Indian SDEs will do all DSA and System Design chatter but cannot create any real value
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>
This what happens when you use the same twitter account for work and nsfw stuff
A big reason for that is non-Indian SDEs choose computer science because they are passionate about it. A great deal of Indians choose it because it pays. The whole DSA interview process has become just like another Joint Entrance Exam. Optimizing for solving as many coding questions as humanely possible.
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Enumerator
Stealth
a year ago
We do have some good open source projects from India https://github.com/jeswinsimon/awesome-made-by-indians
PyTorch was led by an Indian Engineering Lead in Meta. Didn't come out of India.
I have huge respect for creators of Hoppscotch and Hasura. I did not categorically deny that open-source projects come out India. They do come, but just not in the quantity where we can have a significant dent.
This is the trend I have noticed recently -
1. Create a dummy repo for hacktoberfest
2. Call it collection of projects - other people upload their entire project to each folder
3. Upload your LC solutions to the repo
4. Add || Open Source Contributor || to linkedin title & resume
Although, there are many well known projects created & maintained by Indians but they are anonymous
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JackRod
Stealth
a year ago
Also check the contributions of these so called college devrels/engineers. Saying they are maintainers when just change HTMl pages(contributions are abt fixing/improving things)
One more hack students have found is begging Linux Foundation for scholarships to attend confs in Europe/Americas. This will more hurt reputations of brown engineers.
I have worked with Devtool companies, and let me put this honestly. Most DevRels in the west would absolutely crush Indian SDEs in tech game. One DevRel I worked with had 12 years of professional experience, and this dude can build, deploy, talk, and present an entire end-to-end product out of his own effort (currently he has a Indie dev project he built as a demo which has some 8K GitHub stars). How many Indian DevRels can do it? Most Indian DevRels at best can scam their own companies by bringing students which might uptick their numbers but won't reflect on the actual revenue game.
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CareerAnxious
Stealth
a year ago
Okay I got a different opinion. What's wrong in being so? Their life, their choice. Innovation is not born out of compelling someone to do it. The person doing should feel the compelling urge from within. In a nation whose avg income is around 2LPA and a SWE starts at 4+ LPA , it has been a GREAT socio economic leveller. A tool for social mobility. And these people (not all) spend like crazy too. So what is the problem? What have they already not done for the nation?
I understand that u r ranting abt mediocrity. I m just mediocrity is not bad. What they want to do, let them do. Each one to their own. As long as they don't cause harm to others, they are good.
I did not intend to make this post from a patriotic point of view. I am not making any violent call to actions, or asking people to cancel them. I am just calling a spade, a spade. Most Indian SDEs are mediocre, for the very same reason you state — They are tuned to improve their lives and social standing. But the same folks have inculcated a toxic environment through social media brainwashing, that it would make an entire generation of software developers less than capable to do anything. Again, it was just my POV and we can agree to disagree.
may be the real problem then is not them but what interview process of these FAANGs have set, it needs a v2, and the talks might change
Software companies should stop making their businesses a "sabko rozgar yojna". Talk with colleges, inculcate skills that they require, make them grind, hire the best, and build the best out of them. Mediocre folks will mug up 100 Leetcode problems, and then go about giving gyaan to the rest.
Hmm that’s true but real fact is we just broke a kind of record by offering a Staff Engg around 2.6Cr. This bracket will keep on increasing.
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Bro woke up and decided to speak facts. Everything on point. Screw these bhaiyya didis, poora scene pollute kr rakha hai.
ShiroToki
Student
a year ago
Naa bro you're also just coping by saying open source karlo. Let the people do wtv they wanna do wtv makes them happy. You are just getting angry that no one is looking up to you.
If I needed to make people looking up to me, I won't be here. It was just a mild rant and you should not take it seriously ;-)
cryonim
Stealth
a year ago
From someone who's likely at the point of this spear: I agree with your observation, there's 100s of faang guys whose only contribution to the world is DSA preparation and almost all of them, from individuals to marketers looking to sell their DSA courses, lack any genuine passion to even teach. Like pick any striver's explaination and the guy is simply telling you how to mug up a type of problem, or arnav from scaler who's promoting how good their scaler is and preaching software to people whilst all he does is use social media all day. The Blind lead the Blind indeed.
Some people like Abdul Bari are good teachers, but even they just mug it up and teach you how to do so.
And the people who are amazing at CP, like Priyansh Agarwal, just succumb to creating DSA platforms that also score money out of people.
The simple reason all of em do so is because there's only 2 ways these guys see how to make money, by either climbing on top of others by selling them hope or by leaving the mud altogether.
And they are able to sell hope because the rest of us who are able, can see better, but the guy who has only ever seen poverty in his life and has absolutely 0 connections to good resources or people, will only ever see hope in buying the dream.
My point is, software engineers are rare in India. Most of us are simply optimising for the paycheck, and it just so happens that the effort to pay and assurances ratio is leaning towards software engineering right now. So both the guys selling these courses and buying these courses are simply, not engineers at all. Any innovation you expect of them, is misplaced.
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The problem is YOU spend alot of time on Twitter and less on GitHub.
Lots of indian folks doing cool open source contributions, follow the right people.
It was cool for you to judge me ;-)
I have more GitHub followers than my Twitter followers and I am one of the folks with the highest following on GitHub from India and creator of one of the most popular open-source Python project in India as well
Good for you.
It was cool of you to generalise all "indian" sdes based on some you saw on internet.
Whats next, female are bad drivers?
