Comment by thiagofm
15 years ago
First of all, I'm brazilian.
I study computer science and things are bad here. I'm very lucky to be able to understand english well enough to have studied most of courses MIT OCW have that are interesting to me. Teachers here "teach" in a different way, it's sad. Currently, there's much potential being lost.
People here are educated to get a job and work to buy a car, house and consume a lot, which is actually perfect how the way things are in the world right now(be careful US, we have more stupid consumers than you). They are good robots to get things done to get paid.
They need a boss basically, they are educated to be the employee. Awesome for US companies that come here.
I see a good future ahead for our economy, but who is going to get really rich here are people from the outside, the rest are basically going to beneficit from a higher salary and more power to consume crap.
Well, I lived in Brazil for 7 years, and only recently (like, a couple weeks ago) moved back to the US. What I could never understand is how you could trust a programmer that doesn't speak (and read) fluent English. Not being facetious here, but the fact is most good documentation is in English. I was the lucky exception while back in Argentina, but I feel that's still a widespread problem in Brazil.
A pity though, because I know for a fact there's plenty of great talent there.
There's talent everywhere. Every human is talented but the environment that is around that human kills it.
I feel lucky to have my english to the level that is right now and still live here. But I believe you are right, most of brazilian programmers are into java/c# because you can learn it in portuguese(books)... no problem. But try to learn some node.js or anything new not being able to speak english... It's impossible. There's barely doc in english...
The education system sucks.