I am going to share my views on two categories here, one for the freshers who are just starting their career in the world of IT and another group who have good experience in IT but at some point they want to quit their current company but get offers which are low than the current earnings.
As I discuss in most of my blogs, being a fresher you need to stand out from the crowd in order to showcase your extraordinary skills so that you out smart others and grab that first offer letter. But unfortunately not everyone get their first offer very soon and they need to face a lot of rejections. But there is another sub group in that group of fresher who get internship/job offers with either very low or no salary. Some are wise enough to accept the offer and work hard in spite of having numerous difficulties, and the rest are of the mentality that we have invested and paid such huge fee for our education and why to work for 8 to 12 hours daily that too with no salary. Instead wait some more days and grab the offer as we give interviews. I would say that, its not their fault that they are thinking that way, anyone in their place would have thought that way but they need to understand or rethink. Let me explain you with an example of my friend who faced the similar situation.
Back when we just completed our post graduation and were struggling to get our first offer letter, we had one friend name Tushar from our group who was lucky enough that he got an offer by a startup company. The person who referred was another friend of ours who was well settled in IT. The offer contained few clauses, one of them was that he needed to work for at least 6 months without salary and then based on his performance, company would decide to hire him or fire him. Tushar had to travel for around 26 kilometers daily to office working for 8 to 10 hours, at a particular stage he thought to quit such a job which just had lot of problems and no financial gains. But somehow he kept pushing till 6 months, let me tell you what kept him pushing. He was offered to working on Hadoop/Big data technologies, which was a trending technology at that time and he was enjoying his work. Slowly he completed 1.5 years in the same organization and later he quit the job as he kept getting better offers. At the time of writing this post he has a very good CTC (above industry standard) and has travelled more than 5 countries till date. Just imagine for a minute what would be his destination if he had wished not to join his first job which was not paying a single penny! Who knows where he would have landed now.
Not only Tushar’s case, I have seen a lot of such cases where people started out with no gains but just pains. I would rather say just go for whatever opportunity you get at the beginning. Beginning is very very important in the world of IT, you can change to a different path if you wish to later as you go along.
Lets discuss what if experienced guys face such a situation wherein they wish to change the company but are stuck just because no company is willing to pay them the salary they want and instead companies offer package which is lower than the current package. The reason that I can get is your current salary might be more high than what other industries are offering. Say for 3-5 years experience, companies might offer 10Lakhs to 15Lakhs Rupees but if you current package is 20 Lakhs which is way more than the Industry standard then its difficult to switch to new company. Then the only option left is to search for companies which offer high salary range.
Lot of them face this issue, you work for a company and get good increment year after year. The amount is so high that does not fit to the range of other companies and you face problems when you want to change the company.
I have few suggestions on this scenario. The first question you have to ask yourself is “What are the pros of accepting the offer with a bit of low salary then the current or same salary as current one?”, If one of the advantage is that you are getting a good responsibility and the work you are going to do will have a very nice impression in the long run, then to some extent I would say it would be good to accept the offer. who know the offer might give you good $$ and position few years from now. There is one example I can remember while I was doing my internship. There was a guy who joined just a month after I joined that small firm. He had good experience working in few multi national companies with good salary, but I was really confused as to why he joined a small firm while he could have got good offers. Later he revealed he wanted to learn how the small firms work, how is the company managed, employees managed and the company policies etc etc. Additionally he also got to work and learn new things after joining. His main intention was that he wanted to open his own company so wanted some exposure on the working of small scale firms.
Above are the only instances I can recall as of now. But you can share in the comments section below if you have seen any such instances so that we can guide everyone together.
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