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Comment by mindentropy | Hacker News Reader

>Programming/anything to do with PCs in India is a rich man’s hobby.

This is not true. We had a good culture of self assembled PC enthusiasts in our district. This was in early 2000s. In fact it has reduced now maybe due to lack of interest or something even though the prices of PCs have dropped significantly. I see many people use their PCs as locked up phones with no curiosity of hardware.

>Tinkering is not encouraged in colleges in the country.

This sad state is still present to this day and it has become worse as the hardware gets more and more locked down. I don't see much interest in Linux in the younger generations.

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>This is not true.

It is absolutely true. Just because you don't consider yourself rich doesn't mean that these devices aren't out of the reach of a vast majority of the population.

Almost everyone has access to a smartphone, but most of those are poorly made, overheating pieces of plastic - barely suitable for use as a phone, let alone as a computing device on which you can learn something.

In my second statement, I'm also trying to say that though you have a huge number of people in the workforce who haven't had easy access to computing devices, there are also many who do (in absolute numbers but not in percentage). But the numbers are such that given an average Indian programmer, they are more likely to be someone who got educated in a substandard setting among unmotivated peers who have an aversion or even a fear of tinkering and putting a big investment (like a PC) at risk.

People who have money to get a PC as a hobbyist do it for unworthy reasons - like the chance to play garbage tier games like pubg or whatever, or becoming an influencer. This is a generalisation but it will affect the probabilities.

The resources that we have now is way better than what we had in our time. The interest amongst students have been more or less the same.

>that given an average Indian programmer, they are more likely to be someone who got educated in a substandard setting among unmotivated peers

This too has not changed much from our time to now. The changes I have noticed in students is the rise of memorizing leetcode type problems due to the plentiful jobs now which need this skill for interviewing.

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