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

New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

open.buffer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 169 posts

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#11

Post by jimcsharp »

jatsign wrote: post #2

I 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?

I have to wonder if they've ever run into 'call me when your formula matches my number' (in nicer / more convoluted words). In that case a simple transparent table would save them a lot of time and blog posts.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#12

Post by eximius »

Wow, this is really terrible. This looks like a PR explanation for why they're slashing everyone's salaries. A cursory glance shows everyone either staying the same or dropping.

> One of the toughest decisions we made with the new formula was to remove the annual 3% loyalty increase given to teammates for each anniversary from their start date.

> We looked at a lot of options and in the end decided to remove it as it created an unsustainable, compounding affect on pay.

3% is at or just above inflation. If you can't afford to give these raises, you will see severe wage stagnation and, hopefully, a mass exodus of employees elsewhere.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#13

Post by SatvikBeri »

jatsign wrote: post #2

I 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's a matter of degree: non-transparent salary "formulas" (to the extent that they are at all formulaic and not just based on random stuff like negotiation) tend to be much, much more convoluted and inconsistent than this.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#14

Post by aantix »

hajile wrote: post #8

Why 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…

How about just pay them to the value they bring? Why did location ever play a part?

If the dev works on a rarely used admin app, surprise, you pay them lower.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#16

Post by hajile »

jjeaff wrote: post #9
hajile wrote: post #8

Why 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.

It takes quite a good dev to generate 50K more valuable than another dev in another area. There are cases where that is true, but it's not universally true. In this particular case, there's a baked-in assumption that a beginner dev in SF is worth more than a senior dev in a low-cost area.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#17

Post by wyager »

I strongly disagree with cost-of-living-adjustments when employees have the choice of where to live. People shouldn’t be punished for living in less expensive places.

If your company is willing to pay you more for living somewhere else even if they don’t gain anything from it, it means they’re underpaying you right now.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#18

Post by ontoillogical »

School-Cotton wrote: post #10
ontoillogical wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're applying to non-public companies where the stock isn't liquid, it's very hard to compare different packages across companies.

Benefits are another story, and I'd love to see triplebyte release some data about those.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#19

Post by hardwaresofton »

Another company that does open salary calculations is Gitlab:

https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/#compensation (this is a random developer job, you can check out other positions @ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/)

Here's the feature ticket: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/831

Disclaimer: I don't work for Gitlab, but I am a pretty biased rabid fan.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#20

Post by arthurgibson »

hajile wrote: post #8

Why 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…

I'm going to target in on "bad life choice", most people end up where family are, especially if they have kids, schools are good, jobs are available. I don't think anyone who works remote starts in Nashville then goes to NYC on some thought they could get a salary increase to cover.
Post reply on HN