I worked in the US and felt that H1B status was very insecure so I tried to start my own company in India in 2020, and also explored the job and housing market. I agree 100% with all the great financial and work-related competitive points you've highlighted but I believe it misses the human and quality of life factors.

Things that really affected my mental health in India during that time:

1. Food: Lack of variety in food and food ingredients. I like to eat out and cook different cuisines (Japanese to Korean to Middle eastern to French to Northern European). Beef is a major issue in India and fresh sushi can be a hit or miss even in Balgalore. And nothing is available if you're outside of the major metro cities.

2. Prices: If you're in Bangalore you do get a wide variety of food including beef dishes but equivalent quality restaurants and bars in India have the similar range prices as the US (I used to live in the south so it might not be apples to apples). Same goes for food ingredients - e.g. Almond milk and cheddar cheese costs the same in India as in the US.

3. Traffic and honking: Even sitting in an Uber for 30 mins can be maddening for me. Not to mention people actually yell obscenities at each other in traffic jams.

4. Interruptions: India still has power cuts, water supply and flooding issues and the bigger the city (with more opportunities) the worse these problems are. The gated communities in the metros alleviate many of these issues but then you're paying $1000 or more per month in rent or purchase for $600-700K. So same as most developed countries.

My conclusion was that if you got somewhat acclimated to the having a better QoL in the west (which is different than standard of living) you really need to try living there for a few months and see if it makes financial sense, because you'll be paying western prices on a Indian salary. As always YMMV depending on your preferences. I myself ended up moving to Canada.

edit: fixed typo

Sounds like those points are all ripe opportunities for startups of their own no? Just a matter of identifying market gaps, I'm sure that's why US companies have hired so many Indians, just simple filling of needs and not some other mechanic as to way the world works.

Pretty sure you forgot the /s but just in case: a startup to fix "power cuts, water supply and flooding issues"? Like "startup government". I guess that's what the gated communities are?

"Snow Crash" described the logical conclusion of such a development:

"Have to bulldoze lots of neighborhoods to do it, but those seventies and eighties developments exist to be bulldozed, right? No sidewalks, no schools, no nothing. Don’t have their own police force — no immigration control — undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed. Now a Burbclave, that’s the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything."

"MetaCops Unlimited is the official peacekeeping force of White Columns, and also of The Mews at Windsor Heights, The Heights at Bear Run, Cinnamon Grove, and The Farms of Cloverdelle. They also enforce traffic regulations on all highways and byways operated by Fairlanes, Inc. ... MetaCops’ main competitor, WorldBeat Security, handles all roads belonging to Cruiseways, plus has worldwide contracts with Dixie Traditionals, Pickett’s Plantation, Rainbow Heights (check it out—two apartheid Burbclaves and one for black suits), Meadowvale on the [insert name of river] and Brickyard Station."

Balaji recently wrote about a version of startup communities in his book The Network State. Although, he talked about first creating virtual communities and then agglomerating enough critical mass to enable people to demand physical changes in the infrastructure/ affect government in the real world. He also speaks highly of India in a related context because of the proliferation of technology supported by the fact that major technology shapers hail from India among other things.

I don't agree with many of the views and feel like India is missing a key piece. We are not a single country (never have been as goes popular meme goes). It is hard for us as a nation to optimise for success because we have too many competing priorities at the local, state and lower levels. The exaggerated impact of diversity stemming from diverse cultures is too much to handle and optimise for one country's leadership in my humble opinion. I want to think differently but unfortunately the ground reality is telling for e.g., if you only look at the garbage dumps across various cities despite a national campaign of cleanliness. We as a people needed to be made aware in 50+ languages that we should hesitate from destroying our surroundings and not trash them.

It is easy to think that a 5Gbps connection with air conditioning and organic rations just arrives out of nowhere as it sometimes does in many industrialised/developed countries in the West. There is basic infrastructure that is needed not just to stimulate the economy but also allows for those lowest in the social rungs to benefit and operate like normal human beings do in the West. This is nothing new of course and we all have seen the disparities in large Indian cities. Some even tend to compare it to what is happening in SF and other large cities in the US. My experience is that the environment I was in, both in Singapore and US brought out the best in me. I could spend my intellectual bandwidth on things that actually mattered to the larger society around me. One could say that the return on investment (action/thought ratio) was much higher because I was enabled by basic infrastructure. I didn't have to care about rowdy neighbours or worms in chocolates or dysfunctional municipal services (comparing the occurrence of these disturbances among others to problems like gun violence is a bit ridiculous in terms of the impact they cause on day to day life for an average common person).

All this is not to say that India is doomed and there is nothing happening here or possible in the long term future. I'm just opining that it takes a lot of basic needs to be satisfied for a society to operate optimally. Without being too cynical, Kunal Bahl had a basic foundation to leave MS and build Snapdeal (after pursuing a great education in the US). It's not impossible and is a worthy dream that many if not all should pursue but the popular narrative that India is now ripe to be the next Silicon Valley is not realistic. And to me it feels like most technology (only) solutions to societal challenges are like a band-aid. The solutions need to be deeper and cultural, and as much of a curmudgeon this might make me seem, Government needs to be involved in those solutions. Not just government marketing and branding as has become popular these days but actual government action. It will be hard for a large part of the population to see beyond the marketing so yes, it will be an uphill battle.

Apologies for the rant (maybe this should have been a warning up top). There is no TL;DR for this post either because it's a horrible summary of my unquantified opinions.

Just in case you're not /s, you can't run clean rivers as a service. I hope the rivers in Bangalore aren't as bad as they were when I visited in 2009, but waste treatment did not seem to be a priority then, and that's something you need the whole society connected to... It doesn't help to only clean wealthy people's poop.

One reason not to go back to India: climate change and heat. People are basically burning alive there and due to the high population, many people will starve in the coming decades as droughts cause crop failures. This will cause food and water wars as rising instability of the subcontinent means many people will need asylum. The area will not be geopolitically, financially, or otherwise stable in such a time. If I were a betting person, I'd move as close to the poles as possible in the coming future.

