Causes of NIH syndrome

What causes NIH syndrome, and why is it so prevalent in Indian tech startups? I believe these are the reasons responsible for it:

Less involvement in Open Source

Indian developers are less involved in open source projects than developers from other parts of the world. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Indian developers aren’t active in the open source community; many developers from India are doing a tremendous job running great open source projects.

But on an aggregrate level, Indians are way less involved than developers from other parts of the world. Here’s the number of commits pushed on GitHub by US and Indian developers in 2016:

US: 83,435,128

India: 6,856,128

Developers from US pushed around 12 times more commits on GitHub than Indian developers, even though the number of developers in both these countries in 2016 would be around the same number ~ 4 million.

Working on Open Source projects is a great way of understanding the importance of re-using good code and building something new on top of it, so that the developers can combine their effort into progressing the tech field as a whole rather than re-doing the same thing in cycle again and again.

A Lot of Young Developers

As per a study conducted by Stack Overflow in 2016, an average developer in India is 6 years younger than an average developer in United States. And when you are young and you start programming, you fall in love with that power of creating things. You are full of enthusiasm and you want to solve all the problems that come your way on your own. And in general, it does not matter whether that problem has been solved already by someone more experienced.

The over-confidence that comes with young adrenaline wins over reasoning. Being a self taught programmer, when I started out, I myself have suffered from this a lot many time. Around 2 years back, when we were implementing search feature on HighApe website, instead of looking for an already existing service, we went on and created our own search engine.

Now, search is a critical and complex thing to do. But naive as we were, we did it and the resulting product was buggy and slow. It is now recently that we have started using Algolia service and the result has been phenomenal. With easy to setup search rules and ultra fast response time, we are on our way to upgrade the user search experience on our platform to next level.

Less Hiring Cost of Developers

According to PayScale, the average salary of a developer in India is ~ $6000 per year, whereas, the average salary of a developer in USA is ~ $70,000. That means, a company has to pay more than 10 times the salary to a developer in USA as it has to pay to a developer in India.

Of course, the counter point to this argument can be that US economy is stronger and cost of living is higher there, thus the difference. I concur, but that does make it harder for companies there to get good developers on-board. Whereas in India, even an early stage startup can often afford to build a team of developers.

With such a workforce of developers, it starts making more sense for Indian startups to put them into use and get everything built in-house, whereas startups in USA find it better to go for 3rd party products or use an Open Source Project that can help them save a few man-hours. This is also supported from the fact why very few SAAS product companies target India as their market, even Indian SAAS product companies mostly target companies outside of India for this very reason.