The planning required to return to India for good after having spent a substantial amount of time abroad is immense. If I got down to listing the various factors to be taken into consideration and then the variables that can occur in each of them....well I would never get done. But if I were to broadly classify areas that need to be sorted out before anything else, they would be - Job, Housing, Transport (depending on the city you are relocating to this may or may not be very important) and Internet connection - in decreasing order of priority. Others things like finances(bank accounts, 401k, credit cards), immigration paper-work, medical insurance, taxes etc , you can figure out once you are settled.
On the job front there wasnt any searching for me to do since I was transfering with my US company to their Bangalore office. They did a good job of taking care of all the logistics. Of course it is very important to get a fair idea of the market conditions and your market value. Expecting a package much better than a local candidate with similar years of experience , just because you have worked abroad, isn't realistic. However, there is definitely a dearth of talent that comes with complete product life-cycle experience, especially in niche areas. If are able to demonstrate that you can add value to a company not just as a programmer but as a knowledge bank for a product or service, make sure you cash in on that. As far as the work culture goes, I am yet to see a major difference in my organisation between the India office and the US office. How is the "Work Culture" in India ? is probably one of the most common questions folks in the US ask me. And even people here ask me if I am able to adjust to the "office Politics" in India. So I guess there might be some truth to the stories about very long hours, horrible bosses and politics to get ahead. But thankfully I havent been a victim of any of those so far.And I am sure there are as many instances of "Bad Bosses" and "Office Politics" in the US.Also there is a strong divide between product based companies and the software services companies in India. Service sector employees tend to work longer hours simply because they mainly work with clients in the US and the projects are generally short term projects. Whereas in Product companies the work has been consistently improving with groups in India gaining ownership of complete features and in some cases an enitire product line. In such cases the work and the environment at work become very similar to that in the US. However, this development is slow in many cases. You may have to endure a struggle of convincing the US teams to allow you to take ownership of more and more stuff. As a result of this, many "solid" engineers in India lack overall product exposure and hence exposure to the business. Hopefully, moving forward , with greater emphasis on customers and sales in this part of the world, this too will change.
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