Two Different Worlds With the Same Job Title

You’re a software engineer at TCS. Your friend is a software engineer at Razorpay. Same degree, same year of graduation, same LinkedIn headline. But your daily work, salary, and career trajectory look nothing alike. That’s the product-based vs service-based divide — and understanding the business model behind each is the first step to making a smart career choice.

How the Money Flows — The Business Model Difference

A product-based company builds its own product and sells it to users. Think Zerodha, Flipkart, Google, or Adobe. The engineering team directly impacts revenue — every feature you ship, every bug you fix touches the company’s bottom line.

A service-based company sells engineering labour to other businesses. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant get contracts from clients (often foreign banks, insurance firms, retailers) and deploy developers to work on those client projects. The company makes money from billing hours, not from building a product.

This single difference creates a ripple effect across everything — what you work on, how you’re hired, how fast you grow.

The Interview Gauntlet

Service-based hiring is volume-driven. Mass campus recruitment, aptitude tests, basic coding rounds, and an HR interview. Companies like TCS and Wipro hire tens of thousands every year. The bar is set to filter out, not filter in — if you clear the cutoff, you’re usually through.

Product-based hiring is precision-driven. Expect 3–6 rounds: online coding assessments, DSA problem-solving, system design (for experienced roles), and cultural fit. Companies like Atlassian or PhonePe might interview 500 people to hire 5. The preparation alone — LeetCode grinding, project building — can take months.

A Day in the Life: Side by Side

9:30 AM — Service-based engineer (Year 1): You log in, check your client email, and pick up a Jira ticket to modify a validation rule in a Java module you didn’t write. The codebase is 12 years old. You spend 2 hours understanding legacy code, make the change, raise a pull request. Your manager (who sits in a different city) approves it by evening. You leave at 6:30 PM.

9:30 AM — Product-based engineer (Year 1): You join a standup where your team discusses a new search feature. You’re assigned to build the API endpoint. You write code, write tests, and push to a CI/CD pipeline that runs 400 automated checks. A senior engineer reviews your code, leaves 8 comments, and you learn more in that review than in a week of tutorials. You leave at 7:30 PM — sometimes later during launch weeks.

Neither day is inherently better. One offers predictability. The other offers intensity.

Salary Progression — The Numbers

Here’s what realistic salary trajectories look like:

Experience	Service-Based	Product-Based
Fresher	₹3.5–4.5 LPA	₹8–25 LPA
3 Years	₹5–8 LPA	₹18–40 LPA
5 Years	₹8–14 LPA	₹30–60 LPA
8+ Years	₹14–25 LPA	₹50 LPA–1 Cr+

The gap is real, but context matters. A lead architect at Infosys BFS (banking vertical) can clear ₹30 LPA+. A struggling product-based startup might pay ₹10 LPA for senior roles. Averages hide a lot of variance.

Work Culture — What Actually Differs

Learning curve: In product-based companies, you’re pushed to learn fast because shipping matters. Code reviews, tech talks, internal documentation — the knowledge loop is tight. In service-based companies, learning depends heavily on your project allocation. Get a modern cloud-native project and you’ll learn a lot. Get stuck on a mainframe maintenance project and your skills might stagnate.

Ownership: Product engineers own features end-to-end. Service engineers often own tickets — you implement what the client specifies. This changes how you think about problem-solving over time.

Work-life balance: Ironically, many service-based companies offer better 9-to-6 schedules. Product-based companies — especially startups — often expect you to be available during launches, incidents, and sprints. The “cool office” comes with Slack pings at 11 PM.

The “Service-Based Is Bad” Myth

Let’s address this directly: service-based companies are not a career graveyard.

Lakhs of Indian IT professionals have built solid careers, bought homes, raised families, and even moved into leadership roles at service companies. The stability is real — TCS has one of the lowest layoff rates in the industry. During the 2023 tech layoff wave, product-based companies (including Google, Microsoft, and Meta) cut thousands. Service-based companies were largely unaffected.

The problem isn’t service-based companies themselves. The problem is coasting — spending 3 years doing the same CRUD operations without upskilling. That kills your career in any company type.

Switching Lanes — How People Cross Over

The most common move is service → product. Here’s how people actually do it:

1. DSA preparation: 3–6 months of consistent LeetCode/Codeforces practice. Focus on medium-level problems.
2. Build real projects: Not tutorial apps. Build something with a database, an API, authentication, and deployment. Put it on GitHub.
3. Target mid-tier product companies first: Don’t aim for Google straight from TCS. Companies like Genpact Digital, Publicis Sapient, or smaller product startups are realistic stepping stones.
4. Leverage your domain knowledge: If you worked on banking projects at Infosys, fintech companies value that context.
5. Network aggressively: Referrals account for a huge chunk of product-based hiring. Connect with people on LinkedIn — genuinely, not with copy-paste messages.

The reverse move (product → service) is rare but happens — usually for leadership roles, onsite opportunities, or better work-life balance during specific life phases.

Making Your Choice

If you’re a final-year student with strong coding skills, a competitive programming habit, and ambition to work on cutting-edge tech — go all in on product-based companies. The upfront effort pays off massively.

If you need a reliable paycheck, your coding skills are average, or you want time to figure out your path — take the service-based offer without shame. Use the stability to upskill, save money, and plan your next move.

The worst decision is no decision — sitting on an offer because LinkedIn told you service-based is beneath you. A job is a starting point, not a life sentence. Where you start matters far less than what you do after you start.