We don’t care about Tech in India
The market needs to respect programmers for what they’ve built
I agree with Ankur.
I’ve consulted for and built tech orgs for the better part of 15 years now. I’ve seen all shapes and sizes, unfunded to unicorn to Fortune 100, and I’m pretty sure about this: In India, we care deeply about the business; we care deeply about our customers; but we don’t care deeply about the tech.
We hire techies, not hackers.
We sell jobs to candidates, not hard problems worth solving.
We hire for brands, not for portfolios. An IIT tag is preferred over a strong track record of taking systems to production.
We look for educational qualifications in markets where 99% of competent programmers are self taught.
Which is why, when hiring in India, I’ve never been too fussed about academic pedigree. This isn’t to say that an IIT or similar tag isn’t a useful indicator — it absolutely is — but that a production track record is a far better when it comes to evaluating programming skills.
I’ve been working on the tech recruiting problem at GO-JEK for almost a year now, and it’s been tough — we know there are great devs out there, but they’re simply hard to discover in a market that churns out 1M new engineers every year.
Recruiters in India deal with incredible amounts of noise. Resumes all look the same. Closed source work is hard to access and evaluate, making it hard to select among tech resumes.
This is why I think open source profiles matter in India. It’s not that I think engineers that don’t do open source, or don’t have a Github profile are less capable.
I think it makes them harder to find.
The same applies to companies.
As an industry, we need to start to valuing the track records of both individual programmers and companies in terms of what they took to production successfully. And we need to move away from proxies like academic qualifications or alma mater to ones that correlate more strongly with production track record.
There are many ways to do this, but I personally believe open source contribution is arguably the most scalable, transparent signalling mechanism of quality, especially in noisy markets like India. It’s why so much of my own tech hiring strategy is oriented around it. We’ve been ramping up our marketing around our open source for a year now in the same spirit: Make it easier for candidates to understand how we build software.
For India’s tech hiring market, open source contribution is a total win win hack. It scales discovery for both candidates and for companies. All it takes is for candidates to raise a pull request or two every so often, and for companies to keep pushing their code out as open source.
Everyone wins.
