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IITian CEO slams Indian techies, says they don’t want to work 6 days a week ‘even with ₹1 crore salary’
Giga ML co-founder and CEO Varun Vummadi criticized Indian engineers for their reluctance to work hard despite high salaries.
The San Francisco-based co-founder of a tech company has criticised the work ethic of Indian engineers, claiming they don’t want to work hard even when drawing massive salaries Varun Vummadi took to the social media platform X to air his complaint, saying that hiring for his company’s Indian office has been tough because most engineers are reluctant to work six days a week even when they earn a base pay of ₹1 crore per annum or above.
Vummadi is the co-founder and CEO of Giga ML, an applied AI lab focused on building end-to-end customer care agents. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, he is currently based in San Francisco.
“Unwilling to work hard”
In his X post, the IITian slammed Indian engineers who, according to him, are unwilling to put in the amount of work commensurate with their salaries. Vummadi claimed that more senior techies with three to eight years of experience are unwilling to work six days a week.
“I’ve noticed a pattern in hiring engineers for our Indian office. Even with a base salary of ₹1 crore, many are unwilling to work hard. A significant number of engineers with 3–8 years of experience are reluctant to work six days a week,” he wrote.
His post proved divisive on X, where many people sided with engineers who don’t want to work six days a week.
“You can't buy cracked folks. They appreciate money, don't worship it!” wrote one X user, to which Vummadi responded: “You can’t buy in SF. But you can in India majority of cracked engineers in India are heavily motivated by high salaries.”
“Weird way to phrase that a lot of 26-32 year people prefer having a 2 day weekend in their lives. Sounds pretty normal to me,” another X user named Aman noted.
In fact, a number of people accused Vummadi of being one of those founders who want to increase profit by overworking employees.
“People are finally realizing the importance of prioritizing health above all else,” read one comment under his post, which comes hot on the heels of the work-life balance controversy created by L&T chairman’s comments on wanting employees to work on Sunday too.
“why not hire 2 engineers and expect a reasonable working hours from them?” X user Rishika Gupta asked Vummadi.
(Also read: ‘How long can you stare at your wife?’: L&T chairman says he wants employees to work on Sunday too)
