A close friend of mine ( let's call him Yash) was planning a switch sometime last year.
He was already working at a really high paying company and was making 31LPA(28 fixed + 3esops) at 2 years of experience. While switching he got multiple offers but the maximum he could get was 35LPA ( 31 fixed + 4 bonus).
Now one small startup who urgently needed to scale up made him a counter offer for a whopping 41 lakhs. The catch : The fixed was only 25 Lakhs and rest was to be paid as bonus.
He deliberated a lot . The company had just raised a small seed round and the remaining developers on his team were making less than half his compensation. There were also rumours of toxic work culture and there were almost no Glassdoor reviews. However in a call the CTO convinced him that he could even make 1.5X of the bonus if he performs well and he accepted the offer on the call itself. Considering he had been employee of the year in his previous org it seemed a no brainer for him to make it big here.
Today 1 year in : he has recieved a whopping Rs. 0 in annual bonus and sits with a 2 star rating : the lowest in his team. He works weekends most days and is put on something known as pseudo-PIP which means he has to come to office 5 days a week. Also since he has 2 switches on his resume and he has been working on internal tools since the last 1 year, the only option he has is to suck up until he is fired.
Every company has an internally defined pay structure , Amazon pays 50lpa to a senior engineer, Tata Consultancy Services pays 5 . Now there will be times when a company will stretch their limit to accomodate an urgent hire but it is almost always a hire to fire strategy. As the urgency is done for the company will do everything possible , overwork , PIP , zero bonus to make the employee get a paycheck that is on par what his colleagues on the team get.
Making a company stretch their compensation caps to accomodate you could be a suicide move for your career. I would highly recommend juniors be careful while doing this.
