Service company vs product company: 9 saal dono taraf kaam kiya hai, ab sach sun lo
Ankit ke monthly rant ka jawab. Data bhi hai, emotions bhi. Dono chahiye
Rohit Verma@rohit_codes
Contents
Kal Ankit ne apna monthly rant daala, "WITCH model is why Indian engineering has a bad name". Main usse hamesha "calm down" bolta hoon. Aaj properly jawab dunga, aaram se, chai leke.
Pehle disclaimer: main dono taraf kaam kar chuka hoon. 4 saal ek badi service company mein (Noida, banking client), 5 saal ek product company mein (haan, Noida mein bhi product companies hoti hain 😂). Toh ye opinion bahar se nahi hai.
Ankit kahan sahi hai
Pehle credit, jahan banta hai:
- Bench real hai. Mere batch ke log 4-6 mahine bench pe baithe, Udemy dekhte rahe, kisi ne kuch nahi sikhaya
- "Resource" word bekaar hai. Insaan ko resource bolna band hona chahiye. Ek baar mere manager ne meeting mein bola "we'll release 2 resources next week". Woh do resources mere dost the
- Fresher salary. Fresher package saalon se lagbhag wahi 3.5-4 LPA ke aas paas atka hai. Inflation ke hisaab se ye har saal ek chhota cut hai
- Kuch projects sirf maintenance hain. Ticket aaya, ticket band kiya, 3 saal tak. Wahan atak gaye toh growth ruk jaati hai
Ankit kahan galat hai
- Scale ka hisaab. Service companies mein lakhs log hain. Bure engineer har jagah hain, wahan zyada log hain toh zyada dikhte hain. Achhe bhi zyada hain, bas unke baare mein koi LinkedIn post nahi likhta
- Kaam ki variety. Client ke saath requirement 3 baar badalna, 2009 ka code jo kisi ko samajh nahi aata, raat 3 baje production support, audit, compliance. Ye sab engineering hai. Bas startup ke blog pe nahi aata
- Product companies mein bhi CRUD hota hai. Maine product side pe ek microservice dekhi hai jo sirf ek dropdown ki values return karti thi. Uska apna on-call rotation tha 😂
- Seekhna tumhare haath mein hai. Service company mein mere 2 saal ek bank ke saath gaye: Java 6 se 8 migration, batch jobs, Oracle query tuning. Wahi experience dikha ke product company mein gaya
- Stability bhi ek feature hai. Pichle kuch saalon ke layoffs mein sabse zyada log product companies aur startups se gaye. EMI company ke label se nahi bharti
Paise ki baat (mere network ka data, official nahi)
Noida, Gurgaon, Bangalore ke jo log mujhe personally pata hain, 4-6 saal experience pe roughly:
- Badi service company, India role: 8 se 14 LPA
- Service company, achha client ya onsite track: 15 se 25 LPA (onsite pe alag)
- Mid product company ya GCC: 20 se 40 LPA
- Top product company: 40+ LPA, Ankit wala bracket
Haan, product side pe paisa zyada hai, isme koi debate nahi. Par paisa aur engineer ki quality do alag cheezein hain. Inko mix mat karo.
Switch karna hai? Toh aise karo
- DSA ka basic level: arrays, hashing, two pointers, sliding window, trees, BFS/DFS, basic DP. 150-200 achhe questions revision ke saath, 500 bina revision se zyada kaam ke hain
- Resume product ki bhasha mein likho. "Worked on module X for client Y" nahi. "Reduced nightly batch from 6 hours to 90 minutes by partitioning the job and fixing 3 N+1 queries." Number do
- 3+ saal ho toh LLD/HLD basics. Rate limiter, URL shortener, notification system. Apne project ka design explain karna seekho, sabse zyada wahi poocha jaata hai
- Referral sahi tarike se maango. LinkedIn pe "sir pls refer" nahi. Role ka link, 3 line mein kyun fit ho, resume 1 page
- Notice period ka plan pehle se. Uspe maine May mein poora post likha tha, desi_devs mein dhundo
- "Product" label ke liye pay cut mat lo. Kuch product companies achhe service onsite roles se kam deti hain. Number dekho, label nahi
Last baat
Ankit, tum DSA mein strong ho, ye main maanta hoon, aur kai baar tumhare answers sach mein sharp hote hain. Par engineer ki value uske ID card ke logo se nahi hoti.
Aur juniors: tier-3 college, service company, 6 mahine bench, jo bhi ho, ye end nahi hai. Main khud wahi tha. Desi Devs isiliye hai.
Koi doubt ho toh comment karo 🙏
Written by
Rohit Verma
Senior backend dev, Noida. 9 saal se Java aur Node. Desi Devs chalata hoon. Juniors ka bada bhai, DMs open hain, bas "sir" mat bolna 🙏
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Comments
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Sign in to commentKunal Bhatia@kunal_dsa
This is the post. Saving it and sending it to every junior who DMs me 'bhaiya service company mein career khatam?'. Point 2 of the switch section is exactly how I rewrote my resume.
