionally while still in high school. Anywhere in the world. Grok, already.

So then American engineers simply have to be smarter than everyone in two of the most populous countries on this planet and if they are they have nothing to worry about. Right. Isn't Social Darwinism grand ?

A system in which no one with less than an IQ of 170 can expect to find good work is a bad system for America.

Motivated and talented people do just that. My husband needed to write a program in C and wrote the program, a search engine in 1987, and learned C in six months, with one other person. Microsoft almost bought the search engine, but decided to steal it instead.

Our son is the same, super good at math, the high school ran out of math classes in his junior year, he then started taking them at a community college. Decided to just go there get his high school degree and college credits at the same time. Well, now at age 18 he is a first term junior at the University of Oregon, and is scared of majoring in engineering, due to what he has heard about outsourcing. Should he be?

YOU SAID..."Got my first programming job 20 years ago. Day I walked in they said "we will be programming this one in C". I had never heard of C - this was the mid 80s and I was still in college. In a week I was writing code in C. In three weeks I was improving the code of all the other junior programmers in the office."

So you got a programming job in the mid 80's, having no real working programming experience, and never even heard of C, which is pretty amazing considering that the first edition of the Kernighan and Ritchie C 'bible' book came out in 1978. That in itself is pretty amazing. Do you think thats the norm today for hiring practices?

How many resumes posted on monster for programming jobs these days have no programming experience?

But what I think is even more amazing is the fact that you went from no knowledge of C (did you know any other programming language???) to what i guess would be crackerjack C programmer in what...three weeks.

You must be a genius.