Aug 6, 2026
Notes on India tech ecosystem/labor market. (Small sample size etc etc, but I'm pretty confident this is roughly right)
Strengths:
- abundant supply of extremely strong early career engineers. Can program up and down the stack, understand ds&a, os, tooling, sys design, sharp, fast, communicate well, product/business aware.
- if you know how to hire you can spin up very strong "junior" teams in a matter of weeks. (I'm very partial to teams of strong ambitious young ppl and what they can accomplish)
- world-class swes/ems at staff+ level are much harder to find, but it's doable. You've got to have a killer recruiting org (which is also hard to build) and be patient. This layer is a bottleneck to spin up engineering orgs at scale. More on this in a sec.
- there is an abundant supply of jobs for everyone, market clears very quickly. Upward wage pressure, excitement, lots of good energy.
- building pm orgs is very similar to building eng orgs-- lots of brilliant early career ppl, recruiting for world-class performance gets harder quickly as you go up seniority ladder.
- all the ingredients to build killer teams are there today, you can go and build one right now relatively easily.
Weaknesses:
- many young brilliant eager ppl of class 2016 ended up working in some random forgotten org doing grunt work surrounded by less talented peers. As they matured they never got an opportunity to see what world-class execution looks like and so never developed their potential.
- consequently there is limited supply of world-class staff+ talent. Again you can find them if you know what you're doing and are willing to be patient, but on a macro level most orgs aren't doing that.
- young brilliant eager ppl of class 2026 are much better off than their 2016 counterparts. The work is better, there is more information online, ppl sort by talent more, there is more opportunity to learn. Because of this finding world-class staff+ ppl in 2036 will be much much easier than it is now.
- Still, at scale senior talent development pipeline is significantly behind the U.S. and considerably behind China. This is very difficult to fix quickly.
- Culturally seniority beats meritocracy almost every time. This is deeply ingrained and is very difficult to upend. It's a critical obstacle to accelerating the virtuous loop but will take a generation to fix.
- I'm not sure how AI fits into this. India tech is indeed in a virtuous loop, but isn't in escape velocity territory yet the way U.S. and China are. I can see good arguments that the ecosystem will benefit from AI, and good arguments that AI will harm it. (Then again this is true of every area of life everywhere, we just have to try really hard to make it good.)
TL;DR: abundant talent, virtuous loop, great energy. For world-class talent with strong ambitions it’s still rational to come to the U.S.