Why Google put a research lab in Poland

Western technology firms are increasingly seeking talent in Eastern Europe.

from the March 13, 2007 edition

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Mr. Czajka's celebrated TopCoder victories have made programming particularly attractive to young Poles. "Everyone knows Tomasz Czajka and everyone wants to be like him," says Hibner, who recently won an international math competition. "Last time I was in Warsaw, there was a huge poster of him in the center of the city."

At AGH, the computer-science department now gets seven to eight applicants per spot. "We could easily take many times more students if we had the professors and facilities to handle them," says department chief Krzysztof Zielinski. "We're happy to provide computer engineers for the companies – it is our job – but we need some help from them. Right now, we are alone."

Indeed, computer-science professors from across the region say they fear their departments will be sucked dry by Western firms. The private companies offer salaries two or three times higher than those at the university – several times more if the job is in the US or Western Europe – making it difficult to recruit new professors or to replace those who leave.

"If this department is destroyed," Mr. Zielinski says, "there will be no new engineers."

The problem is even more critical in Kosice, a city of 240,000 in impoverished eastern Slovakia, whose year-old information-technology industry has expanded so fast it is having trouble finding programmers. "So many people had left the region to find work in Prague, Bratislava, or London, it made it hard for us to achieve critical mass," says Jozef Ondas, a native who is CEO of T-Systems Slovakia, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

T-Systems, Siemens, and other companies in Kosice have found a solution: working together to help local universities increase their capacity to retrain engineers and other people with the necessary math skills, and to improve professors' incomes.

"We said: Why fight over the same 200 graduates each year?" says Mr. Ondas, CEO of T-Systems. "Let's invest and create an educational system that can produce 500 specialists each year."

"Businesspeople have come to the conclusion that they need the universities, not just their graduates," says Anton Cizmar, vice rector of the Technical University of Kosice. "I think it's a miracle what has happened here."

"If you invest in the university system and support research in areas of interest, students will naturally gravitate into those areas," says Mr. Pashupathy of Google, which opened its Krakow lab earlier this year. "It's a nice circle which ultimately benefits everybody."

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