The talent of Mexican programmers has been recognized in other countries, but to get the most out of them, schools must change their approach.
Mexico is a hotbed of talented programmers. This fact has been noticed by different international companies that, although they have their headquarters in the United States, their development centers are in foreign cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, or Guadalajara.
Mexico has become an attractive place for outsourcing because of the number of quality programmers who graduate each year. However, these coders are closer to the activity of a craftsman, says Jesus Ramos, executive of the Mexican Association of Data Sciences.o
For Jesus Ramos, the Mexican programmers are now like the “wet ones” who went to the United States in search of opportunities. For him, there is the opportunity to remove this word pejorative to give it a new meaning.
“Programming now is a transferable skill, a secondary skill and one that can accommodate different situations, because languages and libraries do most of this software library work.”
Thanks to this technological infrastructure that has been developed, programming is already closer to being a craft than engineering.
Meanwhile, the demand for programmers has made this a profitable career for many who have a lot of information available such as tutorials, documentation, or online courses.
Ramos questions the idea that the Technological Institute of Higher Education of Monterrey (ITESM) is currently the best school in this regard in Mexico, since it focuses primarily on technical and business skills, although he is a graduate of this school.
For Ramos, the best schools with a quantitative approach in Mexico are currently the Center for Research in Mathematics (CIMAT), the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), and the Anahuac University, because they give priority to analytical philosophy and mathematics for reasoning more suited to reality.
Developing robust Artificial Intelligence today requires judgment and ethical skills. In this sense, the best way to have this approach is through analyzing the context, mathematical skills, and finally, with software engineering.