I used to stay in a paying guest accomodation during my first job. My roommate was a guy who had just joined ISRO - we graduated same year but from different colleges. And I also had a chance to interact closely with 2 other friends who were working with ISRO at that time (one was a senior in college).

His payscale started at Rs.8000 per month (in 2001 that was less than $200usd). He was a production engineer. He would be up for next revision of payscale & promotion pending a review in 4 years! He knew that.

I used to wonder what keeps them motivated and I used to constantly question them. One common thread you find based on these conversations is that they are extremely satisfied with work - each of them used to say that what they are working on is UNIQUE that nobody else in ISRO is responsible for. And buck stops with them. They knew that.

That sense of ownership and the way the employees connect to a much larger cause is something unbelievable at ISRO, in my perspective. I used to be in awe of every conversation about his superiors, the work and their perspective of the organization in general.

I think it is an interesting case study in organizational behavior and what keeps you motivated with factors other than just money.

Teaching is another profession I think requires similar mindset. ISRO somehow hires the right kind of people, the employees within the organization are not so flamboyant setting examples for new hires and helps them connect in a way it makes people see contribution to a bigger cause.

Just my observation from what I have seen from close quarters.

BTW, it is also given that he knew they get pension after retirement, medical benefits & all such taken care of for his entire life because he is part of the organization.

Would love to read if there are any case studies on this.

Its also parental and social pressure. All the best trying to explain the people around you, that you are joining ISRO and not some company like Wipro, TCS or Infosys. You will receive a nice lecture and may be have a angry fight session with your dad. In overall's you yourself will be tired after a few days when you watch some one doing far less meaningful, important or difficult work taking back big pay checks, driving a luxury car, and living in a >1cr flat. And then of course your marriage, wife, kids and expectations from them and all that.

Its truly sad that these people are paid so badly. Infrastructure and entire thing is so dismal, my heart aches that things of this importance are treated this way in our country.

I'm sure every Indian teenager wanting to do some meaningful job has faced this situation. I had a tough time convincing my parents I was about to leave a call center job in a big MNC to write embedded software at a small unknown firm. The situation deteriorated so badly my parents threatened they would fall very seriously ill if I didn't do as they say. Finally I had to relent to working at a big software giant.

People say fight the society. But you can only fight a few battles in life. Career is already a tough battle, fighting society to achieve to work something meaningful is waste of time and energy.

We still haven't changed. There are people who even have doubt's if projects like these are necessary. A safe job, a good pension to take care of, male children, jewellery, good deal of real estate and social pride is all we value in our society.

Mars project? Well who cares about that?

For a ridiculous comparison of how cheap/expensive Mangalyaan was

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28425+x+10%5E7+INR%29+...

Not that it matters, but I pay more for my city commute per-km.

As an organization, ISRO is political and bureaucratic. I have a good "set of friends and family" worked there or working there. There are good people and bad people (projects) there. You must be lucky to get into the right one. The pay scale is not competitive - But its not worse. The perks are really good. i.e Ultimately they get paid a little less than a private cos. The perks from the governments should not be discounted EVER. I work in a private co. which is much better than the Infosys/Wipro/etc s.w co's (also with a relatively much better pay). But I can tell you, ISRO job is better than mine. If I could opt today, I would go to ISRO.

With a little lesser pay, you also get peace of mind. This might not be important at 22s or 25s. But at 30, as a husband and a father, I can surely tell you ISRO gives much better lifestyle. i.e you can work for 2 hours or 16 hours if you enjoy that. Average employee productivity there sucks - literally. But at that non-competitive pay, government should not expect more.

You also have a "safe-job" and lesser work pressure. There are certain projects that are high-pressure jobs - but those are rare.

An important factor to keep you motivate might also be "working for your country". I have worked for large govt. projects for western countries and it give you ZERO sense of pride. It is "just another project". And I worked for a very small system for the transportation in my city. And just that feeling of watching that system being used in my country gives me a hell lot of sense of pride/achievement. I don't know if everybody feels the same way - but that is one of the biggest motivation factors for me (I don't work for ISRO / govt)

I agree with all you points.

Coming to ...

>>As an organization, ISRO is political and bureaucratic.

All set ups in India, regardless of private or government owned are extremely political. I've seen dirtiest form of politics in private companies, hailing to be champions of meritocracy which can put government firms to shame.

In fact politics in the number one reason which drives nearly every once-a-great-firm to ground.

