The $500 or so you need to buy your first computer is too much of an upfront investment for a lot of people in the world. And the time required to learn how to program, time you could be spending making money at a local job putting food on the table, is an insurmountable investment.
Part of my family is from a small fishing town in Croatia, I go the their every year on holiday. And every year I see so many intelligent and hard working people there who walk around with that lost expression on their face, longing for a way to make a good living. But there's no role models, no people to set an example. The wealthiest guy in town owns a cafe. To them, what is programming? How do you convince someone like that to spend a month's salary and many more months of hard work learning something when they have no sense of the implications or the benefits of it. A lot of this world doesn't even know what programming is or why we need it, no wonder programmers are in short supply.
Part of my family is from a small fishing town in Croatia, I go the their every year on holiday. And every year I see so many intelligent and hard working people there who walk around with that lost expression on their face, longing for a way to make a good living. But there's no role models, no people to set an example. The wealthiest guy in town owns a cafe. To them, what is programming? How do you convince someone like that to spend a month's salary and many more months of hard work learning something when they have no sense of the implications or the benefits of it. A lot of this world doesn't even know what programming is or why we need it, no wonder programmers are in short supply.