This was all pretty clear and insightful, thank you.
So, at the end of a calibration, if you were forced to lower someone's rating, does that mean their salary would be lowered as well? If so, how does that typically end up when you break the news to that person?
Also, how do you figure out how much you are worth? You can compare with what X position is getting paid in the market, but wouldn't this just be cherry picking?
Thanks to inflation, you don't have to actually lower salaries to effectively lower salaries. You just give raises that don't keep up with the rate of inflation. Employees with low ratings would usually either not receive a raise or the raise would be small (~1%). Low rated employees would also usually get small equity grants (under $5k/yr). But even delivering this kind of news is hard. If the employee has been through an EoY period before, they're conditioned to expect a nice raise and news like this feels like an insult.
As far as how to determine how much you're worth, you can look at GlassDoor and the spreadsheets that have been circulating. There's also salary data out there...not sure how you get it, but my company gave it to managers to guide our decisions on pay. They were dumb enough not to limit it the positions that we managed, so I got to see pay ranges for my position and even look at what I'd get paid in various other parts of the country. But the best way that I know of to gauge your worth is to spend time applying for jobs. Since most recruiters will drop you if you throw out an oversized salary requirement, it's not that time consuming to start at a number you know is over and work down to the point where you start getting put in their hiring pipeline. I also advise people to actually go through the full process as much as possible, as long as you can keep your current employer from finding out. When you come into the process wanting the high end of the salary band, you need to nail the interview process, and practice really does help you avoid being nervous and gives you the ability to read your interviewer better so you can give them what they're looking for. Also, for engineers, the hiring process can actually be fun when you remove pressure from the equation. If you don't care if you pass or fail the process, you're just going to try to solve problems and learn about better engineering practices which you can incorporate into your own work. Many places will even give you a free lunch.
Actually lowering a salary is incredibly rare, if not unprecedented, in engineering.
However, giving a zero percent raise - along with clearly explaining why - is a clear signal that performance improvement is needed.
If a salary is lowered, that would likely translate to the employee being on the brink of being fired, with large performance changes required for them to keep their job.
In my experience also working for a very large corporation managing a large multi-national team, when you're forced to down-rate someone for bureaucratic reasons, the most common method used to offset the insult is to provide a larger than standard equity grant or annual bonus. For example, if you are only allowed to give "Exceeds" to one of two deserving individuals at the same level, perhaps the one being set up for promotion only get the standard bonus but the other one gets an extra 50% of their anticipated bonus. None of this is fair, but it's an example of how managers try to be reasonable without violating company policies.
Almost all managers would spend more on labor than they're allowed, and also believe their employer's comp policies are at least somewhat "broken".
So, at the end of a calibration, if you were forced to lower someone's rating, does that mean their salary would be lowered as well? If so, how does that typically end up when you break the news to that person?
Also, how do you figure out how much you are worth? You can compare with what X position is getting paid in the market, but wouldn't this just be cherry picking?