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Warning: If you think the comparison of Indian IT workers with prostitutes is too offensive, better stop reading right here. Also, it is going to be a long post, because the topic is such - so, go grab a drink or something.I was one of them. In my early IT years, I have personally suffered this phenomenon.Let me take you back in time. The year is 1998. You just graduated as an engineer. Some of your friends from wealthy parents managed to write GRE and fly to the US. Few other lucky ones joined their family business, and yet few others got married and received a hefty dowry, which they used to purchase a house and run a small business. You and your friends are left with no choice but to apply in India’s “booming” IT sector. There is only one problem though - they don't welcome “freshers”! Too sad, your college was either too shitty, or you didn't manage to get an offer through campus placement.Either way, you are running from one company’s front desk to another with a stack of hard copy resumes in your backpack (these are pre-online job portal days). A few of your friends already gave up on job search and started preparing for MBA. In your mind you feel dejected and cheated. After spending 10 + 2 + 4 years educating yourself, you thought it must be over. But now they say, “you are not ready for the industry yet”! You go back to your parents to request money for higher education or a (lame) business idea. They reject it, saying they cannot afford it. First time in your life you begin to experience the true pain of a middle-class Indian {sad music playing in the background}. You are determined to find a job for yourself and your family. Few more days/ weeks/ months of frustration pass, and…Opportunity knocks. After all “Bhagwan ke ghar mein …”. A lesser-known company calls you for an interview. You are nervous, but you crack it and you finally find a job for yourself!Today is your first day at work. There are few more folks like you. You are excited to make new friends. First time in your life you have to spend an entire day in an air-conditioned room. You feel special! You see hope. You start dreaming and setting milestones for yourself. You get inspired by your managers, their managers, the big boss, and the owners. You hear stories about their lifestyle, the respect they command, the cars they drive, the foreign trips they make, and the girls they hang out with. You want to be in their shoes. You are determined to rise.You work hard. A month pass by. Since your direct deposit bank account is not yet set, you get your first salary in form of a paper check. This is the biggest day of your life. You get emotional when you hand the check over to your mother. She keeps the check in front of her gods and thank them for happy days ahead. You see genuine happiness in her eyes - the feeling of great reward, satisfaction, and achievement. You decide to work hard and give your parents everything that they ever dreamt of. Your dad explains to you about “saving”, “investment”, etc. But your mind is somewhere else.You want to rise! You continue to put your best effort at work - day and night. A year pass by. A new batch of fresh recruits joins the company. You start demanding respect; you are now a “senior” after all. However, you are sad because one of your good friends just left the company. You don’t know how lunchtime and breaks will be without him.More people from your batch start jumping the boat. Peer pressure to switch jobs is so high, that you begin to proactively look for a new job. Within no time you get a job offer. This time you are more careful; you interview hard, with few companies, and secure multiple job offers. You are offered a “senior” role with a higher salary. Without a second thought, you resign from your job! Your colleagues bid you an emotional farewell. On your way out, you promise everyone a job in your new company.Back home, your parents are surprised by this sudden move. Your dad is not sure why you changed a job in just 12 months. He gives you a lesson on job stability. You give him Gyan on how your generation is more progressive, fast, and thinks differently. Your mom says she trusts you and is happy with your new job title.Day-one of your second job - you walk in as a senior software engineer. This new excitement soon vanishes when you realize that there are so many “senior” titled engineer around you. You continue to work hard and derive inspiration from your managers.Another year pass. You are still slogging, 12 hours a day, weekends, night outs, etc. While you do that, you see your bosses traveling to the US, and writing emails to get the “work done”. On a late-night, you share your frustration with a colleague friend. After cursing each other’s bosses, you both realize that the life of a programmer is “shitty”! You both agree that programmers do all the hard work but are treated like shit and the managers get to eat the cherry. That faithful day you vow to do whatever it takes to become a ‘Manager’.You speak with your boss about your desire. Your boss encourages you to work hard. Months pass, nothing changes, only frustration grows. You start losing interest in your job. Switching job is still an option, but it is not as easy as before since now your demands are high. You are hoping that things will improve in your current job.On a random day, your boss calls for a quick 1 on 1 meeting. You are nervous. After a long emotional pause, your boss looks at you with