Indian workers get highest pay hikes?

Read this news, and that set me thinking on multiple planes.

Of course, I had this great urge to laugh out loud at some of the comments made by readers on news sites. They made the point that they thought they were not being paid enough. They invariably made the comparison with salaries in the U.S. One person went to the extent of complaining that he got a lesser salary after returning to India. It reminds me of that old joke:

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"
"Then don't do it."

If you were getting better salary in the U.S. why did you return to India at all? Were you so naive as to not know that Indians get paid in INR and not USD? Don't you realize that you spend in INR too?

After that initial reaction, though, I started thinking about what an appropriate wage is. Doesn't it mean different things for different people? What does it mean when a friend complains that he is not getting paid enough when his salary is more than 10 lakhs a year? Note that I want to make a distinction between "I am not getting what I deserve" vs. "I need more to survive" vs. "The market pays more than this to similar workers". Where do people get their sense of entitlement? Why do youngsters think they deserve salaries in multiple lakhs when they have no real-world experience and they will not be contributing meaningfully for 6 months to a year?

It is sheer competitiveness, the free market at its worst - "We need freshers and the only way to get them is to bid more than the other companies" - and then we see people going to various forums to complain about the rising wage bill.

Coming back to the salary hike, a lot of people take it too as an entitlement. I have heard people complaining that their expenses have increased so they "have to have" a good hike. That would make sense if they were from the lower strata of society where a few rupees could make the difference between lunch and starvation, but these are IT pros. The hikes they expect are in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Getting paid as you move up the value chain is not incorrect, expecting it as a matter of right is what I object to.

Then, of course, someone has to ask me whether I am overpaid or not. And that's a tough one, because it is so difficult to put a value on the work that one does. From a personal point of view, I would like infinite money and zero work; so from that angle I am grossly underpaid and heavily overworked.

Oh well, that is life.