Why don't you move abroad?

I just wrapped up a tech conference here this week in Salt Lake City. I was one of the speakers. It was a special moment for me. Strangely enough, the very first time I came to US, it was also as a speaker at a conference.

“Did you just say you are a speaker at this thing?”, asked the US Visa officer, before stamping a B1/B2 on my Passport for ten years.

I was 18 back then. The confusion made sense.

A decade has gone by. I got married, switched multiple jobs, wrote a lot of code, lived in three different continents, spoke at many conferences and made a lot of friends for life. I am now back living in India.

“Dude, so when are you moving to the US?”, I frequently get asked by friends, colleagues and my well-wishers.

“I’m not”.

My answer falls flat on most people. It’s as if, I’ve just said, “I do not want more money and success.”

In this blog post I want to add more colors to my answer. Hope some of you relate with this, especially if you are someone like me considering your decision of moving abroad or moving back.

But first, let me take you back to my teens when life was much simpler and Physics was my most favorite thing in life.

The IIT Dream

Just like many Indians of my generation, I spent my childhood in a single bedroom rented house. Every evening, my brother and I would sit in front of an oil lamp and study, mostly maths and science. In the mornings, our dada ji would teach us English and Hindi grammar. It was a household where two things were most valued - Education and Love.

Education, because that seemed like the only way to escape generational poverty and not having to worry about, if there are enough candlesticks to last the week or not.

And, Love because familia is everything.

Millions of students in India prepare to get into IITs every year. With the proper amount of luck and improper amount of childhood sacrifices, I made it into IIT Kharagpur. And that changed everything.

During the admission to engineering colleges, more than two thirds of students want to study Computer Science. This is want increases the chances of landing a job and what everyone seems to be doing. In my hostel room in Kota where I studied for 2 years of IIT prep, I had a note stuck on my wall which listed all the opening and closing ranks of all Computer Science branches in the 7 major IITs. When I saw the results and my rank, it was nowhere close to those CS cutoff ranks and I teared up as if I had failed.

And just like that, 99.99% of Indian students start their education journey by the system telling them that they are not worth it and they don’t even get to decide what they study.

While I couldn’t get into the Computer Science department, I knew what I wanted to study. My father has been a software engineer since the 90s and my brother is an absolute rockstar with computers. We didn’t have cartoons in TV back in our childhood but had our hands on keyboard ever since I could possibly remember.

So, I was ready to join IIT and say “Fuck you,” to the education system, “I’m going to be the best programmer the world has ever seen.”

College and Open Source

I was nowhere close to being the best programmer. I failed to implement a linked list in C in my first year. It was not going well. However, at the same time, I created my first Python package morse-talk and published on pypi.org. It was immediately used by a professor somewhere in Europe who forked it and made a lot of contributions.

My goal of being the “best programmer” shifted to "create value for others by writing code". That summer, only 4 students were selected in the Google Summer of Code from my college. I was one of them, the only freshman. Two years of GSoC paid more than enough to cover my five years of college tuition fees. I found both value and meaning by doing Open Source.

Very quickly, people started referring me with my GitHub handle OrkoHunter. I, among few of my good friends, established Kharagpur Open Source Society to spread the culture of Open Source in campus. Though secretly, it was to give hope to the students who were defeated by the education system and told “You can’t study Computer Science, because you didn’t know Carbon has a radioactive isotope.” In the first few years, we exclusively hired only non-CS students out of spite.

Twitter @ San Francisco

I was having a blast with the altruism that came with organizing Open Source workshops for students, helping them write their first useful Python application and making their first Pull Request. In 2017, we organized our first ever Open Source conference in college. We had about a thousand attendees, two days of talks, tutorials and lots of fun. We had full flown AV setup, speakers and attendees coming from multiple cities. We had a large budget too. I was leading it, being one of the three co-chairs of the conference. We were living the dream!

One night during the summit, I received an email from a recruiter at Twitter - “Hey Himanshu, We saw your GitHub profile. Would you like to join us for an internship at Twitter San Francisco office in the Open Source team?”. I was so busy with the conference that I forgot to respond for 24 hours. She reached back - “Himanshu, are you interested?”

Landing a foreign internship in college is one of those 0.1% things - it’s extremely rare. You need to practice a lot of leetcode, have excellent referrals and be a sports programmer ready to traverse a binary tree. I have never written a Binary Tree traversal in life.

