Well said. India would be a good example of hole diggers.
If software engineers were oil, India produces the most but unlike China you don't see them producing a Baidu, Alibaba, HTC, Lenovo, Tencent etc. Like you say they have given away their oil to the West by being laissez-faire in IT. It's why there are no Jack Ma, Pony Ma type recognizable names out of India. Instead you see a Nadella and Pichai emerge in the US.
But the same country has done the opposite with its pharma/generic drug sector by being pragmatically protectionist. It's no surprise that some of the richest people in India are now from the pharma sector, which is producing much more sustainable jobs than its IT sector is.
Software engineering is a relatively nascent field. While India does produce a lot of software engineers, it will take some time before the expertise in software development that is required to run a successful business is prevalant enough in India to nurture independent companies and allow them to grow big. There are already a few successful Indian startups though e.g. Zomato, Flipkart.
Anecdotally, there is much activity in the startup sector in India and I am willing to bet it won't be long before we start seeing more success stories.
Zomato and Flipkart are not successful. They are just surviving. Most of the startups are "me too" kind just copying what has already been done but just localizing it to the Indian market. It just takes a foreign entity entering the Indian market and competing with these companies to start its collapse.
Also software engineering is not a nascent field. It was nascent in the 70's and 80's. All the low hanging fruits are gone. It is very hard to be a the next Sun, or Microsoft or Oracle. In fact India should start looking at more nascent and upcoming fields and try to be leaders in it.
Things change. No one expected Mandela to become President when he got arrested.
Let's just wait for the next major data breach or data leak.
Just look at whats going on with Bangladesh's central bank. If they can't protect their data, hard to imagine the rest of the developing world being in a better of position.
Accumulators of data in the west, sitting in ivory towers, disconnected from ground realities, are setting all kinds of precedents just waiting to breakdown elsewhere.
If software engineers were oil, India produces the most but unlike China you don't see them producing a Baidu, Alibaba, HTC, Lenovo, Tencent etc. Like you say they have given away their oil to the West by being laissez-faire in IT. It's why there are no Jack Ma, Pony Ma type recognizable names out of India. Instead you see a Nadella and Pichai emerge in the US.
But the same country has done the opposite with its pharma/generic drug sector by being pragmatically protectionist. It's no surprise that some of the richest people in India are now from the pharma sector, which is producing much more sustainable jobs than its IT sector is.