Salary and role for somebody with 10 years exp in software industry

Typical salary scale

  • <10 Lakh

    Votes: 1 2.4%

  • 10 to 15 Lakh

    Votes: 9 21.4%

  • 15 to 20 Lakh

    Votes: 19 45.2%

  • 20 to 25 Lakh

    Votes: 5 11.9%

  • 25 to 30 Lakh

    Votes: 3 7.1%

  • 30 to 35 Lakh

    Votes: 1 2.4%

  • 35 to 40 Lakh

    Votes: 2 4.8%

  • 40 to 50 Lakh

    Votes: 1 2.4%

  • > 50 Lakh

    Votes: 1 2.4%
  • Total voters
    42
This an interesting topic.
While talking salary, one of the major aspect is the type or rather company you work for.

A rather prime example is OP (@Lord Nemesis ) himself :) If you think about it, starting with 2.5 LPA with only one jump and that too with not a drastic hike, it seems rather impossible for one to reach 20-25 range in 10 yrs.
The reason, it could mean a near 30% hike each year. I haven't heard of a company yet which does that consistently. So a hat tip to you my friend :)

The second aspect is domain/tech
I for one worked with one of the largest banks in the world. And that too on core banking products. So yeah in one of the most paying domain (as would Finacle people in Infy will tell you ;) ).
Secondly, I worked on a rather niche product. I too started at 2.5 LPA and in near 5yrs could only muster 5-8 range (nearly half of @booo calculation of exp X2 -- many HR's follow this calculation ). My average hike per year was around 13% with max range nearly being 60%. So this happened in spite of the hikes.

In the meantime I struggled a lot with finding another job too (staying at same company for long time does not necessarily mean that you are staying because you are loyal to it. ;) )

This compared to a friend who was into analytics - SAS who reached 12 LPA within the same time, in the same company.

Lesson learned was: Domain is good but it should match to your tech too. Niche tech could also mean trouble.

Now I also think saying money is an issue only when people are envious or greedy is akin to being one tracked. Yes, there is a certain section which does things like that but things are never so black and white. There are times when it is a necessity too. Personally, I am the sole bread winner of my family of 4 (not married yet). Have paid for everything including 1 sister's marriage. So you need as much as salary you can muster too :)
 
As most of them mentioned it really depends on the domain. There is no set rule how much a 10yr old person gets in a certain company. In my company I know a guy who gets 30+ and another guy with same experience who gets 20l.

Along with your starting salary it also depends on the performance. Successive 1 rating helps to get good hikes ever year.

So there are 2 ways of getting good salary. Either get good ratings in your current company. If you think you are not able get good ratings, it's better you change company. You can get 30%+ hike of you negotiate.

In my company along with knowing languages like C, C++, it's a added advantage if you know telugu
 
Lord Nemesis said:
In my 10 years of experience, rarely have I put more than the stipulated 9 hours per day and still as far as compensation goes, I started my career at an measly 2.5LPA and it still increased 13 fold without changing jobs more than once and yeah, I didn't get any drastic jump when I changed either.
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Wow, this is amazing. You started at 2.5L and within 10 years you reached 45L without job hopping? you should give more details and advice to beginners here :)
 
Interesting topic indeed.
When i started working i had same things in mind (i.e. hop jobs and earn as much as you can). After couple of job switches, i landed in my current company with a big pay rise and had decided there and then to shift to a new job in couple of years to be on a pay-scale that i felt comfortable with. But here i am in a same company for last 4 years and happier than ever before. And its not because of what i am earning, its more to do with the work i am doing and the work culture. I have no doubts had a switched couple of jobs in last 4 years i would have been earning 50% more than what i am doing right now. But i am not bothered about it these days :)
 
I'd say would depend on what sort of role you are in.
I'd sort it like this, in decreasing order of pay. Not an exhaustive list - but should give you an idea :)

Onsite business development/Sales Manager
Videshi Tier 1 MBA in Videshi IT Consulting co
Management Position in High growth small firm
Niche/Hot Technology/product specialist in fairly successful product firm
Tier 1 MBA/Consulting role in Foreign MNC/Medium but successful Indian product/Domain consulting firm
Domestic Sales for Indian IT co
Tier 1 MBA or Niche/Hot Technology Specialist or offshore Business Development/Presales in Large Indian MNC
Project Management in Large MNC
Some sort of Analyst
Operational Roles

The key is, what is the value that you can bring to business. Just adding on years of experience or being able to do something better is not enough. that's just incremental. If you want something like 10% salary growth every year, you'll need to continuously reskill or get substantially better at what you do.

If you look at a balance sheet, you'll see employee costs are 10% of revenues typically. So if you can create x amount of revenue with your revenue, you can justify x/10.... though it wouldn't hurt to ask more :p
 
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A lot of the times, my US friends do the same kind of work I do, but get paid 10x - 20x. They get ~50% of what they are billed for.
We get paild 5% of it. (Talking of services based companies).And in India, there is nothing like overtime pay or stuff like that either.

