No Pay Rise in Three Years: Inside India's Stalled IT Job Market

A Technical Manager candidate in India went three years without a single salary hike before finally resigning — and his story, shared by the interviewer himself, is becoming a snapshot of what experienced IT professionals now face: too many candidates chasing too few openings.

The account comes from Amarnath Shivashankar, an IT professional who posted his experience on X after interviewing two candidates for a Technical Manager role. Both, he said, reflected the current state of India's IT job market — a market where even proven skills no longer guarantee movement.

What happened to the two candidates?

The first candidate lost his job after his company was acquired by a global IT services firm, and hasn't been able to land a new one since. The second stayed employed but watched his pay stay flat for three straight years at an Indian IT services company before quitting.

Put simply, one path led to unemployment, the other to stagnant earnings. Neither rewarded loyalty or capability. As Shivashankar noted, expenses kept rising through those same three years — meaning the second candidate's real income effectively shrank, year after year, without any raise to offset it.

That's the quiet mechanism behind his post: in a normal market, switching jobs is how tech workers force salary growth. When switching stalls, so does pay.

Do skills still open doors?

Conventional career advice says upskill and the market will reward you. Shivashankar pushed back on that, and his reasoning is worth quoting directly.

"We all know skills are essential, but the entry barriers are so high that a skilled resource may not even get shortlisted for an interview as the demand is so low and the supply is so high," he wrote.

Read that again: the problem starts before the interview. When applicants vastly outnumber openings, a strong résumé may never reach a human reviewer. For the individual professional, this changes the calculus of quitting. Leaving without another offer in hand becomes far riskier when the search could stretch well beyond what you'd planned for — as the first candidate, still jobless after an acquisition, is living proof.

Is staying put the safer option?

Shivashankar didn't pretend to have a fix. "We must just stay put, hang in there till we find a better opportunity, if at all we can find one," he wrote, adding that while optimism matters, "being pragmatic is important."

The takeaway in plain words: this isn't advice to abandon career ambition. It's a risk calculation. Moving into a hiring market where supply crushes demand can cost you more than a few years of flat pay — it can cost you the job entirely.

The underlying dilemma remains unresolved for India's IT workforce: hold a role with limited growth, or gamble on a market where even interview shortlists are hard to come by.