No Salary Increase This Year for FTEs at Microsoft

I don’t think you understand how much stock employees have. If the stock price go up, everyone is extremely happy

Amazon, most people got trivial market adjustments. 1-2% increases when cola was way above that for social security has realistically translated to paycuts which are compounded further with poor stock performance and sign-on bonuses starting to ween down.

Exactly. This is a layoff without having to pay severance.

Tech companies have realized there is no reason to pay their employees living in the U.S. a premium. There was a belief, whether true or not, that having their best employees working together in the same space gave them outsized returns. But now their most expensive employees refuse to work together in the same space.

The only question these companies have now is how to offload them fast enough to replace them with cheaper employees in Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America.

As a bonus, those employees are even more likely to come into the office and gain whatever multiplier effect working physically with each other the CEOs of tech companies believe might exist.

Paying your top performers more is not the same as stack ranking.

Stack ranking was commonplace and common knowledge when I worked there. Managers would submit rankings and the relative rankings would be "merged" up to skip/skip2 level. Well, maybe not "putting them on a stack" explicitly, but submitting a list of where folks fell on the bell curve...

If this is a dupe then please post link. Not seeing it on the first few pages.