Our engineering manager told us today in our meeting that we will soon have a salary restructuring. He didn't have many details to add on top of his announcement. A google search did not produce informative results. Is a salary restructuring just a euphemism for a salary reduction?

akaggie05 said:

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Whenever I hear stuff like that, my brain automatically translates it to "prepare to get screwed."

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I think the Simpsons did an episode where Lisa was president and they had to massively raise taxes. Her plan was to call it a "temporary refund adjustment." OP's post reminded me of that.

Exactly! Time to at least update the resume and start preparing

It may be a switch to more performance based pay, but they're only doing that with the intention of paying less overall, so either way they're looking to screw

cjo03 said:

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just "salary" or the overall compensation structure? could mean any number of things - but that is certainly a strange update to provide a team without any details.

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When it comes to compensation, I always have those conversations one on one and in person. Never before all of the details are set in stone. Otherwise you end up in this situation, nobody knows any details and department wide freakout ensues.

My guess is there will be a compensation band adjustment for each position and will likely result in lower salaries and more bonus potential. If this is the case, get details on the bonus plan and make certain things are realistic. I've seen this before and the goals be impossible to meet so the end result was just a salary reduction.

This always means they are figuring out a way to pay you less.

Recently did this in my group. I didn't lower anyone's salary. I raised some better performers to be inline with colleagues that entered the company years ago at inflated salaries. I did adjust some RSU offerings down but took the equivalent $$ to be issued as RSUs and added it to salary. So they lost net zero other than gains that might have been realized on RSUs over three year payout (insignificant). Not all hope is lost.

I've been through salary restructuring post mergers and acquisitions. What I've seen is things like getting people from Company A's 70/30 split between base and variable comp switched over to say an 80/20 split that was used by Company B.

I've also seen things like a one time payout for setting up your home office and have the company take away your desk.

Another one I've seen is changes to when the variable compensation gets paid out. So instead of a quarterly 25%, ours changed to some structure where the first quarter of the year only paid out 20% and the fourth quarter paid out closer to 35% or some such wackiness.

Also had a situation where they introduced a 2% end of year profit sharing that you only got if you stayed through the end of the year.

And that reminds me of another one where they introduced a profit sharing multiplier based on customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, etc.

In summary, it doesn't necessarily mean less money. It most likely means they're going to pay you differently.

Forgot to add, another time where they took away car allowances and went to mileage only.

This happened at my company except they didn't update any current employee salaries.

So we are hiring in employees with minimal or zero experience making just as much or more than experienced and some management level employees.

IceCream14 said:

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This happened at my company except they didn't update any current employee salaries.

So we are hiring in employees with minimal or zero experience making just as much or more than experienced and some management level employees.

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New hires get the market rate. Continuing employees stay on the HR performance bands regardless of the market rate. This is why its always easiest to change companies to get a pay raise.