Episode 415: I got a low raise and merging teams

Jul 1, 2024

Topics discussed include navigating low raises and corporate salary policies, challenges of changing the pay band system in a company, managing raises in large companies, merging teams with different product owners, and optimizing team merging for engineering velocity.

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Intro

00:00 • 3min

Navigating Low Raises and Corporate Salary Policies

02:43 • 2min

Challenges of Changing the Pay Band System in a Company

04:44 • 2min

Navigating Policies and Managing Raises in Large Companies

06:26 • 12min

Merging Teams with Different Product Owners

18:29 • 8min

Optimizing Team Merging for Engineering Velocity

26:38 • 3min

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Hi guys! I’m a technical Data Analyst in a well established Fortune 500 company, in my job I usually work with databases to build queries and prepare reports for our users. In the past 2 years my team and I had a tremendous impact in the business with several successful key projects, and we received very positive feedback from the management during our yearly review. We are talking about an impressive performance that it’s very unlikely to be repeated again in the future, a mix of luck, great decisions and technical efforts as a team.

I was expecting a substantial raise but my manager, who have been promoted recently and it’s the first time she’s doing this, told me that the salary caps are defined by our Headquarter’s HQ by looking at the average salaries for our roles. My salary is already high based on these statistics. There is only room for a 0.5% increase, which I approved, because it’s better than nothing, but left me with a bittersweet aftertaste. My manager felt sorry and promised that for the next year she’ll fight for more.

I love my work and I consider myself already lucky to have this sort of issues. However, this method doesn’t reward outstanding performances and encourages to just “earn that paycheck”, knowing that whatever I’ll do, I’ll earn more or less the same unless I get a huge promotion to manager (which I’m not ready to do). I see this in our company culture.

How can I bring this topic to the upper management and support my manager to change the system?
I am a manager of a small team of four people. I am about to absorb another team of three. While we all work on the same “application,” we own very different “micro-apps” within that site. Our tech stacks are similar (node, react). The two teams have different product owners under a different reporting structure.

I would love to merge the two teams. I think a seven person team would be more effective and resilient than two 3-4 person teams. Already with my four person team, we feel it when someone needs a couple days off.

How could I plan for and execute a plan to merge these two teams? What considerations for the engineers and our product partners should I have?