Comments (4)

By Krishna, October 9, 2009

There are a lot of them, but I keep coming across one all the time. Here is an example (emphasis mine):

Brad Fitzpatrick, born in 1980, started to learn programming at the age of 5. In high school he went on to create a voting booth script called FreeVote, which he says earned him as much as 27 cent per click on banner ads back then (making for 25, 27 grand per month).

I touched my first computer (for playing chess) at the age of 14. I touched my first mouse (at a science fair) at the age of 19. I wrote my first C program at the age of 21. I have done a lot of programming since then, but the 16-year difference is a huge gap.

The reason is that my family and I didn’t have the money to buy a computer, nor did the schools and under-graduate colleges I studied have them for programming purposes. So I had to wait till my graduate studies. Those institutions have the right facilities today, but back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, India was just emerging from the lost years of the License Raj. The cohort I belong to share the same experience. We probably read a lot more books than a similar American demographic, but programming, not so much. (I remember reading a book on BASIC, but no computer to type it on.)

Time equals knowledge. A vast majority of the senior Indian programmers had their first experience with software development in college. While looking at reasons for the relative low proportion of software products coming out from India, this must be kept in mind. The Indian developers did not know enough programming to start a company or write great software during the early years of their youth, which are usually the most productive.

This is rapidly changing now. With the tremendous improvement in living standards over the past two decades, millions of Indian children are being raised in families that have “the” hardware! The gap in software innovation and entrepreneurship will surely decrease as these children grow up to become software engineers.