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Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

I posted a comment a while back about this subject and the funny part was I got flamed by a bunch of US based technical workers, while the Indian techies pretty much agreed with me. Anyways the TLDR was I have a buddy Karthick and he is one of the best developers I know. So I asked him one day about why there was such low quality in India and he explained to me it was misaligned incentives due to the fact that, the fastest path to management is via a tech degree. So India is churning out a bunch of want to be MBA's with tech degrees that are just doing their time in tech to get to management. He said it was a hold over from the cast system and that you are held in more esteem in India when you manage more people.

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> He said it was a hold over from the cast system

I was with you until the "cast (sic) system".

> you are held in more esteem in India when you manage more people.

You can replace "India" with literally any country in the world. Managers and bosses always are and always have been held in more esteem than leaf node workers, in every society past and present. It's got nothing to do with the caste system.

Personal anecdote: I caught up with an American friend from school after about 15 years. He worked in some kind of product/project management role. When I told him I was an engineer in the Bay Area he said "Oh, you're just a programmer?" (OK so he wasn't a great friend, and that was the last time I spoke to him...)

> You can replace "India" with literally any country in the world. Managers and bosses always are and always have been held in more esteem than leaf node workers

This is true to a much greater or lesser degree depending on country, though. Here in the US you can be a really senior leaf node software engineer with fancy titles like "Staff" or "Senior Staff" or "Distinguished Fellow" and command tremendous respect and compensation.

That doesn't exist in some other countries. I was talking with an Italian friend once who works at a bank over there as a programmer, and seniority was exactly the same as how many people you manage. It was a contradiction in terms as far as he was concerned to be a senior software engineer if you weren't at least managing a team. The first question he asked when I was talking about my job was "How many people do you manage?", and when I responded zero, he immediately thought I was low level (I was not). Everyone aspires to be a manager over there.

My anecdote isn't exactly the opposite of yours, because in mine it's programmers themselves that are assigning status based on how many people you manage, whereas in your anecdote it's someone in an outgroup.

That's only true for a small subset of technology companies.

Outside the tech world it's barely true, and even within the tech world, the vast majority of companies still require you to enter management the moment you've been promoted a couple of times.

Sure it exists outside the tech world. It's the meaning of the word "profession." A senior doctor or senior lawyer is respected, despite being a leaf-node.

"Doctor" is always respected, senior or not, in every society going back to the stone age. It's the nature of the profession. And doctors have authority over people in the workplace - nurses and technicians primarily - even if they don't fire or give out raises.

"Senior lawyer" isn't a thing AFAIK. Law firm partners or senior partners have management roles, or at least, influence, in their firms. Otherwise you're an associate, or in private practice, working for the government, or as corporate counsel (where again, you might manage teams of people). A random lawyer with a small private practice isn't going to command a ton of respect in society generally, even if they do very well financially.

"Senior lawyers" exist—they become judges :)

Err...ok, but again, a judge commands respect because that's a position of authority. They can order people or organizations to do things, take away their property, freedom or even their life. They can literally write the law in some cases.

"Staff" and "Senior staff" and such are only recognized by ingroups. And often you need to be a staff level engineer to even begin managing people in tech.

In most industries that aren't tech, compensation and prestige are directly proportional to how many people you manage. Only in tech can individual senior engineers have impact that justifies the high pay without managing people.

Only in tech is this the case - but I don't think that only in tech this necessarily needs to be the case. High impact employees can exist in a wide range of roles, but recent cultural trends have been to push toward commoditization employment so that someone with a different approach is assumed to be a malus rather than fairly evaluated - there are KPIs and if your work style isn't optimized for them you'll flounder in corporate america.

Not sure why you're being downvoted; this is true in my experience as well.

Hell, I've been (a software developer) in SV for 16 years now and I hadn't heard of the "Staff" title until a few years ago.

Consultants, lawyers, physicians, engineers, architects, designers, board members... lots of occupations with high status and/or pay without managing people. The 'how many people' you manage metric is just a heuristic, and maybe believed by people stuck in the middle of business hierarchies.

Agree on 'Staff' and 'Senior staff'... military terms that never caught on generally. Not sure why they have started being adopted by some companies... I guess in larger companies people want their hierarchy and pay scales and whatnot.

I'll go by them in order:

> Consultants

A term so generic as to be almost meaningless. It can apply to an Agile coach, an Ivy League fresh grad billed at $1200/hr by McKinsey et al, or a programmer with an LLC and some marketing skills. These all vary widely in prestige.

> lawyers

Ditto. No one is impressed by a poor ambulance chaser or public defender. Judges, senior partners at big law firms, senior corporate counsel, DAs and attorneys general - those are lawyers people generally respect. And they all have authority over people and laws.

> engineers

Depends on where they work and what they do. Engineer at FAANG or a hotshot startup - that's been glamorized by media and entertainment but that's a relatively recent phenomenon. Engineer at a mid-sized auto parts or chemical company - usually associated with pocket protectors and slide rules, but basically just solid pros that take home a solid paycheck.

> physicians

They don't always hire or fire people but they certainly give orders. To patients, nurses, technicians. Physicians have always been respected, in every society across time.