a smile and offers you the opportunity to travel “on-site” - if and only if you can meet a few critical deadlines. You are all charged up now. You want to make it happen. You tell your mom, she encourages you to work hard. Another year pass. After a lot of frustration and hard work, your boss finally recommends you for a short-term on-site visit.You pack your bags. This is also the time when your parents start bringing in marriage proposals. Yes, it would be nice to have a girl in your life, but marriage is the last thing on your mind at the moment. Everyone in your friend and family circle is excited about your ‘foreign’ trip. Your mom will most likely tell you that her children visiting foreign land was always her dream and that she never thought it will be fulfilled.Your client visit is successful. You come back home with packs of chocolates and distribute them among your friends, colleagues, and relatives. You are now an “America return”!You start thinking about your next trip. After working in the US, you start complaining about the Indian work environment, unstructuredness, unprofessionalism, and even lack of talent. You want your company to send you for a long-term US assignment, or you are (of course) ready to quit. The tiger has tasted human blood after all - he now seeks only human flesh.Just then, your company offers you a promotion. You are now a manager! You take your friends out for dinner at the same restaurant where you vowed to become a manager. "You did it", "Mr. Achiever", ... - that's what some of your female friends call you. You underplay the complements, but inside, you are blushing.You tell your parents that you are now a “Manager”. Your mom says, she always knew that you will make her proud - and you did it. She is especially excited because this will make it easy for her to attract “good” marriage proposals for you, as the marriage market is pretty tight these days! Your dad is a bit skeptical. Why not, the old man slogged for 25 years to earn that title - you did it in less than 5 years. He does not say a word though. You begin to like your new role because you can now occasionally visit the US, and earn some dollars.In your new role, you have a few employees reporting to you. You start spending more time communicating with foreign clients. They give you work and you distribute it to your team members. You feel rewarded when the foreign client praises you for your on-time work delivery. You go back to your team members and ask them to “achieve more” and work harder. Everything is so perfect. You even change your attire. You replace your torn jeans and an old non-fitting local tailor-made shabby shirt with branded business casuals. Your dad is quick to point out that the new "readymade" clothes are made out of low-quality fabric, and that you could have got a high-quality Raymond attire sewen from a local tailor at that much cost. The poor old guy is struggling to understand why the new you are spending so much money on clothes that will wear off in a couple of years. He tells you proudly have he continues to use the pair of shirt and trousers he got sewed over a decade back during his cousin's son's marriage. And not to mention, your dad is also displeased by the fact that your fancy-looking leather shoes are made of synthetic leather. Your mom says: “for the first time it feels like my child is going on a job”. You smile at your mother. Ignoring your dad, you head out to work. Like a responsible “manager”, you resume your workday on time.A couple of years pass. You get married. Mr. Manager is doing well in the office. Your bosses talk with you about letting you lead the entire client account. It seems like the most logical next step for you, and you are glad that it is happening. Another couple of years pass, and your next promotion arrives. You become the offshore lead of a client account, which means multiple projects and multiple managers reporting to you.On one client visit, you meet your old college friend. Two of you used to be good pair programmers in college days. Your friend tells you about his H1B story, how he is still a programmer, how progress in the US is slow, and how H1B workers don’t have too many choices when it comes to job roles and salaries. You tell him your story of how you lead an account of over a dozen employees. You see a sense of underachievement in your friend’s eyes, and one more time you get the feeling that - yeah, life’s good!Before departing, your friend asks, “Aren't you an engineer, don’t you miss programming?”. You tell him how few things must be sacrificed for a bigger cause - growth.On your way back to the hotel, however, you begin to question your life choices. Is it worth letting go of your hard-earned engineering skills? But wtf you say, you are a manager now! You call home, speak with your mom, check a few social media profiles of "successful" people, watch a random movie, and crash in bed.A few more years pass. It’s time again to get another promotion and move on to the next level. But then what is the next level? You look at your bosses. This time you are not at all excited about what they do. They are doing the same thing as you but on a different scale and level. You are not even excited about the potential of earning an extra 20% salary. You seem to have everything, wife, kids, happy parents, a senior manager position, respect of your subordinates, but inside you feel a bit insecure, unsettled, and unhappy.When you introspect, you realize that the most enjoyable