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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

> The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses don't have any interest in computers. They enter because they scored well in entrance exam (which can be games by studying some books relentlessly for some years), and since Software is still one of the highest paying fields.

I've seen this a lot, especially in ODC parts of Capgemini, TCS, Cognizant etc - it felt like only a very small number of people actually wanted to be developers or even architects; everyone else just wanted to be "a manager".

I'd asked about this strangenes, and Indian friends told me that managers were seen as superior, and even their families would push them to become managers.

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You see this everywhere in the world. I've worked with a huge number of Americans who went to school for anything but computing, would rather be doing anything but computing, but realized that a six-week crash course in web development would literally quadruple their salary. Many of them go on to embrace computing, many of them turn out to be good developers, and some even become passionate, but they all start out by abandoning their dreams and chasing the quick buck.

Tech and finance eat all the smart people. There are unlimited tech jobs, but only so many jobs for physicists, chemists, professional musicians, teachers, lawyers, etc. And the vast majority of them pay a lot less than tech and finance.

Difference is, a lot of these people wouldn't get jobs as junior devs in the west, and if they did, there just wouldn't be so many "natural" opportunities to move into management. Whereas in India, the big outsourcing firms need such a large quantity of people every year, that thousands upon thousands are hired and placed in junior dev or test roles. And because these orgs are so large, there are many layers of middle management, and plenty of opportunities.

I don't think this is true at all. The tech bubble in the West is huge and claiming junior devs in the West are anywhere less afflicted by the rat race syndrome than India is outrageously false.

The tech bubble in the west is bug, sure - but that's not the same as organisations with 100s of thousands of employees selling bodies as cheap as possible.

Furthermore, it's naive to think India is the same as western countries - it's a huge country with it's own unique culture (cultures, really), history and languages. For many Indians, software development isn't seen as professional career path; a dev job is little more that a vehicle to becoming a manager. And being a manager, in charge of people, elevates your social standing, to a position of kudos and respect - that doesn't happen in the west.

> everyone else just wanted to be "a manager"...I'd asked about this strangenes

It isn't strange in the slightest. If you look outside tech, you'll find this in every industry in every country. Everywhere in the world the person in charge is more respected and better-paid than the person doing the work. And it's always been this way. Tech, and software-heavy tech in particular, is the outlier.

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