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Ask HN: Why corporate culture never increment your salary?

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Re: Ask HN: Why corporate culture never increment your salary?

#72
post #28

Because they know you'll do the work you're doing -- and the tenfold increase -- for what they're paying you. They exist to make money, not to enrich their workers. The optimisation strategy is to pay as little as possible for as much productivity and labour as possible, then charge as much as possible for it to customers as a package item. Everything trickles up to the top of the pyramid. Sadly the only way to relia…

Before looking for a new job, put together all these things you have done in a paper to make a point for the salary bump. Request exactly the amount you want, the company might negotiate, so prepare for that (ask for more holidays or other types of compensation). If what you said it's true, this is essentially just a matter of renegotiating your contract. Yes it's disappointing, it should come from the company itself…

This is the sensible advice. Don't just ask for a raise, gather evidence to support your request. It's a negotiation, and you need to prepare well for it.

Some companies give small yearly rises to keep up with inflation, but others will expect employees to speak themselves. It all depends on how much pressure the shareholders/board exert to keep fixed expenses from growing.

Re: Ask HN: Why corporate culture never increment your salary?

#76
You are doing it wrong. If you want to have pay raise, the threat of leaving must be clear and present. You have to look for another job and bring over whatever secrets and IP the other site coveted as much as what you legally allow to do so. It is this very clear threat to your immediate boss that you will get you that pay raise immediately (when you resign they will have "generous" counter offer even though they deny your increment earlier). If he or she will look bad or lose their job when you're gone, you will get the pay as you deem so to save their ass not because you pity enough to really deserve it. However, it makes more sense to just jump to another company rather than going for pay increment. Statistically I reckon staying for pay increment is around 2% annually with internal cap of no more than 10% allowed for any raise under whatever exceptional reasons. It is arbitraily number that has no reality base just HR follow because it is so. Meanwhile for headhunting budget we tend to allow 30% to even 100% for the same job in the corporate (there is a range given in Mercer HR saas as guideline). So a jump to another company means easily 30% pay increase than under best increment scenario of 10%. Look at all high paying CEOs. You will find very few and rare they raise to the top in the same company. Vast majority has perfected the art of ditching company for the next. I am in HR field for over 3+ decades in multiple fields from finance to engineering to logistics. As retired HR, my advise to you is be ruthlessly disloyal. It pays. Only fools (we do use this words to describe that kind of loyal employee) stay loyal to the same company. In any company HR is not a big department. We do have internal worldwide vine to discuss this kind of employment and ben&comp things. How we work strategically setting global policies usually not that much differ from country to country or company to company (we tend to mimic each others informally). How the policies are actually implemented will differ because of localities factors. Don't feel hurt. It is just business. You are just another production cost that bosses at the top like to keep it cheap.
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