WigglyBanana

To people who choose to stay in India, what made you stay? 🪷

Question came up because it’s Independence Day 🇮🇳 A lot of us have had the privilege to be able to go abroad, but ended up choosing not to.

For me, it was just believing there’s enough growth here in the coming few decades + friends/family

Looking to hear if the reduced brain drain is actually true, and what makes people stay.

16mo ago

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PeppyPanda

Pine Labs16mo

For me it was the army and followed by my corporate job. I never felt like leaving the country. It’s always better to live like a first class citizen in a 3rd world country than a third class citizen in a first world country.

In addition to this, family is what defines us as Indians and that kept me hinged back home

TwirlySushi

INDMoney16mo

Wait did I just read that you were in the army?

WigglyBanana

Stealth16mo

@Cheetah92 you were in the Army? 😮 Would love to know more about your journey from army to startups 🫡

CosmicBurrito

Stealth16mo

Reduced brain drain is not true at all. Record number of students are leaving India. Not just to US / UK as in the past, but to literally any developed country.

I think most of the people returning would be from US, after they became tired of waiting for a green card. If the US citizenship / PR could be done in 5-10 years, no one would leave there at all.

TwirlySushi

INDMoney16mo

Maybe the quality of students that leaves now is worse? I’ll write a rant about this somewhere soon

WigglyBanana

Stealth16mo

Not sure what the stats say It’s just seeing people around me in college
Went to a good college, almost everybody who did well in college remained here. This wasn’t true a few years ago, most good scholars would go for a foreign MS or MBA

Numbers might be increasing, but I feel a lot of top students choose to stay back now

QuirkyTaco

Stealth16mo

Might seem absurd, but one of the reasons was Have seen majority of the companies driving their least profitable work from India cost centre’s and when something becomes profitable or may have a potential of growing big, the work is shifted back to the core R&D offices.

Wanted to prove that this can change, and create opportunities for myself and others who are working from India offices.

Worked on making sure our team drives high velocity, high impact projects and have them going on end to end. The basic idea was to stay in India, build opportunities being here, because that scales the best in longer term.

WigglyBanana

Stealth16mo

Super interesting
What kind of company is this at?
Can one person really do that much? (Unless they’re leading everything)

QuirkyTaco

Stealth16mo

A medium sized US company.
It’s definitely not a one person work. I have had some really strong managers, senior management who made sure that the opinions are heard loud and clear.

It is also strongly driven by a strong engineering teams which has excelled at delivering when timelines were really tight and sometimes when requirements changed last minute.

I just have had the opportunity to lead a number of projects with this team, helping with hiring some really driven people and ensuring the team can deliver on high stake efforts