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No my friend, the people who ensure the paycheck has the specific number it does are some drones in HR far removed from you. They determine reasonable bands for your role based on industry standards and how the company wants to position itself in the market.

Then your individual contribution and performance determines an additional +-10%.

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Don't know which company you work for but this is unequivocally not true at mine. HR are subservient to Engineering (our CEO started as a senior SWE ~15 years ago). I am also one of those "useless" EMs that barter for the comp packages of my most valuable SWEs.

Your situation seems rare.

From my experience there's a lot more wiggle room in those pay bands than you'd think. Along with that, at many orgs your EM has to haggle on your behalf with their boss and every other EM that shares their budget ~yearly for your share of a limited pool of incremental dollars. I've specifically requested not to be under certain EMs in the past for that reason.

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