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Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

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Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#201

Post by aerovistae »

mfoy_ wrote: post #181
aerovistae wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easier to hire here, supposedly. Fewer tech firms by comparison to SF/NY -> less competition for applicants. I'm in Chicago making ~95k and these threads the last couple days have been ever so mildly depressing, with people graduating same year as me and making $323k.

I mean, for what it's worth they say quality of life barely changes once you're past a threshold.[1] So I wouldn't worry about it too much. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/money-improves-qual...

I just have a hard time believing that. It's a funny contradiction because I know perfectly well I'm not really much happier now at $95k than I was at $60k, or working in a park for minimum wage a decade ago, but at the same time there's so much I'd like to do that I don't because I'm trying to save money, and at $323k it would be pretty effortless to save massively and do whatever I wanted.

Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#202

Post by chejazi »

e40 wrote: post #133
jotux wrote: post #104

It's strange to me that these salary discussions are so narrowly focused on just pay/bonus and don't seem to care about benefits and work/life balance. Here's stuff I track in my own career spreadsheet and compare new jobs against these metrics when considering a new one: * Vacation, sick, and holiday time off * Distance to work and traffic considerations * Relative cost of living * Health insurance cost and coverage…

Agreed! This myopic focus on salary numbers is disheartening. I'd add to the above: * culture It's related to "expected work hours per week" but tells so much more and is probably the single largest contributor to whether or not you'll like working there.

Culture means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. There definitely needs to be a mechanism for capturing the energy from a company that a candidate can experience at their leisure. An onsite isn't good for this due the stress of an interview, Glassdoor isn't good due to its bias toward negativity, social media is in the right direction but corporate social networks are usually closed off...

...Perhaps a corporate slack channel that candidates are invited to join?

Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#203

Post by akhilcacharya »

stuff4ben wrote: post #115
akhilcacharya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raleigh/Durham NC - we're probably the biggest tech hub behind Austin.

Hardly. Atlanta, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc are all much bigger than RTP. It's nice here, but it ain't that good.

Er, behind Austin. Austin is probably behind all of those save for maybe ATL, I don't know much about the tech scene there.

Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#204

Post by bdg »

krapp wrote: post #178
rspeer wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're telling us the presence of joke entries somehow negates the absence of women? That logic makes no sense.

Just look at the number of flagged posts in this thread - it's obvious Hacker News can't take the concept of gender seriously. Why should the data be taken seriously?

You're implying most women submitting identify as men on the grounds of a joke entry and flagged posts.

I don't think these are related.

Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#205

Post by wagglycocks »

jdmichal wrote: post #183
fasteddie wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but 1. even a small amount of friction will cut off the vast majority from doing it, especially when 2. there's no payoff to lying about your location in a salary transparency app

If there's no payoff, then why gate via location in the first place?

Because it's currently full of junk entries where people say they work on the moon

Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#206

Post by bbcbasic »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #162
jotux wrote: post #104

It's strange to me that these salary discussions are so narrowly focused on just pay/bonus and don't seem to care about benefits and work/life balance. Here's stuff I track in my own career spreadsheet and compare new jobs against these metrics when considering a new one: * Vacation, sick, and holiday time off * Distance to work and traffic considerations * Relative cost of living * Health insurance cost and coverage…

As you get older, your view on benefits changes dramatically. When I was fresh out of college, I had no wife, no kids, no bills, no house. I took all the cool startup perks - free concert tickets, free box tickets to pro sports teams in town, free RedBull, free pop and food, free lunch. Now in my 30's I have bills, investments, a house mortgage. I went to interview at some smaller startups and established web agencie…

Yes I get free redbull, lunches, holidays, accomodation etc. in my job. I can choose what restaurant, what airline, what suburb to live in. To make it easy they just pay me thins thing called "money" which is like a token for all the free stuff. Awesome!

Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#207

Post by wagglycocks »

DarkTree wrote: post #49
cloakandswagger wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, how exactly was it fixed? Now I can mark 'Other', but as a gender-fluid this really should be more a slider

Surprisingly, this is the first troll I've seen on HN.

After enough downvotes I think the bad posts just disappear from view. I'm not 100% sure how it works.

Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#208

Post by rifung »

mfoy_ wrote: post #181
aerovistae wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easier to hire here, supposedly. Fewer tech firms by comparison to SF/NY -> less competition for applicants. I'm in Chicago making ~95k and these threads the last couple days have been ever so mildly depressing, with people graduating same year as me and making $323k.

I mean, for what it's worth they say quality of life barely changes once you're past a threshold.[1] So I wouldn't worry about it too much. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/money-improves-qual...

I don't think that's actually completely true. See: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/danielgilbert/files/if-mone...

Re: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

#209

Post by stephengillie »

jotux wrote: post #104

It's strange to me that these salary discussions are so narrowly focused on just pay/bonus and don't seem to care about benefits and work/life balance. Here's stuff I track in my own career spreadsheet and compare new jobs against these metrics when considering a new one: * Vacation, sick, and holiday time off * Distance to work and traffic considerations * Relative cost of living * Health insurance cost and coverage…

Having grown up in a laboring community, I don't understand how most of these points are relevant to doing your job. These are just different kinds of compensation.

Like "short-term incentives" aka bonuses, these are just different "shiny objects" aka distractions your employer can wave around to keep you unfocused on some other part of the value exchange, such as no versioning of code or an ancient and unwieldy code base, poorly-maintained infrastructure, not keeping the building warm enough, or "modestly immoral" activities like nepotism.

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