New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
open.buffer.com
New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
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Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#2I like the idea of transparent salaries, but does a "transparent" formula ever become so convoluted, and open to gaming, that the company may as well just not bother?
It can be argued that not disclosing salaries is a way to suppress wages; an asymmetry of information. Is open salary information where "everyone at the same level gets the same salary, but there's some gotchas" another way to do the same thing?
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#3Recently there was a discussion about salaries in SF. And the numbers there were much bigger. What gives?
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#4I like the idea of transparent salaries, but does a "transparent" formula ever become so convoluted, and open to gaming, that the company may as well just not bother? It can be argued that not disclosing salaries is a way to suppress wages; an asymmetry of information. Is open salary information where "everyone at the same level gets the same salary, but there's some gotchas" another way to do the same thing?
It certainly goes hand in hand with a good culture, which is also one of the strong point of Buffer.
Their transparent webapp thing[1] is really nice to play with btw, it feels like a no bullshit vibe for newcomers as well as current employees.
It makes me think that these "formulas" will probably not age well with time. They're already at their version 3, which would probably not be a good formula at the early days of the start up and will probably not be a good formula in 3-5 years.
Somehow related, I remember having something like these to rank posts on one of my boards (similar to the weight ranking of HN). I had:
* time influence negatively
* number of upvotes and downvotes in the comments influence positively
* number of heavy posters influence positively
* number of upvotes for the post influencing positively
It was really tricky to tweak, in the end with the website scaling up I was constantly tweaking the formula. I don't think there is a "always work" formula.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#5I like the idea of transparent salaries, but does a "transparent" formula ever become so convoluted, and open to gaming, that the company may as well just not bother? It can be argued that not disclosing salaries is a way to suppress wages; an asymmetry of information. Is open salary information where "everyone at the same level gets the same salary, but there's some gotchas" another way to do the same thing?
It certainly goes hand in hand with a good culture, which is also one of the strong point of Buffer. Their transparent webapp thing[1] is really nice to play with btw, it feels like a no bullshit vibe for newcomers as well as current employees. It makes me think that these "formulas" will probably not age well with time. They're already at their version 3, which would probably not be a good formula at the early days…
That helps, thanks.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#6Recently there was a discussion about salaries in SF. And the numbers there were much bigger. What gives?
If you're talking about the triplebyte data (https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary), Buffer's SF salaries seem comparable.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#7I like the idea of transparent salaries, but does a "transparent" formula ever become so convoluted, and open to gaming, that the company may as well just not bother? It can be argued that not disclosing salaries is a way to suppress wages; an asymmetry of information. Is open salary information where "everyone at the same level gets the same salary, but there's some gotchas" another way to do the same thing?
> We’re looking at other ways to recognize loyalty such as profit sharing, 401K matching, bonuses based on profitability, dividends, and future stock buyback programs.
So, yeah, ti doesn't make much sense in practice. But it's nice to have the numbers open.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#8Why do companies continue to pay out higher salaries to devs in high cost of living areas? In this case, their payscale pays out 30-50K more in high cost living areas vs low cost areas.
Rather than blow revenue rewarding bad life choices, offer to move them to an area with lower costs of living. Do that for only 10 employees and you have 300-500K EVERY SINGLE YEAR to re-invest into your company. In practically any other industry, this kind of saving would be obvious.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#9Why do companies continue to pay out higher salaries to devs in high cost of living areas? In this case, their payscale pays out 30-50K more in high cost living areas vs low cost areas. Rather than blow revenue rewarding bad life choices, offer to move them to an area with lower costs of living. Do that for only 10 employees and you have 300-500K EVERY SINGLE YEAR to re-invest into your company. In practically any ot…
Most likely, they have found that some really good developers want to live in specific places with really high standards of living and since they are good, they could easily get a job somewhere else and stay in the city they want to.
Not everyone is willing to just move for a job if not necessary.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#10Recently there was a discussion about salaries in SF. And the numbers there were much bigger. What gives?
If you're talking about the triplebyte data ( https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary ), Buffer's SF salaries seem comparable.
That only reports base salary, making it worse than useless.