Constructive feedback for Indian SDEs to go beyond average!

I love to read about tech and how startups evolved. Have spent a lot of time figuring out how the good product companies in the US got built: Google, FB, Instagram, Snap, Pinterest etc. etc. One thing stands out: A lot of these started out as just projects, and not a real startup. Instagram was just an idea to make photo filtering better. Reddit was just a project around making a cooler internet. They set off as projects, and got some traction before becoming funded startups. Because they had devs in the founding team, who were always doing projects as side hustles. This wasn't the time when SDE salaries were so pumped up, they didn't want to just become good devs, they probably wanted to solve real problems. My takeaway: Maybe Engineers shouldn’t be too incentivised to just code. They should be incentivised to think business. Thats how FB, Google, Insta etc happened as companies. In India, high pay endears engineers to stick to coding, do less business thinking. That’s why we don’t see too many coders posting their side projects on X, Reddit, GV within India. Maybe there just aren’t enough. Have just been thinking about this. Open to thoughts from the community - maybe my view is limited. Would love to hear.

Good folks of Grapevine in tech leadership, what kind of projects make an SDE fresher stand out from competition, that makes you put your finger on their resume. Few friends looking for a switch, all with well above-average product thinking and speed to pick technology. Any pointers would be nice !

Indian SDEs on LinkedIn & Twitter are some of the worst engineers you will ever find across the real world. Their typical value lies around: - Cracking a FAANG/MAANG or Product company. - Make an announcement on LinkedIn & Twitter and accumulating followers. - Starting YouTube channel, Topmate links, affiliate marketing channels, and more. - Rant DSA, System Design, Interview resources all day long. - Post daily of their office, their colleagues, candid shots, and barely getting any work done. While this is expected out of early career professionals, it pains to see senior SDEs doing the same shit over and over again. Things don't end here — Everyone talks about creating a revolution. And the revolution is teaching DSA. If you are an experienced SDE and still ranting DSA, it just means that you have barely learnt anything that is of worth any value. You are atmost a "Ticket Engineer". You get assigned a Jira ticket, you bust your ass solving it, and that's it. That's your entire value. Its high time that these "Bhaiya", "Didis", "Bhabhis" stop ranting DSA and System Design over and over, and build something of real value. You would barely see any credible open-source projects coming out of India (but hey, we have some many contributors!), barely any Indie dev project, or anything that captures the attention of the world. Literally every popular SDE you might follow or see over your social media is the same. Their entire community game is a farce and designed to capture gullible college students and shill thousands of rupees out of them. You might be featured on Times Square ($40 ka showoff), but no one would remember you for anything that you built. <Rant Over. Peace>

I am an engineer, what I enjoy is solving technically challenging problems. I don't really want to spend my time bothering with non-code solutions to your business problem, and I don't care how much money my code makes you. Just have a tech lead give me a challenging tech problem to solve or build for(WITH the necessary requirements) and I'll get it done. Simple. Personally I'm saddened to see how chasing impact has taken over all good tech companies, and how you basically HAVE to create value and take ownership in other ways if you want to be SDE-3 or higher. I would rather be a more technically competent, deliverer SDE (think someone who's extremely good at being an SDE-1). Climbing the SDE ladder is boring.

Lead social, brand, perf, SEO, partnerships, community, growth, pretty much everything across zero to fairly high budgets. Happy to help.

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?

Been long since I wrote here. A casual post to discuss anything startup/VC related. Which startups are doing good, which ones not too good. Especially if you're a founder - how is the market feeling? My pov: despite the excess capital with VCs, funding is still very much dry. For a bit during the last year, there was a flurry of investments in SaaS and AI. Even that has dried up now. Slowest I have seen. Why: I think there's no push factor to invest, there's a lack of people starting up (vs. previous years). Awaiting some inflection point, so that things kickstart again.