when the party is over for indian software industry salaries

the great resignation wave has resulted in great salary inflation in India. For long multiple of 1.5 to 3 was where the mean lied . Now its very common for younger professional to claim 3 to 5 multiple. The skew is higher at less experience but that’s common thing in stats 🙂

This is not first time

But this not first such rerating ,we had similar events in last 2 decades .One in 2006 era and other one in 2012.In both cases the salaries were rerated .But in the years to follow we had very slow growth with passive push back from companies . This brings us to the discussion of brutal appraisals we will have in 2022-2023 era.

The hard math behind salaries

Every company whether they have a flat agile team or pyramid teams have revenue value assigned to their people. For services its driven by billing and is more obvious. For others its unspoken but such numbers do exist. Once this rush is over its natural that product owners and likes will do the hard math[for most companies IT is cost center ;for some its key differentiator ]. That’s when the hike, retention and appraisal discussion of next year are expected to be brutal.
The case might be easy if you’re working at internet giants or flush with cash unicorns. But for a vast majority these multiple will pose a moment of truth.

How to ride the tide

My advice to younger folks is to increase their talent multiple as much and as fast as possible. There are few skills in software like design, architecture, security, networking that are hard skills and they are function of time and exposure. But for professionals working in pure play language programming or framework programming its easy to level up in short time with practice. It is also important to note that pure play language or framework programming is also where people replacement is easy (its very easy to hire freshers in bulk and wait for them to mature ,say about a year). In  case of framework programmers the sheer speed of changes in their ecosystem means that such salary gains come with a time to live value attached to it.
So this great salary rerating is also call to action for making the individual difficult to replace :). Difficult in the sense of depth ,breadth, command over craft and also future proofing. Or else the same economic principle or supply demand that apply to goods can easily come hitting hard.

so level up, invest in your self fast.

( pasting below a skill map for anyone to chart their training journey in Indian software industry ,its something that I have been following for years and my resume has been styled as such 🙂 .I don’t claim this to be path breaking stuff but over years my Jrs have benefitted from this so there is no harm in having a look 0

Here is link to the xls i created ,if the image isn’t clear

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l5TBR76nEh-dUXc4FL1e95b2C9hadzn2vGiTb4MrSrg