time of your carrier was the years when you were a hardcore programmer - a problem solver, a magician, a hero, a person in constant demand, a true engineer! Now you are simply moving emails from clients to developers, and status emails from developers to the client. You have become a fuc**** “Dalal”. After 15 or so years, you are caught in your life’s biggest irony - everyone but you love what you are doing! You don't know what to do next or how to break this deadlock.This is when your wife tosses the idea… of moving to America for good.An unsatisfied mind always needs something to cling to. You like the idea but you are not sure what you will do there. If you go to America, you will have to step down at-least 2+ levels. Yes, you will earn in dollars, but you will be working at the same level as your college friend who moved to the US on an H1. This would be a big blow to your “rise”. And even if you get an offer, you are not sure if you have the technical chops to take up engineering roles. You do nothing. You let a few more years of indecision pass. Your children go to school. You keep visiting the US once every year and bring home all the latest and greatest gadgets for your wife and kids.Your company, once a market leader, is now declining. Last quarter your company registered lower growth numbers. Even this quarter the growth continues to slow down. You are worried about the prospects of your company. You start looking around and realize that it is the same story with other outsourcing companies as well. You discuss the situation with your executives. You realize that even they are equally clueless. One fine day in name of “restructure” they fire a few of your colleagues. Around 500 mid-level managers are laid off company-wide. You are scared! In the all-hands meeting, your company CFO says that it was a necessary move to keep the stakeholders happy and that there will be no more layoffs.A few months later your company announces that the retirement age will now be 55. Using this new rule, they terminate a few hundred more employees. It was clear that your company wants to get rid of the mid-level management layer who are worthless for the foreign client and the profits of the company. After all, the company gets paid for programmers, aka hands on the keyboard! You and many others like you don't belong to the “billable headcount” bucket. You realize that excluding those programmers, everyone else is a liability to the company. You begin to feel like an old prostitute. You were in great demand when you were young, but as you grew old, your services are no longer needed.Your college friend (the one who you met in the US) calls you up one day. He tells you that he has moved back to India. You are surprised and puzzled. You ask why, and he starts giving the typical NRI shit - India is progressing, I want to be part of the progress, bla bla bla. But then the important question arises - what would he do in India? You ask. He tells you that he got a job offer in a product development company as a lead engineer. You ask if he will be programming, and he says yes. On further questioning, you get to know that he is paid much more than you are. Life came to you in a full circle, the only problem is that you are trapped inside that circle - not sure how to break out of it.On a Saturday evening, lights in your area go off. There is a blackout. You walk out of your room and go to the balcony. Your dad joins you. You have a chat with your dad. You try to hide your situation by discussing topics related to the IT industry and not about your situation. Par beta, baap too baap hota hai. He is been observing you all the while. Without beating around the bush, he says, “Lalita Pawar of Hindi film industry got work in cinema even in her old age, whereas other so-called hot actresses faded in their 30’s.” He then asks, "do you know why?" You nod your head. He continues, “that is because, Lalita Pawar sold talent, whereas those hot actresses sold their skin. When the skin wrinkled, they were out of business. Real talent never wrinkles”. At that moment lamps lit up, and power got restored. You take the opportunity to end the awkward conversation with your dad and walk out.Your dad was right with his film industry analogy; a similar thing happened to the Indian IT workforce. They all started as engineers. Somewhere down the line, the engineer inside them gave way to a manager. That day you realized that engineering requires talent and management is a hot job that practically anyone with a few soft skills can do.This “manager” bandwagon has rendered a great amount of the Indian workforce worthless. It is only in India that an engineer who passes out of college immediately enrolls themselves in an MBA program. Only in India does a developer become a manager within 5 years.Who is at fault? Everyone - from IT firm executives, who use artificial promotions and client visits as motivators to the greedy engineers, who want to rise the ladder even at the cost of giving up their core engineering skills.Indian outsourcing companies have created an unhealthy and unsustainable eco-system where a software developer does not have any respect and is usually “looked down” upon. The irony here is that it is exactly this software engineer who the client pays money for. It is sad, that only a small part of this money trickles down to this engineer, and the rest is used to run the management heavy organization and earn profits. More managers translate into less salaries for