Poor labor laws in India leaves workers with no bargaining chip and incentivizes these greedy corporate to do whatever they wish to do. If you think this is the worst, wait till I introduce you to employee bonds. You will be surprised to see that MNC companies playing their PR cards right with tokenism bullshit like BLM, pride month or any other similar nonsense in the west will not shy away from violating some of the most basic rights in developing countries, because legal grey areas allow such practises.

Here’s how their business model works: greedy capitalist (usually from the west) can’t part with their money, and do justice by paying the right wage to local employees. so they outsource the job, and pay about five to ten times less than what they’re actually supposed to. This job is given to one of the many service-based companies. Now, the company that accepts this job eats away 40-60% of the money they’re paid. They make their employees sign an exploitative employee bond, claiming that they’re training them, and that this bond, which will last for two to three years, will be used as a safeguard to compensate for their training (they don’t teach jack shit). So if you decide to leave the company, you are required to pay from your own pocket!

For the first six months, they usually don’t pay any salary to their employee. They teach them outdated, crappy shit for the sake of maintaining legacy infrastructure. Then they do what is called project allotment. Here’s the tough part - if you’re not allotted a project, then your early career is screwed, and it is what they call as “putting on the bench” - basically, the company bureaucracy sucks, so they don’t track which employees have and have not been allotted. When you’re on the bench, you’re paid, yes, but:

• you do not have any relevant experience to jump to any other company. You have nothing to show to them.
• you can also not use that time to learn something, as you’re working on-site, on a restricted internet, which is monitored by these organizations.
• if you tell that you were not allotted a job, chances are that you’re going to:
  • be allotted a legit job, and you’ve saved your career (kind of).
  • be allotted a botched job, you’ll take all the blame, and you’re fired.
  • get fired immediately, as you’re a burden to the company.

This is the worst situation any new engineer graduate can be in. Now, if you’re assigned a project, you’re still acquiring some knowledge, and will be allotted further projects in the future. Now when it comes to switching jobs, you’ll be seen as an inferior employee by various MNCs and startups, unless you can prove them otherwise with a solid resume.

Now, about the “bad Indian dev” troupe - actually, there’s a lot of reason why you find bad devs in such companies:

• they’re paid a crappy wage, so they do their bare minimum.
• they have to work on fast-paced projects with tight deadlines.
• their culture does not promote good software engineering practices.
• they’re forced to write bad code - planned obsolescence and restrictive documentation is what companies like these use in their favor to force their customers to be dependent on them.

One of the college mates who landed a job in Cognizant messaged me, asking about trivial personal stuff about how we were faring in our lives. And then he broke down, crying how he was harassed by his managers, made to stay late at night, and had to take the blame for the mistake of their seniors. And how he hates his parents for forcing him into CS. This was about six months ago, and I’ve not heard anything back from him. His salary? It was about 4 lakhs (₹400,000) per annum, which is about ₹33k per month. Rent costs like ₹15-20k in Bengaluru, so they have to live in a crammed apartment with other bachelors, and it goes does to ₹10k (I highly doubt if they even rent places at ₹10k). 23k left, of which another ₹7-9k goes into paying for daily necessities like food, internet and transportation, of which, only ₹4-6k is left. Then there’s also debt to pay. Salaries do not go higher than ₹6 lakhs (₹600,000) per annum in such companies, unless you’re promoted to the level of a manager, which pays you ₹10-12k lakhs (my cousin sister is a manager in such company). And these wages do no account for the growing inflation. This is the peak wagie life.