Not to forget the air pollution. The PM 2.5 levels are morbidly high. Millions of deaths are linked to air pollution. People in their 40s,50s are increasingly dying of cardiac arrest, more and more kids have asthama and other lung diseases. Delhi is literally a gas chamber, even Bangalore air is mostly at unhealthy level. Given the population density and increasing industrialization, this problem is only going to increase in the next 10-15 years.

This is the thing for me. You couldn't pay me a million dollars a year to live/work in Gurgaon (Ok, maybe a million for a year or two, but then I'd be out). It is the place that comes closest to Blade Runner in my mind. Every time I went outside I felt like the air was trying to kill me. All of the giant hulking new offices and extremely little green space are like right out of some post apocalyptic nightmare.

> People are basically burning alive there and due to the high population

This is only true for poor people. It might sound bad, but average Indian live much worse life than someone who could afford/have skills to visit US.

In Delhi this year, I had my ACs running practically 24x7. I could stomach the power bills but the quality of life is atrocious. I basically couldn’t work outdoors or even go for a simple walk to the neighbourhood otherwise I’d be drenched in sweat.

Modern Indian apartments in major cities are also atrociously designed with little care for ventilation and materials.

You can fight the elements, but then you’re just locked inside a concrete and glass box all day long. No fun in that.

Yes, however due to there being significantly more poor people than rich people, especially tech workers, there will be antagonizing behavior in the future. There will be country-wide instability, and even if you're rich, a comparatively rich country like in Europe or the US will be substantially more stable than one with a higher degree of income inequality.

US has higher income inequality than India[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:M...

It is not only income inequality one needs to look at, it is the amount of the baseline population which is well fed and taken care of, as generally, those that are will not wage war against the rich, while those that aren't are much more likely to.

If 90% of the population is starving and makes 10 dollars a day (hypothetical numbers), and 10% are rich and make 100 a day, the poor will be much more likely to revolt than in a scenario where 90% make 100 a day and can afford food, shelter, education etc, and the 10% make 1 million per day. It is not the level of inequality, it's the baseline.

Put differently: https://speakola.com/political/margaret-thatcher-on-socialis...

>If I were a betting person, I'd move as close to the poles as possible in the coming future.

The north pole has no ground below it, so I'm sure there are limits to this strategy.

Why not just simply go to North India instead of traveling halfway across the world?

Jaipur is 75 degrees right now. Cooler than Houston.

It is still not safe in North India either. Eventually the entire subcontinent will heat up past humans' wet bulb temperatures.

And then the sea levels will rise to where Mount Everest will become beachfront property. No one is safe anywhere, climate change will destroy everything.

Impact Lab has a pretty cool map of temperature projections.[0] I don't think see level rise will impact humanity as a whole that much. - The dutch for example have been successfully fighting the tides for centuries. It is certainly a problem in this context that the majority of the world lives in coastal cities, but generally there will be time to either build dams or evacuate. Extreme weather events are much harder to deal with though, and they are going to ramp up greatly with 2022 giving us a good first taste of what is about to come. Note also that while I filtered the map for the high emissions scenario, there are little understood feedback loops that might make things much worse than we currently can predict with certainty. The effect on permafrost, rainforests and the oceans from extreme heat is too complex for us to currently simulate adequately.

[0] https://impactlab.org/map/#usmeas=absolute&usyear=1981-2010&...

Fighting the tides is one thing when sea levels have been stable for millennia. Now we're heading towards meters of difference in average levels by the end of the century. I fully expect most of the Netherlands and most coastal metropolises to be underwater by late 21st century.

Me, too, I predict a lot of jobs for Dutch dam-engineers though, we need to be building more Dams in the rest of Europe.

So will the US though.

You came to the right place then! /s

https://youtu.be/RjsThobgq7Q?t=862

The same thing is happening to the US in the Midwest and California, two zones of high agricultural significance.

the thing you have been talking is of crop failure but just ask your stepdad google they would better tell you that even you all will die of hunger if india won't produce and export in the countries and hope this you hate was also there at the time begging for vaccines from India. better mind the buisness you can get into your control.

Let’s not forget that all of this only applies if you’re of the “right” religion. There’s a thick glass ceiling in vast majority of Indian professional world if your name sounds a certain way, no matter how good you might be. We like to ignore this facet but on the ground level, this is the obvious reality. Around election time one has to worry whether their family member who has gone out for an errand will return in one piece. Yes I know you might’ve not have to worry about this particular aspect (HN crowd is generally a lot more privileged), but it’s the ground reality for a large number of people. Families will literally take out loans against their entire sum of generational wealth for a mere chance to leave India, that takes pretty strong push factors than just “status” within community. In summary, outside a handful of big cities, and if you belong to the “right” religion, life is incredibly rough for the majority. There is simply no comparison when choosing to plant one’s roots in India vs a western country. It’s great to visit, but not to build a family life. Yet.

I'm surprised I scrolled this far and nobody mentioned gender as a factor either.

> Around election time one has to worry whether their family member who has gone out for an errand will return in one piece.

Oh really. What a joke

be careful generalising india because anything that one can claim, the opposite is also true.

A major reason countries like the USA and the UK flourish is stability. Stability is not something india has and that is a very difficult thing to put a price on. Indian capital markets are not transparent though that is less of an issue for startups. What should be telling is the number of "Indian" startups that are registered in places like Singapore.

I have to rain on your parade but there are many aspects of life in India that money cannot solve. I am no fan of the USA either but the "gun culture" thing is a strawman that doesn't affect daily life in the cities. It is certainly a problem but not a problem that many make it out to be. Be careful with the healthcare argument too. India's legal and police systems are a joke and their healthcare system is cheap but kills millions every year due to medical negligence. The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

The UK isn't thriving - 18% inflation, low salaries (except in the money laundering industry), bad and very expensive housing, no infrastructure investment, etc.

UK doesn't have 18% inflation, that is just a projection from Citigroup [0] (if gas prices continue to grow it will probably get there, like the rest of Europe). Inflation is at 10.1%.

I'm not sure why you say 'low salaries'. Adjusted by cost of living, salaries are not that low [1]. Median (removes those salaries from 'money laundering industries') salary in London is almost £39.7k [2]. Adjust that by cost of living, and it is higher than median income in San Francisco or NYC [3].

