Slashdot Mirror
The Microsoft Salary and Review System
f1055man writes "If you can make it through the obvious bias, Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WASHTECH) has put together a revealing article on Microsoft's salary and review system. 'Internal Microsoft documents obtained by WashTech News show that Microsoft salaries have been stagnant or nudged only slightly higher over the past two years. Comments from current and former employees about the company's compensation and performance review system suggest a growing level of frustration among rank-and-file workers.'"
It's not the 50% mark of the company's pay scale, it's the mean of the pay range. Ideally, in a mature company, the mean of that scale ought to also be pretty close to the median. In my experience, the median is usually a little lower, but not as dramatically as you suggest, however, my experience is as an engineer, not as a programmer.
Without some supporting evidence, the rest of your excerpt can't really be evaluated - except that I can state with some authority that what you say is not entirely true. I earn more than the "competitive" average in my field simply because of supply and demand - there is not a plethora of experienced signal integrity engineers in my neck of the woods.
My company uses banding, although they, like most others, don't call it that. Some people are above the mean, a bit more are below it. Both performance and demand have a big bearing on salary and bonuses.
-h-