Bengaluru is the default answer for engineering in India and it is not always the right one. We are based here, so read this accordingly, but the honest position is that the city solves one specific problem — depth of senior people who have operated systems at scale — and charges a premium for it whether or not that is the problem you have.
The premium is real and it is not only salary. Rates run above other Indian cities for equivalent seniority, attrition is higher than most markets, and commuting geography means that where your office sits relative to where candidates live functions as a pay adjustment they will price in. For a company whose constraint is capable execution against a clear specification, rather than scarce architectural judgement, that is a great deal of money spent on capability that goes unused.
The alternatives each have a character worth understanding rather than treating as generically cheaper. Pune and Hyderabad have substantial engineering populations and their own global capability centre ecosystems, so senior people exist, though the pool for any given specialisation is thinner. Chennai has real strength in enterprise systems and hardware-adjacent software. Kochi, Coimbatore, Indore, Jaipur and Ahmedabad have growing developer populations, meaningfully lower costs, and notably lower attrition — people are less likely to leave when there are fewer places to go, which cuts both ways.
Lower attrition is the underrated advantage. A team where people stay four years rather than eighteen months accumulates domain knowledge that no documentation replaces, and continuity is worth more on long-running product work than raw capability is. Against that, hiring for an unusual specialisation outside the major cities can take months rather than weeks, and if your roadmap depends on a specific rare skill, that delay is the whole cost.
Distributed rather than located is the third option and it has genuinely improved. Hiring across cities widens the pool enormously and removes the commuting constraint, at the cost of needing deliberate remote practice — written communication, decisions recorded rather than reached in corridors, and periodic time together in one room. Companies that do this well do it on purpose; companies that drift into it because someone good lived elsewhere tend to end up with a headquarters and some outposts, which is the worst arrangement of the three.
The question that decides it is what kind of scarcity you actually face. If you need people who have solved your problem at your scale before, and getting the architecture wrong would cost more than the entire team's salary, pay the Bengaluru premium and get the judgement. If you need twelve solid engineers to build a well-understood thing over three years, another city will give you a more stable team for less money — and being honest about which situation you are in is worth more than any comparison of city-level averages.
