You’re not wrong but there has been a big shift in the Indian tech education scene the last couple of years. All these startups raised an insane amount of money and are suddenly hungry for product-focused talent.

The average Indian engineer used to aspire for consulting jobs (think TCS, Infosys) since product-focused jobs were so few. Now their goal is to get a job at a startup.

Consequently, the tech stack and skills they’re learning is entirely different. Not .NET and Java but React and Rust and UX design.

I really think the quality and type of Indian engineering talent you will see in the next 5 years will be radically different. The market has shifted drastically.

This is my experience too. Worked with an Indian start-up and most of them were utterly useless. They also never managed to make any of their deadlines because they'd always say yes to whatever you asked. Thank god for the one guy who always fixed everything we needed.

Of course, this is a broad generalization, but so is the idea that Indian talent will take over the world.

Seems like a culture problem and not a talent problem. Us developing world folks do not easily say "no" because we grew up in a top-down, authority-driven place.

Americans are pretty uppity when it comes to taking orders if you compare to others.

There is also a difference in interviewing. Only in America do you have to proactively market and sell yourself. Most other cultures are more timid and humble.

It's not about the yes or no culture difference, it's just the lack of autonomy to solve a known problem, root cause analysis, debugging skills, proposing a solution, empathy towards customers etc.

And don't get me started with the caste system making a bunch of clueless people arrogant to no end.

I spend these days 4h+ a day in calls to explain basic stuffs and basically debug a multi-awards SaaS application as nobody has a clue in that company.