the engineers, making the engineering jobs less attractive. This creates an exodus of good talent out of the country, and the ones that remain push themselves to non-engineering roles, like management. The results are obvious. Such organizations will not be able to afford good engineers unless they start letting go of their unproductive (aka, non-billable) staff - all the so-called leads and managers at various levels, and all the unproductive engineers who are caught up in the bandwagon of becoming managers.In a way, the software industry is reviewing. The bubble must burst someday. Unfortunately, it took an external force to trigger it. If the 4 giant outsourcing firms had done some introspection and restructured their organizations to focus primarily on core engineering/technology and less on the hopelessly inflated management layers, then such layoffs could have been avoided. Due to the short-sightedness of Indian technology leaders and the greed of engineers, it is immanent that there will be a lot of job losses in the coming years.What will happen to all the laid-off employees? Well, a lot of them will begin to learn new technology and re-educate themselves to get absorbed in the new eco-system. Those in their 50’s will use up their earnings to create a different source of income - house rental, interest, stock investing, etc. Few who refuse to change will blame the market conditions, government, etc, and live a sad life with a lame job or without one.Overall, this change is good for the Indian IT industry. India is moving from a cheap labor-based software outsourcing destination to a global technology hub. In another 20 years, India will be churning out independent research and indigenous products in advanced science and technology. India will create technology for self-consumption first, and exports later. The era of product-as-a-service ecosystem and automation has already dawned and is on a rise. This new industry will shadow the old outsourcing model and add even more value to the global technology juggernaut. In a way, this move is welcoming, because the old outsourcing eco-system was misusing, abusing, and eventually discarding India’s resources - its engineers. The era of prostitution and Dalaali has to end!Your wife now hates you because you didn't go to the US like your friends. Your mom is now old and worried. Your dad is the only one who is less worried because he is finally seeing changes that are making practical sense. He is now only worried about your worried mom!

How many times have you had bad sex? If you consider the alternative of not having sex, even bad sex is still pretty damn good.Now let me ask you: how many times have you had a bad workout?Odds are this number is considerably higher. I’d argue it’s more frustrating than not getting any. Don’t lie. You’ve considered quitting the gym after plateauing for a while. I know I have.Then I go on Instagram and I see someone crushing a PR. It’s almost like everyone in the world is crushing it every day.What’s A Bad Gym Session?Before prescribing the cure, let’s first diagnose the disease. What exactly is a bad gym session?Did you miss a PR?Was your energy nonexistent?Were you sucking wind more than usual?Each of these things can put a damper on a pretty sweet gym session. Put them together and you might as well pack it up and consider the day a waste.The truth is you can’t kill it every day in the gym; some days are just going to suck.Acceptance is the first step. The next step is to define what a good workout is.Hitting a PR? Lifting more than last time? Never-ending energy?If these were the only criteria for a good workout, I’d only have two or three awesome workouts a month. That wouldn’t have been enough to keep me working out hard for all these years.An awesome workout and a bad workout, like everything else, are based on perception and perspective.These days, I have only awesome workouts. I don’t hit a PR every day, and that includes when I was recovering from back surgery hoisting those hefty 25’s.I chose to look at my workouts like sex. Even a bad workout is better than no workout.PR or Bust?Using PRs is the obvious go-to for progress checking. It’s pretty badass when you push yourself further than you have ever gone before.It’s also one of the hardest to achieve. It’s like trying to score an 80-yard touchdown every carry. You need to lay down some two-to-three-yard gains to set up that 80-yarder.When you start working out you, racking up PR’s is easy. I mean, it’s easy since your previous PR was what? Zero? Don’t get me wrong. Focusing on PRs is a good way to stay motivated in the beginning, but it shouldn’t be the basis of an awesome workout once you have been lifting for awhile.If you can hit a PR once or twice a month, then you’re trending in the right direction.And that doesn’t have to be a 1-rep PR. That could be a 5-rep PR or a 10-rep PR. Any progress is good progress.Getting frustrated with your progress at the gym doesn’t do anyone any good.Reframe how you judge the awesomeness of your workout.Perception is everything. If you have a crappy outlook, then everything will be crappy.If you look at your workouts in a different light……then workouts and sex belong in the same category of awesomeness.As they should. They were for Arnold. We all remember that scene from Pumping Iron where he compared the pump to blasting off some knuckle children.Here is how to reframe your perception.The Ladder of Workout Awesomeness ExplainedIf setting PR’s and lifting