The lack of technical depth in China's Software Industry

I have a friend who is the COO of a chinese IT outsourcing company that's also a Microsoft partner. It was very interesting having the conversation with him about the difficulty of hiring good technical talent. I used to work for Microsoft and have managed outsourcing partners before so I'm quite familiar with that the outsourced work involves and the technical skills and competencies you would have to hire for. I've encountered quite a bit of the impression here in the US with regard to China's technical talent in that you can get a lot more for the same if less amount of money, that there's simply tons of Masters and PhD's in computer science you can get to do even the smallest parts of your programming in China. From discussions with my friend it is in fact very difficult to find and hire someone with more than 2-3 years of practical experience for the technical staff. There's a couple of very simple reasons this is the case. 1) The best and the brightest had left china to study, to be a part of larger opportunities. Some ex-pats are returning, but you cannot get them to take chinese-level salary. 2) Computer science is not as a mature and prevalent education program in China as it is in the US where it was created. 3) Because of the one-child policy creating a generation of people with a high sense of self-entitlement and the cultural perception that management is better than technical excellence, anyone with more than 2-3 years of actual computer programming experience expects to be management positions and not technical. This is definitely a topic I wish I had more data points on in terms of computer science degree programs, their maturity, amount of graduates every year, average income for those just graduated etc... But I know that the expectation that China is the next India for outsourcing is unrealistic and that if your software company is moving operations to China for the supposed cheap and large technical talent pool you're in for an unpleasant surprise. There are definitely success stories in software in China like taobaowang, the chinese google equivalent, alibaba etc... and hopefully more of the same will drive the creation of a huge talent pool for the future. For now you have to remember that what the chinese software industry excels at is immitation, and product quality is not a familiar concept.

How timely, I just got a McKinsey article that talks about this issue: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_abstract_visitor.aspx?ar=1685&L2=18&L3=31&srid=27&gp=0