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by shagie·8y ago·view on hn ↗
It depends on what one's career goals are. From what I understand (I'm not Indian, but I've worked with many over the years), for a sizable portion of the workforce, the goal isn't to be senior programmer but rather management.

The way you get to management is by having people report to you and then get a new job higher up on the ladder at another company (it is my understanding that promotions from within the company are difficult compared to hiring outsiders).

One puts in time in grade, switching projects frequently to build up the resume. Unfortunately, this makes institutional knowledge at the client companies not something that is preserved easily.

(anecdote: when I was laid off to be replaced by someone from India, the 12 years of how the system works was transferred in 4 weeks of 4h a day meetings, 5 days a week (that was painful)... keeping in touch with my old coworkers, the person who replaced me left 6 months later and explained everything about how my job worked and what they learned in just a few days... who left six months later and only did one day of information transfer)

So, switch companies, go from developer to sr. developer in a year (2x 6 month projects) to team lead (with 5 people reporting - another year or so) to architect (with 3 team leads reporting - another year or so)... and you've got a manager.

If someone is on the track "I want to be a manager", switching projects frequently and never actually diving too deeply into the project is probably the best approach.

The technical people are harder to find. They're not switching jobs quickly and so they're unlikely to get hired into the project that the client sees. Maybe they're tapped as a "work on this 25%" but I know how that goes... it means one week out of the month you're catching up on everything for that project and trying to fend off context switches before you're not thinking about it for another month.

For the technical people, many of them are able to find a visa and move to the US for some extended period of time. This contributes to a brain drain in India. Also the indentured servitude aspect of the H1B visa means that there is less mobility and again, its harder to meet these people in random places. They do exist - and I've worked with a number of them... but I've worked with far more people who are in a position for six months to a year and then moving on to another contract at another contracting company.

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Most people in India don't seem to be bothered by a brain drain and don't treat it as a problem as such.

You have to remember that India has more than a billion people and struggles to find work for all of them.

I was surprised to see (in contrast to other countries trying to stem brain drain) that its a stated goal by the Indian prime minister that they want to see some 50 million (more than the population of many countries?!?) workers sent abroad in the coming decade. Whether it eases their unemployment issues or if they see it as a genuinely beneficial strategy is not clear to me. A bit of both I guess.

This plays into another very interesting phenomenon. Indians tend to look up to the western world a lot and I think it shows in their approach to tech.

For example, if you ask most Indians who the top tech people in their country are they'd probably mention Indian CEOs of western tech companies in the US. This is in very stark contrast to say, China, where their own entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma are most influential.

That is to say, rather than build their own ecosystem or companies most Indians aspire to work for Western firms and deeply synthesize their economy to them.

Absolutely correct. The brain drain for a small fraction of a percent that get visas to work in other countries is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It's a mere trickle compared to the reservoir of people behind it.

Though, its more of a next generation thing that will be interesting - the changing demographics. The US has birthright citizenship - all the children born in the US to visa holders will be US citizens. That will do some interesting things in a few places when they start needing to pay taxes in the US if they are overseas and haven't given up their citizenships (n.b. I'm not an expat and so am not completely versed in the associated tax law).

Sending workers abroad and having them send money home to family outsources the social support structures needed in India and reduces the pressure for unemployment. This feeds into the growing nationalism and xenophobia in many western countries. In other countries it allows people with fewer scruples to take advantage of this labor force and essentially turn them into slaves (confiscation of passports and financial trickery).

I'm not sure where this is going to come back and where the ultimate costs with this policy are going to be paid - but they're going to be paid somewhere.

The Indian tech industry is certainly going for a synergy approach with western markets rather than... say, Japan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome ) or China (copy and maintain behind the Great Firewall).

Its going to be interesting to see how this all plays out over the years to come.

This is spot on. The incentive system so much more promotes management careers that anybody who wishes to go down the tech path comes across as stupid.

Its very common in services companies to treat tech people as somebody who don't have the chops to do prestigious management work.

Do this for sufficient number of years and eventually you will have very few people who want to do any real work and most will want to be managers.