more than last time is your only criteria for a good workout, I wish you the best. You’re going to be one unhappy mofo.It all comes down to measuring progress. Did you get better than last time? But there’s more to progress than PRs.I introduce to you the Ladder of Workout Awesomeness (Cue the trumpets.)The Ladder of Workout Awesomeness is:Personal Record (PR): You’ve accomplished something you’ve never done, like a 405-pound deadlift.Weight: You increased the amount of weight lifted.Volume: You increased the number of reps.Frequency: You worked out more often, such as moving from three workouts to four in a week.Form: You stopped rounding your back on deadlifts. Score!Did You Show Up? Consistency is the most important factor for transforming your physique.The Ladder Of Workout Awesomeness ExplainedThis ladder works like every other ladder on the planet. You start at the bottom.Did you show up? If you did, you had a good workout. This means you didn’t die last night. This is huge. Most people can’t muster enough motivation to get to the gym. But you did.Someone is looking for a gold star for the day.Now I know you might be thinking that’s like giving everyone a ribbon for participating but keep in mind that most people don’t participate. They’re too busy thinking of excuses and rationalizing not going to the gym. You didn’t. That’s a huge win.Form. You can never go wrong when focusing on form. It’s the most important thing keeping you out of the ER. Good form takes practice; lots and lots of practice. Even if you could do a power clean in your sleep, a little practice now and then will help you when you need it most. If you can progress your form, you’ll be doing your future self a huge service.Frequency. After having good form, did you make it to the gym more this week than last week? Did you do two back workouts in one week? That’s progress. I bet you weren’t crushing two back workouts in a week a few months ago.Volume. Are you doing 4 sets of 10 now? But isn’t that the weight you were doing 3 set of 10 last week? Adding an extra set or hammering out a few more reps than you did last week is all progress. Revel in it.Weight. A numerical representation of progress that we showcase on social media. Adding more weight to the bar is tough to do. It doesn’t matter if it is 2 pounds or 50 pounds, progress is progress. Congrats bruh, you are in the upper echelon of awesome gym sessions.PR. Let the euphoria of the PR wash over you as you post this on social media. Remember it’s not bragging if it’s true. You have reached the pinnacle of gym achievements. If you can lift more than you ever have in any lift, celebrate that shit.The TakeawayExcitement mounts as you go up the ladder. Personal records may get all the Instagram likes, but don’t forget about the factors that lead to your success.First, you need to show up. Then, you may need to train more often, use more volume and add weight to the bar before going for personal records.Once you ingrain these habits you’ll be well on your way to never having bad workouts again.Aesthetic Physiques

Side note: in the US, maternity leave can be taken unpaid through FMLA for up to three months without your position being given to someone else. Paid maternity leave is another thing entirely and is left to companies to decide. My current employer just increased (as of last week) paid maternity leave to six months. Most major employers give 8–10 weeks for women and 6–8 weeks for men. Smaller employers tend to offer a lot less.The question leads with an assumption then seems to be implying something that cannot financially be done unilaterally by individual companies (provide benefits that the rest of the industry cannot).The gender wage gap is an issue fraught with peril. The biggest reason is that it’s largely a partisan issue and because the vast, VAST (I’m gonna put it north of 99%) of people have no clue what they’re talking about. They either don’t work in a field where they have a relative “need to know” or they heard someone say there’s a gender pay gap and they either rolled their eyes at it and ignored it or it confirmed their biases and they repeated it.Memes are really terrible ways to make policy and all most people have is a meme. Once we hear a meme three times from a source we trust AND repeat it three times, it becomes basically dogma. People looking at the same thing with different politics will interpret it differently. WORSE still, people who should know better generally refuse to do so and repeat it even though they have both the resources and the obligation to investigate it and report the truth and what we do not know.ONE — if you took all the pay that men made and all the pay that women made in the USA and then divided it up between themselves, men would, indeed make more.TWO — that’s a raw number and ignores individual variables which include a great many factors that must be considered.Men gravitate to high-commitment, high risk, high reward jobs in higher frequencies than women do. This ranges from upper managers (who live and breathe the job), neuro-surgeons (high commitment in hours), to coal miners (high risk), to electrical line stringers (high risk), to fire fighters (high risk), to under water welders (high risk). Women have a lower frequency of pursuing those roles but higher frequency in pursuing general practitioners and certain specialist roles (OGBYN, PEDS), accounting, teaching and administrative. These have lower physical risk and time commitment levels but besides the