In some societies, it's safe to be an average person.

In some societies, it's safe to be a mediocre developer. If you're coding CRUD apps or doing basic DevOps in Bangalore, you'll find yourself comfortably middle class, respected, and stable by default. Your tech ecosystem, both at the service company and product company, ensures your technical growth follows a predictable trajectory. You're trained to a reliable standard. Any IT job provides steady progression, H1B prospects, and decent benefits. It's safe to be a code monkey, perhaps optimal. It applies to all: FAANG chamchas to WITCHA sweatshop workers.

Silicon Valley isn't for code monkeys like you. You have no choice but to innovate. You'll be grinding leetcode till 3AM. Your technical foundation isn't built on Java and SQL, your mind needs to grasp distributed systems, ML architectures, and legit theory.

In many ways, Silicon Valley is the Finals, and Bangalore is a training ground. In the Finals, you better be ready to ship or die trying. It's not pretty. No one tells you this, you either figure it out and scale, or you're replaced by someone who did. This is why so many average Indian devs prefer their service companies.

This is also why the whole "haha outsourced Indian code!" joke only comes from mediocre Valley techies, they're comparing themselves to their Bangalore counterpart, who writes more boilerplate, earns less, and moves slower. Elite Indian engineers never say that, because they know their Valley counterpart is crushing it and has a 500K USD+ TC while they make a fraction and no one takes their ideas seriously.

Most FAANG coolies working in India are anyways working on backend dashboards or cloud. None of that fun Consumer side.