EXCLUSIVE: The largest analysis of engineering salaries in India!

We analyzed 25,000 salaries to find the companies that pay the most and the least, and open-sourced it all.

Pay transparency is VERY important in India: there can be a 5x diff in pay for the same role!

🧵

1/6 While Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart and Flipkart are some of the most common employers, Google at a median pay of 66LPA ($80k) is the highest paying common one.

Rubrik, Coinbase and Twilio make up the top 3 highest paying overall with many employees making 1cr+ ($120k)!

2/6

The AI girlfriend epidemic is bigger than I thought it was.

8 of the top 50 most used Gen AI apps in the world are mostly AI companionship:
Character
Janitor
CrushOn
Yodayo
Candy
SpicyChat
Chub
DreamGF

With loneliness rising, this will fill the gap, whether we like it or not. Others:
Soulfun AI
Muah AI
Nomi AI
Replika
Kupid AI
RomanticAI

Even if you're not a user, I'd check these out to get a taste of what is out there in the world. Most of these have apps have in the millions of users.

Huge Immigration News!

Today for the first time ever, USCIS published a breakdown of priority dates of Indians on EB visa backlog.

There's been a huge uptick of EB-1 in '22 which means the PD won't be current for ~2-3 years at best!

Chart for Indians on EB-1.

1/4 I've written about the way to understand how these numbers translate to the expected wait, agnostic of new applications and transferred PDs, here:

It's too complicated for a tweet.

Here's the chart for Indians on EB-2.

2/4 debarghyadas.com/writes/eb-wait…

In the last 20yrs, "study CS and work in tech" became a "path" to wealth

Now:
—BigTech did layoffs, aren't hiring
—Tech job postings are ~40% of '21
—Startups often prefer tenured hires
—Huge pipeline of CS majors: 40% of MIT

Winter is coming for software engineering.
🧵

1/5 Beyond that, there seems to be less and less whitespace for software to create value in people's lives. Compare how much time we spent with tech in the year 2000 as a society vs 2024.

Companies are trending to being smaller and more efficient, not large and IBM-like.

2/5

Google Gemini doesnt generate white people even when you ask for a medieval king, pope, American or even Google's own founders!

Carmack, Balaji, Paul Graham, LeCun, Andreesen and Elon have all expressed dissent

Google hotfixed it for now.

🧵 of the popular screw-ups on X

1/19 Black king of France from the 18th century

2/19

https://twitter.com/1235608350861045761/status/1760116228746805272

My #1 tip for engineers navigating the rough hiring market is to uncover hot startups you may not know.

Reach out to the junior VCs with an email asking them who is doing well and whether they're hiring!

Some budding superstar startups compensate handsomely for talent.

1/5 Most engineers who are graduating college wrongly assume:
— Startups don't pay well
— Most startups can die suddenly (you usually have a healthy forewarning)
— Startups won't sponsor visas
— Lack of job security

These are usually false.

2/5

Winter is coming for Indian Masters students in the US this year.

~50,000-65,000 Indian Masters students in CS are going to graduate looking for tech jobs that *most* will NOT find.

This is the single largest international student subgroup in the US.

THREAD

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1/7 When most people look at international student data, they view it in aggregate which hides the underlying severity.

Graduate and undergrad look very different.

India sends the most grad students to the US, primarily for a Masters degree — 166k!

2/7

Raising a child in the US seems hellish compared to India.

US—Wake up early, cook, drive kid to work, both parents work, do groceries, chores, cleaning. Lonely.

India—Maid cleans, driver drops you, groceries in 15mins, cook cooks, parents babysit. Community.

(requires $$)

1/4 Specifically, this holds true for a Rs ~35L+ ($40k) household income in India and <$1M in the US.

ALL my friends who moved to India as parents are happy, but the few who did the reverse are not. Most ensure the baby has US citizenship.

I'm in India, and I see it vividly.

2/4

Youtube will do an ABSURD ~$40-45B revenue in 2023.

Youtube's implied valuation would be ~$225-250B, the size of Adobe!

That would make them the largest video app by revenue by FAR, over Netflix (~$35B), TikTok (~$18B) and the rest!

Here's the math—

1/6 Youtube revenue is split into advertising and subscriber revenue. Ads is reported under "Youtube Ads" but subscriber revenue is under "Google other".

Aside from that, Google Other includes Google Play, hardware and more.

Here's the Q3 2023 earnings.

2/6

HUGE Immigration News: proposed changes to H-1B, the US immigrant worker visa!

Highlights of the 277 doc, in non-legalese
—Stop H-1B fraud from Indian IT, increase lottery odds by +60%
—Allow entrepreneurship on H-1B!
—More!

BIG fan of the new rules.

Let's break it down—

1/7 1a. Stop H-1B fraud

In FY2024, there were 780k H-1B lottery registrations, driven by Indian IT firms registering multiple times. Only ~469k or so are unique.

Rule now says the lottery will require passport number and one passport will count as 1 registration.

2/7

EB-1 green card applications from India are being processed 6.5yrs in the past (2017), the most retrogressed it's EVER been.

This is driven by the uptick of Indian EB-1C "multinational managers" which will hit an all-time high of ~7800 in 2023, half of ALL EB-1Cs!

1/4 Experts say this date isn't going to move forward anytime soon.

