The Salary System

The salary system is quite remarkably broken, for something so prevalent. Everything from the scaling to the way it is distributed. Take for example how a CEO can earn stupid numbers of millions while the grunts may not always be able to count their thousands. Clearly the inequality is massive, and when cuts happen it invariably hits the lower ranks while the higher ups still get their bonuses (albeit reduced) and no pay cuts at all. You'd think the reasonable thing to do would be to cut salaries across the board instead of losing expertise from laying off staff.

Then comes the matter of how increments work. Oddly enough, the percentage points apply across the tiers, causing a geometric salary increase as base salary grades are raised. This means that a 7% increase for a grunt is much much smaller than the 7% that a CEO may get for similar high performance. Barring a promotion, it is actually impossible for the lower rankers to actually catch up.

A possible alternative would be to have absolute increases in salaries at increment time, such that both lower and higher rankers receive the same increment range due to their performance. That should help flatten the curve.