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 ...
They pack in apartments, 3 to a bedroom, in cities like D.C and Chicago, and goldbrick and bullshit their way in, depressing our tech wages.
Well now they are taking over cities like where I live in Frisco Texas, and they live in nice homes in gated communities.
Are they sure he didn’t just walk in front of a train or be electrocuted by a low hanging power line? This happens so much in India it is astonishing. Go on X and search for “Indian dies” and your mouth will be slung open for hours. I don’t think there is an I.Q. over 70 or a licensed electrician in the entire damn country.
So much fear over AI, and yes there may be temporary shifts in employment that do cause upheaval for a number of years.
However, throughout human history, advancements in productivity and efficiency always lead to long term improvement in the general standard of living for the majority of the population.
I think what it comes down to is, if you are afraid of AI in the short term, you are against it. If you are financially independent, you are much more supportive.
That has not been my experience at all.
The H1-B people I worked with were fawning to their bosses and ruthlessly domineering and oppressive to their subordinates. Caste backgrounds were absolutely critical among peer groups, and peers were always in uneasy competition with each other.
Indians are very good at being polite and "helpful" when they tell you what they think you want to hear. Their culture rewards that behavior and harshly punishes those do otherwise. They can lie as easily as they breathe if all they have is adverse information for you and you are in some position of authority over them. You must be very careful in the questions that you ask.
It's not some moral failure of individual character. It is how they are taught to behave from earliest childhood. Yes, I have friends who were raised in India. They explained many things to me. Maybe those explanations were correct.
It takes careful reading between the lines to supervise Indian teams. They don't work the same way that American or European teams do. As peers and colleagues, I have found Indians cannot be trusted. They frequently backstab each other, and they may backstab you if circumstances get difficult for them.
"Your mileage may vary" as they say.
Yea, there are a whole cadre of execs who went all in for work- family, friends, hobbies, faith, tossed aside to rise up the ladder.
Since that was their choice the want it to be everyone’s life too. These guys must boil every time they have to see a happy person not hunched over a laptop.
80+ hr weeks were common in the US from the late 80s to 2000.
then the dems handed the IT sector to india via the H-1b visa program.
which also has a direct impact on national security.
“Your mileage may vary” as they say.
Indeed. But the one thing I learned is that if you want to get them on your side, learn about Cricket. I can talk to them about Cricket and they appreciate it.
They’re going to your house?
Hint: yes, they will, cause unlike rogue illegals we know who and where they all are and their visas expire without a job attached.
Here’s the big picture underpinning all of this evil:
worshipping a pantheon of fake gods leads to death and destruction.
There is only One Way to Life.
Well, I can only speak for tech, in smaller towns, they are the only doctors who will practice in more depressed areas and they buy the homes. I have worked with Indian-Americans most of my career, and I consider them just as competent as someone whose family has been here 150 years. It’s the mumblers from Bangalore or Mumbai here for 5 years who cheated their way through university in India(that is rampant) and then come here and goldbrick for $40 per hour. They really are 1/3 of an American in terms of job value. I saw a post on LinkedIn, and the guy got torched. “American companies need persons who know how to build the house, not guys who make the bricks, and Indians are the guys who make the bricks... bye!
>> 80+ hr weeks were common in the US from the late 80s to 2000.
Tell me about it. In my experience, 60 hour weeks were typical and 80 hour weeks at crunch time were not rare.
That was as a software salary slave. When I went out on my own the money got better but the time pressure got WORSE!
Actually “the dems” (being Ted Kennedy and Bruce Morrison, both Irish Republican agitators) cooperated with Bush 41 to implement H1B.
The Bush family just wanted to screw the unions like they did when they lobbied for opening China in the ‘70s.
Kennedy and Morrison as usual were only interested in getting more Irish Catholics into the country - they called them “underrepresented”. Those were called “Morrison visas”.
Back in the ‘80s there were a lot of Irish illegals in San Francisco. They worked in the bars, hotels, restaurants. Morrison and Kennedy likely wanted to legalize all of them and of course get them voting.
But the whole thing backfired on them with the Tata consulting takeover of the H1B component, something they didn’t see coming. Now Morrison criticizes H1B, but we can brand that a**hole with possibly destroying Western civilization. Along with his buddy The Swimmer.
People of low skills and low coping mechanisms are affected by this.
They are not highly intelligent.
The politicians are so terrified of the tech bros we have brought 3 million+ Indians over here and fired 3 million+ American white tech guys. And nobody talks about it. Not one media report in sight. It is breathtaking.
Not going to be truck drivers either.
The Eastern Europeans that I worked with were consistently the best software and hardware engineers. Some of the Russians were brilliant.
Feel free to relax at home … in India.
Removal is not impossible
Indians are cursed. They go into IT but many don’t understand it very well outside of the classroom. They know the theory but not the practice. That’s why they burn out.
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