lower pay, generally much higher job satisfaction.Women show higher frequencies in taking time off for family and —well— to give birth. Even in places like Sweden, men take less time off than women do. In fact, in very liberal / gender equal countries, gender trade and pay stratification increases. (The theory being: in India, Sri Lanka and China, family and community pressures young women to chase “the sure thing” because of the expectation of helping support the whole family vs. Sweden, NZ or Norway where individuality reigns and people can do what they want.)In employment surveys, women consistently show greater job and life satisfaction than men. This is because women tend to show better judgment in balancing personal and professional life in pursuit of happiness whereas men show higher frequencies of willingness to sacrifice happiness and family to pursue their careers.Even within the same field for pay surveys, men show higher frequencies in taking the jobs nobody wants. In nursing (dominated by women at a rate of 91:9 % — and where most studies fail to break it down further), males tend to pursue graduate degrees at double the rate of women, they take critical care nurse jobs at a much higher rate than women, pick up additional hours at a higher rate and work third shift at a higher rate. So when even a detailed survey of nurses is conducted, it’s always on “hourly pay” or “annual salary”, which misses the mark.My husband, for example, is a critical care RN in the highly stressful CVICU where it’s about 20% male (double the raw percentage). He also works third shift which bumps it up to about 30% male. When there are shifts to be picked up, it’s almost always men. This is because women show higher frequencies of saying, “No. I’m not sacrificing my personal life for more money.” On the other hand, men seem to obsess more about making a giant pay check.All of this is why it’s VERY dangerous to confuse income with quality of life. It’s why I do agree that internal pay equity is very important for companies and why companies should be held to account if they cannot show rigorous processes for making sure people are paid fairly. All things considered, once that’s achieved (and it really hasn’t, but more on that later), it’s hard to demand that women pursue jobs they don’t want or to punish men for working crappy jobs and making more.None of these are useful as generalizations because they ignore the individual — they are statistical frequencies of behavior. There are people like me who have zero desire to move up the corporate ladder beyond a certain point (I want a 40 hour work week and my five weeks of vacation) and there are plenty of women who want a high-committment surgeon job (my good friend from high school, Joan, is a thoracic surgeon in Ithica, NY).For the better part of two decades, I’ve been an integral part of conducting pay equity surveys. When you account for—Total number of hours worked on the job.Years of experience.Education.—pay discrepancies fall within the statistical margin of error for almost every major trade below top corporate leaders and super elite niche professionals. Still, there are plenty of places that don’t seem to want to give women a chance to enter their halls of employment. Many legacy engineering firms and divisions of major companies resist the entry of women into those places. They are the companies that should be hauled into court. For the rest, we’re in a bit of a pickle. Either we pay a worker for what they do (their niche contribution x the commitment level [danger or hours]) or we upset the market value of that job, which causes more problems than we’re trying to solve.Where the gender pay gap represents some form of discrimination is mostly in:The pressure families and community place on women to do a certain type of job which as both an overt effect and a very subtle (nearly subconscious) effect on them. If you live in a world where you’re told that bad women aren’t at home caring for the family, you’ll probably take more time off and work jobs that aren’t going to pay as much.The pressure women face in negotiating pay is complex. Even women tend to interpret strong women salary negotiators as “bitchy” whereas they interpret men as “strong and confident”. This is on the interpretation side. Women, in turn, through those factors and likely a long history of being told to be docile, will tend to negotiate less hard than a man in the same position.Lastly, there is the very real fact that even when we account for all the variables (as many as can be calculated), women do tend to make less than men. This gap is likely due to discrimination. For middle managers it’s within the statistical margin of error (5%), with much lower hourly roles it’s basically non-existent because of hourly wage laws and union contracts. At the very, VERY top positions (super-specialists in medicine, top-level artistic talent and corporate leaders), women of similar years make a lot less and that is another thing entirely (which leads to a lot of hand-wringing because, well, it’s almost always hard to feel sorry for Brie Larson who’s making $12 million a year vs. Chadwick Boseman who makes $18 million a year).It’s worth noting that none of that “money saved” (which is irrelevant) is spent on paid maternity leave. No company can unilaterally do that because it would put it at a competitive disadvantage against other companies. This has to come from the government and that’s not likely to happen in the US anytime soon.