How I Plan to Make 60k to 100k USD as a SWE in India

Introduction

Hello folks! I’m back with another blog. This time we’re going to talk about making money as a Software Engineer in India.

For those who don’t know, I work as a frontend software engineer at Browserstack. I’ve spent numerous days over the last few weeks thinking about what I should do next in my career and what would be the best next step to take.

My Recent Experiments: Half-Baked Attempts from the Last Six Months

1. Trying to Make a SaaS Product

I created a Telegram bot that would remind users about their medicine/supplement intake based on their schedule. I tried to sell it to my health coach, but they never got back to me.

Unfortunately, the bot got reported and banned after I shared it on Reddit (likely someone reported it). Telegram even warned they might ban my account. All that remains of this project is the code in a private repo and a demo video, which you can check out here.

2. Contributing to Open Source Software

I decided to become a contributor for Astro, which I used to create my own portfolio website. Astro is primarily a static site generator, so I thought it would be a good starting point for open source contributions.

I’ve tried exploring other libraries in the past like Poimandres or repositories like Remix or Solid, but never actually contributed since I hadn’t used them much. With Astro, it was different—I was actively using it and had some understanding of how it works.

I managed to get 3 PRs merged into their repo. The core maintainers were super helpful and guided me even with the first issue.

Becoming a maintainer for any library isn’t a simple task:

There are significant responsibilities.
The path isn’t straightforward.
It depends entirely on your interest in the technology itself.

You could also explore freelancing by building things with Astro and finding clients from their Discord server or Reddit. However, I felt this would distract from my long-term goals—I’d end up doing Astro freelance work instead of upskilling in areas aligned with my career objectives.

Important Information

Astro maintainers and many other OSS repositories are funded through people/organizations who use them, or through platforms like Open Collective. Core maintainers can earn around $1000 a month based on their hourly contributions.

3. Exploring Freelance Work and Bounties

I occasionally visited websites like Algora or Replit Bounties, but never actually solved any bounties. I noticed many open PRs and delayed feedback on those repositories, which was discouraging.

For freelance work, again, I considered it but ultimately decided it would be a distraction from my primary career goals.

4. few other things

I also tried web3 for a while, only a week TBH, also gave thought to learning rust/ golang as a lot of javascript tooling is written in those languages, also found a cracked engineer, who is is writing javascript tooling in zig, more about him. Also questioned my existance after watching videos like this and this, from harkirat.

What do I do next?

some explorations on the average payscale of the industry

type-of-companies — type of companies we can apply at.

usual payscales I got from some youtube videos/ linkedin posts, ambitionbox.

laid out some basic goals for me and my friend.

Summary from the explorations

The results were pretty underwhelming for me after doing all these explorations. I was dabbling into things which are less explored, but was never able to go all in.
I would like to explore this and a lot more stuff, but I also want a bit more stability in my life in terms of money.
So the next step I would like to take is 🥁 drumroll 🥁 , “JOB SEARCH”, my personal goal is to work at a MAANG/ MANGA like company in India or a series A/B/C/Unicorn from USA.
It is not just about the money, the kind of people I end up working with, the problems we solve and the networks I build is worth a lot more for me.

Strategy

DSA
System design (HLD+LLD),
OSS contributions
Personal Profile (Conference talks, meet-ups talks, tech blogs)

Preperation Resources

DSA

LLD & HLD

Learners Bucket
TBD

All of this combined with checking posts on Linkedin, Reddit, Leetcode and other platforms for interview experiences

Applying Strategy

apply on careers page
check linkedin for openings, and get referrals from current employees
reach out to HR’s
reach out to founders for remote opportunities
job boards like remote.ok and wellfound
for web3, there is superteam job board, solana job board