On scaling an engineering team in India
Three things your India plan assumes that aren’t true.
I read a lot of these plans. The same three assumptions turn up in most of them, all of them reasonable, all of them wrong in ways that cost a quarter or two before anyone notices.
One: the ninety-day notice period is not the law
Everybody tells foreign employers that India runs on ninety days’ notice, generally in the tone you would use for a tax rule, and it ends up in plans as a fixed constraint that nobody thinks to question.
It isn’t one. Private-sector employment here is governed by the contract rather than by automatic statutory protection, with notice periods running anywhere from 15 to 90 days depending on seniority, the type of employment and the applicable state law. Ninety days is a convention in IT services and financial services. It is a term someone negotiated, not a rule someone legislated.
Terms that were negotiated can be negotiated again. Buyouts are ordinary. Partial waivers are ordinary. What determines whether you get one is whether anybody raised it early, and in most searches nobody does until the offer is signed and the clock has already started.
The practical failure isn’t the ninety days. It’s treating the notice window as dead time. Three months in which a candidate stays embedded with their current employer, being talked out of leaving, while the hiring company goes quiet because the paperwork is done. Plan for that window as part of the process and most of the risk goes away.
Two: Bengaluru is not the only answer
The default plan puts the team in Bengaluru, and for deep specialist hiring that is still often right. It is also getting less automatic every year.
Tier-two cities are growing considerably faster than the established hubs, with Coimbatore, Kochi and Ahmedabad well ahead of tier-one growth rates. The centre count nationally is heading toward more than 2,100 by FY28, with around 150 new ones opening each year.
Read that as a hiring signal rather than a property one. Every new centre in your chosen city is another employer with a recognisable brand competing for the same people, and the established hubs are where that competition is fiercest. A smaller market with fewer rivals can be a better place to keep a team than a larger one where everybody is recruiting everybody.
The honest counter-argument is depth. Specialist and very senior hiring still concentrates in the big hubs, and a plan needing principal-level people in volume will struggle outside them. Which is the actual question worth arguing about internally, rather than which city has the cheapest desks.
Three: cheap engineers do not mean cheap engineering leadership
The cost case is what starts the conversation, and it holds up well in the middle of the org chart. It gets applied to the whole chart, and that’s where plans break.
Senior leadership here is repricing quickly. Government projections have global roles held from India rising from 6,500 to over 30,000 by 2030, while Indians currently hold only around 10 to 13% of leadership positions in these centres. A scarce layer, in rising demand, with every established employer promoting into it.
So a plan that applies one blended discount to every level will fill the middle comfortably and then stall at the top. The role goes unfilled for two quarters, or it gets filled by someone the market had priced correctly and you hadn’t.
Budget the leadership hire separately. It is a different market with different dynamics, and treating it as the same market with a bigger number attached is how you end up with forty engineers and nobody credible to run them.
The assumption underneath all three
What these have in common is that each treats India as a place with fixed rules you have to accept, rather than a market with conditions you can negotiate.
Notice periods get treated as law. City choice gets treated as a cost input. Leadership pay gets treated as a ratio. In each case something negotiable is being handled as a constant, usually because the person writing the plan has no basis for questioning it and nobody around them has an incentive to.
Most freely available data on Indian hiring is published by firms that sell hiring, setup or employment services, and the recommendations attached to it tend to point back at what they sell.
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