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Can you explain some of the reasoning behind that policy, because I don't understand it.

haribilalic 16y ago
I guess the justification is that if you really worth the new salary, your old salary would have been closer to it.
olivolive 16y ago
A reason I've heard is that they want people who really want to work at The Company, not people who are motivated by the pay bump.
raganwald 16y ago
Such rules are usually driven by HR, not by hiring managers. The hiring manager's motivation is to get something done. Your compensation is a rounding error on the revenues from a successful product or whatever it is you are hired to create. HR, on the other hand, exists to create a "system." One of the primary properties of the system they are trying to create is predictability. If you have a process of some sort, anybody ought to be able to put the same inputs in and get the same outputs out. Thus, they look for a good way to explain what you are offered. Capping it based on your previous compensation is a nice, simple rule that fits well with a process. Paying you some random amount based on how urgent your skills are needed on a team is not a repeatable process. In a weird way, although HR talk a good line about people and soft skills and values and missions, they behave just like autistic programmers: They put numbers and rules ahead of people and priorities.
tptacek 16y ago
HR departments are a subclass of the same abstract base class as procurements departments. In both cases, the real job of the department is to reduce specifically-enumerated-company-cost X by Y%. All other responsibilities are window-dressing. Any simple intervention that can be accomplished by HR that comes with a simple story about reducing salary costs is likely to become company policy.
CodeMage 16y ago
I never inquired about it, because I was afraid that I might respond with something I would later regret. However, I speculate that in their case it was because they must have spent way too much money initially, when they first opened up their offices in my country. I don't know whether the salaries they offered initially were a part of aggressive hiring plan or just a result of someone's incompetence in HR; given the usual level of competence in their HR, it would be really hard to tell which of those two it was. However, the job was really good in all other respects.

I guess the justification is that if you really worth the new salary, your old salary would have been closer to it.

A reason I've heard is that they want people who really want to work at The Company, not people who are motivated by the pay bump.

raganwald 16y ago

Such rules are usually driven by HR, not by hiring managers. The hiring manager's motivation is to get something done. Your compensation is a rounding error on the revenues from a successful product or whatever it is you are hired to create. HR, on the other hand, exists to create a "system." One of the primary properties of the system they are trying to create is predictability. If you have a process of some sort, anybody ought to be able to put the same inputs in and get the same outputs out. Thus, they look for a good way to explain what you are offered. Capping it based on your previous compensation is a nice, simple rule that fits well with a process. Paying you some random amount based on how urgent your skills are needed on a team is not a repeatable process. In a weird way, although HR talk a good line about people and soft skills and values and missions, they behave just like autistic programmers: They put numbers and rules ahead of people and priorities.

tptacek 16y ago

HR departments are a subclass of the same abstract base class as procurements departments. In both cases, the real job of the department is to reduce specifically-enumerated-company-cost X by Y%. All other responsibilities are window-dressing. Any simple intervention that can be accomplished by HR that comes with a simple story about reducing salary costs is likely to become company policy.

CodeMage 16y ago

I never inquired about it, because I was afraid that I might respond with something I would later regret. However, I speculate that in their case it was because they must have spent way too much money initially, when they first opened up their offices in my country. I don't know whether the salaries they offered initially were a part of aggressive hiring plan or just a result of someone's incompetence in HR; given the usual level of competence in their HR, it would be really hard to tell which of those two it was. However, the job was really good in all other respects.