Application Technology Research Institute. Walking in, I saw the usual rack full of badly printed manuals for pirated software and a cardboard box brimming with long red skeins of firecrackers. The place was otherwise indistinguishable from any cut-rate consumer electronics outlet in the States, with the usual exception that it was smaller and more tightly packed together. There were a couple of dozen people there, but they weren't acting like salespeople and customers; they were milling around talking.

It turned out that they had just opened their doors something like an hour before I arrived. I had accidentally crashed their opening-day party. Everyone stood around amazed by their good fortune: a writer for an American technology magazine showing up for their grand opening!

Dai Qing, the director, a young blade in an oversized suit, beckoned me into the back room, where we could sit around a conference table and watch the front through a large window.

He bade a couple of females to scurry out for slices of cantaloupe and mugs of heavily sweetened coffee, and gave me the scoop on his company. There are 21 employees, 16 of whom are coders. It's a pure entrepreneurial venture - a bunch of people pooled their capital and started it rolling some three years ago. The engineers mostly worked in state enterprises or as teachers where they couldn't really use their skills; now they've developed, among other things, an implementation of the Li Xing accounting system, which is a standard developed in Shanghai and used throughout China.

The engineers make some 400 yuan per month, which works out to something like $600 a year at the black market exchange rate. This is a terrible salary - most people in Shanghai can rely on making four times that much. But here, the coders also get 5 percent of the profits from their software.

You can't pick out the coders by looking at them the way you can in the States. The gender ratio among coders is probably similar. Everyone is trim and nicely but uninterestingly dressed.