The attitude among Indian tech employees

I am starting up soon. I care about working on meaningful problems, with good people and building the right culture. Have been hearing from a lot of folks about culture problems in startups. Seems more of a norm rather than an exception. Curious to know why do startup culture degrade? What pitfalls should I avoid to create a healthy culture?

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?

Wtf is Urgent?! How can everything be urgent? If it is urgent, why are you calling me? Call the ambulance! Thanks for reading

Recently while working for an Indian startup I had a terrible experience, not because the entire team was bad but just the one person, the team lead treated me like shit. Never left an opportunity to humiliate me publically, no appreciation, no feedback, no proactive help. Just pure toxicity. Is being a good person too much to ask from seniors? Fortunately for me, I never derived my self worth from him else I would've killed myself by now. I am now planning to switch companies, and I want to know how to find and gauge good people beforehand? What can I do to make sure or atleast increase the probability of me being with good people? Is this even possible? Anyone can share any anecdotes on their startup stints and their relationships with people there is also welcome.

Just wanted to know why and how come our companies have horrible WLB and cultures compared to western counterparts. Is it the fault of the employees for accepting whatever and acting like sheep or is it just the mindset of the senior management to treat their subordinates the same horrible way they were treated as some sort of sick rite of passage ?

I have for the past couple of months gone through really pathetic and exploitative behaviour of the Indian companies (especially startups). > They ask to do extensive assignments, wasting a lot of time, just because they have an upper hand > Then they completely ghost candidates with no response (most times) / delayed response This is really pathetic. Lack of empathy just shows how immature and under-developed you are. If you ask someone to invest their time, you have the responsibility of timely and proper communication. ALMOST ALL STARTUP HIRING MANAGERS AND HR TEAMS NEED TO UNDERSTAND THIS.

I don't have problem with Hindi But it isn’t the first language many prefer in this vast country Please let us (Hindi speakers) know, we will drop our assumptions Thenks

So basically I don't hesitate in challenging the interviewer if I feel like they don't know how to interview a senior candidate so during many interviews, this is how I have caught them off guard: 1. The interviewer was asking me technical questions and expecting to explain properly throughout. So at the end i asked him about the tech stack they use, he said Azure. I asked him why they use Azure and not AWS, to which he said "it's cheaper", i didn't let it go, i asked him for a proper technical explanation, his red face was worth seeing. 2. The interview asked me a hard DSA question, and I wasn't able to solve it properly, he didn't even give me enough hints, just expected me to solve it. So halfway I asked him, would you like to solve a DSA if I ask you right now, he said no because it's not his interview. To which I asked, are you afraid that you won't be able to solve? If you are going to reject me for not solving this question, would you resign if you aren't able to solve the question. He ended the call. 3. One interviewer was asking me absurd technical detailed questions. I asked him why are you asking such questions, he said he needs to know my thought process because he will work with me. I started asking him similar questions, he said he won't answer because it's not his interview. I said I also need to know your thought process because we'll work together, so you should also answer these questions, he had no reply. 4. The interviewer asked me about a challenging project that I had done recently. I don't like this question at all. So I said there wasn't any challenging project because I'm good at what I do so it's always easy for me. He moved on to the next question. 5. HR asked me why I resigned without an offer? I asked if it's mandatory? No reply.