Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

blog.stackoverflow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 295 posts

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#11

Post by mathattack »

chollida1 wrote: post #4

A couple of things that stood out. 1) I'd imagine stock options are part of the job, but I don't see that anywhere. Do new employee's get stock options? I'm guessing they keep this hidden as it allows them a bit more flexibility on offering signing bonuses to entice employee's they want to hire? 2) I don't see any section for bonus on the calculator. Do stackoverflow employee's not get bonuses? 3) Why are years of ex…

On 3: I suspect that it's hard to get too precise on the A+++ to B grading scale. It's an imperfect measure and there's already plenty of disagreement between 4, let alone going to 10. You can fix some of the bias by using other measures that may correlate to the grade, but also provide some other guidance. Years of experience is one of them. You'll see that grade has a much higher impact than years of experience, so it's just modifying the total on the margin.

I haven't worked at a company with total transparency, at least not at the worker bee level. I have worked at partnerships where all the partners knew what each other made, and it was generally heavily weighted towards seniority. The system seemed to work better than I would have expected. My experience in "secret" systems is any time two people compare salary, one gets very pissed off. This is why I keep my comp private.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#12

Post by megadethz »

CoachRufus87 wrote: post #7
dmackerman wrote: post #5

Very cool. Salaries seem on the low-end of the industry standards from what I've seen. $120k for 5 years of experience in the Bay-Area is pretty insulting.

What would be a more competitive number in the bay area for 5 years of experience?

I can concur with the OP. I recently interviewed at Bay Area companies which included late stage startups and big companies. Have about 5 years of experience. Total liquid compensation was in the range of $200k to $300k annualized.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#13

Post by benjaminhodgson »

chollida1 wrote: post #4

A couple of things that stood out. 1) I'd imagine stock options are part of the job, but I don't see that anywhere. Do new employee's get stock options? I'm guessing they keep this hidden as it allows them a bit more flexibility on offering signing bonuses to entice employee's they want to hire? 2) I don't see any section for bonus on the calculator. Do stackoverflow employee's not get bonuses? 3) Why are years of ex…

I saw a documentary a few years ago about Pimlico Plumbers, a large plumbing firm near where I live in London, who went transparent and revealed all the employees' salaries to their colleagues. It was interesting because salary transparency was not part of the company culture all along; it was an experiment in changing the status quo of an already-large workforce.

It did not go entirely smoothly: there was significant anger and resentment in the workforce at first, but eventually things smoothed over and (as I recall) everyone ended up more-or-less happy.

I dug out a review of the doc, if you're interested: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9393303/Show-M...

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#15

Post by [deleted] »

megadethz wrote: post #12
CoachRufus87 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a more competitive number in the bay area for 5 years of experience?

I can concur with the OP. I recently interviewed at Bay Area companies which included late stage startups and big companies. Have about 5 years of experience. Total liquid compensation was in the range of $200k to $300k annualized.

[deleted]

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#16

Post by jnevill »

dexwiz wrote: post #14

Either I am vastly underpaid or the numbers are very high for newer developers. Even with 0 experience and 0 skill, it quotes $86k.

If you are a developer worth your salt and not even registering on that scale, then I'm going to go with "Underpaid". Unless you live in like Bumstump, TX where you can buy a 4 bedroom 3 bath home on 2 acres of land for 60k.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#17

Post by poopsintub »

megadethz wrote: post #8

The salaries generated by the calculator while transparent are not validated by the market and are laughably low. Given the elasticity of supply and demand the salary mush be constantly evaluated against the market. This seems like just another trick to suppress wages for a qualified engineer. In today's market, a person with multiple offers would command at least twice the listed compensation at any of the software…

New York seems in the range I thought it would. Bonuses and stock aren't factored in, as someone mentioned. I imagine they might not over that type of thing, though.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#18

Post by NKCSS »

dmackerman wrote: post #5

Very cool. Salaries seem on the low-end of the industry standards from what I've seen. $120k for 5 years of experience in the Bay-Area is pretty insulting.

Location, location, location; I live in .nl and with about €55k, I'm at the upper end of the job market here (14 years experience).

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#19

Post by Gmo »

chollida1 wrote: post #4

A couple of things that stood out. 1) I'd imagine stock options are part of the job, but I don't see that anywhere. Do new employee's get stock options? I'm guessing they keep this hidden as it allows them a bit more flexibility on offering signing bonuses to entice employee's they want to hire? 2) I don't see any section for bonus on the calculator. Do stackoverflow employee's not get bonuses? 3) Why are years of ex…

My company has transparent salaries since the beginning 14 years ago.

Funnily, in the words of one of the co-founders, it's more a mere accident than a clear will from the beginning : "we did not really plan it that way, but back then, it was easier to let the document listing the salaries open for everyone than restricting its access to a few persons" and they decided to keep it that way ever since :) We always ask a new recruit which salary he/she wants publicly (by that I mean in front of a not insignificant part of the company, we are 50) and show them salaries of other people in case it does not really fit.

We are also experimenting with allowing people to choose their salary after 3 years in the company (there's a process and some caveats of course).

And we did not really see any downside so far

Post reply on HN