Infrastructure is miles better than the US. Public transport, while expensive, works quite well. The US has virtually no public transport whatsoever.

Housing and renting is expensive in every major city, it is not a problem exclusive to the UK.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflatio...

[1] https://neilkakkar.com/salary-calculator-by-city.html

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416139/full-time-annual-...

[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...

Edit: format

It's really not a great point to use London, by far and wide the only and biggest exception the rest of the market in the UK, to compare salaries for tech workers. You can earn quite a lot more adjusted for conversion and taxes pretty much anywhere in the US if you compare to someone living outside London. And even then, London rents (never mind houses) are ridiculously expensive.

> no infrastructure investment

I think one could say anything about UK these days, but lack of infrastructure investment? Seriously? UK compared to the US, it's like 50 years of difference. And I'd argue it's still ahead of most of the old EU, too.

Indeed, as if the Elizabeth line hadn't just opened up this year!

It took them a while, and tons of money, but they made it happen. Which is more than most of the US can say.

.

Get a license for what? I don't really understand the relationship between bureaucracy and buying a book... You can buy anything you like from anywhere in the world, pay your duty online, and have it delivered to your door. I did it a couple of times with DHL, Royal Mail, and never had any issues.

>bad and very expensive housing

Are you kidding? London has the highest quality apartment buildings in Europe. Well designed new builds with good services are abundant. This stuff hardly even exists in countries like France, Germany or Spain.

> their healthcare system is cheap but kills millions every year due to medical negligence.

This is a problem money can solve though. If you have the money, you can get pretty good medical care in India. "cheap but kills millions" isn't really a problem faced by most people who have the money to afford it.

> The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

> Exactly. You need the money in the US to just be able to afford healthcare here. There are millions of people who don't have insurance (private, medicare), or have expensive deductibles to make healthcare out of reach for some.

90%+ of Americans have health insurance of one form or another

Having health insurance and getting any real benefit from it are two different things.

Yes, and insurance doesn't always cover every single medical bill. Therefore a lot of people experience extraordinary amounts of medical debt.

No this is not true, you can’t be denied medical treatment in the US even if you don’t have the ability to pay it.

Yes, you can be denied treatment. ERs are just obligated to stabilize patients no matter their ability to pay. Nobody who needs it is getting an insulin supply or chemotherapy without the ability to pay for it.

Emergency medical treatment, right?

Right. Anything beyond that nobody is obligated to provide. However, if you're in that level of dire straits there's almost always a way to get it covered. In most states, anyway.

Yes, but if you “look like you can pay” you can get much more than that.

Healthcare in India also has one very negative aspect which is that more than half of the doctors have qualified due to some form of caste based affirmative action. More than 50% seats in Indian Medical colleges are reserved for "lower castes." It's much easier for a less hard working/bright student to get into the college if he belongs to the lower caste which reduces the quality of doctors so much that a lot of people refuse to get treated by doctors who have lower caste surnames. Atleast in America you are guaranteed you have mostly competent folks treating you, hard to do that in India without doing background checks on the caste of the doctor as well.

How is this any different from saying you would avoid a black/Hispanic/minority doctor in the United States? The US also has affirmative action for medical schools. If anything this problem would be worse in the US, since it's harder to determine race by name here.

Your comment reads as thinly veiled casteism/racism.

You can go with doctors with Jewish/Asian last names - that way you chance to hit affirmative action doctor are pretty minimal.

PS I personally never thought about it that way and it’s probably silly to filter like that for routine care but may make sense for high risk surgeries when you can’t do due diligence other way.

I wouldn't even call it veiled.

And the racist shows up.

The qualifying exams for MBBS degree is the same for everyone. A huge percentage of medical seats are literally purchased by wealthy parents for their kids. Yet the concern is always about low caste physicians, not nepotistic physicians.

The exam is the same, but the scores required vary by a large margin based on if you are in a reserved category or open category.

I'm not saying that someone with a lower exam score cannot be a better doctor than someone with a higher score, but I would assume there would be a strong correlation

I am not talking about the entrance exam. I am talking about the final exam you need to pass to graduate. It is the same for everyone.

Once again, most of the students who qualify in the entrance exam with a lower score are the middle-high income class, donations and payments based upper caste students.

In all my years in India, not once has anyone complained about the upper caste doctors who have literally purchased a seat in medical school, including yourself. Their only concern is caste. The racism is very loud and very clear.

You would be a fool to go to any doctor who has a degree from a random private university in India. So you only go to doctors from reputed govt. colleges like say Maulana Azad or AIIMS where you can't just buy the degree. But here the issue is reservation which is as bad of a problem. So vetting out quota doctors is required here if you want proper treatment. You are saying they all qualify the passing exams on the university? But is there no difference in someone getting barely passing marks to other student getting distinction? I have heard professors giving grace marks to SC/ST students just because they fear being slapped with draconian caste discrimination cases if they fail the undeserving student. If you look at the topmost doctors they are all of unreserved category, now this is not some "racism" but in reality it shows that merit wins in the long run.

> The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

If you're going to use the qualifier "provided you have enough money to access it", then Indian healthcare is equivalent or better depending on the illness.

> I have to rain on your parade but there are many aspects of life in India that money cannot solve. I am no fan of the USA either but the "gun culture" thing is a strawman that doesn't affect daily life in the cities. It is certainly a problem but not a problem that many make it out to be. Be careful with the healthcare argument too. India's legal and police systems are a joke and their healthcare system is cheap but kills millions every year due to medical negligence. The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

I think its interesting that you manage to both minimize the impact of firearms in the US and ding the healthcare system of India in the same comment.

I have to disagree with both. Guns are a constant threat, even in the bluest of cities since there are Red States just a few hours of drive away (if you're not already a Blue City in a Red State which is extremely common). The threat of school shooting is very real. Kids have to go through bs "active shooter drills"... this is not the sign of a healthy society.

Indian healthcare system certainly has flaws but it manages to provide basic healthcare to all citizens. There are lots of fantastic doctors trained every year in India.

The legal and police systems, I buy that argument. The mainstream media, totally under the control of the authoritarian right wing Government. Modi. Those are legit criticisms.

