Saw this mentioned briefly in the Straits Times today, about how Google has been unable to find engineers in India who are familiar with the latest coding techniques for websites. I thought, hmm, that would be either Web Standards or AJAX. It turned out to be the latter. And it took one of their own to say it:

“The people are smart, innately smart but don’t have this particular skill set yet,” said Shriram, an Indian native who is a founding member of Google’s board of directors.

In this post, I’m moving beyond the scope of our WebSG shores, to a neighbouring IT giant that seems unstoppable, despite hiccups like this. The skillset problem could be generally prevalent in Asia. IT schools are probably not teaching students the latest techniques because there still isn’t strong enough awareness, and therefore demand, for Web 2.0-style applications that are easy to use and fast. The US is still driving innovation in this area.

Of course, we can’t blame institutions entirely for our backwardness. Innovators don’t rely on spoon-feeding. They pick up a book or visit a website on CSS or AJAX and they learn from it. So it’s our mindset we need to work on.

It was also amusing to read that Americans were being sent to India due to the lack of user interface designers there. Let’s see if India bounces back.