My interviews were all around the projects I had open sourced by then. One being the most popular Python library for Graph Theory, the other being a package used to study X-ray data from black holes. I was working on much more important things. Learning how to traverse a Binary Tree for me was a waste of time - that’s how I saw it back then. I knew I will most likely never use it. Though I used to be maniacal about writing reusable code and ReactJS!

I applied for the J1 visa (short term work visa) and made my way to San Francisco. That summer in SF was probably the coldest summer I had ever. The internship paid extremely well and taught a lot of things about corporate Open Source. I worked upon setting up the opensource.twitter.dev - something which still runs and publishes weekly reports of Twitter’s flagship open source projects. I’m pretty sure Elon Musk has seen the website.

Career-wise, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. My manager from Twitter moved to Spotify later on who told me about the Backstage Open Source project, which led me to Harness leading the product built on top of Backstage. As Steve Jobs once said, “you will only be able to connect the dots looking backwards.”

The Emotional Turmoil in San Francisco

Despite the thrilling career advancements that summer, I often wept myself to sleep at nights. The timezone difference between India and US west coast is about 12 hours. Which means, when you wake up, your family and friends are about to go to bed. And when you come back from office, your family has just woken up. Couple of hours is all you get to connect with anyone back home.

Okay, here’s the thing, I had lived alone before. For the IIT prep, I was in Kota for 2 years locked in my room and studying, visited home only two times during Diwalis. My college was in a remote village and far from home as well. But I had never felt that lonely, being on the other side of the world than home.

I am also not an introvert when it comes to talking to strangers. I was leading two student groups in college and fortunately made a lot of friends. It was easy for me to approach seniors, batch mates and juniors in college to build relationships. However, making friends in US was a completely different ballgame.

Money and Status was on everyone’s mind. All they talked about was Visas, dating, getting paid more and playing a different kind of game that I wanted to play. Not many truly wanted to be a software engineer or cared about Software. While I found few who did and made a real attempt to know each other - the friendships I found in the US were very shallow. Back home, we called them acquaintances.

It all felt … like an unlivable place for commoners like me. Homelessness was at its peak. I am the guy, who likes to walk slow on the streets without a destination. But I was told on day one Twitter orientation to “Walk fast”. Drugged homeless people approached me, one guy tried to hit me while waiting to cross the street. I once went out to get some groceries and when making a turn, I saw a person holding a gun, hiding at the turn, waiting for someone. I had never seen a gun in my life till that point. It made me think - “If I’m caught accidentally in a gun fight here, no amount of legal justice or candle marches would make my parents happy”.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a huge respect for San Francisco and the Bay Area. For me, it still is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Being an engineer as well as follower of Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, I thank the west for what it has given to world. One of the first Open Source license BSD, came from Berkley. The computer I am using to write this on, came from the valley. Silicon Valley is an absolutely historic place for a techie like me. I actually felt quiet emotional walking on the Haight-Ashbury street. The words “Turn On, Tune In and Drop out” echoed in my ears.

Despite the respect for the place and culture, I found myself struggling to become one with it. After spending 4 months there, I still had one year of college left. On my final day in US, I ate my last bagel sandwich in a cafe in Mission district and boarded my flight back to Kolkata. After 24 hours of flight and three hours of cab drive, I reached my hostel. One of my dear friends was waiting for me downstairs at 2AM. We hugged and I knew, I had arrived home.

College placements and first job

Being an Indian student, it is almost impossible to get your first job in the US. Very rarely companies take the chance of picking you to go through H1B lottery, employers go for a safer choice. My manager at Twitter tried to get me a job, but after months of struggle, he gave up, and I had no job offer.

All IITs and most colleges have a “placement season” where companies fly in on campus and hire as many students as they can within a short period of time. It’s a flea market. Thousands of students show up in collared white shirts, blue pants and polished black shoes with resumes in their hands. Day 1 placement makes you a rockstar among your friends. If you are not placed by Day 10, you are essentially a loser.

Students get no choice of where they want to work at. If you pass their series of coding tests, panel discussions and what not - you are given one offer (if you are blessed then maybe 2-3 offers) and have to make the decision in an hour. No negotiation on what you will be doing, at what location or at what compensation.

The rebel in me found the system to be dehumanizing, especially for the Top 1% students of the country. As a result, I told myself that I will find a job elsewhere where I will have some idea on what I’ll be working upon and with whom. I did not sign up for campus placements.

A friend of mine connected me with an employer in Tokyo. The product was Mercari US and the team was pretty diverse. It paid well and many of my friends were already going to Tokyo that year. I interviewed with the CTO, VP of Product and Engineering and my Engineering Manager, and I was in! Again, without traversing a binary tree. The job paid extremely well for a new grad like me. I was set to join them after I graduate. As they say, when it rains, it pours.

