What happens if your boss goes to their boss and says, "Hey, one of my employees is planning to jump ship for salary reasons, can we do anything here?"
Of course you can do that but you enter another level of negotiation because you are quitting and it might not even count toward the budget at this point. I would not recommend doing that every year as a negotiation tactic either.
I tend to agree with Redwards, and unless you are working in a small company if you do your job correctly it becomes more a political game than anything else.
I've had success in getting promotions for some people when this sort of thing happens... sometimes it's a wake up call for the execs to light up a back burner conversation with HR.
If the option of giving people nontrivial raises is unblocked, you only need to play it once. It is harder to play it this way, of course, but once you have an exception / your boss has more budget / etc., you can hopefully just do normal raise negotiation.
I'm referring specifically to 'redwards510's department, which has a specific budget for raises (and to similar cases). I'm not referring to companies where in general one needs to threaten to quit to get a raise, of which there are a lot more. My guess is that if 'redwards510 threatens to quit, and that goes successfully, that will necessarily involve either raising the annual budget for raises (which, if I'm understanding correctly, is in dollars-per-year, not dollars), or fixing the process.
Definitely true, but in software engineering it's typical to have short stints anyway. If you change companies every few years, why not play this card all the time before jumping ship?
Pretty sure that in the current era there isn't a "S" at yearS for someone decent (and willingful).
Most companies are perfectly fine to hire/poach from elsewhere whereas most companies are sucking at retention (that is, if not actively pushing people away). The combination is an aggressive environment.
What happens if he replies that "We've been recruiting for 6 months for this position and we couldn't find anyone decent enough even at his current salary"?
Haha! This is exactly the argument I use when trying to negotiate! I say "you won't be able to find anyone for what you are paying me now". Management shrugs. I tell management in no uncertain terms "i need to make more money", strongly hinting that i will begin looking elsewhere.
If management truly wanted to "negotiate" then they would begin putting conditions on a raise or something.
