I work for a large, highly regulated corporation. I’ve been here for 3 years and generally enjoy the work. I liaison between the business and IT and ensure that requirements are met and help surface issues and or potential future issues.
I recently got promoted to a lead role within a newly developed team to help create a new process and program. I thought it sounded great! I’m WFH and easily get bored without a challenge so I was eager for something new. This sounded like a great opportunity, one of my good work friends also works on the team so it all worked out perfectly. I’m rather well known within the organization so I applied and contacted the hiring manager to let her know I had done so in case HR tried to filter out my resume. Interviewed the next week and got a call from the hiring manager a few days later and was extended an offer. That’s where things started to get messy. During our phone call I expressed my excitement for starting the new position and started talking with her regularly and getting up to speed on some of their initiatives, etc. Essentially, implicitly accepting the job.
In the meantime I’m thinking about the conversation I would have with HR and the ensuing pay raise, the extra week of vacation, etc… I thought the pay raise would easily be 10-15%. Boy was I wrong…. Initial offer came in at 2.8%. I immediately called the HR rep and explained that the offer she sent me was a 2.8% raise anticipating that there was some sort of clerical error and it would be resolved. Nope. They said that I entered a new pay grade and, as such, I would be aligned with the bottom tier of the pay grade. It just so happened that it was only 2.8% because I was in the upper portion of the previous pay grade. I negotiated a bit and ultimately got maybe another 3%.
I then start to dig around on the HR website and find that they actually publish these pay grades with their ranges. With a little math I find that I fall in the 23% of this pay grade. So I have stellar reviews, am considered a role model within the organization, have an MBA and MS in Economics (along with the student loans to prove it) and I’m at the 23rd percentile. To try to shorten this up, I don’t much care if I’m a role model or not anymore. I work as if I’m in the 23rd percentile. I bought a mouse jiggler, downloaded teams on my phone and put a fancy email signature together so it doesn’t look like it’s coming from my phone, and I’m no longer a slave to my computer. I’m over it.