A software engineer with five years of experience recently turned down a job offer of 15 LPA. They had expected something closer to 25 LPA. Publicly, they called the offer a shame and asked whether this is simply what the market looks like now. The complaint spread fast, and the internet did what it always does. It argued.
What started as one person venting frustration quickly became a proxy war over what tech professionals in India should realistically earn. Some commenters agreed that market conditions have tightened. Others insisted that 15 LPA is perfectly reasonable for certain roles, and that counting years spent in an office chair is the wrong way to measure a salary. Everyone brought their own receipts. Everyone seemed certain they were right. The truth, as it usually does, sits somewhere in the middle and depends heavily on context that is easy to overlook in an online shouting match.
The Offer on the Table
Fifteen lakhs per annum typically translates to roughly one to 1.2 lakhs in hand each month after provident fund contributions, taxes, and other standard deductions. Twenty-five lakhs pushes monthly take-home closer to 1.7 or 1.8 lakhs, depending on how the salary is structured. That gap is not trivial. It represents a different quality of life, different savings potential, and a fundamentally different sense of career trajectory.
For someone who has spent five years learning, shipping code, and surviving performance reviews, the lower number can sting. If you entered tech during the aggressive hiring waves of 2021 or early 2022, you probably watched peers switch jobs for eye-watering hikes. Seeing slimmer numbers land in your inbox now feels like a personal slight. It feels like the industry has pulled the ladder up behind it. That frustration is human, and it is worth acknowledging.
But feeling slighted is not the same thing as being underpaid. The market does not owe anyone a specific number based on years served alone.
Why the Market Feels Different
There is plenty of visible evidence that tech hiring has cooled from its peak. Startups that once outbid each other for engineering talent are now trimming burn rates to preserve runway. Several large multinational firms have conducted layoffs or instituted hiring freezes. In this climate, every new headcount faces sharper questions from finance teams.
Companies are not offering less simply to be stingy. Many are facing direct pressure from investors and boards to show a path to profitability rather than growth at any cost. Engineering teams are still expanding, but the frantic pace of 2021 has given way to caution. When the supply of available talent meets a smaller pool of aggressive buyers, the clearing price shifts. That is basic economics, and it is playing out in salary discussions across the country.
Geography also complicates the picture. A five-year engineer sitting in Bangalore or Hyderabad often has access to a denser network of high-paying employers than one in a Tier-2 city where local demand is softer. Remote work briefly promised to flatten these differences, but many firms have quietly returned to location-adjusted pay bands. The same resume can command different numbers depending on the cost of living where the employee is based.
Skills Still Beat Calendar Years
The strongest counter-argument in this entire debate is straightforward. Not all five-year engineers are interchangeable.
Someone who spent half a decade maintaining legacy enterprise applications at a slow-moving services firm is not the same product as someone who spent those years building distributed systems, optimizing cloud infrastructure, or shipping production-grade machine-learning pipelines. Time served and depth of expertise are related, but they are not synonyms.
The role itself matters enormously. A generalist frontend developer with standard React experience is swimming in a deeper talent pool than a specialized Site Reliability Engineer who owns Kubernetes clusters, observability stacks, and incident response protocols. A data engineer with strong Python and Spark skills might find herself in genuine demand while a generic backend developer faces stiffer competition. Domain expertise in areas like cybersecurity, platform engineering, or AI systems commands a premium precisely because it is scarce.
The 25 LPA expectation is not fantasy. Engineers absolutely earn that and more after five years. But they usually earn it because they bring something to the table that is hard to find. If the skillset is common, the bargaining power shrinks. That is not cruelty from the market. It is how labor markets function.
Reading the Fine Print
Another layer that gets lost in online arguments about CTC figures is the enormous variation hidden inside headline numbers.
Fifteen lakhs at one company might include a heavy variable pay component that is not guaranteed. At another, it might be almost entirely fixed base salary. Some offers come packed with stock options that could be life-changing or could be worthless, depending entirely on whether the company ever reaches an exit. Joining bonuses inflate the first-year CTC but vanish immediately after twelve months.
Then there is the identity of the employer itself. A Series A startup offering 15 LPA plus significant equity is a fundamentally different proposition than a Fortune 500 firm offering the same cash with predictable hikes, strong benefits, and institutional stability. Treating them as identical because the digits match is a trap candidates often fall into.
Even cost of living reshapes the equation. Earning 15 LPA while working remotely from a city with modest rents can