What US has in superior is the mentoring culture, the business people interwoven in the university culture (like the extra courses offered in Sloan with real companies!), the sharp focus on patent, other things. But technical knowledge in top Brazilian universities will compete or outclass technical knowledge in US. But there are many things important, supporting things, a whole infrastructure beyond the technical people required to advanced technology.
The most demoralizing thing was the phoniness. The pointlessness of it all. Everybody was just going through the motions. The only thing people wanted to know was the exact sequence of steps they had to follow in order to achieve success. Everybody here knows you have to go to school in order to not be a nobody. So everyone goes to school. It barely matters what field they pick, anything will do. The more prestigious the better. People go to these places and they study crap they don't actually care about because it's all just a means to an end.
I was constantly surrounded by people who I felt didn't actually enjoy computers as much as I did. Made me so disillusioned I chose to do something else with my life. I just couldn't bear to be around people like that anymore.
http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html
The problem is real. But it is not something unknown in other countries.
100% this. I've visited Brazil as a tourist and if I did not go with a Portuguese speaking friend, I would have been lost on day one. English is pretty much only spoken by people who can afford private education there.
Not exactly. Different realities exist among the many states and high school public education levels. Most English-speaking people in Brazil might come from affluent or high-middle-class households, but that doesn't necessarily determine their interest in pursuing a career in tech. More to the point, having an interest in tech can motivate learning English, as that makes you instantly able to tap into the wealth of free information and learning material out there. Most excellent professionals I know didn't even have a degree for their first 2 or 3 years of experience, let alone formal training in English, but they all could communicate adequately. I would also add that formal education "support" you way less than other fields. Experience is the critical component, imo.
I can illustrate this perfectly, albeit anecdotally: I come from a very disadvantaged background, a poor family, both parents didn't even finish high school, got public education all my life. My first PC was assembled from old parts that my father could salvage after he left his job as a bus driver to fix computers for a living. He got me a magazine one day with a CD that came with visual basic 6.0, he installed it, and I started messing around, knowing almost nothing of what I was doing. I just liked that when I dragged some things and put them in that grey window, it looked like the other programs I used to draw on (mspaint). I was 11-12 at the time, and from that moment on, I was hooked. I began understanding how to put behavior into things and what code was, mainly from the magazine pictures, then from other books my father started to get for me. Fast forward 5 years, I got my first internship 2 years before getting into an IF because I made a PHP website for someone, and they referred me to someone else.
10 years later, I had more experience than people who were almost twice my age, having worked for 4 different companies and building a clientele myself, because trust me, I needed that extra money. All along, I learned how to read and listen because of all the studying needed to do things in my job. Then I discovered forums, then Reddit, which made me start to write. That came in handy when I decided to apply for positions in foreign companies. 2 years ago, I started working for a company in Central Europe.
Now pair that trajectory with one from a friend of mine the same age as me, born into a wealthy family in Rio, both parents highly educated, always had access to quality equipment, internet, etc, graduated from a respected federal university, learned to speak 3 languages since he was a kid.
Because he spent so much time in uni, when he joined the company I was working for, he had no professional experience. Because of that, the way he progressed was slow, much to the incompetence of leadership, who saw people like that as always green, regardless of talent or skills acquired. He couldn't recognize that he was being held back; he had never worked for anyone else before, so he stayed and stayed and stayed, lured by derisory raises and false promises. He didn't have the drive to pursue clients outside the company, so he kept to his hobbies most of his free time. Anyway, long story short, all the other teammates left (interestingly enough, with stories similar to mine) for foreign companies.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: incentives are different depending on your background and the market tends to reward experience over formal education for relatively good paying coding positions.
Sorry for the wall of text.
Entire essays can and have been written about the problems of our education system. My favorite one was written by Feynman and it has already been cited in this thread. I'd like everyone here to know that it's stunningly accurate to this very day. I actually gave up programming as a career because the system and my peers demoralized me so much. Pursued an alternative career instead.
I'll have you know that brazilians who speak english fluently are the elite, likely private school educated. That's the pool of candidates you're selecting from. Those are the brazilians you're likely to meet here on this site.
> Lookup the law exam. It's rough.
Not at all. It's the bare minimum and it wasn't even enough to prevent the job market from being literally flooded with lawyers.
Had you cited concursos which roughly mean "contests for government jobs" you would have been right. Few job openings, tens of thousands of brazilians competing for them, infrequent tests. That's how judges are selected, for example. I know people who literally study for 10 hours every single day and who have yet to make it into one of these positions.