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linkedin is now becoming quora/youtube where every faang engg can teach you how you can become crorepati by learning dsa or by subscribing to their course
How many FAANG engineers have the capability and credibility to leave their jobs and build something of their own? (Spoiler alert: They can't!). This is why we see folks from Gojek, Flipkart, and more actually leading the way and building startups that "can" build real value. Amazon which prides itself for its leadership values, has seen almost zero notable startup founders coming out of its folds.
they can't since they have made youtube as their passive source of income by adding clickabait titles.
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ashy_larry
Student
a year ago
While I respect them for cracking FAANG/MAANG, the major issue is not recognising the 2021-22 hiring market that led them to such opportunities, and assuming (rather deceiving) that hiring levels are the same. They are not by a margin.
Sab apni roti sek rahe hain
Bhai mujhe baar baar mini heart-attack aajata hai tumhara username dekh kr. You'll convince me that I'm Aamir from Gajini one day. 😂
ashy_larry
Student
a year ago
🤣🤣🤣 sorry Bhai
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One thing I like to add is everyone from iits or so called top institutes gets jobs and they act so rude and like superior like they are the owners of the companies chill dude your not the first to get a good job yet act like diks atleast be humble well done you have achieved something good but don't be a jerk
Also imagine he was bragging and being a jerk to one girl who was only bcom graduate from DU at way better level and position in big 4 yet she remained quite and didn't humbled her when I asked she simply said he might learn it over time if not it's not my job to humble him and I can't simply waste my energy 😂 oh god if she had said one thing that guy would have been roasted to ashes
Yeah that’s true!! We got lot’s of those DSA & Leetcode influencers. But who rejected you bro?
From nowhere. I focused on only a few things and make well around what I am capable of. It was just a comment on the state of Indian SDEs right now.
So what’s your advice to the newly graduated folks? Instead of doing DSA what should they focus on?
This post was not for new grads. Its alright and utmost necessity to do DSA to survive the harsh reality of the corporate. Once you get more senior, its necessary to look into what you bring to the table as an engineer. Most fall in the mediocrity trap, and this is what I call a "Ticket Engineer". Learn new things, build new stuff, and continue hacking around.
Most of these are there to farm social media audiance then become full time influencezas, they are worshipped like that iit jee teacher from kota, giving them the ability to sell stuff better than srk or some hero sports man could ever sell for edtech orgs.
They're on very lucrative carrier path, making unfathomable amounts of money.
This trend just reinforces the saying about sell shovels in a gold rush.
Kabhi koi ias academy teacher se expect krta h kya vo accha ias officer ho? ya fir koi jee guru toh accha engineer hoga ?
similarly expecting these pseudo celebrities to be real software engineers is an irony in itself.
satoshi_nakamoto
Stealth
a year ago
@PushyCourt you seem to know people who were recently spamming social media about their adverts on Times Square 😂😂
I know them too
Topmate ki chandni, phir andheri raat. Times Square mai feature hone se pehle aukat toh dekh lo apni. People will see it and be like "Bhai kaun hai yeh? Pata nahi, kahi ka mentor lagta hai. Acha, choro jane do"
You are talking about a small group of LinkedIn/Youtube influencers. But then say stuff like "Indian SDEs". Most people have work Mon-fri for a firm where we are exhausted coding 5 days a week and that stuff is company property, we cannot open source it. It's only natural for people to seek some balance in life and not do any coding on the weekends.
Regarding "DSA is shit, you need to create something end to end". Brother, DSA is the real shit. I used to hate DSA. But it has huge applications in real world software problems. If you don't write optimal code in terms of memory/time complexity your software is absolutely useless IMO. I think it's completely justified for people to improve in DSA and system design as much as possible
"DSA is the real shit" — Yeah, will wait when some Indian dev creates some new & novel algorithm that actually does something useful rather than just focussing on optimisation and all that stuff. I can agree with the fact that most Indian devs are not passionately driven by anything apart from the work, so can't expect them to build something that's novel. Any dev who is boxing themselves in a DSA preparation is failing a really critical test where they should go out and try solving real-world problems, rather than those silly LC questions that people have already beaten to death.
What are you talking about? Sure novel algorithms are rare to come by. But we are engineers not research fellows. Most Indian startups have some novel problems being solved utilising popular algorithms as subroutines. Such is the case around the world. Where are these non Indian engineers, coming up with novel algorithms everyday for no reason?
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I'm myself a DSA person, although I don't go around preaching it but i do believe that it gives you a different perspective. Everytime you see an unoptimal code something triggers inside you. Your brain automatically starts looking for slow db queries, unoptimal use of memory etc, which is a good thing
That's alright and quite good — But the focus was on building a real thing. Like a complete end-to-end application, or a product that everyone loves, or some open-source library or framework. Wondering how many DSA folks have hacked around such stuff?
Deadshot99
Stealth
a year ago
I get your point completely here.
Before these people started showing off their DSA/CP there were lot of people who joined/cracked FAANG. And there are people who still do it without their help so they are not special
These influencers will join a company, work for 6 months and leave to “teach” (not targeting that person for sure)
And most of them either start a company which sells these courses (and make a big deal on X), or are devrel. Very few of them are actual developers. And TBH devrel is not SE
I come from tier 3, worked at some best companies (it took me more years than an IIT person), but still I got there without any course. Not everyone wants to brag. Seen people using tier 3 to take extra credit (esp that Atlassian guy).
Now a days every 4th year student think just because they can solve LC problem, they can become a SE and work on projects. Sorry to burst the bubble but that is not the case. Actual software development is not CP. but this is all thanks to these people
4th year students promoting their career counselling and resume review. I think what is going on, a person who is still applying to jobs is giving advice and doing resume training
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