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You are spot on. As an Indian who's been working in IT for over a decade now, I concur. I am a software engineer and many people are surprised to see that I have not moved to a managerial role. Software Engineering is severely underrated and I have been on the receiving end of the dump work as you put it. It was frustrating to see the rampant nepotism and the rat-race to get to the US. I spent many a sleepless nights to gather the requirements from a US developer only to have the credit seized and see manager exploit us even more. With these new guidelines the so-called Onsite leads/managers are getting their comeuppance.

>>I am a software engineer and many people are surprised to see that I have not moved to a managerial role.

It is extremely wrong to say Managerial roles are there for the taking and good developers are not taking them.

If you are a good developer most managers are extremely hostile to you. Because they think if you become a manager you become a threat to their job. Therefore they prevent you from becoming a manager.

Its typical power play.

If you are really good and have real chops in you to do any big stuff, you are ruined in India. People will try to get rid of you anyway they can. The society as a whole hates merit people here. Because most are crooks and they don't like seeing real people getting rewards. That would disrupt their ecosystem.

If you are good, India is the last place you want to be. Move out, one way or other for your own good.

I couldn't agree more. I will not go as far as saying that India is the last place which values meritocracy, but it would be a wrong assessment that the general populace values meritocracy and hard work. The power structures in place give very little incentive to hard work and smarts. The managers, at least in IT services, are, to put it mildly, incompetent. The pay-offs of being a good developer are extremely small. The crabs in a bucket mentality drags everyone down. The odds are totally stacked against a competent software engineer.

>>I will not go as far as saying that India is the last place which values meritocracy

The issue isn't just limited to software companies. You see in a country like India question papers leak, people cheat in exams. Teachers have their favorite pets at schools and colleges whom they reward with marks unfairly. What happens when a populace of this kids goes to do jobs? They bring the same culture everywhere. Which is why you will see every one wants to cheat at everything.

Everything from cheating at taxes(fake rent receipts), jumping traffic signals, promotions at office, voting for wrong interests, bribes, corruption etc etc. This permeates to every aspect of our nations very existing character.

People, society and governments have wrong priorities in India. Most think building roads or some fancy infrastructure will solve their issues.

In reality Human resources are what matters in building a country. The rest happens on auto pilot.

I won't say everything on west runs on Merit. But the situation is definitely better than India in my experience. Most importantly I have seen better the quality of human resources better a country turns out to be.

My guess is India will take a lot of time, several decades, may be even centuries to fix its core issues.

I haven't spent a lot of time in India so I could be wrong but as an external observer: India's GDP per capita is still quite low.

A large part of the country is undeveloped. Fixing roads and infrastructure definitely helps but reducing population and creating better health should help as well.

India is a huge exporter of engineering talent. This is bad because it's a brain drain for the country. If I was getting SV level salaries, India would make sense.

Sorry to hear you were one of those receiving that dump work. I saw it happen to one of the most talented developers I've worked with at a prior gig a few years back. A few of us made a pact to never dump our work on "V___" and try to lighten his workload. Hopefully, this will improve people's situations.

>I spent many a sleepless nights to gather the requirements from a US developer only to have the credit seized and see manager exploit us even more.

Yes, I've seen them too, that's their typical attitude :) I still remember dejected co-worker (who resigned and took back his resignation because manager made false promise to retain him) said, "these guys shouldn't called managers, they are cheats,cheaters"

Same here. I am unfit for pure managerial role. I need engineering. If there is people skills require to the Engineering end, I'll do it. But not full time.

> I've seen people, just after 2 years asked to give-up technical career...

I think this is largely a cultural thing - many Indians just don't see development itself as a career, everyone just wants to be a manager with people working below them. Sort of a 'face' thing. And of course when you have that attitude, you are generally not going to be excited or even really interested in development, which is perhaps one of the reasons why so many Indian developers are just not very good*

* Source: I've been team leader for an Indian dev team working out of Mumbai for several years. I am not saying India doesn't have good developers who care - it does, but they are extremely rare are companies like Capgemini and Cognizant, who simply don't pay enough to attract such people.

There are plenty of good developers in India who only want to be developers. They never work for outsourcing companies. They only apply for product based companies they are interested in.

More generally, good developers don't work for outsourcing companies.

Yes, that's what I meant when I said they are rare are companies like Capgemini and Cognizant because of low salary

Its not just low pay. A friend of mine employed a developer who was a senior at WiPro earning over 1 lakh per month. He was employed for my friend at a junior developer salary simply because he was sick and tired of writing random throw away code. This developer finally wanted to gain some real skills, work on a real product, and took a huge pay cut to come to start working at a product based company. So far he is doing pretty good.

Largely because the management gravy train is yielding fewer returns year after year for a while.

There are people, especially who can't play the poisonous political game for too far that their mileage is limited to a point. These people have to retrain themselves with some hard hands on skills, or will suffer at the next purge.