> I have to disagree with both. Guns are a constant threat, even in the bluest of cities since there are Red States just a few hours of drive away (if you're not already a Blue City in a Red State which is extremely common). The threat of school shooting is very real. Kids have to go through bs "active shooter drills"... this is not the sign of a healthy society.

Sorry you are buying far too much into the news. I suspect more people are burned alive in housefires from shoddy construction in India, than die in the US to guns.

If you’re gonna wildly speculate then by all means go ahead and make up the most wildest shit imaginable.

It’s actually surprisingly close in absolute numbers. About 20k not-self inflicted gun deaths in the us, and 17k deaths by fire in India. Ofc per capita gun deaths>>fires.

The non-self inflicted is huge though, most gun deaths are suicides.

Correct - though the US doesn’t have a dramatically higher suicide rate compared to countries with vastly lower gun related homicide rates. So excluding non self inflicted rates may provide the more relevant metric for this analysis.

Too late to edit - I meant to write "excluding self inflicted rates", not "excluding non self inflicted rates", though I don't get the impression there was any misunderstanding.

Yep - many people see the "gun deaths" number and assume all of those are crimes (well, technically suicide is a crime where the victim and the perpetrator are the same).

In addition, a hunge chunk of the actual gun deaths are related to drug and drug trafficing.

If you don't deal/buy drugs, and you don't drive through the inner city projects where turf wars are a thing, you can cross that off your list.

I feel very safe from gun violence in the US.

Once you factor those out, I think you are MUCH more likely to be killed by a vehicle than anything else.

And even if you don't, it's about even.

Indias population is X (maybe 7) times more than USA

> I suspect more people are burned alive in housefires from shoddy construction in India, than die in the US to guns

ChEcKmAtE!

> even in the bluest of cities

Are you telling me there is ACTUALLY gun violence in Chicago, Detroit, and New York? Well, knock me down with a feather!

BTW Someone needs to tell India to get a handle on their vehicle death culture. It is a constant threat. Children are being absolutely slaughtered in the streets by these assault vehicles and the numbers are only rising.

> even in the bluest of cities since there are Red States just a few hours of drive away

I remember reading somewhere that the statistics and likelihood of innocents being shot were more closely tied to "blue" and gun-free cities and states.

Is that not the case?

That makes sense. Gun control is an all or nothing thing. You can't ban guns in some states and let other states run amok with them. People and guns can move easily across state borders.

The threat of a school shooting is real everywhere, I don’t think the news does justice to showcase how often gun violence could have been avoided if the individuals in the kids life payed attention.

> The US healthcare system - for all its flaws - has some of the best outcomes provided you have enough money to access it.

You're kidding, right? Vast majority of Americans have poor outcomes despite being insured. Let's not even talk about the uninsured that are constantly kicked to the curb as soon as they're stable. Medical debt is a big issue in the US regardless of your insurance status. Medical bankruptcy is a thing. People have to choose between food and life saving drugs like insulin which are cheap and easily available pretty much everywhere in the world. Do you want me to go on?

I don't know how stable the USA would be if all billion Indian people came to North America and Europe.

Who said anything about that? Besides Viktor Orban.

A million immigrants are let into the US every year.

If you look at persons obtaining permanent resident status as a proportion of total population, it peaked in 1900-1910 and has been fairly stable since the 1990's: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/109xdKq3U7ISifgyjlQLL...

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

The U.S has stability? Mmm not really.

It has been stable since I have been here? In fact all the issues that make the most $$$, gun violence, abortion, race relations, these are not a problem at the macro level. If anything it should be commended that our media and leadership has the luxury to complain about these “issues” that affect less then 5% of the population.

Surely a man would say that abortion is not a problem at the macro level and only impact 5% of the population.

Doesn't impact you so of course you don't care, but it does impact a lot more than 5%. Same for race relations, lots of people having to spend their life being put all kind of barriers in front of them.

Stable for who, and how do you define stability? For you it feels stable, for some factory worker it's not great. But I was getting more at American politics - that feel to me like they've reached rock bottom (at least compared to the last 2-3 decades). Eventually a crippled political system will bring down the economy. It's very possible all things considered, and relative to Europe (or China, India, whatever), the U.S is doing good. But that's not gonna matter much to the average American citizen. There's no way Americans won't feel the political and economic mayhem that's coming the coming decade or two.

Bro good luck on the upcoming Hindu-Muslim civil war, and then subsequent South Indian secession movement.

PS: I know what you're going to tell me, that I don't know what I am talking about, but believe me, I do.

Even though it can be agreed that coming back to India is a good option for most many Indians, it is also to be noted that Indian political games within Indian orgs make it super hard to do anything. IMO the only reason to go back to India should be to start on your own with your trusted friends. If you think you can work in India and contribute positively think again.

Genuinely curious what Indian political games within Indian orgs means? Are they vastly different from politics and culture in western orgs?

> no prevalence of gun culture

Let's compare crime rates, rates of conviction, police corruption, judicial corruption, etc. and see what place is safer to live in.

> Kids just stay at home grinding LC all day.

That's sad. I would rather study a computer science subject that helps me create something of value.

Do you think Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, Dennis Ritchie, and others spent their days grinding Leetcode? no. If they did, you would not know about them today.

They spent their days improving their craft by creating and delivering value.

All of the people grinding Leetcode will be replaced in a couple of years by Github Copilot anyways.

> its a whole different scene

Sure, it is. A scene obsessed with passing interviews rather than what comes after you accept the offer. A scene obsessed with entering a MAANG and total compensation. A corruption of the software engineering discipline.

A lot of that rings true. Other than healthcare.

It can be a nightmare finding a good doctor in India. The way most doctors behave can be insulting plus a lot of them are truly incompetent or corrupt. There are no real consequences to any of that. Most private hospitals are out to maximize how much they are earn from you and unnecessary procedures are the norm.

As just one data point, check out the ratio of natural births to c-sections in India in private hospitals.