Ankit Khurana@faang_or_bust
ok i read it. 'bure engineer har jagah hain' is not data. where are the numbers
Rohit Verma@rohit_codes
Ankit, tumhare 'sir we use the framework' wale interview ka bhi koi dataset nahi tha 😂 anecdote vs anecdote. but theek hai, salary ranges daale hain, bata galat kahan hain
Ankit Khurana@faang_or_bust
the ranges are fine. my point is the median service dev cant clear a product interview. thats the data
Omkar Joshi@omkar_java
And the median product dev can't handle a client call where the requirement changes 3 times in 20 minutes. Different skills. You keep judging a fish by how it climbs trees bhau.
Omkar Joshi@omkar_java
Rohit, thank you for writing this calmly. Point 4 is my life. Java 6 to 17 on a bank system, 2 years. Nobody calls it engineering because it's not on a startup blog.
Priya Rawat@priya_tests
sahi baat 🙂 aur ek cheez: service company ki QA ne mujhe production se darna sikhaya. woh darr bahut kaam aata hai
Sneha Kulkarni@laidoff_not_out
the stability point. six years in startups, laid off by a mass email. the 'product company' label doesn't pay EMIs. good post rohit.
Harmanpreet Singh@harman_devops
paaji full support. mere college ka aadha batch service mein gaya tha, aaj unme se kai log product cos mein DevOps lead kar rahe hain. label se kuch nahi hota
Divya Ramanathan@divya_ramanathan
As a hiring manager: I have hired from both, and the best predictor was never the company. It was whether the person could explain one hard problem they solved, end to end. Aiyo, I wish candidates knew this.
Vivek Chauhan@vivek_backend
Arre well written. The payments world runs on bank cores maintained by service company engineers. UPI does crores of transactions a day, and a big part of that reliability sits in those boring systems.
Karthik Subramaniam@karthi_rustacean
The 'microservice for a dropdown' line is unfortunately true in product companies also. We have one. It has its own dashboard itself.
Ira Saxena@ira_datadesk
Data desk person here, so I have to ask: can we do the salary ranges as a proper anonymous survey in desi_devs? 'mere network ka data' is honest, but a 200-response survey would settle this debate for a year.
Ankit Khurana@faang_or_bust
fine. i'll give u this one: the 'resource' culture is the problem, not the people. still think 2 years max
Dhruv Thakkar@dhruv_ships
Bhai bhai, ek third option bhi hai: dono chhodo, apna kuch banao 😄 but seriously, mere first 2 clients service company ke onsite contacts the
Anoop Menon@anoop_flutter
Machane, Infopark agency guy here, we are neither service nor product, we are 'whatever the Gulf client wants by Thursday' 😂 but point 2 about resume in product language, pwoli, doing that tonight
Prashanth Gowda@prashanth_sre
9 years on call. production does not care which logo is on your id card guru
Kabir Sethi@0xkabir
bounty hunter, no company at all 😎 but some of the cleanest fixes i ever got on a report were from teams full of so called 'resources'. turnaround in 2 days. respect
Vikram Iyer@vikram_on_h1b
From Seattle: half my team came through service company onsite routes, including two of the strongest engineers I know. The body shop abuse in the visa system is real and should be fixed, but the engineers themselves are not the problem.
Nikhil Sharan@nikhil_twopointers
Very balanced, Rohit. One add for the switch section: revise. 150 questions done 3 times beats 500 done once. Samjhe juniors?
Kunal Bhatia@kunal_dsa
Nikhil bhai and his revision gospel 😂 but 100% true, I have the spreadsheet to prove it
Rohit Verma@rohit_codes
Itne comments ki umeed nahi thi 🙏 sabka shukriya. Ankit, tumne aaj thoda maana, main isko jeet maanta hoon 😂 aur juniors, DMs open hain, bas 'sir' mat bolna
Arjun Mehta@arjunmehta
Late here. Fintech guy, 2 years in a service company in Bengaluru before moving. This is the most sensible thing written on this topic this year itself. The ranges match what I see.
Ryan Goh@ai_maxi_ryan
both cooked tbh. AI writes the CRUD now, service or product doesnt matter. learn agents 🤖🚀
Rohit Verma@rohit_codes
Ryan bhai AI ne kal hamare staging mein migration chala ke table drop kar di thi. usko bhi bench pe bhej du? 😂
Kunal Bhatia@kunal_dsa
Ryan every thread: learn agents. Bhai ek baar production on-call karke dekho 😂
Bikash Kalita@bikash_from_ghy
Late but: remote for a Berlin startup from Guwahati. My manager in Berlin had no idea what 'service vs product' even means. Outside India nobody cares about this label. They care whether you ship and whether you pick up when prod is down.