Incompetent work colleague on higher salary than me

Maybe you should ask your new colleague in a subtle way about his negotiation skills.They are obviously lot better than yours so you might pick up some tips.

You are taking it a bit personally.

Why not tell your manager you know you are being underpaid and that you want a raise? It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Don’t be aggressive about it, but there’s no reason to not ask.

Hard to get a 25 percent raise in a job, not unheard of but hard. And that puts you on a par with him, you'd ideally want to be ahead with what you are saying and with his potential for raises. So, maybe 35-40 percent raise is needed to ensure that you aren't in the same position next year if you happen to see he got another raise. Knowing the business, do you reckon this is possible?

'I will also inform my manager that this guy is not fulfilling expectations and is making no attempt to learn the new skills in the job that I am spending my working hours training him on.' Maybe leave it at that.

OP, your colleague is not the problem you are. If you are good at your job and care about your job that’s great. But it means that you are likely to suffer the same fate as everyone who cares about their job. Which is that you will end up in the same situation anywhere you go because the reality is that what you describe is more common than not. Everywhere. Everywhere you go you will end up carrying people around who are not fit to lace your boots. I bet your incompetent colleague sleeps well at night. Maybe it’s time to be more like him in some ways. Talk yourself up, be your own biggest supporter, get the best deal for you and don’t care too much about others because that hurts you and not them.

While that would rightly annoy anybody in your situation, it is absolutely irrelevant as to how you go about sorting out your own salary to bring it in line with expectations.

It is good news that you’ve found out that your employer is willing to pay more for your job.

Now if you want to cash in on that information the best way to do that is as I’d described previously.

As another piece of advice, particularly when working in small specialised technical teams, it’s critical that you have a clearly defined job description to enable you to be properly assessed for your performance review. If part of your time is taken up by training a colleague, then how you perform at that training should be part of your performance review. So it would be very valuable to you in your pay review to have a professional looking training programme developed and documented with training records included. If you are not doing this then you are not valuing your training/mentoring and how can it be properly assessed then? It would also give your colleague a kick up the arse to learn stuff because you can point to the training record if the colleague comes back to you that they forgot the stuff you already trained them in.

Also, if you are good at aspects of your job, and particularly if nobody else is good at it, you should be putting that down in your performance review that you are the Subject Matter Expert (SME) on anything you are good at that nobody else is good at and give yourself the credit. If you have multiple areas where you are excelling then the more the better.

For your own information, multinationals often have pay scales based on specific criteria and within those scales there will be bands of pay. You can absolutely request from your manager to have the pay scales and bands explained to you. For example, holding a Masters might jump you up a scale, having 10 years experience in the industry likewise, having a role where you mentor another colleague, being an SME, having certificates for anything relevant to your role. All of these things can be used to push you up the pay scale or up the bands within the pay scales.

Where you are in the pay scale and what band you are is what determines how your raise is calculated, usually it’s a percentage of your base salary, so the larger your salary the larger the raise and it compounds up each year. This means if you start on a low salary the gap enlarges every year from where you should be, even if you score the same on your performance review.

This means at least every now and then you are absolutely entitled to approach your manager and query your rate if it is not at the expected market rate, particularly if you are consistently achieving your targets and getting a good performance review each year.

A good manager should be able to work with you to get you pushed up the pay scale or at least give you tasks to do to get yourself up the pay scale such as doing courses.

At the end of the day, the reality is that you have a better chance of getting the market rate if you move company, or at least if you can get a job offer you then can say to your boss that an opportunity has come up that you are interested in and unless the current employer can match the offer you will be mad not to take it. At least it could be used to bargain for a significant increase.

Best of luck.

This just sounds like work 101 to me. The other guy is useless and I should be making more than them. Its a tale as old as time.

You seem to be carrying him. Why? If something goes wrong or isn't done, when the management ask about it, let the management know you'd do it straight away and that you thought he'd done that task and say no more. Make a note of how many times the management have had to ask you to do something that your colleague should have done.

If he is no longer shadowing you then let him come to you for help and show how to do the task but that is all you should do no more.

Work with him as much as you need to and no more. The management team will have to notice.

If you have the bottle for it OP.

ignore this, if you want more money then get a job offer and then ask fo a raise because you have had a job offer at 25% higher.

only thing that works

many people have given you the correct advice at this point

You are long overdue a raise just based on inflationary benchmarking and if it’s not forthcoming then you need to test the market to either force their hand or move on

However, it seems like you’d be happier if he got a pay cut rather than you get a raise, which is not a healthy attitude to have

I work for a multinational and used to work on a manufacturing site for it. Was there over a couple of years, doing a very good job and knew I was on a bit less than the market and asked for a €4k bump to hit what I thought was the lowest point of the range. It wasn’t coming and I transferred to the central office and have made progress too and am happy with my money.

Because of my role and system knowledge, I can see how much the replacements were and there’s been 3 in 3 years! Generally on €10k more than what I was asking for and a couple of them didn’t get past probation.

From my experience, some companies are so focused on the bottom line that they can easily be penny wise, pound foolish when it comes to staff retention. Then it becomes a supply and demand issue when sh!t hits the fan and they have to pay the going rate.

It could be as long as 7 years since you’ve been paid the market rate. Can only imagine what inflation has been in that time and could be a bigger impact if your profession is in demand. In many ways you are ideal from the company’s perspective but you are doing yourself a disservice. Makes sense to see what else is out there, have a call with a recruiter and gather more info but don’t expect an increase based on your ability versus this person.