While I agree that for-profit hospitals do have a lot of money-minded doctors (I hesitate to call them corrupt, as desire to earn more is normal in every field), I disagree with you completely that from the healthcare point of view India is a negative. India has excellent healthcare facilities and very good doctors (in the city) - and most importantly it is affordable for the upper-middle class even without insurance (in the sense that it won't bankrupt you). Medical insurance is also comparatively cheaper and makes healthcare quite affordable, even for the middle-class. It's a huge positive compared to the US.

(Your point about C-sections though is very valid and I too consider it extremely unethical that many doctors now treat it as a norm and less seriously - there are too many C-sections done unnecessarily both because of greed and for an over worked doctors convenience.)

Personal anecdote, but most of my wife’s friends in India have themselves opted to go with a c-section. Mainly to avoid a tough labor and be able to plan ahead. My wife gave birth naturally here in the US where it is not an option unless medically necessary. In India patients can choose it seems and doctors allow it because it is a higher bill for them as well.

Yes, this seems to be becoming common too as a perception has been generated that it is a "minor surgery". One of my relative too opted for C-section because someone close to her frightened her that natural childbirth is horribly painful and really bad experience. At no point did the doctor tried to dissuade her from having a c-section or explain to her the potential danger to her and her baby's health if she underwent it.

> check out the ratio of natural births to c-sections in India in private hospitals

Many countries hover around 50%. Percentage is also strongly dependant on maternal age I think.

https://www.bellybelly.com.au/birth/highest-c-section-rates-...

>> Kids just stay at home grinding LC all day

Those kids should start their own unicorns instead of grinding LC all day. That would be a much better use of their intelligence.

After spending years grinding LeetCode...

1) they will join Meta and be a cannon fodder developer for a PHP coder that never excelled at those puzzles, Mark Zuckerberg.

2) a Github Copilot user will wipe the floor with them. Being good at LeetCode puzzles will be as practical as being able to mentally calculate square roots. Just a party trick for low rating TV shows.

Doesn't matter.

When I joined CS degree I also thought like you did.

Now looking at insane competition, the kids who can't write a real program if their life depends upon it, constantly getting better internship and job offers than me, I believe I was wrong.

No one cares.

People who interview are also likely Leetcode kids. So they will ask some obscure question from 14th page of Leetcode to flex, so the probability of passing is almost proportional to amount of time you grind.

If I have a chance to go back to year 1, I focus on Leetcode. Fundamentals be damned.

In this industry no one has an incentive to care about efficiency. If they did, we wouldn't be gambling with right candidate answering an obscuring question from some 10+ page of Leetcode or Hackerrank.

Now someone from outside India can reply to this with their usual justifications. To be clear, I don't hate DSA questions. Just pointing out as your leetcodes get harder, you tend to select people who do leetcode whole day than those who are good at DSA and also good at programming.

Edit: and yes, "if you're good at DSA you should be able to answer the obscure question". Dude obscure question will be LC hard or upper end of medium. The kid who does Leetcode 3 hours a day already seen the question and remembers the answer too, and there are n > 10 kids like that.

All of this was fueled by zero cost credit, tidal waves of VC money and the very early stage of monetizing the web. Soon the world wide web will be a thing of the past and most economic value will have been captured by corporate walled gardens and this job marked will fall in line.

I think learning data structures and algorithms as a software engineer is important. And if you legitimately want to pursue a deeper understanding of those because you have a practical purpose in mind, that's great.

But if that does not really interest you, and you only do it to pass some pointless interview to become an entry level employee at a MAANG... you need some perspective in life.

Let's say you do become an employee at a MAANG. You buy an expensive house, now you have to pay the mortgage for years. You get married, start a family with kids... now you have raised your cost of living to the point it is really hard for you to make less money. Now you have long-term, lifetime commitments that require you to make a lot of money, and your MAANG manager will sniff that desperation, will rub his hands, do an evil laugh and then work you to death.

Your family will be happy and abstracted from everything, but you will be deeply unhappy. You will have no time to make friends, you will be a foreigner in a very different country and nobody will understand you. You will go on vacation to expensive places, but your mind will always be trapped in the anxiety dimension created by your manager and your H-1B status. With a couple of mouse clicks and the stroke of a pen, your manager can make everything go away at any moment because when you lose your H-1B status you have to leave the country at once.

You will eventually get used to your higher standard of living and become indifferent to the materialistic aspects of your life. The excitement of your new life will fade away. Living in a nice house won't matter, having an expensive vehicle won't matter. You will have musical instruments and a boat and whatever hobbies but you'll have no time to pursue them. You will soon realize that you have money but no time.

The little time you have left, will be for you to spend with your kids, but you will be too tired to have meaningful interactions with them. Your kids will become spoiled by the standard of living you provide and will barely know you because you are always busy with work. They will grow in another country, speak a different first language, and will be assimilated by another culture. As they grow, they will feel more culturally disconnected from you, and become indifferent to you, your culture and your identity. Just like you did, they will leave the nest and never look back. You will be reduced to a contact in someone's smartphone that is never called.

You soon realize that the cost of your prosperity is the solitude and distance from your family and friends. You will be a miserable MAANG salaryman that made a pact with the devil and lost his soul. And it all started with the empty promise that if you complete enough stupid Leetcode exercises you will be rich and happy. If you are not already happy without a MAANG job, you won't be happy with one.

And I am going to plagiarize the ending of a similar story here:

His darkest secret, however, is that he lives in constant fear that, some day, he will fail. He will fall behind with his tasks, he will not meet his manager expectations and be replaced by younger engineers with more energy and more up-to-date knowledge. He will realize that his friends at work were fair-weather friends and that he lost, in a single stroke of fate, the attention he was so eagerly seeking.

Like the rest of us, he will grow old, his priorities will change, his eagerness will die down. As he looks around him, he may realize that the best times of life have passed him by, and that there is no making up for the lost time. He will be bitter, having left an insignificant mark on the world, having wasted his time in pointless pursuits. No one will miss him.

To him, I dedicate this epitaph:

Here Lies a Pirate Who Never Sailed.

Assuming you're from India and know well about the job market here,

My comment tries to highlight a very specific issue that using progressively harder leetcode problems selects for people who do leetcode all day, and me trying to focus on CS fundamentals and actual programming was a mistake.

It has nothing to do with me wanting to work in FAANGM or not, or any of the philosophy you wrote.

