In one of the Russian online forums, I ran into a post called “Indian try/catch Java idiom “. Here ‘s what it was about:
“Indian software developers learn from books and copy/paste code from book samples. The Java try/catch example is sometimes shown in a standalone Java application in a method main:
try {
// do some stuff
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace(System.out);
System.exit(-1);
}
Some “great ” authors write these examples and other just copy and paste this code. So if your application server all of a sudden stops working, the chances are that one of the software developer from India just copy/pasted the above code. ”
People from the former USSR often overestimate their coding abilities. But if you apply 80/20 rule, everything falls into its place. In any country with a reasonably established higher education 20% are the best and 80% will always remain poor-to-mediocre software developers.
Since English is a primary language in India ‘s universities and colleges, they have a huge advantage over developers from Russia, Ukraine et al, where many programmers have hard times with English and lag behind Indians in the world IT workforce. Add to this fact that India has huge amount of people in general hence a lot more educated people than Russia, the 80% here and there are not the same.
For sake of this discussion, let ‘s assume there is total of one million of active software developers from India hence 800,000 of them are poor-to-mediocre. At the same time there is only 100,000 visible software developers from Russia hence only 80,000 of them are poor-to-mediocre.
Of course, 80K of bad developers is better than 800K of the same, but if you put things in perspective, I don ‘t think that software developers from Russiua, Ukraine, or Belarus are in general superior that their peers from India.
There are stars and losers everywhere.
Meanwhile, when software developers from Eastern Europe ask me, “What programming language to learn next “, I always give the same answer, “English “.
Disclaimer. I was born in Ukraine, got my Applied Math degree in Russia, and started my software development career in Ukraine.
Yakov Fain
yakovfain.com 