My vocabulary of five letter words is improving—thanks to Wordle.
I was reading through Gergely Orosz’s article on “What Silicon Valley ’ Gets ’ about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not” and I couldn’t help but compare it to the Indian tech industry.
I have only worked at startups and whatever I know of the big Indian tech companies are from my friends and old classmates.
I have a lot of room to make decisions at my current job and I usually do take these decisions which I had thought were reserved for senior engineering managers or others higher up in the ladder.
Part of this might be because we are a small startup but the other part is the company culture.
I work at an American company and this is my first job as a software engineer. So I only have this personal experience to benchmark what my peers say about their jobs.
Most of the large service tech companies in India could fall under the category of what Gergely points out as “traditional” companies.
I’m often baffled by the work environment and the culture these companies cultivates.
You see a lot of such companies coming to colleges at offering jobs to 100s at a time. To them, engineers are just raw resources they can train and put to work to output software.
But that isn’t how this works. Software engineering is a creative process. You are an engineer. You are building things.
Mindlessly following orders without even thinking for a minute myself is not what I look for in a job.
If you look at their hiring process even closer, you will see that the tests and the qualifying criteria are skewed to accommodate people who can mindlessly follow orders.
I am not saying that this is the case for every company but it is based on empirical evidence.
I am also not saying that working for these companies is a bad idea. I know people who are perfectly comfortable with their jobs here.
I run before this gets any more controversial.