You wrote that FANGM salaried person will be miserable. You know who will be more miserable? The software engineer who had to settle for a less paying company or startup. The engineer who came from a humble rural background and wanted to leave a mark on the world, but lost to the measure-oriented competition which rewards the cargo cult mentality.

Looking around me, the cargo cult leetcoding kids are more happier, that's probably because they are already from a better background than I am. Doesn't change the fact that if I grinded what it required to game the job market, I would've been at a place better than them.

Doesn't matter you are one of the most gifted athlete, if you're playing the game that doesn't have any prizes.

You assume that the facade people put on social media means they're happy. It will be all happy pictures at expensive restaurants and exotic vacation destinations, until one random day they change their relationship status to divorced or whatever, and then all that MAANG income will go to alimony and child support, and the wife will be keeping the nice house and car.

If the main thing that connects you to your family is money... well, guess what: your wife can have all of your money and stuff without needing you to be around. If you are married and working all the time, you are playing a very dangerous game. Once the net worth grows, so does the incentive to divorce.

All those innocent MAANG kids are in for a big surprise when they realize who is really in charge. Perhaps if they became a bit more informed about family law instead of focusing solely on those dumb Leetcode puzzles...

Doesn't matter. That's the most important thing that helps to get job here. Insane competition and qualifying questions for even low paying jobs are around LC medium.

Let's change the interview process then.

Is that why my LeetCode ranking is always so depressingly abysmal? My solutions are always bottom 25% of speed and space usage, and the pass rate for some of their questions are way higher than my average.

It might be like the old adage says: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Lots of people just copy/paste the optimal solution, and submit.

> Interviews over there are insanely competitive.

Why is it then that it's common understanding that Indian teams are usually bad? Why are they so difficult to deal with and why do they produce bad code?

Because you get what you pay for.

A significant number of engineers that FAANGM and a lot of others brings into the US from their Indian offices are top-notch. The salaries they pay in India are in the $60k-130k range which is incredibly good there. Same with a lot of good startups and core engineering firms. The off-shore consultancies you might be familiar with are sweat shops that are a dime a dozen with engineers coming and going a revolving door. They're optimized to make a quick buck with as cheap labor as possible. Just like the US firms that hires them.

Body/team leasing is nearly always shit quality, doesn't matter if it's from India or not. You can try to pay folk in India much less than you can get away with in e.g. Europe though.

I've had some good experience hiring contractors. It all depends on what the goal is. If the goal is high quality work there are shops for that and if the goal is for a big enterprise to manage costs and de-risk themselves by hiring contractors as easy-to-let-go resources, you get exactly that. I've dealt with both and the latter is just extremely frustrating made infinitely worse by dealing with the timezone.

If you've seen job placements in top tier colleges in India, it's obvious that none of the body shops ever get even a small percentage of graduates wanting to join. They're always the last choice even for the less academically inclined. It has been the case since at least 2005. Until then these companies still had some sway and were hiring some good candidates. Now they're coasting on their "account winning" architects who then transfer all day-to-day stuff to some of the most tough to deal with engineers.

This seems about right, if you want the expert in something you’ll pay out the ass for it but drowning in extremely high quality code.

But if you just want good code it’s cheaper to hire employees. Contractors around or below the cost of full time employees are truly something else.

There a over a billion people in India, and tech is where the young have been going for a while. In any large population you willhave good and bad people. In the US the bad move to something else, but in India there isn't a something else better than working for a place that will hire you cheap to produce bad code.

There are a lot of bad engineers in India, but if you can weed through them and are willing to pay there are a lot of great ones too.

You're probably thinking of a few big consulting companies who by no means represent the best and brightest and are just resume fodder for many others. The turnover at these places is awful.

Just one example, a lot of target's tech seems to be developed in their Bangalore office: https://india.target.com/work/teams/targettech. Hard to tell how much, but I imagine that being a significantly better workplace than Accenture. I hope one of their developers sees this and can clarify the extent their team works on the app/sites.

Because people hire the cheapest people they can get.

The highly skilled people likely wouldn't even be on the market for hire because they already have well-paying jobs.

Because, somehow, being good at contrived puzzles don't mean squat when it comes to delivering actual value in production.

If you have high 6 or low 7 figure USD saved up, you can retire in nearly any location in India already.

I agree with most, except the quality of my life.

I find my general quality of life to be better. Access to clean air, a great commute, education, a more relaxed lifestyle, better treatment for women in public in the US as compared to India

Of course this is highly contextual, but this my opinion

Aside from the same far right nationalists making headway in authoritarian, it probably would be great

I haven't tracked Indian politics, but they are comparing India with the US here. After Trump, you think India could be doing worse? That's saying something.

They are literally building concentration camps for Citizens.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/1/2/how-is-it-human-indi...

https://www.telegraphindia.com/north-east/another-goalpara-c...

What's "LC" ?

LeetCode I think

May I ask, how fast are the exits if I was to invest in India companies?

One thing that turned me off from US venture capital was the culture of delaying exits to the stock market, compared to the 90s when Microsoft/Netscape/Amazon all IPO'd at like $30 million market caps and rallied and there was so much upside and liquidity. Is there a culture like that in India right now, or something similar?

I really like how the Matic/Polygon team achieved "unicorn" status while in India and stayed in the scene (I heard they moved to UAE since). I don't care that its crypto, I care that its tech and moving fast.

Is the action just in Bangalore or is it all over or a few other tech hubs?

The exit scene is very rough actually. Indian investors are conservative and the public markets don’t have much appetite for loss making companies. Silicon Valley accounting chicanery such as “adjusted EBITDA” don’t fly here - investors demand PAT - Profits After Tax.

Many of the current crop of unicorns have been waiting for years for an exit. If the current funding downturn continues, there is a good chance most of these will wind down without ever getting an exit.

that’s very insightful! I’ll look further into it

I know people in tech who have gone back to Pakistan rather than stay in the US.

> 500+ LC. Kids just stay at home grinding LC all day. There are dedicated youtube channels in Hindi & other regional lang telling you how to dynamic program, backtrack, div & conquer, two pointer....its a whole different scene.

