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Comment by prakhar897 | Hacker News Reader

For the people arguing that Indian Techies are expensive, Here are the pay bands for Amazon in India vs USA.

       USA             India

SDE1 160k | 30k

SDE2 252k - 325k | 65k - 100k

SDE3 400k - 600k | 150k - 200k

Also, Labor laws in India are non-existant where you can work your employee to death. Amazon also pays top of the market in India and you can get decent workers for much less. Hence, you can get 10x the output by investing the same capital in India instead of USA.

Another point is the labor of India being poor quality. These come because people contract WITCH companies which pay not even pennies to its employees. Expecting people to create top notch work while paying 4k$ per year is just not feasible even in India. (McD worker in US makes 13k$ per year).

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There are exceptional engineers in Bangalore, Chennai, …

It’s just they are outnumbered 1000:1 by some of the worst engineers I’ve encountered.

That set is hired entirely for low cost area-under-the-curve reasons. It’s sad because clearly there is interest in the profession (at least, seemingly, until their parents start asking why they aren’t VPs yet) but somehow companies and the educational system fail them.

For the most part India “worked” because it was so cheap you could hire an army of people and a crazy number of managers to make those people minimally productive. There is an art to that but it has enormous costs on the non-mediocre teams that have to burn tons of energy constantly course-correcting the remote teams and push back constantly on code quality issues.

I’ve worked for companies with massive india teams. Consistently they are pretty bad.

The companies who do it right are doing it to find talent, not cut costs, and ruthlessly filter and winnow the WITCH fodder until they get teams that are functional. But you have to be ruthless on quality and nepotism.

This is exactly the problem.

Median income in India is $3.6/day. It takes very little training to have someone do work for $10/day, which is a three-fold increase in income and a huge boost to standard-of-living. That's call center, data entry, etc.

From there, it takes a moderate amount of effort to train someone to churn out low-quality code. That brings income to perhaps $100/day, which is a very decent standard-of-living in a low cost-of-living area. That's maybe 2 years of bootcamp-level training and 4 years at a low-quality university.

Most of the talent pool in India (and many other developing countries) is shaped like a pyramid, where top-tier talent exists, but it's hard to find the needle in the haystack. Interviewing is far from a perfect process.

It's not a problem which is quickly solvable. The amount of top-tier talent can grow exponentially, but low-tier talent can grow just as quickly for many years -- India has over a billion people.

It's not clear it's even a bad thing. At the end of the day, the transitions from $1 => $10 => $100/day are a lot more important than $100 => $1000, since they provide for access to decent food, housing, and medicine. It's okay to prioritize growth at the bottom.

Without prioritizing the top at all, at some point, you do hit the middle income trap, but that's a much still better place to be than $3.6/day median income.

> It's not a problem which is quickly solvable. The amount of top-tier talent can grow exponentially, but low-tier talent can grow just as quickly for many years -- India has over a billion people.

What has grown faster: the number of IIT seats or the number of "technical colleges" and bootcamps?

There's a similar situation in the West where very capable talent don't want promotions because the expectations are too great for the increased amount of money / pain. At some point, it's better to sort-of coast at a lower level, work on side-projects intending to turn them into a viable startup.

That's what I've been doing the past few years! I was demoted when COVID hit and a bunch of jobs in my company disappeared, and have been happy as a clam ever since.

Cool. The department I'm at has a lot of people who have been (t)here a while. Some of the IC6-7's come across as big fish in a tiny pond robotic sociopaths.

Manager no. 1 (HR) is a pushy, luxury SUV-driving, former IC who doesn't know anything about me or my work yet offers "advice".

Manager no. 2 (technical group) is a former IC who:

- Still plays at being a lead IC while also supposedly being an overworked manager

- Believes the world is orderly, the impact of work is entirely quantitative, and lacks theory of mind

- Believes he has a monopoly on good ideas

- Shoots down everyone else's ideas

- Refuses to concede any point or apologize in any context

Manager above them is a good guy, but all of his direct reports come across as a-holes.

I'm ready to bounce because:

- My coworkers don't value software engineering, curiosity, professional development, excellence, experience, aren't supportive in any sense, and not people I would socialize with... they're really boring. The ex team lead is a cool guy and one of the hardware integration people is my kind of properly socialized, hilarious troublemaker.

- On-call preventable fires happen often, sometimes in the AM

- "Too overworked" to do anything right the first time, so tech debt accumulates and there's no incentive to fix anything

- "Too overworked" and yet there's no possibility of new hires

- No one cares about the tech or language we have to use. Customers complain about it

- Nothing fun happens at work. Ever

The issue is not quality per see. It’s difficult to work with Indian teams because the cultural gap is huge. Attitude towards hierarchy, easiness with conflicts, reluctance to say no are all major difference.

Understanding when you are getting push back from an Indian team can be very difficult.

No, it really is the quality. The issue is entirely the massive pool of unqualified engineers. The single biggest issue most US companies have is they try and hire in India the way they hire in the US. The smart companies actually "hire" as a kind of internship/trial run with no expectation that a new hire will still be around in 6 months and a very high bar for retention. Companies that do not do this end up with staff that are 90% useless. Once the person has proven their worth, then you move them into the real team.