Same thing in product companies too.

Read my other comments. Management fanciness is Indias national culture.

>I think this is largely a cultural thing - many Indians just don't see development itself as a career, everyone just wants to be a manager

I don't quite agree with cultural thing view. Honestly, 11 yrs back when I started with Cognizant, I was asked so many times by managers "how long you going to be technical? you can write programs now, do you want to continue that even after 5 yr or 10 yrs?"

Its not cultural thing, its being imposed by less talented management people, who see 'people/project management' is the only path for growth.

Through working with teams in India, and spending a lot of time there over the years, I have several Indian friends working for Capgemini and Cognizant. The opinion I put forth (and it is just my opinion :) is based on what I've observed and also what friends and colleagues have told me.

Assuming these managers you mention were also Indian, couldn't their behaviour also be part of it being a 'cultural thing'?

When we mention 'cultural thing' it labels virtually everyone from India. There is vast difference between working in outsourced companies like CTS, Indian startups/ product-based companies.

true, these managers are Indians too :) They follow the rules set by their high management, it has to be company culture set by founders.

At the end of my parent comment I did specifically say I wasn't referring to all Indians - you'd have to be an absolute cretin to label all developers from a population of 1.2 billion.

If you are not referring to all Indians, as you mentioned, where is this 'cultural thing' coming from? I'm quite confused about, what you exactly mean by saying 'cultural thing'?

Edit: you mentioned many Indian wants to be managers and dont see development as career choice, I disagree. I view the situation as, many Indians forced to follow companies culture set by founders. There is difference between the two.

Edit2: >My Indian friends who work or worked at such companies tell me this comes not just from management and the company itself, but also from a desire for the perception of prestige; to appear 'important' to their families in particular.

hmm, i think your Indian friend shared wrong info with you. Indian Families doesn't know difference between manager or tech-lead, technical architect. Most often middle class families doesn't care about the designation in IT but they do care about salary :)

My Indian friends who work or worked at such companies tell me this comes not just from management and the company itself, but also from a desire for the perception of prestige; to appear 'important' to their families in particular.

In a population of 1.2 billion, of course not everyone fully buys in to this. I've had the pleasure of working with some Indian devs who were interested and excited by development, and saw a good, non-administrative career ahead of them irregardless of what others thought of them. Of course I never have this pleasure for long - they always leave for product companies, and usually get 200% or more salary into the bargain!

> hmm, i think your Indian friend shared wrong info with you. Indian Families doesn't know difference between manager or tech-lead, technical architect

No, but they know the difference between 'manager' and 'not a manager'. It's not just one friend, it's multiple people across Capgemini and Cognizant. You make a good point about salary being important, but it's far easier and more common to become a manager at Capgemini, Cognizant etc than it is to become a good developer anywhere.

What exactly groundbreaking stuff the product-based companies are doing in India? I know that some of them are good ore average. Rest of the people who work in these product based companies do similar work as these service companies except that they are highly paid and have much less politics.

>>Indians just don't see development itself as a career, everyone just wants to be a manager with people working below them.

Not new. This culture has existed since forever.

You will see in India there is wild craze for MBA degrees. Everyone wants an MBA. Like every single person. I even know house wife's who do MBA's because 'Just in case'.

Even before that, non impactful, unreal and very little value adding desk jobs have always been valued heavily in Indian culture.

To give you an example IAS. People know the job involves forwarding a few memos, approving leaves and vacation requests and supervising a few juniors. You get luxury free accommodation, handful pay and other myriad benefits.

Even in the private world its the same.

It all comes down to a simple thing: "In management, you get a lot of big stuff for free, which others don't get even after work".

I've got an office in Bangalore. I have not interviewed a single person from the big outsourcing agencies who had real talent. Bangalore is packed with talent but they all cost at least 3* more what the outsourcing agencies are paying.

I've seen both ends here in the US. I've worked with some of these big consulting agencies and those guys are almost always completely incompetent, whether they're H1B's or not. Half the code is either obviously recycled from another poorly done project or blatantly pasted from stackoverflow. A large number of the projects I saw never met expectations and we're quietly buried.

On the other side, I've known a lot of Indian developers at product companies here in the US and they're mostly brilliant. I'm sure it's self selected to a degree because you've gotta be pretty smart to get a job on the other side of the world. Still, I think taking down these big visa abusing companies is good for the US and India. The good engineers in both countries will get the pay they deserve, and Indian developers will get a better shot at working at companies that aren't just body shops

How the hell does management get work done then? They fired all their devs to bring over these people, then if what you paint is true nothing ever gets done. Is the goal to keep the old stuff running (by not touching it) at a lower price? I cannot understand how that is a reasonable option for a company.

It's like saving money by not changing your oil. They don't know what the hell oil does, just that it costs money every 3000 miles. They tried not changing it one time and nothing happened, so it must be an unnecessary expense.

