Rant - People in Tech have lost their mind
People in tech are in over their heads. There’s been an unsustainable inflation in salaries and somehow 20 somethings have actually started believing their skills are worth what they’re making I speak to so many engineers who just with two years of experience are making 30-40 LPA packages. They actually believe they are better than people in say banking who make the same salary after 15 years of grinding it out. It’s all supply-demand. Supply will soon catch up to the demand. Salary normalization will happen. Your salaries may not grow for years if you don’t personally grow as well in skill set and become more valuable overall. At the least, don’t have an attitude about how much you make. Stay humble. Enjoy the good times while they are still here
Techies were highly underpaid
- barring: 1000-3000 jobs created annually by FAANG which are like 30 -50CTC+, WITCH hired 1,00,000+ techies at 4-8 LPA
- the latter has corrected because it was already a suppressed market
IT was highly underpaid. Maybe true.
The rest of ‘high tech’ was definitely overpaid
Potato123
Stealth
2 years ago
4-8 is way high, it's 2.75 to 4 (HCL does 2.75 and LTIMindtree 4)
See more comments
India got this island of higher pay (IT industry) well before the manufacturing/infra investments happening now. Still the difference was not so great in old days and people made real money only going and slogging on onsite assignments. Then fang became a printing press for dollars and capital dumping from US China happened to any startup with a good story about “next billion consumers”
End of day other than WITCH, India still does not have global brands in manufactured goods that can compete with best - like shoes/clothes italians dominate luxury brands, zara is spain, h&m and ikea swedish, koreans and japanese sell cars and motorbikes, germany sells autos and machine tools… our banks are also global midgets and cost of capital is high.
Only a solid manufacturing and innovative product economy can drive the need for sustainable tech cos in any field internally.
Else it will always be tied to global cos and their policies / currencies / capital allocation.
Need more zeus numerix , newspace, pixxel and astra microwave type cos
Despite decades of hero atlas bsaslr cycles we all use , taiwan is the cycle making superpower. The design sw, machines that drive that no doubt made there only.
One cannot float a ship forever on a hot air baloon
Think catia, ansys, matlab, labview, eda, solidworks type high value licensed sw how many indian cos do we in those? We are wasting our best manpower doing pieces of everything while real control and overall design remains in foreign capitals
See more comments
But the sad part is, even the ones that grinded out for years and climbed up, are also getting the axe.
WingardiumLeviosa
Stealth
2 years ago
I disagree with the overall premise here:
1. The demand for software outstrips the supply of software engineers by a significant margin & this won't close up, until significant software automation kicks in. Even with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
2. Even in banking, there's investment banking and commercial banking & investment bankers always get a significant premium. In terms of salaries, the order will always be:
Investment Banking >= Software Engineering > Commercial Banking
3. The appropriate value for a salary of an individual is largely decided by market factors.
So if a company deems that the salary of a 25yo software engineer is more than the salary of a 35yo commerical banker than that largely an issue with commerical banking sector underpaying their employees. How is the software engineer at fault here?
Jaydee
Student
2 years ago
True.
But why do you think software automation is not kicking in(assuming you are in tech)?
I think its pretty much here
Irony and reality is that those who create (like original versions of codes) mostly do it for free and uploads it on open source platforms/ github etc. Rest copies codes/ calls libraries and charges 💣
See more comments
Seeing their salaries, I always wonder: What are these developers developing?
This doesn’t make sense. You are comparing apples to oranges. Going by your logic, a banking person with 2 years of experience also should not earn more than a gardener with 15 years of experience, right?
AdventureHusky
Student
2 years ago
Just producing cs grads doesn't mean supply will catch up. The ones who are starting their career at 20+ have skills which those at 3-4(WITCH) don't have and neither is education system improving to change anything. Yes there are some who have made it by cheating their way through but these people will struggle once they enter the industry.
Startup valuations are to blame.
It is only fair that techies get paid for the immense value (atleast on paper) that they are producing.
Laying off have nothing to do with salary, until you guys make it a thing
Free markets bro, capitalise and move on. Grinding, being super smart, being are glorified bs when it comes to real world.
