Techie who worked at Microsoft compares Indian and global work culture, says Indians don't do deep tech work

A Reddit user claiming to have worked at Microsoft and Qualcomm is going viral for sharing views on the kind of work Indian tech teams handle. The techie argues that most Indian engineers rarely get the opportunity to work on "deep tech". Instead they are stuck with work on product integration and maintaining existing systems.

When it comes to tech, India is certainly seen as a country that has a skilled workforce and plenty of opportunities. But while choosing where to work, many Indian engineers still try to move abroad. There are multiple reasons and one of them, according to a former Microsoft and Qualcomm employee, is the chance to work on more complex technical problems. A Reddit post discussing this very issue is now going viral, where a user claiming to have worked both in India and abroad argues that most Indian tech teams rarely get the opportunity to work on “deep tech” problems.

The software engineer, who claimed to have worked at major technology companies including Microsoft and Qualcomm, with around 6 years of experience, argues that in India, software engineers do not get to work around Deep Tech, fundamental scientific or engineering breakthroughs. In a long post shared on the DevelopersIndia subreddit, the engineer claims that in India the focus of many companies is largely on product integration, feature development and maintaining existing systems rather than building core technologies.

“After working in India for several years, I’ve noticed that most engineering teams here — even in FAANG — rarely work on deep tech problems,” the user wrote, adding that while there are exceptions, they are relatively rare.

The techie maintains that a large portion of engineering work handled by teams in India focuses on tasks such as product integration, feature development, maintaining large codebases, and adapting systems originally designed elsewhere.

In the post, the engineers also criticised the hiring culture in the Indian tech industry, particularly the heavy focus on algorithm-based interview preparation, often referred to as the “LeetCode grind”. According to the user, many candidates spend years practising coding puzzles for interviews, even though their day-to-day work may not require that level of theoretical computer science depth.

“With the AI wave, I think this difference will become even more obvious. The world will need engineers who deeply understand systems, algorithms, hardware, distributed computing, and architecture — not just people who can solve coding puzzles quickly,” the user further wrote on Reddit.