The reversal of Russia’s brain drain: US tech companies turn to offshore programmers
MOSCOW, Russia, Spring 2000 -- Pilot Software had a problem. The Cambridge, Mass., company's customers urgently needed support and maintenance work on their copies of a popular software package Pilot no longer produces. But Pilot's engineers were too busy developing new software to spend time on the job.
Pilot found the solution in an unexpected place - the run-down laboratories that make up the campus of Moscow State University. Even more unlikely, perhaps, is that it got the help it needed from a New Hampshire-based software company that has set up a subsidiary on the Moscow campus, where it is doing its small part to help stem the Russian brain drain.
Sprawled out in the shadow of the Stalinesque skyscraper that once served as a towering monument to Russia's proud scientific legacy, this campus has come to symbolize everything about the post-Soviet era - declining prestige, outdated equipment, and plummeting living standards - that has made Moscow's best and brightest leave in droves for better opportunities abroad. But lodged in one of the buildings is the Moscow subsidiary of Auriga, an Amherst, N.H.-based company that is bucking that trend.
The company is attracting some of Russia's most talented software designers to work in Moscow. Its 65 Russian programmers sell their expertise in software and applications design and development to US software companies via the Internet. Known as offshore programmers, these specialists are disproving a popular myth about Russian computer experts - that anyone worth his pirated copy of Windows 98 would bolt from Russia the minute he got a job offer abroad.
From Moscow to Siberia, Russian programmers are taking on jobs without leaving home and making their American clients happy. The Russian programmers work just as well as their American counterparts, but the jobs cost up to 40 percent less because the Russians work for less, said Scott Livermore, engineering manager at Pilot Software.
Livermore turned to Auriga after offshore programmers in India did not work out. "This is definitely the future," Livermore said of working with Russian programmers. "There is a lot of work that needs to be done, especially when you're working in an area that is as tight on labor as Boston's high-tech labor market."
Auriga's lead programmer on the Pilot job, Muscovite Alexander Belyakov, 47, said he enjoyed working for a firm in Boston area. But he would never want to live there. "I'm too old to move around," he said. "I like it where I am."
This is the refrain sounded by a number of engineers ensconced amid the state-of-the-art machinery in Auriga's basement lab. All have experience working with US companies; many are fluent in English; some have been offered jobs with companies in California's Silicon Valley where they could earn up to $100,000 a year - more than three times the highest salaries at Auriga. But now that they have good jobs here, no one wants to leave Russia.
"Don't get me wrong, I liked San Francisco. It was the most beautiful city in the world," said Anton Kuzmin, who ran a virtual laboratory at Lynx Software in San Jose, Calif. "But I can do well here, and my wife and family feel better here."
All this does not mean Auriga has ignored the market for Russian programmers in the United States, where demand for highly skilled programmers far outstrips supply. Auriga's Web site contains an advertisement offering qualified applicants "a quality of life far above the average in the USA."
Alexei Sukharev, a former professor of computer science at Moscow State University who left Russia to found Auriga in the early 1990s, said his company has 30 Russian programmers working in its Amherst officers."But not everyone wants to live abroad," Sukharev said. "Offshore programming allows them to do front-line work with top companies. They are all well-fed, they all have cars, they are happy in their jobs."
In Moscow and St. Petersburg, offshore programmers are just one small slice of the action. In Siberia, the stakes are higher: Officials hope they are the vanguard of a new economy - the makings of a Silicon Steppe.
CommonInterests.com, a Web site that aims to connect people across the Boston area, took shape on a computer in a ramshackle Soviet-style apartment block in Tomsk, a western Siberian city.
The site was designed in part by Pavel Khristolyubov, 23, a Russian programmer who works in hometown of Tomsk, working for Double Decker Studios, a South Boston company whose clients include Bell Atlantic and Boston.com. While on an internship program in Boston in 1998, Khristolyubov met Dmitry Gurevich, who emigrated from St. Petersburg in 1990 and later founded Double Decker.
Now Khristolyubov spends about half his time programming for Double Decker and half managing other Tomsk programmers who do the same. He makes less than the $45,000 a year he thinks he would fetch on the US market, but far more than the $160 a month that would be considered an excellent salary for a programmer working solely for Tomsk-based companies.
He wouldn't name the exact sum but says it allows him to live better than he would in America on an American salary. He can make mortgage payments, save for a car, support his wife, Lena, 21, in taking classes, vacation in the Caucasus Mountains, and even take his mother-in-law out for sturgeon shish kebab. Those are rare amenities in Russia, where most couples the Khristolyubovs' age live with relatives and have little spare cash.
Khristolyubov is one of hundreds of offshore programmers in Tomsk, say local officials. Yevgeny Gayevoi, head of foreign relations for the regional government, envisions them being followed by translators, physicists, chemists, construction engineers, anyone who can export brain work via e-mail. "We're betting on the Internet for our future," he said.
It is easy to see why. Tomsk is isolated even by Siberian standards. The three-day train ride from Moscow, crossing four time zones, is lengthened by historical bad luck: In the 19th century, the city was bypassed by the Trans-Siberian railroad, and in Soviet times, it was declared closed to foreigners.
But Tomsk also has six universities and 60,000 students among its population of 500,000. The computer science departments draw students from across Siberia, the Far East, and Central Asia.
"Brains are the raw material for our industry," said Igor Itkin, whose firm, Stack Ltd., made the Russian version of Novell GroupWise and trains Microsoft-certified systems engineers in Russia. He was also named director of a bankrupt state factory that now, with Stack's help, is making computers that work in arctic conditions for oil companies.
Igor Seryodkin, 39, says his firm, Exoft, was chosen by his American partners, Montana-based Commodity Software, over groups from Moscow and St. Petersburg to help design software for the US commodities market.
"My guys are so brilliant that the Americans got very excited," said Seryodkin. One day last month, in their office that looks out at an Orthodox Church, Seryodkin's "guys" were working away to Led Zeppelin and chatting online with an American partner, who was logged on at an Ohio laundromat. All of them said it wasn't just the money that attracted them - it was the chance to work in the field they loved without leaving home.
Khristolyubov agreed. He enjoys showing off his city - from the snowy birch woods overlooking the frozen Tom River to the latest hot night club, Millennium, which features Siberian Crown beer, pool tables, dancers dressed like robot aliens, and, if you stay late enough, an amateur striptease.
"I'm from the provinces," Khristolyubov said. "I want to be mobile and cosmopolitan, but I want to stick to Russian culture. I don't feel comfortable living in the US. I'm at home here, and I know my worth."
More from this Reporter
- In New Russia, Tatars Plot Revolution - Capitalism
- Putin challenger is trailing despite success in reforms