Life in Tokyo

I was very excited to go to Japan. I found the country to be extremely calm and connected with the roots of human consciousness. It was people, people were hardworking but respectful of each other. Great customer service, free of crime and welcoming. Everyone was somehow aware. Everyone respected elderly and valued wisdom.

Japan and India only has a timezone difference of about 4 hours. There was plenty of time in the day for me to connect back to family and friends. I made friends there as well, actually a lot of them. I was sharing my apartment with a very good friend of mine from college. Life was amazing!

Work was great too. I distinctly remember my manager saying - “You don’t seem like a fresher”. All because I have been writing real code for 5 years at that point and not traversing binary trees. I knew what a 12 factor app was and how to write effective Database queries that scales up to tens of thousands of daily active users.

One fine day, I was talking to my ex-manager back from Twitter, who had just moved to Spotify. He told me about Backstage Open Source. It was released just a few days ago, on March 14, 2020. I have always dreamt about writing Open Source software while getting paid for it. He said, “Himanshu, just so you know, I would love to work with you again in a heartbeat, if I could.”

Over the weekend, I got two pull requests merged in the project. It had 50 GitHub stars back then and a few contributors. It is currently at about 30K stars with 1500+ contributors. Interviews happened with Spotify and I knew every single one of my interviewers. In one of those, we forgot to introduce ourselves as we have been talking back and forth on Discord on the same day. I made my way in. Spotify flew me Premium Economy to Stockholm, the land of Opeth and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. That’s all I knew about Sweden.

Life in Stockholm and Covid

My first summer in Stockholm was my best summer ever. The bar was already high by that point, but I absolutely enjoyed biking every weekend to play football, walking around the rivers, parks and nearby jungles. Stockholm is an interesting landscape, within 5 mins you can reach downtown, a river, a historic place or a cave - it’s all nearby, everything is.

Europe values work-life balance like no one else. I still believe if anyone wants to have fun in life and doesn't want to work too hard, get a job in Europe.

But back then, Covid was at its peak. It didn’t affect my life in Sweden who was one of the few countries to not implement ban on anything. However, I didn’t get to see enough of Europe or attended enough concerts as I had hoped for. I only got to travel in my last year, and it was already too late - the dark winters in Stockholm had taken a hit on me.

Two and half years passed by. I experienced the peak of my career. Got to be known as “The Backstage Guy” in the Open Source community. I saw the team grew from 10 to 50 and onboarded many engineers, many of them were far more skilled and experienced than me. I had learned a lot at Spotify and is one of the best companies to be working for as an engineer.

The timezone difference was not that different either. Again 4 hours and I was able to connect with my family and friends. I found some good friends back there as well. However, during that time, my grandmother passed away. This was the first time I had experienced death in my family. Someone I knew was no more in this world. I was not able to go back in time and mourn with family. Though I was not extremely attached to my grandma, it made me think - what if I had lost someone else, someone far closer to me? It was also the time when I became a lot closer to my lovely childhood friend, who is now my wife. After many years, it made no sense to me to live far from her.

In all the European and work life glory, something was not working out.

“You know you can come back right?”

One fine day, I was sitting in my living room. I had gained about 25 KGs of additional weight in the past year. It was three in the afternoon and the sun had already set. I was on a video call with my dad. We were talking about a few things, one of them being Russia’s invasion on Ukraine. He was quiet worried about the situations in Europe. I said Sweden had no bone in this fight so don’t worry about it. But then after the conversation, he was about to hang up, as mom had called for the evening tea. Just then, something hit me and I froze. I was alone in this apartment, middle of nowhere. Why was I not there with them, having that cup of tea?

I broke. Tears streamed down my face and I had no words. What could I have said? That I am an incapable, grown man who can’t even live on his own? Someone who can’t move on from family? At that moment, I just wanted to hug my father, but I couldn’t.

He kept asking - What happened? Why are you crying? Are you not well?

Silence. I had no words to explain what I was feeling. It was definitely the Chai, now that I think about it. Us Indians, huh.

After few minutes, he said something that unlocked a door in my perception that I had never opened. He said, “You know you can always come back right? No one is forcing you to live there. You can have an amazing life back in India too.”

To be honest, I didn’t know this. I really did not know this! All I knew, was that you are supposed to move abroad when you grow up. Moving abroad is synonymous with being successful, filling up your bank account. It takes your career to the moon and gives you the highest level of status possible among your peers. I thought that was the only, most respectful way.

