This is the age of AI and disruption is happening at light speed. It’s important to restructure the hiring processes and systems that have been followed so far and requires new outlook. Here are my comprehensive thoughts and observations based on my experience.

Covid19 Hiring, payment bubbles, fakes, & nukes

  • I have seen a trend of ruthless hiring with ridiculous payments during Covid19 period until the closure of pandemic. In India, at least I have seen people grabbing opportunities which we couldn’t imagine and I look at it as mis-hires.

  • For instance, a 2+ years experienced engineer was offered wages > a 10+ years experienced person. Is it really worth? Is it a supply demand issue? Is the candidate a rock-star dev or a champion?

    • First off, I have no say on these exorbitant payments to young engineers, it’s up to the employers to analyze and hope this data point was already taken into cognizance.

  • Another case was a <=5 years experienced candidate was offered positions like Technical Architect, Product Manager.

    • There would be some arguments like why wouldn’t a 5 years experienced person be a Technical Architect or a Product Manager

    • Sure

      • Why can’t a person who’s contested and won a local body election directly jump to a Chief Minister Post through MLC(a political party nominated post) without having experience as an MLA or worked as a Minister?

    • So, regarding these title misalignments I think it will impact the eco-system, org charts and hierarchies will lose respect IMHO. This is a rare case of the candidate attaining that level of knowledge and expertise within 5 years. Still, I personally disagree with these Job titles given to <=5 years experienced person.

    • Here's why I believe so

      1. He or She wouldn’t have learnt enough in 5 years. I consider failures as very crucial for an engineer in the early stages of their careers. This is only possible if you are trying and attempting new things and learning lessons the hard way. And, I believe that an experienced engineer will get things done with less room for systemic failures. They’ll have broader and better perspective and the way they look at things is different(In a positive sense) from <=5 years experienced person.

        Note: I am not saying always value the years of experience. I am talking about real, quality experience that’s relevant to the open job position and how vast and diverse it was and number of domains covered etc, as a hiring manager your should get a confidence that he or she can pull it off besides their technical caliber.
        This should be one of the criteria to consider and allot a Job title to a candidate BUT not the ONLY criteria.

      2. For a life suggestion and wisdom, would you like to hear from a 65+ old or 30+ or 18+?

  • What could be the reason for these mis-hires?
    • Most of the services/product companies have things running in parallel like new road-map initiatives, new project discussions, bids, budget-allocations, value proposition discussions, sign offs and deals happening at higher level and generally they onboard with 1 or 2 key people like Project Delivery Lead and Solution Architect, once the solution approach is proposed followed by high level breakdown, documentations, and further negotiations will happen regarding the delivery timelines. This is the vital step, often times the deals are signed with aggressive timelines for various reasons, competition, corporate strategy, anticipating the future assignments and long-term renewals for service orgs, and for product may be the feature is new and first entrant in that market segment.
    • Now, the targets are given to the recruiters to onboard resources with x, y, and z skill-sets in couple of weeks. At times, the resources with these skills may not be available in the pool, so they go for external hires.
    • And during Covid times this led to the expansion of the horizon of loopholes further and was subjected to exploitation by the greedy and despos.
      • We have witnessed the great resignation trend in IT due to stress, overwork, burnout, preference to mental-wellbeing etc due to indefinite remote work. So there was a trend of more demand and less supply of resources for few quarters. The lucky(from their POV) ones are the desperate and hungry ones who wanna be employed in IT Sector without prior genuine experience.
      • Recruiters are under pressure to close the positions and candidates are desperate to break into IT by hook or crook.
      • So, candidates are hired at insanely fast recruitment process with crazy exponential hikes and pay-scales with fancy and loose Job titles unmatched to the candidates experience.
    • During that times, many unheard-of incidents happened.
      • For instance some greedy candidates have accepted 3 Full time jobs(Not signed up as part-time or contractual work) at one time and were doing all of them in parallel managing with proxies and outsourcing the job itself, technically they were employed by 3 employers as FTE(Full time Employee) at a time on paper which was not OK in India(How can 3 PF accounts be opened at once in the same time window). Later some of them got caught and nuked. Uncaught are scot-free.
    • And, some have accepted the offers in which they have no proficiency, these candidates were not properly filtered during interview.

      Interview performance doesn’t always guarantee the candidates performance after on-board.

    • As there is a saying "sooner or later truth comes out" candidates of this category were nuked due to performance issues.
    • One step further, some of the candidates have faked their experiences with fake documentation to break into IT sector taking advantage of lock-down and remote virtual interview situations. Some are caught in interviews and abruptly quit from the interview calls. Later, some are caught post on-board during BGV checks and the uncaught ones are scot-free.

