Why are Indian startups so obsessed with Micromanagement? i.e. WFO

I am a 6 yrs experienced Software developer and part of a mid-stage startup. This is my third job; I have been working here for 3 years. I was involved here as one of the core engineers at the start in developing the overall platform, After that, my growth as an engineer stagnated for 2 years . Constant importance and priority are given to business requirements and hacky work getting pushed to production in the name of fast iterations and business impact every week. My engineering manager lacks proper engineering skills and doesn't respect engineers even after their impact on the company and constantly keeps saying the engineering team doesn't contribute to the revenue of the company despite us pushing work that improves business positively. Last year around November, around 80% of the engineering team was subtly suggested to start looking out for work (basically a soft layoff) because management was too scared of a social media backlash Due to all this,2 years' worth of technical debt has accumulated on the overall codebase and apart from giving justification for every code improvement that we try to make there, we still have to work on business/product requirements. My growth as an engineer has stopped and I am worried about missing out on the latest developments in the tech industry, especially with AI in the picture, and want to make my skillset somewhat AI-proof. I have come back to hands-on coding this year , so that's a positive start. I am considering taking a 3-4 month break after resigning from my company to study, develop side projects, develop a portfolio etc Has anyone else been in this boat ? How did you come out strong?

Culture, WLB etc.

It’s should and will always be about how productive those hours actually are. You see, no knowledge worker puts out more than 2.5 to 5 hours of real work in a day. That’s 12.5 to 25 hours of productive work in a week. The rest? It’s just meetings, updates and moving things around. Five-day work weeks? If you’re measuring by butts in seats, sure. But if you’re looking at actual output, it’s a joke. We need to obsess over productive time, not clocking hours. The attendance/week hours mindset is a pseudo-metric killing the workforce, making us focus on quantity over quality. Think about it: As a knowledge worker - your days are filled with meetings, status updates, and email threads. How much of that is real, impactful work? Very little. We’re stuck in busyness, mistaking it for productivity. But then again, if orgs obsess on outcomes only, employees will call them out: 'You don’t see my effort to go from A to Z, you don’t acknowledge it.' Hence, orgs measure you by hours. And for those thinking, 'Pay me by hours, overtime factored in' – great on paper, but useless for knowledge workers. IMHO, we are way more more comfortable measuring by hours than outcomes. We rave about deep work, about focus hours, but in reality we laude how long someone stays logged in. Weird isn't it.

It has become very prominent in India now

Indian managers will make the work culture toxic even if they are in good international companies. Indian branches of the same company will be shity because of these insecure managers.

So recently, I read a lot of posts on Grapevine regarding some startups having no vision, poor management, toxicity etc etc, yet, many of these startups are doing quite a good business. I understand there is no correlation between work culture of a startup and it’s business outcome, but certainly, when a startup has poor management and unclear vision, then it should have troubles. That is not the case. Ola Electric seems to be doing well, Zomato became profitable and there are a few other MNCs with a similar scenario. As an employee, I really want to understand if we are missing something here, like maybe lack of foresight, or are we being greedy with respect to salary and stuff, or maybe we don’t empathise with founders? Sometimes I really try to understand the perspective of founders, but then nothing can justify pathetic workplace or poor management.

I'm seeing so many posts where startup employees are cribbing about things like layoffs, work culture etc etc. Doesn't seem like they have perspective on everything it takes to build a startup. I've built a failed startup myself and have immense respect for founders who are grinding it out there in such difficult recessionary circumstances. And then you have so many of the engineers and PMs cribbing about basics without talking about important things like learning growth, building for the future etc. Why such myopia? I work at a big tech and envy the speed at which startups move, the big responsibility everyone gets to handle, the fast career growth. All these things are being cribbed about. They crib about founders wanting more. Their job is to ensure success, not to give lifetime jobs to entitled people. They have more headaches you can imagine. In my small startup I had a million headaches. I can only imagine how hard it must be to run larger ships. Is everyone joining a startup these days looking for a get rich quick scheme?

I have been on a permanent wfh role since covid. Yes, been 2+ years since I stepped into an office. I stay alone and have little expenses but also 0 social life. Friends are all spread out. Not on any dating app because its exhausting. Can someone just talk about any impacts on their personal life from work life? Does anyone here feel a void too? I’d love to connect.

1. High pressure on timelines- business and top management shits on you if you don’t deliver on time 2. No power to control the outcome- engineers don’t listen to you neither does the design or analytics team, you end up begging for resources 3. Too much politics- business or a senior PM can steal your bandwidth anytime 4. Lack of recognition- if it succeeds business did it, if it fails it is product teams fault (engg never gets blamed for shit)

Majority of Indian startups has toxic work culture and the same is not true for any US or Europe based startup. Indian startups just copy paste ideas from the west and apply it to Indian context. We don't have original product barring few such as Postman and all. Why is it so and how we can improve the situation?