Why the next Gates or Zuckerberg cannot come from India

If you were to take a list of the top 20-30 programmers in the world, you will quickly find that between them, they’ve been attributed to almost everything significant about computer science today.

This brings up the point that most of the world’s advancements are driven by a very small group of people. The world’s biggest businesses, like the ones Gates and Zuckerberg built, were built on great programming ability, which at the time, could have only been done by them. These people are outliers.

It is also interesting to see the countries that they come from. You will invariably find that these countries have an education system that is friendly to outliers. As oxymoronic as this sounds, there is no shortage of outliers in the world, but systems around them often fail them, and they never realise their full potential.

Joydeep Sen Sarma, the founder of Big Data company, Qubole (also one of the inventors of Apache Hive at Facebook), cited this as one of the reasons why the Indian startup ecosystem doesn’t have a company like Google or Facebook emerge, despite the availability of talent. In an answer on Quora he says –

Indian education system is hostile to outliers. As an example – a teen who just loves to spends all his time programming (and can’t stand anything else like social sciences/arts/literature) can have a very bright future (assuming he has talent) in the US – and has none in India. The system in India will give him/her poor grades, teachers/parents/friends would destroy him emotionally. Forget about doing well – such a person would do very badly in India – and I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up as a wreck.

Just to back this up – in all my years of interacting with multiple adjacent batches of IITians (and alumni of other Indian schools) – there is but one true outlier that i have seen who ever made it through the system.

To state the point a different way – what we consider top Indian talent (grads from IITs etc. – going to top schools or employers in US) – is almost systematically biased (because of how they were chosen) to not be tech geniuses of the types that start large iconic tech companies.

 To exemplify this point, I will point out two references:

• David Karp Quit School to Get Serious About Tumblr

• The two paths to success (Paul Bucheit’s story)

 These stories are improbable, if not impossible today in an equivalent Indian context. Suffice to say – none of us has ever heard a story like this about Indian programmers/engineers.  

As a part of my old job, I had a chance to speak with Joydeep personally, and he said, “You so often hear about 14-year-olds graduating from college. You hardly hear about these sort of things in India. How will these people ever realise their potential if you put them through the same education as everyone else? How will they shine if you judge them on things that don’t interest them?”

It’s a vicious cycle; as an outlier, your skill sets a skewed to one thing, and one thing only. You’re probably miserable at everything else at school, but unfortunately, those things matter. Soon, you’ll end up with a bad grade at school, not make it to the college and course that you deserve and never find the job that so badly needs you. Loss everywhere.

We at HackerEarth want to change this. And we think we’ve made some headway.

When it comes to finding a job, it was not long ago, that your identity will be restricted by a resume along with millions of others on some job posting site and you will be judged on a whole host of things that you probably weren’t good at.

On every hiring challenge that we’ve done so far, the unprecedented has happened, where the shortlist of candidates was done on only their ability to code, and nothing else. The recently launched developer profile was another manifestation of this intent. So what if your CGPA wasn’t up there with the rest to land you a job at Google or Facebook? The profile shows just what you’re good at; your languages, your skills.

Of course, this is a tiny dent in the massive problem that countries like India face today. But it’s only one-half of the problem. The other half is you. If you are a programmer, you need to change. Do enough relevant, verifiable work. Have a GitHub profile, solve problems on competitive coding platforms and prove what you do. And then, recruiters will change. Make verifiable work a necessity. And because the industry changes, education will also change. The focus will be on relevant learning.

And then, maybe, just maybe, we might see the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates come from India?

Raghu Mohan Author 58 Blogs