How Different are the Indian Software Developers from Others Around the World?

Indian software developers are compared to those in the US, UK, Germany, and the rest of the world.

Historically, Indian coders have made a small fraction of what their peers in wealthy nations have made. Much is written about how the developers in such nations fear—or do not fear—losing out on lucrative employment opportunities to low-cost outsourcing to nations like India. India had the second-highest number of respondents in the 2018 Stack Overflow poll, which included a question on respondents' salaries. KDE charts were created to compare the annual salaries of Indian developers to those of developers worldwide, and then equivalent plots for the survey's top three responding nations—the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom—were created.

The results indicate that a sizable majority of Indian developers make orders of magnitude less money than their peers in other affluent nations. When writing code, few Indians take ethics into account. Compared to the rest of the globe or the other top 3 responding countries, India has a higher percentage of developers who majored in a CS-related discipline in college. India has a developer population that is significantly younger than the other segments. They have ambition and are competitive. In India, mobile development has a special allure. The majority of Indians are curious about potential instruments.

The world's views on AI are very different from those of Indian developers; we are more concerned about job automation, more enthusiastic about AI making significant decisions, more concerned about a singularity-type scenario, and less concerned with shifting notions of what constitutes "fairness" in algorithmic versus human decisions. Many Indians make significant contributions to open-source software, yet they don't believe they are gaining anything from it.

The average yearly wage for developers in India is over 2.5 times lower than the global average for developers, nearly 5 times lower than the average wage in the US, nearly 4 times lower than the average wage in the UK, and nearly 3 times lower than the average wage in Germany. More than 50% of Indian software developers make less than $10,000 per year. The average annual salary for developers worldwide is 3.5 times more than it is in India. In the US, it is 10 times higher than in the UK and Germany, where it is 6 times higher. In comparison to the other groups, India has a higher proportion of respondents with a bachelor's degree. In comparison to the other groupings, except Germany, it also has a higher proportion of respondents who have a Master's degree. A substantially smaller proportion of respondents in India hold Ph.D. degrees (like Ph.D.). Compared to other countries and the globe as a whole, India has a higher proportion of students majoring in computer science.

93% of Indian respondents are between the ages of 18 and 34, compared to 73% globally and much lower in the other top three responding nations. According to a calculation, more than 78% of developers in India have been coding professionally for 0–5 years, compared to 48% in the US, 46% in the UK, 55% in Germany, and 57% in the entire world.

Only 40% of developers in India would hold higher management accountable for unethical code, compared to nearly 60% of developers in all the other groups. Compared to developers in the other groups, a significantly higher percentage of Indian developers would hold the developer who came up with the idea for the unethical code or authored it accountable. Most Indian programmers are willing to produce code that they deem to be unethical. Only 63% of the respondents from India agreed that they should take into account the ethical implications of the codes they write.