The EB-1Cs are primarily driven by
—Indian IT companies
—people who worked outside the US in a "managerial capacity" during the pandemic

An EB-1 is one of the ways to skip the 150+yr normal green card line.

2/4

Only 0.3% of Indians go to the gym.

— Streets not built for walking, and air quality is low
— Most food is unhealthy: fried, processed, low protein
— Social events are centered around food and drink
— Culturally, "life" > fitness

This drastically reduces our lifespan.

1/5 Indians are predisposed to a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension. Who doesn't know a relative who has had to have heart surgery or take insulin?

In other parts of the world, more educated people take diet and fitness seriously.

2/5

https://twitter.com/debarghya_das/status/1569879113464446982

BIG Immigration news!

UCSIS made a huge statement about how it evaluates the EB-1A Extraordinary Ability visa, the only non-backlogged one for Indians.

Top Highlights:

High Salary
"person’s highly valued equity holdings in the startup are of comparable significance"

1/10 Leading and Critical Role
"Founder or co-founder of, or contributor of intellectual property to, a startup business that has a distinguished reputation"

With distinguished reputation defined as—

2/10

Most people today move to a new city for work and are lonely.

We're never formally taught the art of making friends in a new city. Here's 10 things that worked for me:

1/11 Don't associate introversion to your identity.

Go out and talk to people, it won't kill you. Get better at it. Say hi first. Start by exchanging a few words when ordering a coffee. Speak clearly and groom yourself to be approachable. Introverts hate loneliness too.

2/11

So many of my friends do an MBA despite the $200k+ price tag.

Not one of them say "to learn business". Here are their real 11 reasons:
1. In my field, the "tag", espp HBS / GSB / Wharton, opens doors.
2. I need a break from my job and I could use 2 years.

🧵

1/4 3. I don't like my job and I need it to switch careers (engineer -> PM / VC, consulting -> finance).
4. My undergrad wasn't at a great place, and I wanted a better brand.
5. My parents always painted this vision of engineering + MBA as the "path" and I need to fulfill it.

2/4

Apple Vision Pro fits a ~4K display in a tiny 3.6cm screen.

This is only possible because of cutting edge advancements in display research.

It's the BEST
—Pixel density: 3400ppi, 7x iPhone 14
—Brightness: 5000 nits, 4x iPhone 14

of all consumer displays in the world!

🧵

1/4 The new display, made by Sony and TSMC, uses "micro-OLED" technology.

It uses lithography used to fabricate chips to create a silicon backplane with an OLED front plane to create a tiny, dense 3800x3000 display.

But it's far from what's possible...

2/4

In the first study of its kind, we looked at the outcomes of the top 250 rankers from the IIT class of 2013-2020.

HALF of the top ranking IITians 30-32 years old are in the USA, but only 20% of the 25 year olds are!

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1/4 This could mean one of two things:
—IITians tend to move to the US later on in life
—Younger IITians prefer to stay in India

Most of this sample of people study Computer Science at IIT Bombay or IIT Delhi.

2/4

How much time and money does it take to train an LLM from scratch?

MosaicGPT—7B—21d—$20k
LLaMA—65B— 21d — $2.2M
GPT-3—175B—34d—$1.8M
PaLM—540B—50d—$7-15M
GPT-4—?—6-12mo —$100M+ (?)

Even with 8x of new Nvidia H100s, GPT4 could take $150M and 500+yrs to train!

1/4 Assumptions:
—@emad assumed "100M A100hrs" for GPT-4. No better estimate!
—First 4 model stats come from real data in the papers
—I used 0.35x from @MosaicML's blog to convert A100 hrs to H100hrs
—Latitude and Coreweave offer H100s at $4.76/hr and ~$4.91/hr. A100 is $2.21/hr

2/4

Heart disease is the highest cause of death in Indians at ~25%.

Outside India, we're 2-3x more affected than the local population, and research shows its genetic.

With 500M+ Indians at at-risk age, this may be one of the MOST impactful unsolved issues of humanity.

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1/5 For heart disease amongst Indians
—Mortality due grew +40% from 2009–19
—Hospitalization rate is 5-10x < age 40
—Relative risk is 6.6x in the US compared to average

I personally know so many uncles ~60yo who have had bypass surgery (CABG).

What can you do to prevent this?

2/5

H-1B numbers dropped yesterday and they’re APPALLING.

781k applicants competing for 85k spots, with 96k people from primarily Indian IT cos accounting for 409k apps.

ITServe lobbies for this to happen, and we send home well-educated students in the US as a result.

Outrageous. This is a different kind of abuse than misusing prevailing wage: after the fee was reduced to $10, there are purportedly shell companies solely to create multiple applications without actually having a job offer (immediate layoff if they don’t get an H-1B).

~50-60% of H-1B holders in the last decade are from outsourcing shops.

They abuse the system and pay ~$80k. Excluding them, a high-skilled worker makes $120k+.

Does sending back an MIT ML PhD for a $60k Infosys worker sound fair?

It needs to be fixed.

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1/5 Methodology—

I took the data from h1bdata [dot] info and used ChatGPT to classify company names into BPO or not. In the last 10 years, 57% of the top 1000 employers were from BPO shops. This doesn't account for bonuses and stock comp, just base salary.

Who even are they?

2/5