Will there be correction? Definitely, but if you are decently smart and know how to play your cards, you’ll be well off
vanishinggradient
Student
2 years ago
There is no reason to be entitled or arrogant no matter how much one earns
pride isn't the opposite of shame but it's source
> I speak to so many engineers who just with two years of experience are making 30-40 LPA packages.
depends man
I know some 20 something coders were better than me than I was at 30
top level talent no matter the age gets paid
although some trash slip through the cracks or never work out
In football, 20s somethings are making 10-40k pounds/week even ones that didn't work out like Ibe (crashed his expensive car)
> They actually believe they are better than people in say banking who make the same salary after 15 years of grinding it out
not all devs are like that, a lot of us are self-depreciative and don't think we are doing anything important. I know PhD who are working on climate change who get paid shit stipend in comparison
problem is one has sell himself
Well said. The fact is there will always be someone with less work experience who gets paid more.
The data scientist part is spot on. Most of what I see is that their deliverable will be either be a hit or miss kind of a thing. And if it's a miss they will not own it and likely blame the data quality or the users.
And business decisions aren't always taken based on the model/dashboard. From what I have seen their work soley depends on the whims and wishes of PMs. For this ,they are given an entourage of Data Engineers and Data Visualisation resources.
Sometimes I think their remuneration far outweighs the value they bring in.
How do you explain freshers making more out of college every year as compared to same college seniors in their mid career? Does getting higher pay on switch over retention makes sense to you?
Don’t go down this rabbit hole. Maybe be happier than your kid would earn better than you as people in lower side of pyramid are getting better pay now
Your view is limited to a select few who get placed in FAANG. Most techies still start at 3L PA.
Agree.
But the problem with saying 15 years experience is always better than 2 years is not correct.
I had an engineering manager with 14 yoe say that I won't be able to run microservices on docker without hanging the machine. He claimed he has been in this industry for 14 years and it is not possible.
The only issue with that was docker was released 9 years ago and has come a long way since that. And because of this I was able to run the services with no issue.
Now if I had listened to a 14 yoe guy and not even tried it then it wouldn't have been possible.
But at the end the attitude you mentioned is also not necessary.
Regarding inflation, yes somewhat agreed.
Just to tell why the incident is of importance is because after doing this it saved the company 2 months probably.
There was no local environment to test backend code and hence Devs (who were also freshers) had to push code to test it.
So the history looked like:
Feature a commit 1
Feature A added console logs
Feature A changed x
Now all 3 commits were done separately each time and for each build you had to wait 2 mins for the build to finish and since there was an approval process the approver could take like 8-10 minutes to approve the pr because for 35 Dev's only 2 approvers really .
So for every commit around 10 minutes went and for 35 Dev's it would take 350 minutes in just approval and builds without the confirmation that the change will run (1 commit per person per day which is fair because average is 2)
So everyday collectively around 6 hours would be spent in doing fuckall.
So in a year it would translate to 58 days or 2 months approx.
I think my assumptions are conservative in number of commits per Dev per day. Also since there was no local environment the dev environment really became a war zone with things breaking always so I haven't accounted for a feature blocking some other feature's frontend and backend effort
Hard disagree. Indian professionals need to increase their self worth and own our high salaries instead of being insecure about it. 40 LPA isn’t even that much in the grand scheme of things.
justification - depends! technologies are evolving, everyday there is a new tech compared to how it was 10-20 years ago. developers give their blood and sweat day and night and weekends apart from 8 official working hours which companies tend to drag to 12-14hours a day.
we learn and wear new hats everyday just like doctors.
there are avg doctors and then there are MD's who keep reading heavy books everyday to update themselves so that they can give better and efficient treatment/surgeries to patients!
for an HR, its hard to distinguish between the two!
just like that there are many devs who keep specializing in their skills day in an out to keep the new age critical/high demanding business running without failures!
hope u get the analogy
i get it that many normal devs too try to ride the wave of the high paying salaries, they always get filtered out sooner or later by the system in place of the corporates!
True. There has been a massive spike in salary ranges post covid and none of it makes sense. I was a hiring manager for a good 4 years and have seen people cognizant of what they are asking and what they bring to the table.
Since 2020, I’m seeing so called “Data Scientists” with 2-3 years of exp and knowledge limited to just model.fit() and model.predict() asking for north of 25lpa. And the funny part? They are getting it!
What these younglings don’t know is that the market also takes what it gives. Every bubble bursts and every role has its budget and your exceptionally high salaries will get normalised sooner or later.
Instead of chasing that big fat cheque, focus on your skills. That’ll get you further in life than the paystub of an overvalued startup with limited shelf life.
My take may sound rude, but that is the truth.
