Deepak had been working at Amazon India for six years when he was offered an opportunity for an internal transfer to the company’s headquarters in Seattle. In June 2022, he moved to the U.S. with his wife to live the American dream on a company-sponsored L-1 visa, and a $160,000 paycheck, including stocks. But just seven months later, Deepak was among the 18,000 employees who were let go due to an “uncertain economy” in the largest job cut in Amazon’s history.
Deepak, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect his future employment prospects, told Rest of World he had no option but to return to India immediately because his U.S. visa was linked to his job. Back home, he struggled to find a job for two months. The biggest hurdle was his previous salary, which made him unaffordable for most tech employers in India. “I would tell [Indian] HR that I have no expectations and I am open to negotiations,” he said.
In March 2023, Deepak finally started a job where his salary is less than a fourth of what he had earned in the U.S. — and doesn’t even match up to what his peers make in India. “I am now getting close to 30 lakh rupees [approximately $36,000] per annum while my peers get around 35–40 lakh rupees.”
Many Indian techies like Deepak, who worked in critical roles across companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta in the U.S. and Canada, have been forced to move back home over the past year following widespread layoffs. They have returned at a time when Indian companies are also laying off employees, and told Rest of World they have been struggling to navigate the tepid job market.
Employers find it difficult to trust this cohort as there is always an inclination to return to the U.S.”
There are already hundreds of people applying for one job, Veer told Rest of World, speaking under a pseudonym for privacy reasons. “So my resume is not reaching the right people,” he said. Veer had lived in the U.S. for over a decade, only to bring his wife and child back to New Delhi in the summer of 2023 after he was laid off by a small firm.
More than 200,000 tech workers have been laid off in the U.S. between November 2022 and January 2023, according to Bloomberg, of whom 30%–40% were Indian IT professionals. Around 80,000 Indian IT professionals on H-1B and L-1 visas have faced job losses in the U.S. since late 2022, “with the tech industry experiencing a significant impact,” Krishna Vij, business head of IT staffing company Teamlease Digital, told Rest of World. “After the pandemic, the overall startup ecosystem hired aggressively,” Vij said. “Now, what we’re also seeing is that because of overall macroeconomic conditions, the startups are not hiring.”
Meanwhile, India’s tech industry has had over 30,000 workers laid off since 2022. Prominent startups including Paytm, Byju’s, Unacademy, Meesho, and Sharechat have cut jobs in the last year, and the bigger tech companies have announced hiring freezes in India.
The primary reason potential employers are skeptical about hiring from the pool of workers who have returned from the U.S. is trust deficit, Kamal Karanth, co-founder of HR firm Xpheno, told Rest of World. “Employers find it difficult to trust this cohort as there is always an inclination to return to the U.S. So, they are hesitant about hiring these people,” he said.
“[This talent] comes with hefty salaries … so either they are over-qualified for the role or they are not able to take up their offered compensation,” Vij said. “Even if they want to take a pay cut of 10%–20%, Indian companies … are offering about 40%–50% less.”
A tech worker who moved back to Mumbai from Seattle in May 2023 told Rest of World she searched for a suitable role in India for over seven months. The job market in the country, she said, deprioritized her due to her U.S. work experience. “Since the client base is different in India, they also prefer someone with experience handling Indian clients,” the worker said, requesting anonymity as her friends and family are not privy to her struggles.
“There’s hardly any negotiation unless you have multiple offers,” she said.
Soon after completing his MBA at a U.S. university in 2021, Pratik joined a local tech startup as a product manager. Within a year, American tech companies started announcing layoffs. Pratik, who requested to be identified by a pseudonym to protect his identity, told Rest of World it was a very difficult period. In April 2022, he checked in with the Indian tech workers in his neighborhood every day to get updates on who had lost their jobs. Every morning, he would call or text his friends and family to ask if they were fine or if they had been sacked.
Eventually, Pratik was laid off, and he returned to Maharashtra, India, in October 2023. He quickly realized there was too much competition and limited opportunities back home. Pratik pointed out the difference in the number of available product manager openings by country on LinkedIn — compared to the more than 8,000 openings in the U.S., there were just under 1,000 in India, at the time of writing. He said he was often ghosted by companies who had offered him an interview. “It was a good learning [opportunity]. In the U.S., this [ghosting] does not happen,” Pratik said. “They send an apology [at least]. Here, they did not have any regrets. They were like, we are doing you a favor.”
800,000 The number of Indian IT workers who lost their jobs in the U.S. since late 2022.
According to data sourced from Teamlease Digital, techies who have returned from the U.S. and are actively seeking opportunities in India are mid- to senior-level professionals. They tend to work as product and project managers or as engineers specializing in full-stack, design, data, and DevOps, among other roles.
While they struggle to find employment, returning techies also face social stigma related to job loss. The hardest part of this transition, according to Pratik, has been the pressure of expectations from his extended family and community. “We are Marwaris [a business community], so everyone wants to know what’s going on. And explaining so much was not possible,” he said. “So, we avoided talking about it to our extended family and friends.” Though Pratik was lucky his parents understood his situation, he said many of his peers face a lot of criticism or are questioned about their capability if they come back.
For others, especially those with dependents, it could take years to recover from the trauma of being unceremoniously sent back home. Roopa Shetty, an IT worker who lost her job and returned from the U.S. well before the latest round of layoffs, has spent the last three years paying off her son’s hefty U.S. college loans. She told Rest of World the payments have made a “huge dent” in her savings, built over 20 years of employment. “So my retirement [plan], everything — I need to really start from scratch,” she said.
