This is why you are better to work for small companies. Big companies simply cannot afford to treat people as individuals when it comes to terms of employment... it’s just not practical to negotiate individual deals. Big companies must implement standard processes for things like this.

And if you run a small company, this is how you beat the big companies to the best talent... negotiate deals that suit the individual employees.

The moment a company says the word “percentile” when talking about salaries, you know they’ve become “a big company”.