That's because it is a deeply rooted culture/attitude of the people in India (or other developing countries): intellectual one-upmanship (i.e.: my "brain" is bigger than yours).

Nobody wants to be perceived to acquire something (a job, a house, anything) easily; people want to have a sense of the greatest achievement after a tough grind.

This is something that is really concerning to me. If everybody is pushed towards a STEM job the market becomes saturated affecting salaries (and the associated "prestige" in Indian society). And to top it off young children are forced to give up their childhood to pursue Byjus and other scams that prey on the parents' emotions. I grew up in the professional class in India and a lot of thinking is plain irrational and just driven by a herd mentality and superiority complex. Just toxicity all around tbh.

If someone wants to become a travel photographer and is happy with the job and the lifestyle why push them towards a soul sucking STEM job where they may not even excel? But somehow having a low paying "engineer" job is somewhat better than a higher paying "artist" job in their eyes.

And to those reading from outside of India: WITCH company jobs are actually considered prestigious in India. Maybe not by those who frequent HN (bubbles everywhere) but the vast majority of STEM graduates and their communities.

how in the world is working in Infosys or Wipro prestigious. you are just a robot doing some repetitive task for some random dude on the other side of the world

Because it's compared to lower classes sweeping the streets or dumpster diving.

> That's because it is a deeply rooted culture/attitude of the people in India (or other developing countries): intellectual one-upmanship (i.e.: my "brain" is bigger than yours).

> Nobody wants to be perceived to acquire something (a job, a house, anything) easily; people want to have a sense of the greatest achievement after a tough grind.

We have intellectual oneupmanship and hustle & grind culture in the United States as well too. And contrary to popular, it's not new, as Tocqueville and Weber had made note of it during their days.

I'd say it's different.

Developing nation one upmanship is more like this:

"Oh, so you can get into Google Silicon Valley with just 300 LC? You can't do that here in India; you need at least 500+ to join <insert lesser company>".

How exactly does an American keep up with this level of intellectual one-upmanship ? This was on my linkedin timeline today - https://imgur.com/a/dLpo9G7

Why do Americans have to keep up with that?

People are making an error based on the past 20 years of debt binge and capital flooding that took over the world.

When the FDI dries up, India is a very weird place. The energy costs will put a number in Asia and Europe in the next decade with dramatic food security challenges.

Overall, at macro level, US beats India, but are there positive offshoots in some niches.. perhaps!

India is getting Russian oil pretty cheap now as far as I know, and most likely Iran as well. The U.S is not immune to the energy problem btw, Shale oil is getting more expensive because all the easy spots were already used.

India imports more than 90% of it's oil.India hardly has any natural energy reserves good enough for it's huge population. It's definitely going to be tough to fullfill the aspirations of 1.5 billion people who will have increasing energy demands while supply will be perennially limited. If per capita consumption of India even has to reach China levels, it's going to be a massive challenge even with renewables involved. Energy security of India doesn't look good unless they try doing something like the good old introducing democracy in the middle east.

FWIW, India has about one third of the world's reserve of thorium.

I cannot argue here. What would go wrong, if Russian Oil and Gas are foundational to your Energy Security.

Let me call Angela Merkel.

To be fair, Europe was first to start trade war and ramp it up to 100%. Russia is just responding in kind. Europe had a choice in whether to back Ukraine or not (including pushing it to reject Russian demands before the war) and risks were known in advance.

Considering India and Russia has no common border and global interests are mostly aligned, repeat of situation is extremely unlikely. With any critical import you take a risk but this one is pretty small as far as geopolitical risks go.

It's very unlikely Russia will do anything to mess up what they have going with China and India...because they don't have much other alternatives. I am not talking morals here ... I am calling it as it is. This has nothing to do with morals.

If Russia did reasonable things they wouldn't have attacked Ukraine. Since we are talking about a Russia willing to do stupid things there is no reason to believe they won't mess with India or China.

> If Russia did reasonable things they wouldn't have attacked Ukraine

If the U.S did reasonable things they wouldn't have attacked Iraq.

Attacking Iraq was a very, very bad idea. Attacking Ukraine is suicidal.

Suicidal for whom?

Russia. I don't see how anyone can see the massive losses Russia has had as well as the lasting impacts of sanctions as anything but suicidal. Russia cannot even build a modern car with ABS and airbags, let alone a plane or a tank while sanctions are in place.

They will get whatever tech they need from China in return for their oil and gas. I also think for sure overall invading Ukraine was a bad move but calling it suicidal sounds like a reach to me; at least as far as we can see so far - Russia is holding on and shows no signs of cracking.

I don't think they will find drop in replacements for all the parts, or even replacements in general that meet the same quality standards for some of the parts. This issue will likely require a drastic redesign of a large number of parts and will halt production for a while.

> Russia is holding on and shows no signs of cracking.

I don't understand how people can think this when Russia is heavily recruiting from prisons and rolling out ancient T-62s, Russias modern weaponry continually gets depleted whilst Ukraine gets more modern weaponry every month. I think the first main cracking point will be the Russian retreat / Ukrainian recapture of Kherson in the coming months.

Honestly I have no idea how's the fighting going there...it seems like we've reached peak interest a few months ago unfortunately. Russia can just keep Ukraine in this weak state, maybe fire a few rockets now and then. It doesn't even have to keep up the invasion if it doesn't want to...Ukraine would still be a very dysfunctional country with the threat of Russian invasion always on the background. No one sane will want to invest or buy an apartment there. What does Russia gain out of all this shit I have no idea but my point remains is that Russia can keep this up if it wants to. The average Russian citizen is either fine with what's happening (surprisingly many) or too afraid to do anything. It's very hard to predict but the chance of Russia making it like this cannot be ignored imo. If you want to this how a country can make it like this look at Iran.

> Honestly I have no idea how's the fighting going there...it seems like we've reached peak interest a few months ago unfortunately. Russia can just keep Ukraine in this weak state, maybe fire a few rockets now and then.

This is not an option, due to the amount of lives and equipment lost I don't think Russia has the option to pull out. It's a bit hard to have 50k casualties and lose thousands of pieces armoured equipment, hundreds of planes and just be like 'actually that was for nothing'.

