111–120 of 169 posts
So if I'm worth 500k a year to Buffer they will not be able to pay that to me. So stupid.
Spoiler alert: There's a very large chance that you're not worth $500k to Buffer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This creates perverse incentives among your employees. Now every employee is fighting to work on the "moneymaker" applications. And I don't really believe that a company will be able to accurately assess the value that every application used brings it.
That has nothing to do with whether leadership can accurately assess the value of the projects and applications that are developed in general (a point I agree with you on).
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone wants their family and friends to be able to look up their salary. Or to know that they're the lowest (or highest) paid person in their department, etc.
Pure FUD. Millions of people have their salary in the open in the US, from CEO's to government employees. If you wish to pay for your privacy go ahead, but price transparency can only help the workers.
We have CEOs and government employees who have public salaries for the specific purpose of public accountability, not just because we're curious or because we're entitled to know the price of everything at all times.
Now, a world with perfect price transparency in the labor market might make sense, but two points:
1) We don't have that universal transparency now, so being the 1% of firms that does (or their employees) can put you at a disadvantage. Why do you think some places are passing labor-friendly laws that make it illegal to ask what previous salary was?
2) Price transparency doesn't have to mean that we get those prices from an "objective" formula that has no room for flexibility based on the facts and circumstances of each case, right? How is this different from mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, or whatever?
I think that price transparency would probably help the average worker by bringing low performer salaries up and high performer salaries down, and it would probably harm overall productivity by harming incentives. But I'm not an economist.
I know this is cynical, but this really just reinforces my suspicion: the open salary thing is actually an attempt to underpay through a formula that's presented as objectively fair. Over time, it ends up gravitating your workforce towards average or below-average performers. There's no room for top talent here, because there's no subjectivity in this formula. If you're a fantastic dev (or whatever), why would you wo…
Not every company/product needs "top talent" to work, and I could definitely see Buffer being one of them. Why should a company pay extra for top talent if all they have are mundane problems?
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.
That's not really realistic though. How could I convince someone to pay me $250k in Minneapolis when the market is supporting 115-150k?
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 know this is cynical, but this really just reinforces my suspicion: the open salary thing is actually an attempt to underpay through a formula that's presented as objectively fair. Over time, it ends up gravitating your workforce towards average or below-average performers. There's no room for top talent here, because there's no subjectivity in this formula. If you're a fantastic dev (or whatever), why would you wo…
What does it have to do with the openness of the formula/salary data if another company pays more? > there's no subjectivity in this formula Yes, there isn't. Because subjectivity in favour of someone, is to the detriment of another employee (because the budget is limited). It just usually happens to be the case that the employers somehow "magically forget" to communicate this to the employees. So you are basically k…
This is not how salaries work. Companies don't have a pool of $x for y employees. They try to hire every employee at as low a cost as possible. If you accept a salary at $10,000 below what they were willing to pay for that role, it's not like you can rest easy knowing that the other employees will get that money. That $10k is now additional profit [1].
Anyway, you can think this system is unfair and that we should have another one, but this is the one we have now. So you can work at below market rates for companies like Buffer, or you can go get a higher salary at companies that don't do this.
1. This seems like an argument in favor of more worker-owned companies, which I think are fantastic. I think we should have a lot more of them, and I'd like to better understand why we don't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've got it backwards. They're paying people in low cost of living locations less not the other way around. If you frame it that way the economics make a lot more sense; one of the reasons places like SF and NYC are so expensive is because everyone wants to be there for all the jobs. Competition is high and salaries adjust accordingly. Also, speaking from experience (biased toward the financial side of things), you…
Explain to a dev that "we don't pay SV devs more, we just think you're worth less". You don't have to be on-site, so the real market is nationwide (if not international). Companies simply pretend it's limited so they can pay less.
And that still doesn't solve the talent issues; highly skilled professionals congregate in areas with amenities (culture, like minded people, access to top notch medical care, access to schools, access to public transportation, etc) so even if you're remote you're still competing for the high CoL people at high CoL prices.
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.
This is ~30% under market.