Russian space program was in similar conditions for the past 20 years. I have a couple of former classmates who graduated from one of the best math high schools and math universities in Russia, got great grades, won programming competitions and now work as low-level embedded C hackers, writing firmware for space chips. (It seems like the two of them are making every career decision together — they even played wow with characters 'malloc' and 'calloc' side by side.) They earn about a third or a quarter of their "market value" and do php web development on the side to get some money, but have no desire to change their jobs, because they love what they do.

I literally LoL reading the 'malloc' and 'calloc'. Those guys are all-caps NERDS...kudos to them.

My dad worked at ISRO for 30+ years and is now retired - so what I'm saying has some merit.

I don't know where you are getting the impression that ISRO engineers aren't paid well. Sure, they are not paid Google salaries but they are no way paid peanuts. A fresh engineering graduate will stand to get around 40K INR per month. Please not that if you are not landing up a software job, in India, it's a pretty shitty market out there for other disciplines. ISRO offers are great when you consider for example, what a mechanical engineer makes in other private companies.

Working environment is also comparable to any software facility. Please visit the ISRO facility in Bangalore on old airport road. They have some of the most green and spacious campuses. I don't have pictures because security is super tight and they don't even let you carry your cellphones inside.

For a long time, ISRO offered some of the best retirement benefits. My dad and mom don't have to worry about their healthcare costs for the rest of their lives and my dad gets a handsome pension to take care of his day to day living expenses. This has changed with the sixth pay commission.

ISRO also offers housing in some prime areas, near the office facilities so that you don't have to commute much. Of course, not everyone gets this benefit and it's based more on a lottery basis.

The schooling for your kids is almost free in the Kendriya Vidyala schools - and some of those schools offer top notch education.

While you are employed, you pay next to nothing for healthcare (including surgeries). There is the CGHS card that you flash in almost all major hospitals and you are taken care of.

As if this was not all enough, you get to work on some really state of the art stuff that others can't even imagine. There is absolutely no room for error. You just can't say 'oh crap I'll just fix that bug'. One bug might destroy a satellite or screw up the rocket launch. So, there is a lot of merit in building such mission critical systems and a ton of satisfaction. This satisfaction cannot be compared with money.

During launch days, my dad would work 3-4 days at a stretch without even a phone call in between. Such was the pressure.

So, working at ISRO has a ton of merits and satisfaction. It's not for everyone though. There is no glamour as such in the job. You don't have crazy parties or drunken revelries or annual outings to Hawaii. There is an enormous amount of bureaucracy and bull shit that you have to deal with. But for an engineer who loves to build mission critical applications - the place is a heaven.

My father used to work for ISRO too, from '74 to '97. He started with Satish Dhawan, one of the founders of the Indian space program. They moved at the same time from IISc. I agree with everything deepGem has to say about ISRO. It is far from the 'third world space program' that many like to romanticize.

Few thoughts:

- There is a common myth, one about how Indians used bullock carts to test the antennas on a satellite. This, for example, wasn't because they couldn't anechoic chambers, but simply because bullock carts have few metallic parts to interfere with the actual measurements. Image here: https://lh3.ggpht.com/_1UepX3L4zzs/S6Fd5jUwoJI/AAAAAAAAAjU/i...

- Regarding the budget, the predominant political philosophy in India is what Americans would call 'tax-and-spend'. ISRO has essentially a limitless budget to spend on their projects. My father used to travel first class on international trips to meet suppliers in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The reason for low-brow tables and ceiling fans is more to do with cultural aspects. In fact, there are many top universities, and old corporations (based on anecdata) in the US where working conditions are 'ghetto' by Apple-Google-Facebook standards. The reason simply is that renovating workplace infrastructure is a pretty significant expense.

I can also tell you that there are absolutely no problems with technology infrastructure (including internet speeds) in ISRO. Some of their offices were wired for internet as early as early as 1992.

The one downside of working at ISRO, as with any government establishment is the bureaucracy that one has to deal with, and the general reverence for seniority (vs. reverence for pure merit, etc.)

I wanted to comment on the other comment, but those people were getting abusive and had to stop there.

>>My father used to work for ISRO too, from '74 to '97.

This is comparing Apples to Oranges. 1974 India had such a dismal technology scene, ISRO would have looked like India's technology paradise back then. What were the opportunities for technology folks then? Trying settling down in Europe or US, if you can't the next best case scenario is work at BHEL, ITI, BEL and ISRO sort of companies. The next alternative was to work at a assembly line, and next is open a small time grocery shop.

