I recently interviewed for the SDET role at a stock-exchange-enlisted product based company for one of its Indian workplaces. The company is known to offer fresh graduates INR 2.5 to 3 million as a base salary for development based roles.

However, I being with 3+ years of experience as a Test Automation Engineer, struggled to negotiate with them the base salary to even INR 1.5 million at pre-final/final round.

I wonder why testers, even those who write code, struggle to get even 70% of the same salary as the developers. Wonder what prejudice is behind this. Or is it merely a simple supply and demand thing?

I seriously wanted to ask them the same question at the end of the interview but was afraid to get rejected, so didn't. So dear LC community, what are your thoughts on this?