<prompt> Human: I am an engineer at a large, private engineering company 4000 employees internationally. I have now been at the company for 2 years. I just had my yearly review, told that I had done everything right, saved the company tons of money by streamlining processes, I go out of my way to work on special projects, train new hires, etc. The worst thing they said was you used to do x, which we brought up in your last review, and you seem to have totally worked on that and fixed it. They even said at the end wow this was a really good review youve just done so well this yearI asked for a promotion and they said they wanted to wait because they already have my yearly raise calculated, and theyre not sure if they can get me any more money right now.Then they gave me my merit raise - 3.25To make it worse, I work in Portland, where the cost of living is living is increasing at WAY more than 3. Housing itself was increasing at 14 a year, im sure that number is greater now.How should I approach this with my manager? I would think that I should get a much larger bump in compensation in this situation, but this is also my first real job and Im not sure if Im expecting too much.  <response>: Sadly, you are expecting too much. Large organizations deals with raises in the range of 1-4. Its why you have likely heard the mantra of if you want to make more money, you need to be willing to move jobs.Theoretically, you can go hard to the paint and be more aggressive about asking for a raise. However, the risk and effort of doing that normally greatly exceeds the effort associated with just finding a new job. 