I see this tone repeatedly mentioned how some one's dad had so much from ISRO at a time when India was in deep clutches of socialism. Technology imports are tightly regulated by license raj system. Any comparison between Government firms and private firms from those times is totally meaningless. Because the very concept of a good career in a non-government firm was non-existent. So its not at all strange that people working in ISRO had a good career, because frankly what exactly was there apart from the government firms.

We are talking of times when the Ambassador was the only car in India, a telephone connection used to take years to get, and getting a current account in a bank required police verification. And the term private firm was synonymous with a TATA owned company.

By these standards, ISRO is the best career option you could have in those days.

There is no way you can compare that with IT companies today. Not with the kind of technology infrastructure, or even working conditions, or the compensation and benefits.

The scenario today is the very exact opposite of 1970's.

You're the one who's comparing Apples to Oranges. Nobody here are worried about ISRO salary, perks etc. (they are actually good).

No one's comparing ISRO to Google or NASA or SpaceX or whatever. You simply started off with this unnecessary, unwanted posts that aren't even remotely true; hopping from one topic to another without any relevance.

Since you don't have any firsthand experience, please stop it since your posts are just a noise around here in this thread. You've difficulty in accepting it and you simply keep hopping from one thing to another.

Why are you not trying to get a job at Google and relocate to USA, or buy one of those 80 lakh flats at Bangalore.

Don't worry about ISRO. They'll be fine.

>>Nobody here are worried about ISRO salary, perks etc. (they are actually good).

Here? You created your account 19 hours back, just for this thread. What do you know about things 'here'?

I didn't even reply to you. I am not sure why a Karma 15 account like yours created 19 hours back(Which is a classic troll account sign, which trolls create to work on a specific thread on a particular day) should be even taken seriously.

>Here? You created your account 19 hours back, just for this thread. What do you know about things 'here'?

http://xkcd.com/386/ :)

> A fresh engineering graduate will stand to get around 40K INR per month.

According to the Googlez, this is 650 USD/mo. This does not seem like much to me, but I live in Seattle.

According to the Internet $650 in Bangalore is $4700 in Seattle. Thats about what you'd start out at as a programmer in the midwest U.S. but kind of low for west coast. Still, a kid straight out of college with no health problems or baby mamas should be fine. Edit: wolframalpha seems to have something to say but its kind of confusing: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24650+in+bangalore+in+...

Compensation is sufficient, but in no way competitive. Given the real estate market in Bangalore, some of my friends who've had foreign travel opportunities in MegaCorps are buying 80 Lac+ flats. Some more than one of them. And these are guys are mostly under 35 or some even under 30.

Any one who is on VP/Director/Senior engineering managers levels is buying 2.5 Crore+ villas. Expensive cars, having vacations in foreign countries and crazy lifestyle spending's.

The definition of well paid just became a whole lot different. And there is no way anyone can live that kind of a lifestyle working for a government firm.

Again, you can be happy with what you get. But that thought doesn't work always. Peer pressure does amazing things to you. Even if you don't get into it yourself, you will get into it eventually once you start a family.

Also note, that the public retirement investment vehicles today are strong enough and sometimes even better than the government ones. We are no longer in 1980's India. If you are well paid, you can buy your own food, pay your own bills, have your own home, car etc.

Why are you challenging deepGem when he is confronting based on first hand experience and facts while all you have are just mostly assumptions? I understand you intend to win the argument here, but this is the wrong way to do it.

>Again, you can be happy with what you get. But that thought doesn't work always. Peer pressure does amazing things to you. Even if you don't get into it yourself, you will get into it eventually once you start a family.

Can you please stop swaying away from the topic at hand just to support yourself?

I take no sides, just that your ignorant arguments are making these places a little messier (and possibly irritating). I just called one of my friends from ISRO to confirm what deepGem said and they seem to be right.

I understand you need to earn Karma here, but this is really the wrong way to earn it - By spreading mis-information about something you don't have first hand experience with. If I had the tone of the others, I would have probably finished it off with just a single line by saying GTFO, but for the sake of HN etiquette, can I kindly ask you to stop this nonsensical Karma-whorish misinformation spreading?

Well I apologize If my arguments have offended any one here.

And since you have already 'understood' I'm here for karma and you are for the larger good of the humanity. What can I say further? Especially when you have taken so much pain of calling your friends and verifying the information to debate a stranger over the internet.

>>I would have probably finished it off with just a single line by saying GTFO

You already have, haven't you?

>>can I kindly ask you to stop this nonsensical Karma-whorish misinformation spreading?