> architects

Same deal as engineers. Plus on significant projects (like a skyscraper, apartment complex, government building etc) there's probably a team of architects that have one or more managers. Someone with an architect's license working for the city planning office in a non-leadership role? Not especially prestigious.

> designers

Are we talking about fashion designers? They don't manage people? Like literally zero people? That's news to me.[1][2][3]

> board members

They can literally vote to fire the boss of bosses - the CEO. And usually they're appointed on the basis of their achievements in business, law, or the industry.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Klein

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Lauren

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Karan

>> Consultants

> A term so generic as to be almost meaningless. It can apply to an Agile coach, an Ivy League fresh grad billed at $1200/hr by McKinsey et al, or a programmer with an LLC and some marketing skills. These all vary widely in prestige.

To add to your point, it is absolutely the case that in places like McKinsey et al., several key measures of the consultants as they make their way up the ladder are directly related to how many people they manage.

Consultants - the term has been diluted. But if you say that you're a consultant, people's imagination takes over. There's a reason why so many people are consultants. It's because generally speaking it's a term that projects high value merit.

Layers - people respect lawyers?

Engineers - we generally have very low respectability, among laypeople.

While your points on broader power structures are entirely correct, I can understand why their friend put it that way. There's a natural tendency to attribute the state of your country to its past. The caste system was just the noticeable local manifestation of how societies have tended to structure power the world over.

> I was with you until the "cast (sic) system"

You will have to take this as second hand information as I am not familiar with the relics of the cast system. But as he relayed it to me. When you go on a date with a girl that would be considered to be in a higher social status than yourself, the first thing the father will ask is how many people do you manage. Being a manager seems to provide some mobility in the relics of the system that is left. This is how it was relayed to me.

It's the "caste" system, not the "cast" system. Your friend does seem to have a pretty conservative circle of movement. He's probably talking about arranged marriages, not "dates".

(Am Indian, have gone on plenty of dates without ever meeting anyone's father.)

I think he was suggesting that the word you were looking for was "caste"

maybe the explanation is that management level is a replacement for the caste system to measure social status. not much different from western cultures. social status used to be the size of your land and how many people lived on it, now it's the size of your company or your team. the difference is that it is less universal but differs depending on the industry you work in.

I've had similar conversations. These guys were pretty open about the fact that they crammed for exams and didn't take undergrad very seriously. People that are in tech for the money is common everywhere, but there is definitely something unique about the Indian experience.

Unusually high number of openly abusive schools and parents.

90% of my class cheated in some form on regular exams until 10th grade. This was known by the management and teachers often hide it. They also increased marks of students by changing their answers lol. Discouraging environment for actual students.

Why?

Because education is a business. Metrics such as 90 percentile scored so and so drives admission rates.

why cheat?

Because lack of good parenting, teachers and dysfunctional infra. Most teachers outside of few top schools are "failures" (not literally) in private schools where they are spending their time trying to crack exams for government jobs or getting another degree. They don't care or aren't paid enough.

Parents won't help their kids or take much interest in what they like. They will be pretty thorough when investigating report cards and standardized bullshit metrics that indian schools make (outside of board) but shallow when empathising with their kids.

Tuition is a widely common practice in india which is similar to daycare in practice, I guess. It gives off an effect of your kid working... Whenever someone gets a bad grade, the first thing to do is increase their tuition time. My previous schools had same teachers taking tuition at home and an after school program. You will get questions and stuff that will come in exam by going there. It was public knowledge too. Most schools are shady. I can't remember one where I didn't see some bs going on like messing with paperwork for tax fraud (openly), messing with report cards, exams, board requirements, etc.

Big chunk of parents are not educated or live in poverty. Their kids will come to school and disrupt it for others but what can you do about it?

Separate them and put them into low cost classrooms? Yeah, that happens. Though it usually starts from 8th grade onwards. Until then, everyone is in the same classroom.

I think the biggest problem is we start investing in kids at a later age than we should. All their junior years, no one sets a good bar for them. They won't suddenly change as drastically as some people hope.

That's in line with what I perceive to be the waxing and waning of various degrees in the US. The farther the incentives drift away from selecting for people with sustainable interest and aptitude, more generally maladapted people in the field for the next five to ten years.

I think it's often a self limiting thing because word gets around that there isn't enough brass rings for everyone.

The problem is formal scholarly training and employment demands are 4-8 years dislocated from each other.

Universities do their best to keep a bead on the market (at least, the good ones do), but without medical school-style coordination it's almost impossible not to under- or over-shoot substantially in terms of graduate supply.

I don’t think that this is due to the caste system. I have seen it first hand - used to work in a restaurant flipping burgers with the other guys and as soon as somebody was promoted to shift manager - his demeanor towards other employees would change drastically .

That's also the case to a large extent in the UK, which makes me wonder whether it's a hold-over from the Empire rather than the caste system? I thought castes were more about who you're born as than what you end up doing?

It has nothing to do with caste system. It is that younger people are not supposed to say elders are wrong or oppose them, even if they are clearly wrong. I don't know about other countries but this kind of culture is root of many problems in India.

I remember that comment. I’ve quoted that story a number of times.

Thank you, it is good to hear. You know you put words out there and you don't really know if it contributes any value to anyone or not. I just try to relay my life lessons.

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