So, I have a friend who is doing Electrical Communication Engineering from a tier 1 college. That’s not the issue. The problem is that he got a SWE (Software Engineer) position at Amazon. How can someone doing Electrical Engineering, with hardly any coding knowledge, land a SWE role? From what I know, this guy doesn’t even know how to code. When I asked him how he got the job, he said it was through DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms).
Then, I asked about his compensation. He told me it was ₹45L (around $53K) per year, which is a lot for India. But here’s the catch: I did some digging and found that more than half of his compensation is in stock, which will vest over 4–5 years. Essentially, after this year, his cash component will be much lower. He tried explaining it to me, but I didn’t fully understand.
The thing is, I asked around, and many people from other colleges said the same thing. If this is true, then damn—next layoffs at FAANG India are going to be crazy because what are they even going to do with such hires?
I’ve interviewed for multiple intern positions at startups—some without compensation—and even had to go through technical interviews. For backend roles, I had to design a distributed OAuth server to handle token issuance, validation, and revocation. For MLOps roles, I had to deploy on Kubernetes and install CUDA drivers on servers. On top of that, there were take-home assignments, yet I didn’t even get a callback. And these guys just did LeetCode and got jobs? What a joke. If this is how they’re hiring, the quality of work is going to decline very fast.
But there’s another angle to this—there are rumors about some hiring managers favoring female candidates for certain roles. I’ve also noticed that women seem to be doing better at getting jobs in tech. It feels like they’ve cracked the code for securing these positions. However, I came across some Twitter threads where male employees from FAANG companies made creepy remarks about women, and a few women came forward claiming they were harassed in private chats. Most of these incidents involved individuals from Microsoft India, though there are similar rumors about other FAANG companies. Honestly, I think some of these rumors might be true, which is unsettling.
