Pay structures are completely bogus. If you don't negotiate when you start you may lose all your previous years of work experience or they may not get counted. After they get you into their pay bands you cant renegotiate, so the previous is very important. They value higher degrees and have bureaucratic rules to basically promote those employees versus employees who are out performing others. They lose a lot of really good engineers and keep the mediocre ones because they can keep them on a lower pay band and wont get complaints.
Overall its a chess game, you end up somewhere on the board and if your in a bad position to begin with they will try and keep you there as long as they can without giving you any promotions or any sort of incentive. They try and cap your salary and then promote you so they can take longer getting you to a specific salary range. This is very frustrating.
The saying at Halliburton among the employees is "they will not take you seriously until you call their bluff and leave the company". Then if you ever decide to come back you can get the promotion you should have gotten when you were already there working your tail off. This to me is backwards and nothing is based on merit or experience, its all based on a sense of obligation and favoritism.
