Startup struggling to hire engineers? Reading this might help

1/3rd. This is the number I often here these days for joining ratio in engineering for startups. It means that if a company makes 3 offers, then only 1 person ultimately joins. Notice periods are minimum of 1 month and what’s worse is that you only find out pretty much on the last day that the person is not joining! This is clearly very distressing for the company – since you just can’t plan anything around a person joining!

The other sound-bytes we continually hear in India is – very high salaries, very demanding workforce, unavailability and so on and so forth. Overall, a really dire hiring market from a company perspective.

Let’s put this in perspective a bit and maybe that will help provide some pointers to wherein some solutions lie.

-???????In a record year in 2021, startups are estimated to hire around 100k-150k engineers.

-???????India produces approx. ~1M engineering graduates a year out of which approx. 200K are trained in computer science. Very many other graduates learn programming on the side.

-???????TCS is hiring close to 100K freshers in 2022 alone. IT services industry employs existing ~5M engineers and salaries in IT services are subject to Gross Margin pressures and hence haven’t gone up that much.

Is there an opportunity here?

Here are some observations I have with startups:

-???????Many of them grossly over-estimate the technical complexity of the work that they do. A vast majority of the startups do fairly un-complicated work technically speaking. I barely see any real tech in most fintech, ed-tech, health-tech and so on..

-???????In a heavily VC-fueled world devoid of any P&L pressures specially outside of the Unit Economics in the “fixed cost” area, they take the short cut of just trying to get the “rock-stars” at any cost without understanding requirement or fitment.

-???????There is unwillingness to invest at all in talent even for a month or two to be able to give people an opportunity to learn and perform. Somehow they can still live with 1/3rd?joining ratio.

Just like India consumer opportunity is around serving the next Billion, the India technical opportunity is leveraging the vast pools of engineering talent available in India. Trying to fight within a technical talent pool of 100k-200K engineers who are supposed to be “rockstars” makes no sense to me.?

I would strongly advise companies to look within. The answers always lie there.?