Coders Wanted!!! Apply for God’s Sake

Just to remind you the facts once more before I barrage this article with few thought provoking questions- India is home to certain 1.20 bn people out of certain little more than 7 billion people on this earth and we are right at the top in the IT & ITes services. Moment of immense pride…really? World’s top global companies outsource their IT services to us. Kudos!!! Probably the industry puts bread & butter on the plates of millions of people.

I am not being cynical at all. My bone of contention here is to contemplate why we don’t produce “coders”? Why we don’t produce enough world class coders who can build next big products? A product that India can swell its chest upon and become the world’s envy. Well a tough question with an obvious answer.

To say the least- Coders are a rare species. They think, breathe, write and eat code. They simply make computers do what they want them to. The process leads to amazing products that the world uses. They marvel at their technical prowess. They aren’t scared of machines rather they tinker with them, find how things work and hack their way into them to make something out of nothing.

Being a coder certainly doesn’t demand you to be a product of a certain Ivy league college or school. You can learn it at any age. And it’s the surest and fastest way to write your riches story in a relatively smaller time. Companies need them at any given point of time. They are most times short on supply and demand most times is high.

A coder can easily find his way to an entrepreneurial journey because he can build products at will, all he needs an idea to click. Non-technical founders have to depend upon the coders to give their product a shape that can sell. So, a coder is rare species- hence proved.

Coming back to my question, why India doesn’t produce enough coders? May be the answer somewhat lies in the upbringing, the environment in which a child grows up and the financial background of the child and the education he gets. In many parts of the world where you find prolific coders, you will often find they have had computer in their lap since a very raw age. They grew up tinkering with the computer, they have innate curiosity to learn how stuff works and this establishes a future engineer (coders for some) in the making.

India on the other hand lacks enough mentors at first. Children in the rural areas have to slog their ass to make their ends meet. Those who are lucky enough to get an education they don’t go to schools where they have requisite infrastructure and faculty in place. Where to go??

Living in 21st century, people get education with an intention to find job in a private firm or a government department. They don’t read for sheer pleasure of it or finding how things work. But they are not to be blamed, they live in a rat race environment where if you don’t get good grades you will end up humiliating your parents, family, relatives and yourself. Phew!!!

The educational system is equally responsible for it. It promotes rot learning. You are expected to write how it is written in the textbook from a very young age. Mugging leads to good grades. The teachers- they are there for not building a nation rather building their own coffers. But what to do… they get a very low pay as well.

Enough chiding the nation. How to build a coding environment? First of all coding can be included as a compulsory subject in every curriculum from a young age as maths & science are. By the way we are really good at these subjects, though. Promote entrepreneurial spirit among children. And for god’s sake get the process of doing business in India as simple as we can. Promote coding as an important module even in other specialized subjects as well.

Internet needs to penetrate in the Indian rural houses if we are to create coders. Government should take steps to promote the same. We need good coders not the ones who write scrappy codes or google copied ones. We need to promote education based on logic rather rot learning (Logic is the baseline of coding).
Till then India is still finding its coders, there are some but in very low supply, the demand is high.

By the way I am not a coder myself….. But I so desperately want to learn it.