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Comment by gegtik | Hacker News Reader

this is painfully true. at a previous company we went from forced-curve ranking, to a manager-driven model where EOY rankings were completely at manager discretion (though pay incentive was pre-allocated to be distributed at manager discretion). Within a year new directives were provided on how the manager-driven ratings had to be distributed.

its a sickness

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I worked at a big UK company that had a APR process but after all the scores for the year where worked out - there where levelling meetings where more senior mangers / hr fiddled the figures to hit the desired pay quanta.

OH and to get a cat 1 rating (the best) the suggested level was world expert several patents in own name etc

"there where levelling meetings where more senior mangers / hr fiddled the figures to hit the desired pay quanta" That's just business. They need to make the budget. There's not an indeterminate amount of money available so it needs to level out among all the employees.

And yes, achieving "Significantly exceeds expectations" implies some level of walking on water, and is the top 1-2% of the company. This isn't the same as school grades where anything less than an A means you're doing something wrong.

Annual reviews are some of the worst time to get pay raises because of these constraints. Finding ways to get "out of cycle" raises/promotions is much better.

Out of cycle promotions/raises did not exist and as we had Martlesham aka the British version of bell labs where we had you know one of the Inventors of ethernet working a cat 1 was realistically out of reach for the ordinary plebes

The best way, and probably the only way, to get a 25% pay raise, is to jump ship.

Not the only way. Out of cycle promotion (8-10% base + 5% bonus increase) followed by standard cycle raise (4.5%) and then added stock comp (+15% effective) resulted in this for me in one year.

This was the result of very direct conversions with my manager about “I’m at $x, I’d like to be at $y” and he used all the tools he had to get me there.

But yes, normally that’s the only way.

Nice! Congrats to you! It seems like you hit the startup stock option lottery.

That seems to be a very generous and reasonable sharing of income from the company and your manager.

As well as to have a manager that wasn’t a self-serving jerk, whose intention is to manage you down, instead of managing you up.

Most people are not so lucky.

And most managers are self-serving, despite whatever platitudes they say.

But I think for most people, they must take their destiny into their own hands. And negotiate what is best for themselves.

In a sense, you’re only worth what you can negotiate.

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