Why Asking "What Do You Make?" Gets You Fired in Mumbai and Liked in Minneapolis

🇮🇳 India · 🇺🇸 USA

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In the United States, sixteen states now legally require employers to print a salary range on the job ad, as though compensation were a nutrition label. In India, more than half of job postings still say "as per industry standards," a phrase that means nothing and is designed to. Move between the two systems and you don't just change currencies — you change what counts as a rude question at a dinner party.

🇮🇳 India

🇺🇸 USA

According to Hofstede Insights' country comparison, India scores 77 on power distance against the United States' 40 — a gap that shows up directly at the negotiating table. Questioning a superior's stated figure, even politely, can register in a hierarchical Indian office as a challenge to authority rather than a business conversation. India also scores 48 on individualism versus 91 for the US, per the same framework, meaning compensation in India is culturally processed as a matter of internal fairness and group harmony rather than a personal transaction to be maximized. Naukri's 2024 survey found 62 percent of Indian candidates now check salary benchmarks before applying, and Michael Page's research on Indian pay practices notes that a majority of job postings still withhold exact figures, particularly for senior roles, which keeps candidates negotiating half-blind even when they've done the homework.

In the United States, negotiation is closer to a scripted ritual than a personality trait. PayScale's study of 160,000 workers found that seven in ten employees who asked for a raise received one — a statistic Americans repeat to each other with the confidence of a folk proverb. The wave of state pay-transparency laws, covering California, Colorado, New York, Washington, and a dozen others as tracked by compliance firms like Paycor and GovDocs, has turned the job posting itself into an opening bid: candidates now negotiate from a visible floor rather than a guess. Korn Ferry's 2026 global pay transparency survey found only 12 percent of employers worldwide have a fully built-out transparency strategy, but American postings are already public regardless, forcing a de facto openness the law didn't quite finish writing.

The Reckoning. The paradox is that India, the more hierarchical culture, has produced workers individually skilled at quiet, relationship-based negotiation — and the United States, the more individualist culture, has needed state legislatures to force employers into openness that Americans then treat as an entitlement. An Indian professional will often negotiate brilliantly through a recruiter as intermediary, never once naming an uncomfortable number to a boss's face. An American will name the number in the first five minutes and consider it a sign of competence.

Mercer forecasts average 2026 salary increase budgets of 3.5 percent globally, a modest number that both countries' workers are expected to fight over using entirely different weapons — documentation and market data in the US, patience and hierarchy-navigation in India. The result is that an Indian professional relocating to the US often over-prepares for a confrontation that never comes, while an American moving to India under-prepares for a negotiation that happens everywhere except the room they're sitting in.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — an engineer who moved from a Silicon Valley firm back to an India office of the same company was advised to expect roughly a quarter to a third of the US number in absolute terms, and to spend the negotiation not on the base salary, which was fixed by the internal band, but on a relocation allowance and a one-time signing bonus that HR had more discretion over.

Blind — a senior engineer negotiating with a Bangalore employer found the offer stayed entirely verbal for weeks, with the written letter promised only after a formal acceptance, which meant a competing offer couldn't be used as leverage the way it would be in the US, because there was nothing signed yet to leverage against.

Blind — several threads described employees discovering, informally and usually by accident, that a new hire at the same level and title had joined at a noticeably higher CTC, with the difference chalked up entirely to how well that person had negotiated rather than to tenure or performance, which is quietly demoralizing in a culture that otherwise discourages comparing pay.

A forum for Indian professionals relocating to the US described the disorientation of a first phone screen opening with a direct "what are your compensation expectations," a question candidates had been trained their entire career never to answer first, and the advice that circulated was to redirect the question back to the recruiter rather than freeze.

A general career-negotiation discussion thread on Reddit noted a near-universal pattern among people who accepted a US offer without countering: regret, almost every time, versus people who countered and received something — more salary, more equity, or at minimum a better start date — almost every time they asked.

Neither country's approach is objectively saner; they're optimized for different failure modes. The Indian system protects group cohesion at the cost of individual upside, and rewards patience and relationship capital that doesn't show up on a resume. The American system optimizes for individual upside and now, thanks to state law, gives you the floor in writing before you've even applied — but the number in the posting is a starting gun, not a final answer, and treating it as fixed leaves money on the table exactly the way accepting a first offer does anywhere.

If a friend told me they were moving from Pune to Palo Alto, or the reverse, I'd say this: in America, name your number second, but name it, and get it in writing before you resign anything. In India, never name it first, be patient with the verbal-offer purgatory, and negotiate the parts of the package HR actually controls. And regardless of which direction you're moving, do not discuss your salary with your new coworkers until you understand which country's unspoken rules you're now operating under — one will consider you unprofessional for asking, the other will consider you unprofessional for not comparing notes.