[waterhouse]

I'm curious what you think of Ben Horowitz's "How to Minimize Politics in Your Company"[1]. He gives the specific example of an employee asking for a raise; he argues that responding by giving them a raise, even if it's reasonable, rewards behavior that has little to do with their job performance, which has undesirable secondary consequences. He says that the right way to deal with it is to have a good, regular, and standard process for evaluating employees and adjusting their compensation accordingly.

To a person who works at a company that doesn't have such a process, I'm sure your lesson applies. But I wonder what you think about what the company should do. Take the company you worked at as an example: should they have had some process by which they would have measured your performance and come to you (and perhaps your co-worker) with a raise? (More regular and performance-dependant than "+$2k/yr each year if you haven't been fired".)

Regarding the main topic of this thread: Perhaps Satya Nadella believes that Microsoft has such a process, and believes that no one should ask for a raise, and gave his advice as though all companies were like Microsoft. (Or perhaps someone has information contradicting this hypothesis.) pacaro's comment below suggests that, whatever else you might say about Microsoft's process, it doesn't reward asking for raises.

[1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_co...

[ChristopherM]

The company I spoke of did have a yearly review process, I also waited for that yearly review to come up before I objected to the pathetic raises which barely tracked inflation. When one starts out at entry level, one should quickly gain significant raises commensurate with ones skills and abilities. This company clearly tried to get away with doing as little as possible, I also happened to know that senior software engineers at that company in Colorado were making $120k+. Had I kept my mouth shut, sure, in a decade or two I also would have been making $120k+ but in 2020's dollars not 2000's dollars. The actual salary doesn't matter as much as what those dollars can buy.

As for Microsoft, I have no idea how their process works or if they even reward ambition and results. I did work for a larger company later, 6 months in they gave me a $13k raise and 6 months after that another $20k raise when they made me a manager. I never once brought up my salary, what I did do was point out what I thought was being done wrong and then proposed how to fix it. In this case I went to the CTO as my manager really wasn't managing the product at all, I thanked him for hiring me but told him I didn't think I was going to stay. He asked why and I described what it was we were doing and all the problems it was causing. I then followed it up with a solution of how to manage the product. I did not expect, nor even go in there with thoughts of taking over my manager's job. It was just an honest assessment of how to fix and drastically improve the efficiency of the group. One week later the CTO came to see me, privately. He told me they were very impressed with the work I was doing and they wanted to give me the opportunity to manage the product and the engineers working on that project. The first 6 months were probationary, after that I would be made full manager and get a salary increase. At that company, I never needed to negotiate my salary. They were always generous, they listened and were very proactive in keeping their employees happy.

In general though, my experience has been more like the first job. The companies, while having a yearly review process are very stingy. When it's time to hire a manager they bring in someone from the outside as they don't want to hire another engineer and retrain them.

As for Ben Horowitz's article, I would have quickly left any company that followed his advice. Telling me to wait, the company policies etc. I would see them for what they are, a stalling tactic. I would recognize that I was being "handled". With me I voice my opinion, I lay out the facts. If they are ignored, I don't complain, I don't bring it up again. I just quietly look for a new job, and any counter-offers after that point are immediately turned down. As things have gone according to plan, I don't even have to deal with this anymore, because now I have my own company, products and clients.

[waterhouse]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. It does sound like the first company's "review" process was more like something they could point to and claim to be fair to deflect complaints, and less like an appropriate reward-allocation system. And given that, I would agree with your characterization of "telling you to wait" and such as a stalling tactic.

If the system were better, though--say, reviews every six or three months, and you saw people who did good work getting raises and bonuses, mediocre performances leading to stagnant pay, new hires' pay quickly reaching what might be called their "market rate"--then I suspect you'd feel differently. Though I suppose that if you thought the outcome was fair, you wouldn't make a complaint in the first place.

I'm thinking one good way for a manager to respond to a request for a raise would be to conduct a performance review of all employees on his team, and give raises to any who were found to deserve them. Unless that had already been done within the last, say, three months.

(Here's a case I heard about from the U.S. International Math Olympiad team. For background, with a series of contests they select the top 12 high school students from the nation, which become the "black" group at an olympiad training camp, and they give these students a test to determine 6 team members and 2 alternates. They also take 24 students in grade 11 or below into a "blue" group, and 24 more from 9th grade into a "red" group. Now, one brilliant kid had made it into the "black" group and onto the IMO team as a 9th grader, winning a silver medal. The following year, he did relatively badly on the contest and "only" made it into the blue group. The organizers knew he was probably among the best there and should probably be on the team, but they had to find a "fair" way to do it... so they administered the team selection test to all students in both the "black" and "blue" groups. The kid made it onto the team and again won a silver medal for the U.S.)

[zaccus]

>I wonder what you think about what the company should do

Very simple: give the raise that was asked for, or get ready to find someone else for the position. It's the same decision to make, whether they have some kind of process to do that automatically or not.