Slavic Ingenuity

Eastern European developers are gaining an impressive reputation for software outsourcing. Their highly-skilled labor coupled with cost savings has made Slavic developers a popular investment. According to the Central and Eastern Europe Outsourcing Review report in 2010, Eastern Europe continues to lead the growth of IT specialists and software development firms.

One of the reasons Slavic countries, such as Ukraine, have become so successful is their ingenuity. Developers have become creative out of necessity, because they must work with limited budgets and resources. To be able to compete with less powerful hardware than their American counterparts, Slavic developers have become experts in creating powerful and efficient algorithms that can perform on less advanced equipment. This skill is borne out of having limited access to computer resources in their engineering and mathematics schools. Therefore, software developers intuitively spend more time planning, enabling them to implement their solutions more quickly than other outsourcers.

Eastern Europe also has the advantage of history. Software development is a somewhat older industry in Eastern Europe than in North America. Slavic scientists started working with personal computers before the advent of IBM. A professor in Ukraine (part of the USSR, at the time) developed a personal computer prior to 1970. That computer was engineered using many of the same principals still used in computer science today, including encoded memory and binary code. That early personal computer was also equipped with a dedicated keyboard, monitor and a pointer device that was a combination of a mouse and a touch screen. The technology was so advanced at the time that it garnered interest from IBM, who bought a few models for its scientists to study.

This innovation lead to the birth of computer science in Ukraine and built a strong foundation of knowledge that was transferred to new generations of developers in their engineering and mathematics schools. The tradition of computer science runs deep among Slavic developers, and they have a profound knowledge of software products and architecture. Many of these developers are trained by Eastern European schools to understand what is happening inside the software, giving them an advantage to deliver superior products in less time than their competitors.

Developers around the globe, from India to Central Europe to North America, all have their own specific strengths. Slavic developers have capitalized on their long cultural history of computer science and (seemingly disadvantageous) financial and resource restrictions to become leaders in software ingenuity. As a result, Eastern Europe has the expertise to compete with North American firms and outsourcers from around the world.