Having some "in" skillls helps. Otherwise, the only other route is do a tier 1 MBA.
(I wonder why companies pay so much for these managers, the value 80% of them add is minuscule)
 
JMP said:
(I wonder why companies pay so much for these managers, the value 80% of them add is minuscule)
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I know few peoples who are doing job of just approving the leaves for employees and doing basic excel work and getting paid more than 25-30 LPA. I really wonder why mnc companies pay them so much.
 
suds said:
I know few peoples who are doing job of just approving the leaves for employees and doing basic excel work and getting paid more than 25-30 LPA. I really wonder why mnc companies pay them so much.
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Dude, you are making me depressed... :(
 
suds said:
I know few peoples who are doing job of just approving the leaves for employees and doing basic excel work and getting paid more than 25-30 LPA. I really wonder why mnc companies pay them so much.
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If he's been there at the company for a while, there must be some history involved, or he must be really good at kissing ass. I have a friend (he was active on TE) he was a solution architect and got an entire account from red to amber status, and would have gotten it to green if his company hadn't decided to discontinue that relationship. He got to pretty much sit on his ass and write knowledge assets and create tools for 3 years while they identified another project for him (his skills were pretty niche).
Not everybody who gets paid to simply sit on their ass is an ass kisser.
 
As I said sometime back, With the increasing penetration of agile processes like scrum in the software companies, managers who just sit on their asses will soon find themselves out of a job (at least outside of IT services). The trend is self organized teams who can efficiently take care of the work without anybody yelling at them or standing behind their back. Anybody who cannot do the technical work at the ground level has no place in the technology hierarchy at at least below the VP/Director level. Only the people running the business at the top levels are managers. I have seen this transformation at both the places that I have worked and it is good.

There simply won't be any place for people who cannot write code and test (like most managers) because there will be nothing for them to manage. No, not the leave management, not even the appraisals, . For appraisals, each member in a team gives a self rating and a rating for others. The product owner gives a rating for the entire team a a whole. If the team finds that some body is dragging down the whole team resulting in a lower performance for the team, the team as a whole is empowered to kick him/her out of the team. They can move to any other team that is willing to take them. If no team wants to take them, they will be kicked out of the company. Even leave management is done by the teams themselves.

My present workplace no longer has a role named manager in the technology division. The closest to a manager is a role which is more akin to a director for a whole division of about 60~70 people. He is only responsible for budget management and may be the occational arbitration in case of any cross division coordination issues and that that too only when a scum master and the team cannot take care of it. He is not responsible for appraisals, he cannot assign work. He is in no way involved with the everyday work of the team.
 
Lord Nemesis said:
As I said sometime back, With the increasing penetration of agile processes like scrum in the software companies, managers who just sit on their asses will soon find themselves out of a job (at least outside of IT services). The trend is self organized teams who can efficiently take care of the work without anybody yelling at them or standing behind their back. Anybody who cannot do the technical work at the ground level has no place in the technology hierarchy at at least below the VP/Director level. Only the people running the business at the top levels are managers. I have seen this transformation at both the places that I have worked and it is good.

There simply won't be any place for people who cannot write code and test (like most managers) because there will be nothing for them to manage. No, not the leave management, not even the appraisals, . For appraisals, each member in a team gives a self rating and a rating for others. The product owner gives a rating for the entire team a a whole. If the team finds that some body is dragging down the whole team resulting in a lower performance for the team, the team as a whole is empowered to kick him/her out of the team. They can move to any other team that is willing to take them. If no team wants to take them, they will be kicked out of the company. Even leave management is done by the teams themselves.

My present workplace no longer has a role named manager in the technology division. The closest to a manager is a role which is more akin to a director for a whole division of about 60~70 people. He is only responsible for budget management and may be the occational arbitration in case of any cross division coordination issues and that that too only when a scum master and the team cannot take care of it. He is not responsible for appraisals, he cannot assign work. He is in no way involved with the everyday work of the team.
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this happens at my workplace too.

my role is a support "exec". :P and I only recently joined the project.

My PM is an excel guy. he has an spreadsheet ready and drawn up for almost everything. Doesnt know an iota about the technical matters. Although he has a very good grip of the process, and i guess that is what is most important for the managers. One of my seniors, who is a PM himself, says that when he selects "resources", he selects them by judging how good they would be able to follow the process. When i asked him, what about coding, he said, i can teach him coding, but the process is more important.

FYI, im in a service based company.
 
Self management is a near impossible with the quality of people you find in your typical IT services company. You do need a few layers of management, though probably not as many layers, or as thick as there is right now in most companies.

If you have not understood how CMMI sells itself, I'd suggest you read them again. Before we had a few good people, and they somehow managed to make things happen. As IT companies need to cut costs, they rely on more and more grunt work from freshers, and a shoestring quantity of management + some "knowledge" and "process" assets to achieve the same level of productivity, and more importantly, a consistent quality of service, regardless of how good or bad it may be.

How it is done, that would be giving away my company's operational strategy :P

People whining about the way things are being done, trust me, there is a simple and rational explanation for all this (though probably something you didn't expect)!
 
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