- hackers in Shenzhen are underrepresented b/c of the language barrier. There is actually a huge Chinese language ecosystem (a lot of it off Github on Gitee) that is sort of impenetrable but you come across it all the time. I said 10% just b/c typically I have no way to use their work b/c it's under-documented in English. If you zip around this map you will see lots of "Zh" islands: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/
- Are Indian hackers working in Hindi and other regional languages?
- While I understand that it's not as financial comfortable for a programmer in Indian compared wtih the US or Europe, Chinese and Russian hackers aren't significantly better off. Your typical Chinese program is also of course worried about working for a big company and making money and all of that jazz
- "escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' " - I think maybe is the crux of it... Most people work on open source work b/c they enjoy it.. You're definitely not going to make a major github project used by other people just because you're looking to pad your resume.
Sidenote: I don't personally know anyone who got hired from a deliberate effort to build an open source portfolio. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as a way to try to find a job
Secondly, India is still a poor country. So open source is produced as a by-product of the commercial work you do, but it does not have the maturity of a made-for-open-source product that ends up having dubious commercial viability.
The main point of open source in under-developed economies is to put out a positive signal for hiring. So the second you've done just enough, you are looking to escape the hell that is 'unpaid open source work' and move to corporate code that might also be open-sourced. Also, the best candidates (IITians, flagship university kids, Bangalore undergrads) are hired through on-campus hiring procedures. So efforts go into improving their signaling towards those avenues, rather than publicizing your work to the entire world.