Zoho Corporation CEO Sridhar Vembu has raised concerns over a growing trend of Indian-American professionals in engineering and technology moving into high finance, echoing a pattern seen in the broader American workforce for decades.
In a social media post, Vembu noted that “smart Indian-American children, whose parents work in engineering or tech, are moving to High Finance.” He likened this shift to what he observed in the 1990s when he was urged to leave engineering for a lucrative Wall Street job after earning his PhD from Princeton.
“A former engineer from Silicon Valley, who moved to a Wall Street job, tried to persuade me to join their quantitative analysis and trading team, and I instead took a lower-paying job as an engineer at Qualcomm,” Vembu wrote, adding that he did not find the idea of “making money on money appealing—probably my father’s admonition from childhood.”
Vembu now sees this trend accelerating among younger generations of Indian Americans, warning that it could have negative consequences. “This is not good,” he stated. “We need to apply our talents to solve hard engineering and tech problems, hard urban and rural infrastructure problems, hard health care problems, and so on.”
The Zoho founder argued that prioritising finance over technical innovation could be harmful in the long run. “Making money on money feels easy, but a finance-driven economy would destroy society. This is ancient wisdom, and we must pay heed,” he cautioned.