Yes. I managed a team and had to hire many people. My company provided me with a mountain of data that was broken down by location, job title and years of experience. The data was pretty accurate, at least for San Francisco, but I have no way of knowing if the other locations were correct.

Two stupid things on their part...I got headcount, not a budget. So when negotiating salary, it wasn't in my best interest to haggle. I'd rather have happy relationships with my direct reports than know that I screwed them out of a few dollars on behalf of the company. Had they made it my duty to make the numbers add up, I might have been a bit more frugal. Oh, and they didn't filter the data to only show me positions below my title. So I went into my reviews armed with the exact market salary data that the company used to negotiate with me.

Maybe your company also wanted their staff to be happy, like you did - is it only stupid for them to do it, but not you?