You definitely have a unique knack of 'kindly' offending and abusing people.

>Especially when you have taken so much pain of calling your friends and verifying the information to debate a stranger over the internet.

Since you're taking so much pain to spread false info, others are taking some pain to correct a stranger over Internet.

>You definitely have a unique knack of 'kindly' offending and abusing people.

Well, it's much better than spreading false rumours about you just because I don't like you. (Which is what you've been doing about subjects you don't know about)

@kamaal, please don't measure everything in terms of money, and in terms of those million dollar flats. You are simply swaying off of topic. Why do you think you can dispute GP's first hand experience?

Also, you don't seem to have any idea about ISRO. So, please control your assumptions about their salary, working conditions, transport etc. I'd rather trust GP's post about ISRO as he has first hand experience.

Generally, I would have simply agreed with what you said. (and what you said is true)

But! Stop complaining at this one moment. And take a look at the achievements of this country's people. They don't have world's best food, world-class infrastructure and not enough money to hire world class talent either. Probably they have world-class corruption in the country.

How many countries achieve this after having these many "core" problems. Salute to the people who achieved this feat.

>They don't have the world's best food

Strongly disagree. We really do. But yeah I generally agree with your post.

We might have world class food (thanks to FCI's rathouses) but for sure that ain't reaching 600 million. The logic runs thus, they've got no place to shit, so why they need food.

Hat's off to those who stay back in this crazy country and strive hard to lift this sunken ship, and for sure the ISRO folks are among them.

Thank you! I'd think India has one of the most diverse range of cuisines in the world, much of which is lip-smacking good!

Maybe not the best, but pretty close ... in my visit to India, i totally loved the food. One of the vastes cuisines both in taste and quantity !

Most of it burns twice ;)

> How many countries achieve this after having these many "core" problems.

It is a great feat! It's confusing to me how India can plan something like this, but cannot fix the problem of buying train tickets. I've heard that the queues can be quite long.

But it is exciting to see India sending things into space.

If you meant buying online, the problem was solved long back.. https://www.irctc.co.in/

Believe me the website works and is used by millions..

Queues still remain long due to lack of computer literacy and reach of internet..

While they are doing a better job on this, it still crashes @ 10am daily - right around the emergency quota for the day starts. They also need daily maintenance for an hour or so.

And not to mention it is India's largest ecommerce site :)

Its not exactly that Western nations don't have problems they ignore or are not called out on. Its just easier for people to take cheap shots at India, stereotypes and such being what they are.

I don't think their political corruption is much worse than what the US has, we just have laws that permit too much of it. Fortunately the scientist of most countries want to succeed because of their interest in the unknown, in doing things, rather than worrying about politics.

From travelling across India for a few months (also among the "backwards" populations, as they are referred to even in Indian legal texts), I can tell you that yes, corruption is amazingly prevalent. As far as money exchanged, you might be right (I don't know), but the way it affects day to day life is nothing like in western countries. It's a credit to the resilience of people there that they can function on top of that structure and still be enthusiastic about "India" - over a dozen fairly geographically homogenous languages, with most people never travelling outside their cultural comfort zone.

To be frank, nobody is really complaining in the comments. Btw on twitter three trends are for this mission: MissionMars, SriHariKota and ISRO.

One more - #Mangalyaan

Agree with most of what you say. But before jumping into portraying a shoe string salary take into account the "corruption adjusted benefits" that Google and other companes could not offer [http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/behind-the-sband-s...]

How would an Isro engineer get access to bribes and stuff? All that is for people dealing with large public funds and services.

ISRO has commercial wing called Antrix corporation. Just search for the scientists and top officers involved in the scam exposed in 2011. The given link is from The Hindu, most reputed daily in India.

Antrix is ISRO's commercial arm. The engineers who work for ISRO have no connect with it.

Then what was the purpose of barring four scientists from holding any positions and what was this mess http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-ex-isro-chief-three-oth...? A political drama?

I don't know how different are the work environment of ISRO and DRDO but I guess it must be same. One of my colleague at Tata Consultancy Services, an ABAP developer, left his job with decent salary and an opportunity to go to UK for an offshore project of 2 years. Why? To join DRDO at salary 4 times less than what he was getting coz he hated his work and was passionate about working on something that is not just interesting but also makes a difference.

`Project chief Subbiah Arunan says he has not taken a vacation in the last 15 months, sleeping at Isro's satellite centre in Bangalore and going home for "about one or two hours every day". `[1]

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-24547892