I surprised myself and asked for a ridiculous raise last week. It came through yesterday without any push back. Companies may be be starting to see the light.

I have done this a few times. Usually along the lines of "Hey i like it here and I've done good work, but this is out of whack." 35%+ initial bump and usually accelerates further raises. This pattern suggests I'm terrible at negotiating initial offers but decent at navigating once in the door.

Don't you generally need to get an offer to have leverage/know your market worth?

The hassle is mostly prepping for the interviews. If I can't cut out that step, I am basically being saved the effort of cleaning up my desk and going to a new one.

Leverage helps of course but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone asking for a raise to know whether or not they're asking for a reasonable number. If market rate for a given position is $150-200k TC and you ask for $300k not only are you going to get told no (quickly) but it's going to make you look really bad.

I've gotten 10-15% raises before without a competing offer or any other leverage simply because I could show that I was a certain "percentage of market rate" when I was hired, but the market rate had increased ~teen% since then. So it wasn't as much me asking for raise, it was me asking to have my compensation keep pace with the market/inflation.

Talk to your friends and coworkers about salaries. No one needs to reveal where they're at, but just talk about what the market's paying for relevant employees.

Also ask them if their company is hiring and has reasonable interviewing practices. Not everyone makes candidates jump through hoops.

Everyone revealing where they're at exactly (cash + bonus + stock + extra perks/PTO/whatever), while potentially a little uncomfortable in the beginning, is better for everyone long-term. I used to be against it, if only because I was typically at the top of the pay band for my role so had little to "gain" from the practice, but I've come around the last couple years. There's really very little downside, even if you're a top performer.

1. People who are legitimately being taken advantage of can more quickly realize it and either work to correct it or leave.

2. Top earners should be able to justify their outsized compensation to others, including peers.

3. Some people just legitimately don't know you can negotiate things like non-discretionary bonuses, extra PTO, etc.

4. Maybe your company pays everyone below-market, not just you, and at least knowing this will make it easier to decide if it's worth the lower pay (for QOL/WLB or whatever) or if you want to leave.

Also, if this results in underpaid workers getting better salary, this results in the average salary going up and then the max salary going up.

This is what happened with CEO salaries after "transparency" laws were passed making them public.

Now, it's tough to say whether that can be extrapolated out to knowledge workers, but it is a useful datapoint non-the-less.

I used to be against this as well, until I worked at a company that abused this and leveraged it against it's vulnerable employees. Basically, more Jr. or bootcamp people were making _way_ less than market even though they have been working for a while at the company and delivered as much if not more value than coworkers.

Also if there's a quick change in market rates (happening now in the US?) the more people you share information with the sooner you'll find out.

There is literally no barrier to just asking. If you believe you're undervalued but like working at your company/with your manager, just ask. If they're a decent manager they'll be straight with you about money and market. If the answer is "No, that's outside of our payment band for this market", you could go get an offer and then have them counter, or you could just leave, but there's generally no harm in just asking.