Indian Startup Founder Reviews 1,000 Engineer CVs, Finds Less than 5 Worth Hiring
While Meta, OpenAI, and Google compete fiercely, paying millions and billions of dollars to attract top talent, Indian companies continue to struggle to hire even a single qualified individual. While this has been the case for the longest time, the situation is only worsening with the rise of AI. “India seriously has a big f***ing talent problem,” said Umesh Kumar, co-founder of Runable, a platform where anyone can build AI agents. “We got around 1,000 applications for a backend engineering role in just the last two to three days, and guess how many were actually decent? [Less than five].” Kumar’s startup was hiring backend developers with a no-nonsense offer: ₹50 lakh base pay, relocation, food, and a shot at working with top-tier talent. The hiring process involved a simple coding task, two calls and one paid trial. And yet, his hunt continues. Kumar’s frustration isn’t unique. It’s becoming the new normal. He’s not alone in swimming through a flood of AI-generated junk code and resume lies. The skyrocketing salaries at Silicon Valley startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, coupled with the so-called GenAI “upskilling”, are pushing Indian software engineers to expect exorbitant salaries. However, the truth is that many of them don’t have the technical skills to justify those high salaries. In a post last year, author and IT professional Ratnakar Sadasyula narrated the story of candidates demanding extremely high salaries. “Now, that would not be an issue if these people were extraordinarily brilliant, or IIT-NIT passouts.” “Most of them are from ordinary engineering colleges. Forget about being extraordinary, they are not even of decent ability (sic),” he said, adding that most did not even possess proper communication skills. Much of this demand for higher salaries among the new generation stems from the startup boom in 2020, when people were recruited for lofty salaries, at times even without the required skill set or ability. “And now we have an entire generation that acts so entitled, demanding high pay for just about decent skills,” Sadasyula said. Read: Indian Techies Dream of Big Paychecks, But Face Reality Checks AI-Washed Resumes, Broken Code “Code that doesn’t even run,” Kumar said, further pointing out that many engineers can’t even add the libraries needed for the code to work. This sentiment was widely echoed by the community. Another user shared their ordeal, revealing that they manually reviewed 300 resumes, and out of that large pool, only 15 were remotely decent. They eventually ended up hiring just two of them. Umesh agrees. His team uses ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor on a daily basis. But the engineers they hire know where AI ends and logic begins. Others added that the situation is likely going to worsen with the use of AI in colleges. India produces approximately 1.5 million engineers every year. But ask any founder, CTO, or engineering head—and they’ll tell you: hiring good engineers is a painfully complex process. “Been happening since 2002. I remember interviewing dudes who’d remembered every axiom and design pattern off by heart but couldn’t actually code anything,” Mark A, a seasoned entrepreneur said on X. According to TeamLease, only 5.5% of Indian engineers are employable with basic programming skills. Yet, thousands of job seekers flood listings, fuelled by LinkedIn optimism and ChatGPT hallucinations. The situation is no better for product-focused companies. Gautam Goenka, VP of engineering at UiPath, earlier told AIM that hiring is a challenge for them. “You don’t get that talent easily.” While entry-level recruitment poses fewer challenges, the difficulty rises significantly at senior levels.Read: Why India is Running Out of Skilled Engineers This is echoed across the board, as most of the universities do not teach their students how to code. “I have a cousin who’s in his third year of CS with no internship and always complains at family gatherings about how bad the market is. I then asked him to show me his resume…Let’s just say bro has a calculator as his project,” a Redditor stated. They explained that it is indeed true that a lot of graduates are just not competent enough in coding to secure CS jobs. Moreover, startups can’t compete with the compensation, brand pull, or comfort of global tech giants. As Sarbojit Mallick, co-founder of Instahyre, put it, “In today’s Indian job market, we’ve observed that many core engineers aspire to move into managerial roles rather quickly. They often see managerial positions within the broader IT sector as more appealing and potentially offering better compensation.” This isn’t a new issue. In 2017, it was reported that 95% of Indian engineers were unable to code. It’s now 2025, and not much has changed. Only now, the broken C code has been replaced by AI-injected Python wrappers. India’s AI Pipe Dream, Choked by a Talent Gap According to Quess, India has 4.16 lakh AI professionals. However, there is an estimated 51% demand-supply gap. Despite producing five to 10 million STEM grads annually, India is running out of skilled engineers. India has fewer than 2,000 senior AI engineers capable of building foundational AI products. According to staffing solution provider Xpheno, that’s less than 1% of the engineering talent. This is because of brain drain, low domestic pay (₹9–21 lakh for senior AI engineers), and a global tech market that hires the best Indians, only to ship them out. Most Indian CS graduates don’t learn to code until after graduation—if at all. Instead, they do research for irrelevant papers or build static websites labelled as “portals”. Read: Most Indian CS Graduates Can’t Code Professors, many of whom have never worked in production environments, are ill-equipped to teach real-world skills. According to Reddit threads and developer testimonials, AI tools are now used to replace learning altogether. Startups like Kumar’s encourage the use of tools like Copilot and Claude. But while their engineers know when to put it away and think, most candidates don’t. Kumar will continue sifting through 995 trash applications to find five decent ones.
The startup was hiring backend developers with ₹50 lakh base pay, relocation, food, and a shot at working with top-tier talent. Yet, the hunt continues.
“India seriously has a big f***ing talent problem,” said Umesh Kumar, co-founder of Runable, a platform where anyone can build AI agents.
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Mohit writes about AI in simple, explainable, and often funny words. He's especially passionate about chatting with those building AI for Bharat, with the occasional detour into AGI.