  • Note that any candidate/student who’s passed in during the years of Covid in India, be it 10th Standard, 12th or B.Tech or equivalent in some of the universities were just auto passed without a written or oral exam to close the academic year. So, if you are a startup or mid-size employer when hiring focus on the education and pass-out years. If it’s during Covid period, assess the candidates accordingly and rest is based on your hiring risk appetite.

Don’t go by IVY institute tags

  • For employers outside India before hiring candidates from IIT/NIT/IIM you got to know what is the real eligible criteria and parameters to get into these institutes. Every candidate having IIT/NIT/IIM is not a gem or shining stone, don’t fall into this trap. If you wanna hire these candidates layout separate benchmark and interview plan/process/number of rounds for these candidates unless if you don’t prefer to exclusively extend your hiring budget for these candidates.
  • I got to work with some of the smartest people from these IVY institutes, they are ambitious, open-minded, and have futuristic thinking and vision. On a contrary, unfortunately I had to work with some of them, whom I found to be disgusting and their life is running by marketing with this IVY tag day-in and day-out and just wearing crown of ignorance.

    This has only strengthened my opinion that never ever ever never buy this IVY tags baggage.

    All that glitters is not gold.

  • How about internationally acclaimed IVY league institutions.
    • At one point in my career, I have worked with a candidate having Stanford tag with Supply chain background plus technical programming experience. In every meeting where the average audience count was at least 15+. This genius has always created a regret feeling for everyone who’s joined the meeting with obscene display of intelligence.
    • Later, I learned and realized that there are various parameters and eligibility criteria to get into such universities like diversity, inclusivity etc. Needless to say, you can find some top personalities in the internet in politics and they claim to have Stanford Degree and their IQ is stack-overflowed as you know.
  • In 2025 for startups or established orgs when you are hiring for junior to mid-level positions and considering these IVY returned candidates you must re-think is it really worth paying 10x/50x of an average candidate given the tools at hand like Chatgpt, Copilot, Windsurf and other LLMs. If you are maintaining any flight risk tags in your HR database these candidates will top the table. There are some exceptions to this, there are some smartest and best engineers from these IVY institutes, so assess and decide.

    Note: I am not in complete support for Chatgpt, Copilot etc, I have a distinct or surprisingly unpopular opinion on these tools, which I will share in a dedicated post. But, the crux of this point is when your are trying to fill a freshman or mid-level position don’t ONLY prefer Institute tags especially in this day and age when most of the knowledge is out there. And think as a founder of startup is it worth paying 10x or 50x more for a college freshman.

Don’t consider previous Job titles

  • I happened to work with someone titled as Project Manager having 10+ years experience on paper. But, this candidate can’t type a sentence without a supporting tool like Grammarly or auto-correction, pretty consistent in typing wrong sentences in 30+ member group chats having some of the leadership members in the group. The worse is the person couldn’t understand any subject matter. Job routine looks like this: passing/forwarding/tagging team members in MsTeams/Email messages from bottom to top and top to bottom, I mean pass messages to people above their level and to the team below their level. And they are skilled in creating JIRA tickets, creating confusion, false alarms, hype every petty issue raised or ask in group chats tagging everyone to disturb and catch attention. Sadly creates situations like only 5 mins left before closing bell of financial markets. They will top the list if there's a Microsoft Teams chat analytics dashboard that gives insights like the employee with most chat messages in a week, month, quarter, year

Broadly speaking, can’t a bot do these tasks like adding initial comments to JIRA tickets and add follow up comments, forwarding emails to the team, forwarding MsTeams messages, asking for status updates in Teams channels.

  • Another instance, after the first week of my joining in an org I have joined the Standup call, in the call, I have seen a SCRUM Master who was blatantly cheated by contract-workers from outsourced company by giving absolutely wrong, unrealistic, and lazy estimates just for billing purposes. On top of that, for the first time in my career I have seen 3-to-4 names were assigned to a ticket in Agility, may be some projects follow that structure, but still I couldn’t get the right reasoning because the tickets/tasks are not that complex that 3-to-4 people should work on, even if it is so why aren’t those broken down?

I was literally flabbergasted. I worked in a contractor setup too, but never seen a case like this.

  • When I asked the project manager regarding the multiple member assignment to the ticket. The answers was

“There were too many people in the team for little work so a story/task was assigned to 3/4 people in a tool.”

  • I strongly believe that this is just the negligence of Project Manager by not flagging this.

  • Do we need a SCRUM master who just assigns the members to the tickets and accepts the estimates given by them?

  • Do you really want project managers of this standard?

These are just the examples of bad Project Managers.

