Posted on 05/27/2026 7:41:19 AM PDT by Cronos
On a warm night last May, Nikhil Somwanshi sent his roommate a WhatsApp message asking him to tell his family that what was about to happen next was an accident.
The message triggered a frantic search for the 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in southeast Bengaluru
Somwanshi was a star student from a small village in the farm-dotted countryside. 9mths earlier he’d landed a coveted job at Ola Krutrim, an artificial intelligence startup worth $1 billion.
Getting a job at Krutrim was a big deal for Somwanshi and his community. Banners went up in his village, congratulating him. He sent funds from his first paycheck to his parents, who built a small temple on their land in gratitude for their son’s good fortune. His salary of 3.7 million rupees ($41,000) was nearly 10 times what his family earned from farming.
But something has gone awry in the industry Somwanshi was entering. 83% of India’s tech workers suffer from burnout, according to one recent survey. One in four clocks over 70 hours a week. In Bengaluru, tech workers account for a starkly disproportionate 20% of patients seeking transplants due to organ failure, according to a leading regional newspaper. A study of tech employees in the IT hub of Hyderabad found that 84% had a liver disease linked to long hours of sedentary work and high stress.
Some of India’s tech leaders, meanwhile, are advocating 70-hour and even 90-hour workweeks, instead of the national legal maximum of 48.
Tech workers paint a picture of mounting anxiety. From junior software engineers to senior project managers, workers at firms across the industry were buckling under the burden of deadlines. They had little time for themselves or their families, and worried about layoffs. Most said they feared conditions would only worsen with the rise of AI.
(Excerpt) Read more at restofworld.org ...
In my experience, they don’t even know the theory—they merely had their parents or someone else bribe the instructors to get the diploma. Absolute rubbish engineers.
They know all the buzzwords. Programming is something that not everyone wants to do and if you don’t like it, it’s a horrible career. It will eat you alive and I have seen it happen too many times.
So... AI is cheaper than Indian workers? That’s hard to believe!!
Our Founding Fathers were right about the Irish...
More then they knew.
Many have started to come to their senses now that they see the forces they unleashed but...it may be too late.
“Some of the Russians were brilliant”
and that’s why I think Putin really wasted Russia’s potential by focusing on empire building and warfare.
Yeah, I did see some of what you describe.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.