> you are held in more esteem in India when you manage more people.
You can replace "India" with literally any country in the world. Managers and bosses always are and always have been held in more esteem than leaf node workers, in every society past and present. It's got nothing to do with the caste system.
Personal anecdote: I caught up with an American friend from school after about 15 years. He worked in some kind of product/project management role. When I told him I was an engineer in the Bay Area he said "Oh, you're just a programmer?" (OK so he wasn't a great friend, and that was the last time I spoke to him...)
> You can replace "India" with literally any country in the world. Managers and bosses always are and always have been held in more esteem than leaf node workers
This is true to a much greater or lesser degree depending on country, though. Here in the US you can be a really senior leaf node software engineer with fancy titles like "Staff" or "Senior Staff" or "Distinguished Fellow" and command tremendous respect and compensation.
That doesn't exist in some other countries. I was talking with an Italian friend once who works at a bank over there as a programmer, and seniority was exactly the same as how many people you manage. It was a contradiction in terms as far as he was concerned to be a senior software engineer if you weren't at least managing a team. The first question he asked when I was talking about my job was "How many people do you manage?", and when I responded zero, he immediately thought I was low level (I was not). Everyone aspires to be a manager over there.
My anecdote isn't exactly the opposite of yours, because in mine it's programmers themselves that are assigning status based on how many people you manage, whereas in your anecdote it's someone in an outgroup.
"Staff" and "Senior staff" and such are only recognized by ingroups. And often you need to be a staff level engineer to even begin managing people in tech.
In most industries that aren't tech, compensation and prestige are directly proportional to how many people you manage. Only in tech can individual senior engineers have impact that justifies the high pay without managing people.
Consultants, lawyers, physicians, engineers, architects, designers, board members... lots of occupations with high status and/or pay without managing people. The 'how many people' you manage metric is just a heuristic, and maybe believed by people stuck in the middle of business hierarchies.
Agree on 'Staff' and 'Senior staff'... military terms that never caught on generally. Not sure why they have started being adopted by some companies... I guess in larger companies people want their hierarchy and pay scales and whatnot.
A term so generic as to be almost meaningless. It can apply to an Agile coach, an Ivy League fresh grad billed at $1200/hr by McKinsey et al, or a programmer with an LLC and some marketing skills. These all vary widely in prestige.
> lawyers
Ditto. No one is impressed by a poor ambulance chaser or public defender. Judges, senior partners at big law firms, senior corporate counsel, DAs and attorneys general - those are lawyers people generally respect. And they all have authority over people and laws.
> engineers
Depends on where they work and what they do. Engineer at FAANG or a hotshot startup - that's been glamorized by media and entertainment but that's a relatively recent phenomenon. Engineer at a mid-sized auto parts or chemical company - usually associated with pocket protectors and slide rules, but basically just solid pros that take home a solid paycheck.
> physicians
They don't always hire or fire people but they certainly give orders. To patients, nurses, technicians. Physicians have always been respected, in every society across time.
> architects
Same deal as engineers. Plus on significant projects (like a skyscraper, apartment complex, government building etc) there's probably a team of architects that have one or more managers. Someone with an architect's license working for the city planning office in a non-leadership role? Not especially prestigious.
> designers
Are we talking about fashion designers? They don't manage people? Like literally zero people? That's news to me.[1][2][3]
> board members
They can literally vote to fire the boss of bosses - the CEO. And usually they're appointed on the basis of their achievements in business, law, or the industry.
> A term so generic as to be almost meaningless. It can apply to an Agile coach, an Ivy League fresh grad billed at $1200/hr by McKinsey et al, or a programmer with an LLC and some marketing skills. These all vary widely in prestige.
To add to your point, it is absolutely the case that in places like McKinsey et al., several key measures of the consultants as they make their way up the ladder are directly related to how many people they manage.
Consultants - the term has been diluted. But if you say that you're a consultant, people's imagination takes over. There's a reason why so many people are consultants. It's because generally speaking it's a term that projects high value merit.
Layers - people respect lawyers?
Engineers - we generally have very low respectability, among laypeople.
Only in tech is this the case - but I don't think that only in tech this necessarily needs to be the case. High impact employees can exist in a wide range of roles, but recent cultural trends have been to push toward commoditization employment so that someone with a different approach is assumed to be a malus rather than fairly evaluated - there are KPIs and if your work style isn't optimized for them you'll flounder in corporate america.
That's only true for a small subset of technology companies.
Outside the tech world it's barely true, and even within the tech world, the vast majority of companies still require you to enter management the moment you've been promoted a couple of times.
Sure it exists outside the tech world. It's the meaning of the word "profession." A senior doctor or senior lawyer is respected, despite being a leaf-node.
"Doctor" is always respected, senior or not, in every society going back to the stone age. It's the nature of the profession. And doctors have authority over people in the workplace - nurses and technicians primarily - even if they don't fire or give out raises.
"Senior lawyer" isn't a thing AFAIK. Law firm partners or senior partners have management roles, or at least, influence, in their firms. Otherwise you're an associate, or in private practice, working for the government, or as corporate counsel (where again, you might manage teams of people). A random lawyer with a small private practice isn't going to command a ton of respect in society generally, even if they do very well financially.
Err...ok, but again, a judge commands respect because that's a position of authority. They can order people or organizations to do things, take away their property, freedom or even their life. They can literally write the law in some cases.
You will have to take this as second hand information as I am not familiar with the relics of the cast system. But as he relayed it to me. When you go on a date with a girl that would be considered to be in a higher social status than yourself, the first thing the father will ask is how many people do you manage. Being a manager seems to provide some mobility in the relics of the system that is left. This is how it was relayed to me.
It's the "caste" system, not the "cast" system. Your friend does seem to have a pretty conservative circle of movement. He's probably talking about arranged marriages, not "dates".
(Am Indian, have gone on plenty of dates without ever meeting anyone's father.)
maybe the explanation is that management level is a replacement for the caste system to measure social status. not much different from western cultures. social status used to be the size of your land and how many people lived on it, now it's the size of your company or your team. the difference is that it is less universal but differs depending on the industry you work in.
While your points on broader power structures are entirely correct, I can understand why their friend put it that way. There's a natural tendency to attribute the state of your country to its past. The caste system was just the noticeable local manifestation of how societies have tended to structure power the world over.
I was with you until the "cast (sic) system".
> you are held in more esteem in India when you manage more people.
You can replace "India" with literally any country in the world. Managers and bosses always are and always have been held in more esteem than leaf node workers, in every society past and present. It's got nothing to do with the caste system.
Personal anecdote: I caught up with an American friend from school after about 15 years. He worked in some kind of product/project management role. When I told him I was an engineer in the Bay Area he said "Oh, you're just a programmer?" (OK so he wasn't a great friend, and that was the last time I spoke to him...)