The majority of people managers there are just trying to get to their next level, next raise or next budget review. They will do and say whatever it takes to ensure they shine. SO rare to find a manager who is supporting their direct reports, encouraging them to learn and find new positions or opportunities in or (especially) outside of their departments. Instead, the standard is to make sure the employees feel like they are the 'only ones' who can do their job. Praise them enough and they wont notice opportunities are going to others (and this is typically a male who is getting the new job).
Poor and unsatisfactory performance for employees who are not performance incentive-ized (bonus) just leads to a less than 3% raise annually. If you are in a position for a bonus, then you can just about guarantee that your people manager is looking out for their bonus as much as you are and not for your job satisfaction (work load, project balance, training or support needs fall on deaf ears).
Raises are (at best) 4% and that is pre-determined BEFORE you start completing your annual 'personal assessment'. No consideration of job/strength of knowledge as this form is just for them to make you feel like you are a part of the decision process. It ends up making you feel as if you are begging for your 4% (if you are lucky), only to be told 'you didn't perform well on project A so we could only give you 3% this year'. Subjective? NOT! I have seen incredibly useless people do anything but work (shop Amazon, take long lunches on the company, do their homework at their desk, sleep or spend hours just talking about anything but work) and still keep their jobs AND get raises each year. The fact is ALL budgets for personel are calculated before end of year. Each department already knows how much they have to spend on raises for their team before the annual review emails are sent and 'raise' day of April 1.
Unfortunately, the money they have for employee salary is sometimes great at first...but then after a couple of years you realize you have learned how to do a LOT of work for less support and now less pay.
I wonder if this is the norm for most large employers of this sort as they would rather release employees with years of industry/corporate knowledge and retrain new employees (a lot of college hires come here as they are attracted to the starting wage...but there is a lot of early turnovers ( 2-4 years) of these employee types as they don't get as much of a raise as they expected).
Your job salary does not grow with industry standards at this place. Your salary index is 'cost of living' based out of small towns like Hemet, CA. This company is also VERY inflexible when it comes to work location. During COVID, they willingly had most 'office' employees work from home. It is my understanding, employee who are 100% laptop work (don't need a desk or face to face interactions) are being required to return to office. Good luck on being hired 100% home office as existing employees will not get that benefit (see note above: work more for less). Work Life balance is just a catch phrase for them.