> Ukraine would still be a very dysfunctional country with the threat of Russian invasion always on the background

I think Russia has more of a problem the longer the war goes on Ukraine is already going to receive NASAMS and IRIS-T anti air equipment from the US and Germany, which would significantly change the balance in the ability for Ukraine to control the sky.

The weapons aren't going to stop until Ukraine wins, pulling out also means losing Crimea and all the other gains they had made from 2014 until prior to the full on invasion.

Ukraine is more than capable of hitting installations in Russia even in their current degraded state, I don't think anyones gonna let Russia go back over the line and wash their hands of it.

> What does Russia gain out of all this shit I have no idea but my point remains is that Russia can keep this up if it wants to

Can it though? Russia is quickly running out of pretty much everything, they aren't using T-62s (tanks that don't even have a autoloader, a staple of Russian and even USSR tanks) because they want to its because they have to. I think the systemic corruption in Russia means they cannot fight this war for that long, for more then now? sure, but for years? im not so sure.

> The average Russian citizen is either fine with what's happening (surprisingly many) or too afraid to do anything. It's very hard to predict but the chance of Russia making it like this cannot be ignored imo. If you want to this how a country can make it like this look at Iran.

The longer this goes on the more the average Russian will be affected, the more assets that will be seized, the more people that will be sanctioned and the more companies that will pull out.

It's fun playing predictions but truth is no one knows what is going to happen. I hope Russia retreats and gives up as you are implying but I am very skeptical it will happen soon. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised...

Russia is a virtual entity. The real person involved is Putin, and it is hard to see how this affects Putin at all.

With Bush's invasion of Iraq, he ran the risk of losing the 2004 reelection. Putin doesn't even face that risk.

if Russia loses the war and the army collapses there could be some very consequences from Putin, and that it seperate from the consequence of the slow moving collapse of the Russian economy that has already started.

The Russian rouble is outperforming the usd this year. That does not look like a collapsing economy. In fact, it has gained 40% on the euro.

If Russia loses, they will withdraw to their borders. In the worst case they lose access to the Caspian sea. If not, they will acquire Ukraine.

The real loser is Ukraine, no matter what happens from here on.

> The Russian rouble is outperforming the usd this year. That does not look like a collapsing economy. In fact, it has gained 40% on the euro.

It only looks like this because it’s being propped up by massive cash spending of Russian foreign reserves and because it cannot be traded internationally in any significant volume.

If the economy is doing so well why did Gazprom and Sberbank cancel it’s dividend with Russia?. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/06/30/state-firms-gazpro...

> If Russia loses, they will withdraw to their borders. In the worst case they lose access to the Caspian sea. If not, they will acquire Ukraine.

If Russia losses they lose access to their Black Sea headquarters and also Crimea. They also face quite badly, but I guess that’s really already come to pass no one thinks Russia is the number two army in the world anymore.

Even if Russia did capture Ukraine they would face a long insurgency that would make Afghanistan look like a cake walk. I initially thought Russia would capture a lot of land early on but I didn’t they would be able to hold it, and we already seeing this with how many collaborators and Russian soldiers keep dying in occupied cities from partisans.

> The real loser is Ukraine, no matter what happens from here on.

This is hundred percent true but they lose much harder if they just let the genocidal Russians take over Ukraine and keep committing genocide against them.

Not all countries are blessed with the nature's bounty that the US is blessed with. I agree Energy is something India will be working on furiously in the coming decade. I presume both nuclear and renewable will be expanded rapidly. In the interim, India does have good relationships with most energy producing countries (Russia, Saudi).

What food security challenges does India have? India has been much poorer in the past and hasn't had any food security issues in a long time.

I remember when the price of onions went from well under a dollar for a single large onion to about a dollar or more for a large one when there was an enormous amount of flooding in india around 2019-2020, ruining their crops. Apparently the onion is a huge staple out there compared to the Americas and so they needed to source onions from pretty much everywhere else.

It sounds like a trivial price increase maybe to some people in more affluent countries but some in Latin America, it was a pretty challenging price increase.

My personal groceries bill is about 25$usd per week, meat vegetables and a bit of cereal goods. Used to be less within a decade ago, but hey what can you do - North America I was paying closer to 100

India is entirely dependent on the monsoon for fresh water. When combined with a warming climate, this is a disaster waiting to happen. I am 100% confident that we will live to see the days when food scarcity returns to India. Mind you, indian soils are some of the most fertile in the world so this really is an alarming scenario.

India's past issues with food scarcity were due to a combination of mismanagement and theft. Partly the british empire and partly the lack of skills in India. Widespread crop failures haven't been a thing for a while now.

I feel like a good relationship with Russia is not a plus for India right now.

Why? They treat eachother like partners, not like vassal states, and the rest of the world is not treating India like a pariah, despite its relationship with Russia.

It's a win-win for India.

The US may beat India in macro level economic factors for quite a while to come, but for a more senior professional with a marketable resume I think it's not too hard to find the positive niches.

Honestly the main thing that keeps me from moving back is quality of life concerns with traffic, air quality, and noise pollution.

I think the pollution, weather, water quality, noise, dust, and overall lack of high quality public spaces is a big deal.

India is amazing and dynamic in a lot of ways, but there are major intangibles to account for (like how much one values a quiet evening walk in fresh air).

You don't have to live in a Delhi or a Mumbai or a Bangalore. Cities like Dehradun, Ranchi, and more provide many of these amenities.

The most important amenity is Employment. Only a small portion of people would move to tier-2 seconds and that too because of familial ties not some over whelming amenities.

By and large NRIs moving back from US end up in the usual metros at least in the beginning.

I grew up in a state capital and lived in 2 metro cities and honestly the infrastructure was better in my home city in terms of electricity, water and flooding. But there are very few tech jobs, which gives the 2-3 employers there huge leverage due to the lack of job mobility.

Hopefully between fibre penetration and WFH culture things will improve.

Man there is really nothing much to do in these smaller cities. It gets boring very fast. There is also a culture that’s very socially intrusive. People will drop in on you unannounced randomly.

Which is great if you’re a socially extroverted person but if you want to get some work done, not the best case scenario