Demand the best possible salary from your employer

A recent question/comment on an Indian message board was as follows:

Friends,
A recent trend in the IT jobs show that people takes it like a business or even we can call it as a blade business(A guy who charges 4% interest per month on the finance, he lend to his customer). Is this professionalism?

Recently I have seen a resume with around 5 yrs of exp and trying for the 8th job!!! Also seen another person in last 1 yr worked with 3 major Indian IT companies!!! How can we call this as Professionalism? What they gain from this other than money? Or do you think money is the only thing we leave for? What about our learning’s, career, growth, value, contribution etc etc? Do we won’t give any priority to these things? Or only money is the first & last priority in our list??

I had just brought this for debate which I believe it’s unethical & un-professionalism. You might have a different opinion… Also this is not against anybody.



There are several questions above. However, my response below is limited only to the part about demanding the best possible salary from the employer. Please keep in mind that this whole topic is in the context of Indian tech companies. My response follows:


I don't find fault with the guys who negotiate the best possible salary for themselves, for the following reasons:

1. Almost nobody in the industry is a passionate artist who works simply for passion and soul satisfaction. Organizations and individuals are always looking to make the maximum profit. It is only common sense and good survival strategy to be as high on the profit/pay scale as possible for both organizations and individuals.

2. The pay scales within a company always grow at a rate much lower than the rate at which pay scales in the market grow. Meaning, the longer you stay in the same company, the lesser you will earn compared to the pay being offered in the job market for the same job and profile. This difference between personal pay and market rate only increases as the years roll. It is almost like a depreciation of the person's worth in the eyes of the company. Believe me, it does not feel good when you have put in years of solid, sincere, dependable service to the company and you see that the company values a newcomer in the market more than it values you.

3. The disparity between what a person is billed for and what he is paid is quite high. The employee is being paid much less than what the company earns from his work. This is the most important reason why Indian tech companies are so spectacularly profitable. For example, I am work at the client site in the US and the ratio of my pay to the ratio of my billing rate is roughly about 40:60. That is a huge difference, when you consider that a typical contracting company in the US pays between 70 - 85 percent of the billing rate to the employee. If you are working offshore in India, this difference between your pay and billing rate would be even higher. So, someone (read, the company) is making a lot of money out of your work. The least you can expect in return is competitive pay, good facilities, good treatment, respect and recognition of your value. How much of all these are you getting? We are not ignorant medieval farmers who can be kept in the dark while middlemen and rich merchants make a huge profit. Yet, that is how the situation is and that is how people are treated by many Indian tech companies. So, if a guy negotiates a great salary from the company, I say, "good for him"!

4. If you have spent a few years working in any company, especially a big company (where you are a small fish in a big ocean), you know what a hassle it is to get satisfactory increments and promotions. Although the policies and rules are supposed to be well defined and everything is supposed to be transparent, that's not the ground reality. There is an element of arbitrariness, luck, bureaucracy, politics, etc. which come into play, making the whole experience of increments and promotions less than satisfactory. So, it is always better to negotiate a great salary and great role before you join the company. Suppose two people A and B join the company at the same time. A joins for X pay and B joins for (X + d) pay. Suppose over the next few years, both of them get average pay increases. Notice that A will continue to get lesser pay than B throughout the career. The initial pay difference 'd' continues to affect a person throughout their career in the company. Heck, it will even affect them when they are negotiating pay with a new company they want to join, if the pay at the new company is based partially on what he is earning now.

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