Like not changing your oil, it's not something you can recover from.

India has a lot of good talent too. Most are desperate for jobs and will take anything offered(Just for the opportunity).

These sheep are work horses for the political cartels, and these people do bulk of the heavy lifting as the plum money, opportunities and rewards are eaten office politicians and their minions.

Most of this kind of talent is used and thrown like tissues or they grow a brain and move to different companies.

I'm Indian, and I don't know what you are talking about. I wasn't aware that there was a big group of devs working for politicians.

i have worked with one of them and after working for 2 years learnt that they gain the most by not allowing the employee to learn or be good at it. That way a maintain a low attrition even with paying half of what other good companies pay. the overall environment is obnoxious

As long as the outsourcing companies bill by the hour, they have all the incentive to minimise wages, and maximise billable hours.

It's silly, of course, It assumes that you are building a relationship for one project rather than a series of projects. A good team means that the organization will lean on them more, not less.

They are up to shenanigans to make sure they own the market. IBM for example is trying to hire up all available cheap talent in India so their competitors can't hire enough people to fill their contracts.

If your comment is related to H1B, I think you may be confusing this visa type with an O1. To apply for an H1B, you don't need to be highly skilled or have expert skills.

For the H1B, you only need to be applying to work in a "specialty occupation" and earn more than the prevailing wage for that occupation in the US.

From the USCIS website, "Generally speaking, a job is a specialty occupation if the occupation normally requires a bachelors degree in a related field of study. Jobs in fields such as engineering, math, and business, as well as many technology fields often qualify as a specialty occupation."

https://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupati...

While O1 is more explicitly geared towards highly skilled, a lot of professors and researchers (and certainly most of the great engineers employed by FB, Google, etc.), from both India and elsewhere, actually come over on the H1B as the paper work is far more complicated for the O1.

Still doesn't change the fact that H1B is not the visa for exceptional talent. Its simple a visa meant to hire people in occupations where there is deemed to be a shortage of workers, from what I read.

Sure. My point is that I and others (and it seems Trump as well) want to see a system that is geared towards sth more merit based and towards exceptional talent. Any time people try and make a pitch about how legal immigrants are good for the country, most of the time they bring up people who would have qualified under a merit based system. So if a policy is being sold on the basis of X benefit to the American people, shouldn't the policy be geared towards actually bringing that benefit rather than fulfilling some other purpose?

I have a different take on this, as an American by birth: at least there is some recognition that engineering roles are second-class roles. Americans, and particularly bubble-dwellers in this industry, have this incredibly naive view that individual contributors are social equals with management (any tier).

Right. They are not equal just greater.

Agreed. This reflects the worst on the actually skilled Indians who get lumped in with the rest.

second you. The filthy crappy managers of this cartel would get some sense and not treat the self-respecting individuals contribution as waste

My experience is the opposite. The really good ones in the team will threaten to leave if they don't get onsite (US opportunity). Manager will tell them wait for a few months. After a few months of waiting, they will start bugging the manager regularly. Finally, they will agree to apply for his visa. It's currently happening to a guy in my team. He has been told to wait for more than two years now.

Having worked for for TCS and CTS, I second this

"I've said this before, Most Indians coming from TCS,Infy,CTS are not _highly_ skilled people. 80 to 90% of them are don't have expert skills. These people are close to management and play politics well, thats how they reach USA."

You haven't met everyone of them to apply such a broad characterization. You have a point to make - that these three businesses abuse the Visa - but that gets lost in your attempt to pass judgment on a group of people you haven't met, and yet feel at home grouping them together as "shoe-lickers". Get off your high horse.

I think you may be new to HN. As someone who has spent 4+ years in Reddit, I have seen far worse comments about Indians. Compared to that, the comments here are bit more civil. I am happy more and more Indians are seeing what westerners think about them.

As an Indian I feel bad. But part of me knows this is true to large extent. Managers have too much power.

I am not new here. And the tech-migration is a relatively new thing in the Western world. I would wait a generation for that thinking to evolve.

Feel free to cross-check with outsourced Indian IT employees or at-least get familiar with social sites like quora where you can find large of Indians and their views outsourced world. HTH

Get back to me once you have cross checked with everyone you painted with the same broad brush.

On the other hand, Your ill-informed view paints a poor picture of you. As I said before - stop thinking you are better. Instead, you came across as a massive douche.

You and Op are both right.

Yes not all people are bad. But Most are. Buy this is in every single company. Not just outsourcing firms.

The issue in India is scarcity. Which is every one wants their pound of flesh even if that comes from their own brother. They want it.

The Op is right though. You can't get anything through work in most Indian companies. Regional politics, linguistic politics, connections in high places, politics is what you need to progress in India.

In India work doesn't get you too far. Society doesn't reward work or merit. In fact rewards corrupt practices both in government and private sectors.

Yet people in India wonder why no good things happen here.