From the mini-microsoft blog (minimsft.blogspot.com) comes this brilliant, incisive, and right-on comment:

Mini-Microsoft: Goals for a Brave New Microsoft Review and Compensation System: "MS is an engineering company. MS is packed with engineers. Engineers are wired and hired to apply their talents to fixing things. Hence the ongoing string of ideas aimed and fixing things here at MS.

IMO, some things can't be fixed. Corporations (not just MS) have some but not much interest in making life better, fairer, kinder, etc. for their employees. Corporations exist to dominate in business and make the owners wealthy. Sorry to be blunt, but this is pretty much how it works. Employees are hired to further those goals.

Remember that reality the next time you fill out your review form, state your goals, work weekends, skip dinner, and delay your vacation. You are sacrificing your life to make the business owners rich. If you like what you do, that's great. But whether you like your job or hate it, it often doesn't figure into the equation, unless it furthers the entity's goals. What matters is this: did your services bring in more revenue than what you cost? How much more?

Are you paid a market-appropriate wage for your services? If not, leave. Right now, the job market's pretty good -- leastways, it seems that way for talented engineers. If you're working at a realistic market wage, then continue to serve and accept that wage. Do not expect anything more. Cost of Living adjustments? Sounds great, but don't feel entitled.

No matter what happens re: stack ranking, review curves, cost of living, peer reviews, having your ideas valued -- it's all hand waving relative to the reality of how businesses work. They want to pay us as little as possible so they can make as much money as they can from our efforts.

That's the bottom line and it's not going to change. The only way to really change your compensation and how you feel about your contribution is to turn the situation on its head.

Start your own company."

Great advice. I did just that.

A later commenter called this "class warfare" (referring to the assertion that you are working to enrich the corporation and its owners) but I think that misses the point entirely - that businesses exist for reasons that are not always well or explicitly understood by their employees. I think that this was a fairly accurate statement about corporate goals, and the employee's relationship thereto.

Company policies, pay scales, and anything else about the relationship between employer and employee (legal and regulatory requirements notwithstanding) are purely driven by supply and demand, and much of the fluff is there due to employee expectation and market forces - they offer these things because they are expected to offer them, and if they don't, those who can find good gigs with other companies will, and those who can't, well, you know.

So, clearly, the company is not created to provide benefits to the employees, althought that may be a secondary goal - because, if providing benefits to employees was the primary goal, why not just pay every employee an exhorbitant salary, provide a company car and lear jet, etc.? Clearly, this would put the company out of existence in no time at all. So, while the company may benefit from treating the employee well and offering generous benefits, this must, out of necessity, take a back seat to the primary purpose: continued survival of the company.

So, this is not to say that the company doesn't care about the worker bees, but hey, let's face it: you and I both know that if it came to the survival of the organization, the company would terminate ('lay off') as many of the employees as was deemed necessary.

So take all that high-falutin' talk about caring, career development, and anything else that is non-essential to the survival of the company, put it in your bong, and light up, because it's one of the most powerful and widely distributed hallucinogenic drugs around.