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Two comments on Google's focussing on social.

First - Bonuses? For many developers bonuses are not motivators, or not as great a motivator, as ego boosting recognition. (Don't have sources for this at hand).

Second - Social is what Facebook does/is. It is not a secondary goal, a necessity in a strategic space. For example, there was Google notebook. It withered, but evernote keeps going. Notes everywhere is what evernote does/is.

We've seen this play before: a company becomes dominant in a particular field, upstarts are innovating elsewhere, dominant company chooses to respond. Film at 11.

This is a variant on hashapass.com

Note the bit about Infosys establishing comprehensive training programs, implying they are taking STEM graduates and bringing them up to speed on the current technologies. 30 years ago Intel had training programs (I don't know if they do now). So did Apple in the late 80's. (n.b., I was employed by both). Now the expectation for many large employers is that the applicant have already mastered the technologies. "No training for you!"

How much is attributable to "R$wages + R$cost of training" < "US$ wages" I cannot say.

There are two conflicting stories in the job market.

One is "we need more developers and engineers", usually said by top-tier companies such as Apple, Intel, Google, MS. They really do need well-educated graduates to push the envelope.

The other is "there are many unemployed IT people". These were individuals who worked where IT is a cost center, developing CRUD and maintaining in-house systems. Hum-drum, but it pays the bills. Their jobs are being outsourced.

Now, when deciding on a course of study, if you don't know, for certain, that you are top-notch, have a passion for development, and upon graduation will be desired by startups and established concerns alike, will you want to risk time and money studying cs/sw? Especially if you are smart enough to recognize that that situation exists.

If the hum-drum jobs are gone, you have fewer fall back positions available. It becomes akin to working hard on your football skills in high school, going to university on an athletic scholarship and hoping to be picked up by the NFL. There are no hum-drum, non-NFL jobs available; miss the NFL draft and you're just another communications major on monster.com.

This negative feedback cannot be good. We want to encourage brains into STEM, but if there's no fall back position those smart people are going to stay away and study to work in FIRE, or, if we're lucky, medicine.

I have no solution to this problem; it is a massive multi-player prisoners' dilemma and everybody is snitching.