Microsoft techie recalls confronting ex-boss over lower pay than IIT peers: ‘Had to hold back tears’

A Microsoft from Hyderabad has recently opened up about how she believed that graduating from a tier-3 college affected her salary structure at her former organisation, Goldman Sachs in Bengaluru. Kriti Rohilla took to LinkedIn to recall a difficult conversation with her former manager which left her feeling emotional.

Rohilla, who has been with Microsoft for around 1.5 years, said the conversation took place about three years into her stint at Goldman Sachs, where she worked for more than three years.

"I asked my manager why I was being underpaid. I had to hold back tears in that meeting," Rohilla said.

She clarified that she was not afraid of her manager and, in fact, respected him deeply. "Having that conversation felt like asking a close friend to return borrowed money," she said.

According to Rohilla, she raised concerns about her compensation after feeling that she was being paid less than her peers who had graduated from IITs despite similar expectations at work. Her manager's explanation, she said, was rooted in how compensation had originally been determined.

"He said I had joined from a tier 3 college with less than a year of experience. My starting salary was benchmarked to that. Every hike since had been built on that number," Rohilla wrote.

Although she accepted the logic behind the explanation, she felt the situation was difficult because the expectations from her role were no different from those placed on graduates from elite engineering institutes working at the same level.

"What I didn't say: my work expectations were identical to the IIT hires at my level. But I had no offer in hand. So I had no ground to stand on," she added.

Rohilla said the weeks following the discussion were uncomfortable.

She claimed that she felt she was being watched more closely after raising the issue and eventually began exploring opportunities outside the company.

"I started interviewing quietly," she wrote.

Three months later, she secured another job offer and submitted her resignation.

According to her post, Goldman Sachs' HR team reached out the same week and indicated that the company was willing to match the compensation offered by her prospective employer.

That moment, she said, changed her understanding of how salary negotiations work inside large organisations.

"My manager was not being unfair. He was being an employee. Optimising the outcome with the cards he had," she wrote.

Reflecting on the experience, Rohilla argued that discussions around compensation often depend on an employee's bargaining power rather than on merit alone.

"In corporate, nothing moves without a real stake on the table," she wrote. "The painful truth is that leverage is not optional in these conversations. It is the conversation."

The post quickly attracted reactions from professionals across the technology industry. Among the responses was a comment from Partha Bhattacharya, a former Goldman Sachs employee who now works at Google in California.

Bhattacharya claimed that compensation differences between graduates of elite institutions and other colleges had long been a concern within the company. "Goldman is a black sheep in the industry for these pay practices now," he wrote.

While stating that he did not blame Rohilla's manager, Bhattacharya argued that paying non-IIT employees less despite assigning them the same responsibilities hurt morale.

"If they genuinely thought non-IITians are worse, they shouldn't have hired those people. But hiring people, making them do the same work and telling them they deserve less is diabolical," he added.

Another comment that gained traction came from technical lead Navin Kumar, who said many employees have grown sceptical of traditional appraisal-season explanations.