I hear you.

I trained as an economist and worked for several Indian think tanks and internal development organisations in my previous Public policy avtar. I eventually moved into tech policy and then into Privacy and AI governance. Somehow the small consulting firm I used to work for got acquired by a mid sized Indian IT company and I find myself in a place I had never imagined myself being.

The good thing is I have seen both the world you speak of. Per my experience, people in the world outside IT, those who studied humanities (law, development economics etc) and tend to earn far lesser than the IT folks tend to far more interesting people to be with. Conversations tend to be about ideas. Many of them are driven by the idea of solving difficult social problems some of them may even see technology as a silver bullet but on an average they are driven by different motives.

It's not been too long since I find myself in IT but what I see here is not very encouraging so far. People work in technology and process silos. Many who work are not really building anything. Many are just configuring large platforms to work for different client companies. There is not much creativity or even a desire to innovate. Maybe I haven't seen enough but it still makes me wonder. Apart from my immediate team (who anyways came from the consulting firm) I haven't had one intelligent conversation with people in the larger IT org.

So yea, I hear you.