This is an excellent point. Additionally, even if you do find out who can give you a raise, it may be impractical to get due consideration. I've experienced a

This is an excellent point. Additionally, even if you do find out who can give you a raise, it may be impractical to get due consideration. I've experienced a situation where the CEO of the (large, listed) company personally reviewed all compensation changes and hiring offers. He was so busy (doing CEO stuff, presumably) that he'd often miss meetings with his direct reports (no-one would even know what city he was in) so imagine what it was like trying to get a resolution for an underpaid engineer on your team. After a while of repeating "we're working on it" you start to look either disingenuous, ineffective, powerless - or all of those. Edit: a word