The new generation of Indian Developers . . .

There's a new generation of Indian Developers that the world is starting to see.

Historically, people outside India generally thought that developers from India were primarily hired by IT services firms like Infosys / TCS, etc. and that they were hired for manual work that could be outsourced with 2-3 months of relevant training. These jobs typically started at 3LPA for freshers (~$5000/year).

For context, earning $5000/year puts someone in the top 20% of earners in India.

Did you know there's a word "Bangalored" which means your job is being outsourced to the Indian IT sector?

This model started in the 90s, '00s and has been a great ride for the ecosystem.

Times have changed. A new wave is here.

There's a new model that's starting to emerge and I can sense this because a ton of my friends, users and colleagues seem to fall in this definition.

A significant portion of high quality engineers are being hired in India, at compensations never seen previously by the Indian ecosystem. In this new set of developers, I am seeing benchmarks of 15-20LPA pay for freshers, often jumping to 50LPA+ within 5-8 years of experience (sometimes even lesser).

While it might be surprising for some of you, such folks are quite common around here, especially if you are in the tech ecosystem in Bangalore. And the compensation benchmark is not ridiculous, they often add significant value to companies.

Also, this is NOT an IIT phenomenon. I known engineering graduates (from tier-3/unheard colleges) with 6 years experience at 50-55LPA.

For instance, check this reddit thread where people share salaries of individual contributor developers.

What are the traits of these developers? Why are they being paid so highly?

1. Sharp and technically respected: These developers often come with solid domain knowledge (sometimes, imposter syndrome too).
2. Prefer product-companies: You'll find very few such opportunities at companies with consulting or client-oriented projects. These roles tend to concentrate in product companies. They would still have customers & clients, but the tech & product is driven by internal strategy. They aren't given a contract with requirements. Their employer / company has product teams and they are expected to deliver world-class product that can work for their users (across companies).
3. Above average communication: While they are great on the technicals, being able to communicate and interact with peers across the world is an essential skill. Often these team members are expected to communicate with team members using common product/business terminologies, and not just the technical nitigrities.
4. Autonomy at work: These individuals thrive when they are given a broad(ish) goal and left to explore/solve things on their own. If you do much micromanagement, they will leave the company without even thinking twice.

Disclaimer 1: It is always possible to find developers who might be earning high but might not have any/some of these traits. Do your own evaluations before making assumptions ( high salary may ≠ high quality).

Disclaimer 2: If you're thinking, "wow these looks like some solid folks. Maybe hiring such people will mean the company's product awesome too." Umm, not really. They come with some constrains too:

1. Need high quality colleagues to function efficiently: If you hire these engineers, you need equally competent Engineering Managers who know how to help them grow, you need senior staff engineers & architects who can mentor them, you need solid PMs who can collaborate & work with them, etc.. It's the entire unit that eventually builds the company, not just the developers!
2. Get bored easily / want challenging work: It is quite possible that they might have joined this new job with an aspiration to learn something new. But once that bridge is crossed, you need to make sure they have a next bridge available. Because they are often thinking about their personal & professional growth. And if you can't offer them, they'll find it elsewhere.
3. Job hopping and ghosting: This is a challenge with some of these high quality developers (especially when they are in the 2-6 year experience bracket) where they are window shopping even after they join a new job. I have seen multiple people in my extended network, who join a company like Stripe or Atlassian, but are interviewing in Google or Uber even after 2 months and then jump the boat without giving much ado for the company they joined. Their Linkedin as well as resume wouldn't even mention the ghosting (for obvious reasons). While being opportunistic and optimising their outcomes is expected, examples of folks leaving after joining creates ripples for employers

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What has caused this rapid boom?

Firstly, the aspirations of the Indian middle-class has always been big. But beyond that, here are some factors:

1. Remote Work: Companies are starting to build remote teams even for their critical functions like DevOps, backend development or data science. This was not the case 5-10 years ago where companies like to keep critical things either in a closely knit office or with consultancies. Post the boom of remote work, they are now much more comfortable setting up offices elsewhere and getting things done remotely.
2. Startup Ecosystem: Product startups are high intensity jobs -- these fast growing startups bringing some of the toughest technical challenges to these developers. The set of engineers who worked at Flipkart in 2012-17 or at Ola from 2013-18 or at Razorpay from 2017-20 are some that have seen massive scaling issues. This hands-on experience has caused a great increase in the number of high quality developers across the ecosystem.
3. Large volume of graduates: There are over 200k CS graduates coming out every year in India. They are all aspiring for the top paying jobs and as they start to get profiles/personas of folks in their network who earn high amounts, they push for the same -- learn the technical details, start looking for similar quality jobs and support each other with referrals and interview support.
4. Community-led Learning Ecosystem: The best part of this industry is that there is no virtue-signalling or gating -- if you are looking up enough on the internet, you'll come across most things you need to break through. Insights are shared by people on how they reached there (for example, check this reddit), resources to learn technologies, preparation, what not.

