" By hiring Prity Tewary, Wipro, India's third-biggest software exporter, may have found the key to expanding the engineering talent pool that Indian universities produce in a year .... She and 1,100 others, many of them plain vanilla science graduates, are studying for a four-year master of science degree in software, telecommunications and microelectronics on Saturdays. Wipro is paying their tuition, providing them with classroom resources on its sprawling, university-type campuses, and giving them stipends that start at 6,000 rupees, or $137, a month. In turn, the student-workers are helping the company go beyond the limited universe of 184,000 fresh engineers available for hiring as programmers each year.

"We build our own engineers," says S.K. Bhagavan, who oversees Wipro's in-house "talent transformation" team of 70 faculty members. In a year, Bhagavan's team conducts 150,000 hours of training, and that includes coaching in "soft skills" needed by a work force that interacts with clients globally.

... At an aggregate level too, India needs to convert more of its generalist scientific talent into software professionals to sustain the industry's competitiveness. Of a total population of 7.7 million science and technology professionals in 2000, about half, or 3.8 million, were science graduates. Only 970,000 were graduate engineers, according to an estimate by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research in New Delhi. While India does need more science doctorates to carry out research, it doesn't need more unemployed physics graduates.

Seven out of 10 employees hired in the last three years by Infosys Technologies, Wipro's slightly bigger competitor by market value, were fresh graduates. In order to raise the quality of the talent it hires, the Bangalore-based company has released some of the course material it uses to train employees to universities under a $2 million "Campus Connect" initiative."

Would Linux have succeeded if Linus Torvalds hadn't evangelized it? As brilliant a hacker as he is, it was Linus's ability to convey his ideas in written English via email and mailing lists that made Linux attract a worldwide brigade of volunteers.

Have you heard of the latest fad, Extreme Programming? Well, without getting into what I think about XP, the reason you've heard of it is because it is being promoted by people who are very gifted writers and speakers.

Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can't do anything about that.