I've worked with people in India for 20+ years. Understanding how to read pushback and identifying issues early are skills you learn pretty quickly, but it is a good point.

As I said, there are awesome engineers there, and the key is to shape your hiring to the actual environment.

The hierarchy issue is humongous, though, even once you are really familiar with it. For me it is often just a blind spot for people who grew up in the US. I have many issues with US culture and the idolizing of titles, celebrities and rich people, but India is so often next level on this topic, coupled with a kind of acceptability of abusive behavior by the people higher up in the hierarchy.

Staying on top of this is both necessary _and an obligation_. You have a responsibility to the people you hire.

> It’s just they are outnumbered 1000:1 by some of the worst engineers I’ve encountered.

That's because a lot of the Indian consulting firms will take pretty much anyone off the street, put them through a 1-week "boot camp", and throw them at a project with the title of Senior Engineer*. As you said, there are plenty of talented engineers, but they're obscured by the sea of warm bodies whose only function is to put billable hours on an invoice.

* I haven't seen this firsthand, but it's what I've been told by Americans who have done management stints out there. It certainly seems consistent with the quality of work from some of the cheap job shops.

There is also an interesting phenomenon that is perhaps overlooked -- Indian tech salaries are low because American tech salaries are high.

How?

Many Indians only work at these 30k jobs because of the possibility that they can eventually parlay those years of experience to emigrate and get a 300k job in the US. At big tech companies, many join the Indian office with the implicit or sometimes explicit promise that the company will sponsor their L1 or H1B after a couple of promotions.

I see parallels to how medical school graduates treat residencies and fellowships. If becoming a doctor meant making fellowship money forever (often 1/5th to 1/10th of what a full doctor would make), not nearly as many quality people would go into medicine.

You can only pay them so little because they see themselves as still in training for the "real job" that is in the US. Don't confuse this for true arbitrage.

> Many Indians only work at these 30k jobs because of the possibility that they can eventually parlay those years of experience to emigrate and get a 300k job in the US

As opposed to... working for that salary because it's an amazing salary by Indian standards?

Because the US is an outlier. People are comparing to UK and Canada. Compared to UK India is similarly expensive enough.

Nobody is claiming India is expensive when compared to the US.

UK salaries are 75k$ for SDE1, 165k$ for SDE2. Roughly 2x Indian compensation. EU region also has strong labor laws.

> UK salaries are 75k$ for SDE1, 165k$ for SDE2

They’re definitely not. Where are you getting this? Divide by three

UK engineers are earning much over £20k a year, even outside of London. Amazons site says: SDE1 is on a low of £45,653 which is $56,344.02 SDE2 is on £70,703 which is $87,257.47

So somewhere between you both.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

Filtering on UK gives total comp of $60k-$200k+ at Amazon

> Hence, you can get 10x the output by investing the same capital in India instead of USA.

Then why doesn't every tech business around the world of any size do that?

“I’ll hire 5x as many people and work them twice as hard to be 10x more productive” is a disastrous mindset for managing software….

There is no SDE2 in India making 82 LPA.

The correct band for India should be around:

SDE1 - 30k

SDE2 - 40K - 45K

SDE3 - 50k - 70K

82 LPA may be an outlier but the range you mentioned is wildly incorrect. I’m an SDE2 making 57 LPA ($70K), and know other SDE2s making >70 LPA ($85K).

What ... In India ? I've only heard about Quants rarely making such amount. Where can a SDE2 get >70 LPA ?

You just had to switch companies last year when there was massive demand. I know of people who make that much purely by jumping at the right time.

I agree - that's definitely one way to land a lucrative offer. But I'm surprised that there was a massive demand last year. Because I was of the opinion that 2022 was the year where they really slowed down the hiring

My friend makes 80LPA = 98k$ as SDE2. Multiple former teammates makes around 70LPA = 85k$.

SDE2 is quite wide band, how much is their YOE ? IMO, for such numbers, the their base pay is 50% of TTC - so something around 40L and the rest is RSUs.

> Also, Labor laws in India are non-existant where you can work your employee to death.

I feel like this is my current work experience in the US. I frequently work 65 hour weeks and overnight shifts while also having to work all day the next day. There are no laws protecting me from this and I don't get paid overtime for any of it. I've worked the equivalent of 12 extra weeks of full-time work in the past year with no extra pay or time off to compensate.

(I've been casually looking for a new job/I'm quitting my current one in a few weeks)

150k - 200k for an offshore developer is ridiculously expensive. This is why companies are increasingly moving development out of India to places like SE Asia and Eastern Europe. The costs savings have to be worth the efficiency hit, otherwise there is no point having remote dev teams.

For those unfamiliar with the initialism:

WITCH: Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL tech.

<https://analyticsindiamag.com/witch-vs-faang-saga-to-continu...>

Comparable to FAANG.

>WITCH

It's been a while since I heard that term. They are everywhere in Danish government IT (through KMD).

InfoSys (the I in WITCH) invested in OpenAI back in 2015. How much is their investment worth now? If it is in the billions they should probably take the OpenAI hype and pivot to something else than being a cheap outsourcing company.

If they were able to invest billions in a moonshot then obviously their profit model was working...

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