What is the kind of work they are doing?

These are some of the roles with some of the highest number of opportunities in the ecosystem:

1. Product Development (Backend/web): This is the typical application development on frontend/backend that you might hear about across organisations.
2. DevOps / Platform Engineering: This role involves working on building, scaling and monitoring infrastructure for companies internally -- a large part of it is around automating the workflows instead of running them manually.
3. Data Platform: As companies scale, managing data for different purposes (analytics, reporting, using in applications, monitoring, etc.) becomes a challenging task. In these situations, data platform teams help setup, scale & manage data infrastructure at a "reasonable cost".
4. Machine Learning & Data Science: From banking enterprises setting up their underwriting analytics teams to big techs setting up their search & recommendation divisions, India is a popular hub for these roles that require deep levels of fundamental understanding of math & statistics.

What kind of companies are these developers working for?

1. Big Tech: Google, Amazon, Meta & Microsoft have large teams setup in India. These teams have scale that very few tech companies have, and to manage that, requires a competent set of engineers.
2. Global Enterprises: Think about international large scale companies like PayPal, Smarsh (a B2B compliance platform), Victoria Secrets, Cyncly (Design SaaS used by Furnishing & related companies). Enterprises in India are typically process & people driven, with tech limited to being a cost center for many of them. But in the global ecosystem, it's often that traditional enterprises tend to use software to automate their processes & workflows -- either by buying software or building them. They use software for most things -- from finance to HR to customer interactions.
3. Global Startups / Tech Companies: India teams are often setup as product development centers with expertise in different domains. For example, here are 10 companies that would fit this description: AppDynamics, GoJek, Expedia, Rippling, Uber, Intuit, Indeed, Coinbase, Atlassian, Rubrik, etc.
4. Indian Startups: Tech startups are typically heavy on technology leverage to build the business. Companies like Cult.fit, Flipkart, Zomato often have great engineering talent density.
5. Indian Enterprises: this segment is still to catch up but picking up. For example, Tata Neu -- they were primarily having high quality product team but the engineering driven by a team of engineers/consultants from TCS (apparently 200+). They finally decided to build an internal team of 30-40 engineers. I'm pretty sure if they are able to hire engineers at half the quality of what Cult.fit has, these 30 engineers can be super efficient.

What are the side effects of this upsurge?

1. Knowledge sharing & transfer: Working in a global enterprise opens a gateway of knowledge sharing of different industries, geographies and user base that they didn't have access to in the past. From cybersecurity to HRMS softwares, the variety of organisations having offices in India is extensive.
2. Increase in entrepreneurial aspirations: With accelerated financial & technical growth, these developers often find themselves itching to start up on their own. This becomes doubly true when they are working in Global / Indian startups and not just large scale enterprises.
3. Increased cost for Indian companies: The cost of hiring a high quality engineer has increased faster for Indian organisations as they are now competing with international organisations who might have an upper hand given the PPP difference between their HQ country and India.
4. Moving back to India: With high quality opportunities available here, I have seen multiple friends move back from different parts of the world (including the Bay Area), back to India / Bangalore. While they would not earn the same in absolute $ terms, the pay in India is a significant value in India. (For example, I know a friend who was with a Big Tech firm in Bay area, earning $250k cash. Moving back to India, they're at $85k cash -- which might sound like a downgrade but is a much higher amount relative to the cost of living here)
5. Moving internationally: Working with large enterprises naturally opens up the door for developers to move to the other units of the enterprise internally or even work remotely from other countries. I have friends who relocated to Amsterdam, Paris, Singapore etc. internally within their existing orgs; as well as friends who started working remotely from different countries after joining these orgs.
6. Technical Expertise being moved to India: with availability of high quality developers in India, I have seen multiple organisations that have either decided to not expand a certain vertical in US or decided to setup a team.

If you have any thoughts or perspectives to share on this topic, feel free to drop in comments and continue the conversation.