Indian SW salaries rise 19%

DQW NEWS BUREAU New Delhi, Sep 11

A typical Indian software professional got an average salary
increase of 18.7 percent in 2007, an improvement over 18.3 percent recorded in
the previous year.

This is revealed by a nation-wide survey carried out by IDC
India for Dataquest.

The report revealed that foreign MNCs pay higher salaries and
those engaged in R&D pay the highest. Not surprisingly, the top three
paymasters in the industry-Cadence, Sun Microsystems, Honeywell Technologies-are
all engaged in R&D. Seven out of the top 10 in the list included MNCs like
IBM, Capgemini and CSC.

The industry average salary grew by 11 percent in 2007 to touch
Rs 6.2 lakh per annum. This growth is encouraging compared to a drop of three
percent in the industry average salary in 2006. This average salary increase is
considered significant as the software talent pool of the top 50 companies has
grown sharply-at nearly 30 to 40 percent annually, in the last three years. It
is generally expected that with the on-campus recruitment of thousands of
freshers, the average salaries should go down.

While Cadence and Sun are the top paymasters for all employees
with up to 10 years of experience, Infosys is more generous with the salaries of
its senior and experienced employees. Infosys is one of the best paymasters for
professionals between 10 to15 years and more than 15 years of experience.

The survey points out that there is virtually no correlation
between 'salary levels' and 'satisfaction with salary'. Commenting on
the survey results, Prasanto Kumar Roy, Chief Editor, Dataquest said, "We
knew that high salary didn't always mean high satisfaction, but the sheer
extent of disconnect is amazing. There was less than eight percent correlation
between salary and satisfaction with salary!"