  • On the brighter side, I have worked in projects with incredible project mangers having excellent planning, execution, and team building skills. They are aligned with project goals, road-map items and always in sync with Architects and they consult Senior Devs and Architects for estimates, task assignments, and before sending out an important note that requires technical aid. Also, they get things done without being pushy.

  • How did some of them got these titles?
    • Every company will have their own promotion criteria and policies. Some good orgs have an assessment test for promotion, and some have a criteria to be in the current title for max 3 years and beyond that you are automatically promoted.

      I have seen a candidate who stayed in a company for 20 years and now the candidate is close to the edge of the ladder. How about the skills required for that position? Only people working with him/her can tell or scream. I am sure it will be an everyday nightmare and warfare for the people working with them.

  • Don’t hire or fill Leadership positions just because they have 20+ years experience, look at the quality of the experience, and breadth of the experience along with depth.

    Have a mandatory psychometric assessment for leadership positions.

    I have seen some people in leadership positions without a single leadership quality, they couldn’t handle pressure themselves, have zero patience to converse with team, short-tempered, judgmental, sheer arrogance, no respect for the craft and the team they are leading, full of themselves, insecure, bossy, boasty, and annoying. These are the traits of mentally sick, immature, and weak individuals.

    Leadership is an art - This is not for everyone

  • It would be a catastrophe if an employer offers a highest leadership position for candidates like this considering their previous title.

Don’t fall for LinkedIn profiles

  • Majority of the Linkedin is filled with crap. In my view it’s <Instagram, >Facebook, +/- Tiktok
  • We can find Politicians, Comedians, Hollywood actors, Real estate brokers, Mutual Fund agents, Cold callers, Spammers, Sellers, Impersonators etc, Spiritual Gurus. Journalists posting news articles, Facebook re-posts, Whatsapp memes, spiritual posts.
  • For professionals their walls are filled with high quality productive posts like

    Just joined __ corp and these are my onboarding goodies, wish me good luck.

  • Coming to individual profiles, sky is the only limit for a profile to boast.
    • At one point an intern who has just completed Masters from a USA university was tagged to the project I am handling, when I asked what was your background and what tech you are familiar with, candidate replied

      C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Javascript, Typescript, DataScience, AI ML, DevOps, Azure, AWS

      • I took nearly 10 seconds pause. It felt like concussion.
      • I thought that the candidate must have forgotten to add ChatGpt.
      • Interestingly, candidate’s LinkedIn profile was also claiming to know everything. The candidate wasn’t lying it’s exactly what was mentioned in the LinkedIn.

  • This has become a fad to self-proclaim and do unrealistic claims in LinkedIn profiles.

Are H-1B holders in Tech worth the VISA

  • H-1B’s intent is to hire the speciality skilled workers from outside the country, but is every H-1B holder having a speciality skill and even if they fall under that category are they worth it. Is everyone holding that visa worth it or only a few or many?

  • What are these speciality skills(In Tech)? Are these skills so hard to find in local talent?

  • Think.
  • As an employer do you really need to pay that fat and hefty pay-cheques for these candidates.

    I hear an argument that "H-1B candidates are relatively cheaper to hire compared to local talent"

    • I don’t think it’s entirely true at least from the little that I know
    • Even though if it is the case, and the objective is to do cost-effective hiring with quality talent why not do remote hires and you’ll have rest of the world to choose from.

    Are these H-1B candidates transforming projects and companies from red to green, or green to greener?

    Exceptions are always there and outliers exist.

  • I strongly believe you can form an exceptionally talented remote team instead of hiring a single H-1B candidate.
  • So far in my work experience out of all the H-1B visa holders I have worked with, I found only a single digit number of candidates that are worth the H-1B visa.

  • Hire local talent or can opt for remote hiring(find quality hires at reasonable cost) and keep the H-1B candidate hiring as last option unless you have a specific pressing reasons like Employer Tax benefits etc.

Prefer in-person interviews

  • Do in-person interviews for Senior Management and Leadership positions. If you have almost decided to onboard a candidate for Leadership position who is in other country or continent, do one final in-person on-site interview and meet the candidate before the final offer rollout. You cannot afford a wrong hire for leadership position but you can afford travel expenses.

  • For other roles
    • If the candidate is residing in your country, state/province do in-person interview.
    • For remote hiring or hiring candidates from other countries or continents, it may not be practical to do in-person interview, so invest in right tools and have processes and systems in place for legitimate and authentic interviews.


In sum, it’s high time we preserve and maintain the quality in IT industry. The first step is to redefine the hiring processes and make this Tech job market open, hopeful, and welcoming for genuinely hardworking and passionate people.