Hiring software engineers in Indian start-ups: India has millions of software engineers from good educational backgrounds and reasonable work experience. This headline is well sold across the world. However, the truth when you scratch the surface is not very pretty. The software jobs in India have grown faster than the availability of software engineers. The jobs have come from large Indian services companies, outsourced software setups of foreign companies, foreign multinational software companies, Indian corporations, and Indian product and service-based companies.
If you try and setup a software company in India, you will have to compete for hiring against all the above mentioned companies. Above all, the main issues while hiring software engineers would include:
1.Most fresh candidates straight from engineering colleges are not well placed to deliver
The curriculum and focus on concrete software projects in engineering colleges is very limited to theoretical knowledge only. They may need a lot of training before they could be operational.
2. The large IT services companies in India will not help the cause.
They have been doing the same service oriented software development for decades. Many software engineers who work there get groomed with the same mind-set of working based on somebody else’s requirements – At any given point in time, the people in these companies sitting on bench (waiting to be assigned on a project) could be well over 30%. So many good potential software engineers sit work-less for months. This leads to many of these engineers getting rusty and less productive. – The notice period for most software engineers is 3 months. It is way too long for any hiring company to wait.
3. Competition from MNCs
The foreign companies are willing to pay high remuneration for experienced and skilled software engineers. That raises the salary expectations of all software engineers and it creates a vicious circle leading to unreasonably high compensation expectations
4. Unprofessionalism from Software Engineers
Unfortunately many software engineers would not act professionally and ethically. They may take multiple offers from various companies and negotiate them against each other. They will also most likely not work hard in any organization, and keep looking to switch to another company every year or two. All these factors create challenges in setting up and retaining efficient software development teams in India. It will cost a lot in terms of time, effort and money before you can get a good dedicated developers team. Several entrepreneurs and global organizations face this challenge and actually pull out of Indian development centers for these reasons.