Software Engineering is a game of Pinball

Ask me anything except my company name, or things that can reveal my identity. I may respectfully choose not to respond to your question based on my own judgement. Here’s a brief intro about me: I’ve worked as both software engineering manager & software technical architect over the last 18+ years on various tech stacks managing backend, frontend and a little bit of cloud. I have seen ups and downs in the software industry. Currently I’m working as a senior architect in one of the product based companies in India.

I started my career as a backend developer and started liking the domain and started learning new stuff and getting better at it now after working for 2.5 years being a backend dev in two different startups i recently joined a big tech as a software engineer and i am asked to learn front end frameworks like vue.js i don’t mind learning new stuff but nor feel great as well as i always wanted to take my tech career in backed side of thing . Yes i was told before joining 20/80 % (frontend/backend). Not complaint or something just wanted to understand other forks pov on this . Peace

- Indian tech market size reached $254 billion in FY24, growing 3.8% YoY - Mere 2.5% of Indian engineers possess AI skills, 5.5% qualified in basic programming - 86% of Indian businesses actively reskilling IT workers to meet skills gap - AI/ML engineer salaries range from Rs. 8.2 LPA to Rs. 43 LPA in GCCs - Data engineering, product management, and DevOps roles see 10-12% salary growth Source: [Business Today](https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/only-55-of-the-indian-engineers-are-qualified-with-basic-programming-skills-report-443227-2024-08-27)

Context: I am a software engineer with 4 years of experience. Everytime I work with a bunch of engineers (Especially Indian Startups). Most of them are workaholics. They are just working for some company full-time. They are interested in learning more about technology, making jokes about technology, following technology news, etc. That is it. No social life. (Especially after Covid). No skills in any other part of life. Their comfort zone is so small that they have developed a lifestyle of working, sleeping & watching something on laptops and that's it. They make an excellent salary but don't do anything else. Every time I meet a 35-40-year-old software engineer, it is just a physically unfit guy with an arranged marriage who is boring as a brick.

1. You are building a software that otherwise could be built by a 12 year old kid, if given proper training. 2. You cannot code if I cut off google, stackoverflow & related websites. 3. You are just concerned about producing the output quickly because a. your work is time bound, b. you want to stand out from others. 4. You attend countless meetings that carry no value, thanks to Agile. 5. 10 people write code for the same software which otherwise could have been written by 1 person. 6. You write pages of documents just because you are expected to write for the team, compliance & stuff. 7. You don’t care about non-functional requirements as nobody asked for it. 8. You are spending hours together in coding a simple thing & you are branded a hard-worker. 9. Or you don’t spend much time in coding because you impress people with tech jargons that you learnt recently. You are branded a smart-worker. 10. The code you write will be completely rewritten in next 3-4 years just to catch up with the industry trends. 11. Your only goal is to earn loads of money which otherwise could not be earned in other engineering fields. That’s one of the reasons why you are on grapevine. Prove me wrong if you can, by commenting your opinion.

Hi, just reaching out to people working in core technology and engineering (Not IT, Consulting, PM, UI/UX People) for general discussion on the state of R&D in India, your pay, comparisons to IT folks by your family friends etc. You may be working in R&D as an engineer or building some deep tech product as an entrepreneur Non exclusive list Mechanical/Chemical/Material engineers People working on Drones/Robots/Transportation/Defense Tech I am missing a lot of fields here, but I believe there are lot of communities out there of software engineers, design folks, MBAs, not much of the hands on engineers in India