201–210 of 295 posts
I have to divide the number i get in that calculator with 2.5 to get to my salary.
[1] South American software engineer, with +6 years experience, and ~3 in skills.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack Overflow employee here, here's some answers (or at least, my take). Regarding point 1, remember that there are no salary negotiations at Stack Overflow. No one gets a raise because they ask. People get raises because they demonstrate skills, increase experience, etc... A candidate will have an initial skill evaluation they might not like, but they are pretty much guaranteed to have a much better one after one y…
Thanks for sharing, and I hope employees keep us updated on this experiment (because transparency). My reference to negotiations was mostly for a negotiation upon hire. A job is advertised at a certain range, and the applicant expects the top of that range. I know that Stack Overflow's process might be a bit more evolved, but most companies that advertise a range probably leave a little wiggle room at the top and don…
Our hire/no-hire policy is only based on competence, however true competence includes the capacity for realistic self-assessment. Keep in mind that our skill scale, especially for core skills, goes from "I could be better" to "I am world famous for this skill", so it's fairly easy to prove or disprove whether someone is at the top of the ladder.
> If you would object to the skills evaluations, and if we assume some of those people are earning more than you, how is that different than "salary envy"?
Big caveat: this works for us, but of course each company is different.
Our skills are based on measurable stuff and generally do not represent a "career achievement". An employee can't say "I'm better than Marco, so I should be paid more". An employee might say "This year I've done better than Marco at SQL, but Marco has a better score in it, can you review mine?". In most cases, we simply look at the evidence: has the employee actually been better than Marco in the last year in doing SQL?
Also keep in mind that there's a huge gap between categories. We've four, B, A, A+, A+++. They start at "B" which means that someone did not do much on that skill in the past year. For example, I've got a B in sysadmin stuff which I never need to do. In order to get an "A" one needs to be completely proficient in the skill, no obvious gaps, so for example I've (IIRC) an A in SQL, which means I can do SQL as well as anyone else in the team. In order to be "A+" one needs to be really good at the skill, someone that is recognized in the team for it, if I were to get it for SQL I'd need to go above and beyond the average. Patrol SQL for misbehaving query plans. Perform DBA tasks. Et cetera. An A+++ means that one is actually famous for the skill, for example a Microsoft MVP, or a famous blogger, etc. A guru level of skill is needed in SQL. Probably something which would take me 10 years to achieve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Be careful to compare like for like. A highly qualified ops person compares to a highly qualified developer, not merely a "skilled" one. For all the difficulty of objectively measuring skill, I would assume that a highly qualified ops person would make substantially more than a merely skilled developer. I think that I failed to communicate my meaning clearly in that statement, so I will attempt to clarify. What I m…
> that in my experience a highly qualified Ops person will /also/ be a skilled developer, but a highly qualified Developer will /not/ be a skilled Ops person. I have ~15 years of ops experience, and I'm not a skilled developer. I bill ~$200/hr for infrastructure/AWS architecture/DevOps consulting (when not at devops day job), with limited need to be proficient at software development.
I'm a terrible programmer but I have 20 years of massive scale op experience.
At my self-assessed skill level and years of experience, they're offering $11k/yr more for a "Developer" than a "Site Reliability Engineer". I find it interesting that they value someone in a "Developer" position higher than someone in a "Site Reliability Engineer" position. Having been an Ops person for my entire career and at the same time a competent developer in numerous languages and environments, I find this un…
and that's one problem with this "salary transparency" stuff, "my work is just as important or even more important than his, why I'm getting paid less?" I could argue against you too, for example, you say "competent developer in numerous languages and environments", that's really just a small fraction of what computer science is really about.
Hiring is supply and demand. There are more competent accountants vying for the same jobs than there are developers. More developers than there are SRE's.
The rarer the skill set, the more expensive it is to hire.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Unfortunately comparing European and US salaries is comparing apples to oranges. Not only there's vacation as other people mention, but most importantly and often ignored : tax rates and retirement. In those 55k, you also probably have a bigger tax bill, so it would be more fair to compare money that ends up in your pocket. Retirement: you probably have a national system, with a formula that tells: if you worked X ye…
Dutch income tax more closely resembles the tax bracket in midwest America.
My income tax percent in Holland is slightly lower than it was in the U.S. and my pay is a bit higher than it was in the U.S.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you work for a company that preaches it's all about the bottom line and nothing else counts then I'd suggest you work for a shitty company. I would and have left companies with that attitude. For several reasons but a big one is that it's simply short sighted and ineffective. It leads to thinking like let's out source all our devs because it will save us short term money and the proves the fact that companies don'…
There's more shitty companies than unicorn companies out there, by a landslide.
A+++
A+
A
B
(There are no A++ players)