As the title suggests, I’m an Indian. I’ve been working remotely for nearly 10 years and during this time, I’ve had the opportunity to be a senior developer, a CTO, and a CEO. I’ve built several platforms from scratch; e-commerce, logistics, medical, social media, AI, and a whole lot more. I’ve worked with people and teams from all over the world and I still work remotely for a company in the US.
I live in Bangalore, India, and my wife is a travel and lifestyle journalist (among other things) who also works remotely. The two of us work on the go; we travel for her assignments and we travel for fun, too. But, no matter where we are, we ensure our work gets done.
Before I begin, let me be clear: what I’m talking about here in this piece isn’t something only remote Indian candidates go through. I suppose it’s something pretty much anyone can experience. But, it’s definitely something I’ve seen happen to people from developing nations (non-first world countries).
Let me narrate this with an example (one that was totally true, btw). Sometime ago, I was looking for a job with a job title like this: “Senior fullstack developer (ReactJS/React Native/PHP-NodeJS)” and found one too. They were looking for a person with startup experience and at least 5 years of work experience with the listed skills — all of which I happily checked off. They were also offering a pay 90–100k USD a year and were okay with candidates working remotely from anywhere. The job description also contained the usual content: “We are an equal opportunities employer blah blah-…” you know the drill. I applied for it straight away and sent them my CV.
They responded the following day and we scheduled a call. The call was with the CEO himself and overall, it was a great call. At one point, he asked me, “Do you have a desired salary in mind? A ballpark figure would work, too.”
I said, “Well, you have a range mentioned in the listing — 90–100k USD annually — and that works for me.” He nodded in approval and said that we could proceed to a tech assignment. The CTO got in touch with me and sent me an assignment that I was done with in a couple of days. He was impressed with my submission and so, I was passed on to the next round; theirs was a platform for group conferencing and the CEO wanted me to hop on to one of the scheduled group events and get a hands-on experience of the platform. The event was about 2–3 hours long and he sent a bunch of follow up questions to get an idea of what I thought I could improve on the platform and what I liked/disliked about it.
I got through all this and the entire process took a little more than a week. Finally, they scheduled a call to discuss the offer. The offer on the table was 45k USD annually.
I blinked and thought I’d misheard him; so, I asked him what the figure was again and he said what I thought I’d misheard: USD 45k annually. Of course, I could choose to “let go” of $250 monthly and pass it on to an equity stake in the company — like it was a great perk that would keep me interested.
I said, “Wow, hold up. The job listing said 90–100k annually but you’re talking to me about 45k annually. I’m not sure if I’m missing something or if I misunderstood something.”
He said, “Yeah, the job description does say 90–100k USD but we pay based on your demographics and since you’re in India, we did some research and we believe we’re paying much higher than average that you’d earn in your city. The range on our listing is for people who are in Europe or in the US — basically out in the west.” — this, coming from a guy running a company based out in Hong Kong, basically meant that he wouldn’t pay his own countrymen the specified range.
But, this is exactly what I have a problem with. When you put something on the job listing, I believe that’s exactly what you mean. If you’re going to contradict yourself, I might have to start saying, hey, I’m sorry I can probably just work on the PHP bit and not the React stuff you ideally want even though I do know your entire tech stack.
It’s not just the fact that he was contradicting the range mentioned in the job description that pissed me off — it was the excuse he used. “You live in India”.
What the average pay in Bangalore is shouldn’t even matter especially when the job description declares a pay range, the demographic restrictions (which was worldwide for this listing), and the fact that they are an “equal opportunities” employer. They also went the extra mile of wasting my time for over a week with the rest of the process instead of stating this fact during the introductory call.
Fortunately, most remote hiring companies don’t do this. They genuinely don’t discriminate and are willing to pay for the work you do — not based on the price of onions in your country. However, there’s a large number of remote hiring companies that follow the practice of underpaying employees based on demographics.
This is how I look at it: if you’re willing to pay a $100 for a phone and you find an Indian who’s selling the same phone, are you going to tell him, “No, you can’t sell this for a $100. You don’t need it because you can make do with $50 in your country because that’s the average there. That’s all I’m going to pay”? It’s different if the Indian dude chose to sell a $100 phone at $50 — that’s his choice. But, the buyer can’t be the one who decides the worth of what he’s buying in this scenario. I mean, the buyer can choose to walk away and if needed, be upfront about why they don’t want to buy a $100 phone from an Indian — maybe the quality is lower or maybe he doesn’t like the colour. Those reasons are justified. If the Indian didn’t want to sell the phone for $100, he’d be selling it in his country for $50 if he wanted to. But again, that’s his choice. No one else is allowed to make that choice. Going by that logic, Apple (to name one company that overprices their products) would be out of business!
I’ve read several similar blogs about pay disparity and the common theme is underpaying. Several people I know have had to sign contracts with companies that chose to underpay them at the last possible minute only because they probably had no other offer on the table or they probably were already out of a job for a while. It’s a terrible practice but one that has no straightforward way to monitor.
Personally, I’ve seen this happen to Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, and to some candidates from African countries. The greatest irony is that I’ve seen this happen to Indians … by other Indians living abroad. Like, what the fuck? It’s different when some other country dude chooses to screw you over — but are you really trying to screw over your own people? From my own experience, I’ve had this happen to me more times than I’m willing to admit because, quite frankly, it’s an embarrassment to Indians in general.
Good developers around the world (irrespective of their economic status) looking for remote jobs invest a lot of their money and time into improving themselves. They buy new tech to make themselves more efficient, they sign up for courses to get better at what they do, and they learn English (if they’re not native English speakers) to communicate well. Somehow, I find these facts being pushed under the rug because nobody likes to acknowledge it. The least you can do for a candidate like that is to pay him/her what you’d pay yourself for such a role — they would be incredibly grateful and work more than what’s expected of them.
If you’re a company or an individual that has inadvertently put a candidate in a position like this, please just stop. You’re forgiven and you probably missed out on potentially good talent. Please be mindful is all I ask. And if you’re expecting someone to compromise on their pay because of where they live, ask yourself if you’re okay compromising on the amount of work they do to keep things proportionate to your pay.
