They’re cutting most people’s comp and dressing it up like they’re doing them a favor. The message is basically: “good news, we’re now rewarding top performers even more… by taking from everyone else.” It’s not about recognizing excellence; it’s about squeezing more out of people with less. And naturally, it all rides on their annual review system, which is subjective at best and arbitrary at worst. So now, their raise depends even more on whether their manager feels like fighting for them in a broken system. This sets people up to compete instead of work together. And the timing is pleb-crushingly tone-deaf. After myriad industry layoffs and burnout, they roll this out like it’s some kind of gift. It’s not. It’s just another way to try to do “more” with less, while pretending they’re “investing in talent.”
Dance, monkeys, or we will give your job to AI!
(We will give your job to AI regardless, then hire you back at a lower rate when it goes to shit).
My employer did basically this and it’s really only used for nickel and diming employees. At best you get 100% of what you would’ve been due, but you probably end up getting 95% of it. So while you might miss out on a couple hundred dollars the company saved millions by doing this across the board.
This is a downgrade worded like a upgrade.
Amazon is doing the same thing.
It’s phrased as giving top tier employees ability to penetrate bands.
In practice you have to be rated Top Tier (which is assigned on a curve and only 5-10 percent of employees will hit) 3 years in a row. So if you have an off year or a new manager then you’re screwed. I’d wager that’s less than 1% of the company that’ll hit that.
For everyone else it was a 10% pay cut. Woo?
For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
Google’s talent pool must be a joke these days. Every single product I can think of that they make is just awful in 2025.
Google has entered the IBM era.
No wonder a lot of their top engineers have been leaving recently.