The very next day, I wrote an email to my General Manager that I am moving to India. Spotify didn’t permit engineers to work from India, so I knew this was not going to work out. But at that moment, I just wanted to go back home and hug my father - and no job or salary was going to stop me from doing that.

Fortunately, Spotify valued the work I was doing with Backstage and exceptionally permitted me to work from India. I was their first R&D hire here.

Back home

Once I had made the decision to move, I decided to update my friends about it. I put up a WhatsApp status and also made a post on LinkedIn. My post went viral with 5 million views, 28,000 reactions and 900 comments.

My decision to move back was shocking to many. Many of my friends who lived abroad related to the challenges of loneliness and cultural shock with me. It was also post-Covid era, where many realized remote work is possible and being in the same location all the time is not needed. Startups were blooming, many of them hiring engineering exclusively in India. There was a mass reverse-brain drain happening in that moment, it still is happening, and I am very excited about it!

I moved back home, starting living in Mumbai with my wife and family. I now get to spend time with my parents without having to plan my days and think about my international travels. Back then, any travel would be 2-4 weeks and there was no room to catchup with an old friend in a different city. I had missed so many reunions, marriages and family events. I now attend them all.

My mental health has now fully recovered. My physical health is coming along, long way to go still.

I work remotely at Harness as a Product Manager, the best job I could be doing right now. I fly to Bangalore every quarter to meet my team in person and spend a lot of time with my colleagues in the US over Zoom. I like working late, my most productive hours are 6-10PM. In childhood, this was the time after school where I would sit to study without any distractions. In college, this was the time after classes for club meetups, project discussions or just writing code. Even at work, my most important meetings happen in the evening. Some see it as a cost of living in India, for me this works just fine. Maybe things will change after having kids.

So, why don’t you move abroad now?

I think people should live where they are the happiest. Happiness sparks creativity and is responsible for overall success. Yes, moving to US increases my chances of professional career success, I’ll get to be in proximity with people who have ideas and money to make the ideas come alive. But for me, it comes with significant emotional damage. For some people out there, this is a sacrifice worth making. This was a lot true 20 years ago. The internet age has changed everything. It is now possible to balance career, wealth and happiness while living in India as a techie.

“Why don’t you move to the US with your wife? You’ll have family and friends around.”

Let me put it in a way which doesn’t offend people - very few of my friends in the US are my real friends. My best friends in US are all planning to move back. My other friends are stuck in the whirlwind of H1Bs and Green Card applications and coping up with their emotional challenges. I wish the best for all of them, but I do not enjoy that lifestyle - it reeks of captivity and not freedom.

“If you plan to start your own company, shouldn’t you move out of India?”

Yes I do intend to create a company in the future. And yes, most likely the customers are going to be in the west. However, I have seen enough companies with India based founders that I have full confidence I do not have to move personally to make the company successful. I’ll travel frequently and stay up late - which I already do in some sense. We live in a global internet-enabled world.

It’s also not that easy. Visas make it extremely hard for Indians to start a company in the US. The whole process makes me want to puke. The Government and popular opinion seems to be heading in an opposite direction. The dehumanizing experience is similar to my take on campus placements in college above.

“Why don’t you move temporarily for a few years?”

Maybe for 3 months, yes. Moving for 2 years is a slippery slope of accepting the emotional damage which I will cause to myself and my wife. The drug called monthly salary will keep adding band-aids to the damage and it will again be too late before I realize the repercussions.

“If you don’t move, it will affect your career.”

For me, success is both the professional success and emotional wellbeing. I am willing to sacrifice some of my professional success for the other. We all have one life.

My vision for India

As Richard Feynman says - you are not nameless to yourself, your family and the surrounding ones. When I was 17 in college, my first meaning of life came from doing Open Source and helping others realize that they have much more in them - much more than what the system and society says about them. I uplifted many and showed alternate ways to do well in life. At least, for a few dozen people. A path which did not include Grades and meaningless competitive code grinding.

I think 21st century is a fantastic time to be in a developing nation like India, especially among the tech-enabled hard-working Indians that I know of. I have a lot of hope for my generation. I plan to write more on this in a separate post, when I find time.

Hope you enjoyed reading through this. If at any point, I have hurt your sentiments, I would like to apologize. This is me expressing my own personal views on this very controversial and emotional topic. I still advise people to choose what’s best for them, moving abroad is a great option for many who do not carry emotional baggage like me. We all have one life, and we all should do what’s best for us and our loved ones. Peace.