[kragen]

Many Russian programmers are algorithmically brilliant. New compression algorithms in the last few years are largely Russian. A Russian guy figured out a couple of years back that using two pivots instead of one in quicksort reduced the number of swaps by 20%, which improvement is now in JDK 7. Quicksort! He found a jewel of performance improvement hiding in the world's best-known optimal algorithm, a jewel nobody had noticed since 1961. Russians routinely win on TopCoder.

It turns out that great software developers are not enough to be the world leader in software development. But it's easy to imagine why someone might think they could be, especially by 2012.

[jimfl]

This is very different from software development, which involves a hugely broad diversity of skillsets—only one of which is programming—and the ability to have them all work together without clawing each other's eyes out. Project management, technical writing, graphic design, operations, support, quality assurance all must be cohesively brought to bear in order to claim leadership in software development.