Zoho Corporation CEO Sridhar Vembu has expressed concern about the increasing number of Indian-American professionals in engineering and technology shifting towards high finance, mirroring a long-standing trend in the broader American workforce.

Vembu shared on social media on Tuesday, “Smart Indian-American children, whose parents work in engineering or tech, are moving to High Finance.”

He noted that the shift highlights what smart Americans have done for well over a generation.

“When I got my PhD from Princeton in 1994, 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. I did not find the idea of making money on money appealing – probably my father's admonition from childhood,” added Vembu.

‘This is not good’

To the shift where the younger generation of Indian Americans are shifting to finance, Vembu said, “This is not good.”

He urged talent to solve hard engineering and tech problems, hard urban and rural infrastructure problems, and hard health care problems.

“Making money on money feels easy but a finance-driven economy would destroy society. This is ancient wisdom, and we must pay heed,” he concluded.