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Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

businessinsider.com

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Re: Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

#101

Post by nonethewiser »

jachee wrote: post #41
sokoloff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m opposed to disclosure laws that would be prone to expose the income of individual people. If Alice is the only SWEPR5 at a company, that proposal publishes her salary. If Bob is clearly the best SWEPR4, Cathy the middle, and Dave just barely got promoted to that level, their salaries are also individually published. I don’t object to good faith ranges being required in job listings, but I oppose anything that wou…

Management is the only one who benefits when labor doesn’t openly share salary information. Let the information flow. Knowledge is power.

And job seekers. They don’t want potential employers knowing how much they made.

Re: Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

#102

Post by colmmacc »

occz wrote: post #75
candiddevmike wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know there are some countries where you can look up anyone's income?

Taxable income is public information in Sweden, and you can basically buy a catalog containing the previous years income for everyone in a given area if you'd like. Stuff like addresses and so on is also public information in Sweden, for what it's worth. This always makes me feel a bit strange when hearing people considering releasing someone's address to be doxxing and something horrible - like you can just look up…

I have a very hard time believing that sales-people and trades-people don't take it into considering when negotiating or quoting a price. One of the reasons a car sales person wants to "check your credit" early in the process is to get your credit rating and address - which helps them guess your price sensitivity - and many home services certainly take into account the area you live in even when it is irrelevant.

Re: Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

#104

Post by nonethewiser »

ta1243 wrote: post #70
sokoloff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upthread proposer asked "is there any disadvantage[?]" I listed one (or two, if you count "this won't accomplish much because of the equity comp portion"). Philosophically, whether an individual's ought to be private is an interesting but distinct question. This proposal has the disadvantage that it makes disclosures about individual people who might not want that disclosure made and which are not being made today.

If an individual salary ought to be secret, why does the US insist on advertising the salary of so many people (not even just the salary range either - but the individual name = $xxxxxx) If a salary shouldn't be secret, why does the US insist on allowing some people to keep their salary secret?

> If an individual salary ought to be secret, why does the US insist on advertising the salary of so many people (not even just the salary range either - but the individual name = $xxxxxx)

Where

Re: Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

#105

Post by solardev »

nonethewiser wrote: post #97
solardev wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that matter? They should all be able to know each other's salaries.

What’s your salary?

40 euros/hour right now. Last job was USD $98k/year. Before that it was $65k. Before that it was $42k.

I was part of a team that led a salary transparency initiative at a previous job, and it eventually led to the creation of a union there, but not until after I left for unrelated reasons.

I don't get this weird paranoia about salary privacy. Opening it up helped everyone negotiate.

Re: Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

#106

Post by velcrovan »

tristor wrote: post #56
velcrovan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is legislated that everyone has to do it, then people looking to sell their labor can do so with perfect knowledge of where the market is at, reducing the negotiating strength of these shitty companies. This is how it already works in Norway. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239

And how is tech compensation in Norway compared to the US? That's what I thought...

The raw numbers are different, I’m guessing (I haven’t looked). A tech worker in Norway also pays less for healthcare and housing, is healthier, spends less time in traffic and lives in a society where everyone lives safer and more equally, and has more power to walk away from a shit job than someone in the US. It’s a system that values autonomy for the most people over the power of a tiny sector of the economy to rake in maximum dollars, and wage transparency is just a small feature of that system.

But yeah if it doesn’t bring you personally more money I guess it’s not even worth thinking about

Re: Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

#107

Post by city41 »

DrReachAround wrote: post #44
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Level 59 is entry-level for an SE (e.g. an undergraduate hire), Level 58 is for Interns. People at Level 59 are expected to reach Level 60 within 2 years or they'll basically get managed-out, but once you get past Level 61 people generally take things more slowly. In West Coast circles (Blind.app, et al) Microsoft's reputation is that it's still "the country club" where you go if you want a stable career without too…

The downside is you have to put up with Microsoft's ineptitude. I was on a Microsoft project for about 6 months and it was a terrible experience. Everyone was out for themselves, asking questions was treated as an annoyance. Condescension at every turn. It was a small team and perhaps not representative of all of Microsoft, but it was a bad enough experience that I'd never consider working there in any capacity.

Microsoft is a massive company. Each org and team are very different. I worked there for a few years and my team was extremely old school (waterfall, no automation, all manual QA, heavy upfront planning, etc) while I had friends in other parts of the company where it was pretty much the exact opposite. The same can be said about talent density, innovation, etc.

Re: Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

#108

Post by DecoPerson »

dom96 wrote: post #6

At this point is there any disadvantage to legislating that all companies should share a transparency report where they list their levels + avg, min, max, median salaries for each level?

This significantly disadvantages good money.

Good money being: any company that tries to do things properly (or, relatively properly).

Bad money being: profit, profit, profit. Take risks and misreport. Don’t put anything in writing. Pay bonuses under the table. Etc etc etc.

Not only does the good money need to spend a lot more money to comply, they also wind up wasting a lot of money on “fake” compliance or “over-“ compliance. For example, insurance companies often find ways to make companies insure the same risk multiple times. Or consultants over-analyse and say “This whole thing is a risk for your company. It needs to be fixed. I can do it for you.”

Good money will pay consultants to prepare excruciatingly detailed salary transparency reports, and they’ll live with the cost of their honesty (“you pay women less than men!!!! it doesn’t matter that your state has very few qualified women in that field!!! pay them all the same!!!”).

Bad money will do just enough to be compliant, and they’ll fudge the numbers (with sneaky fringe-benefit bonuses to their employees so they don’t care).

Re: Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

#109

Post by WrongAssumption »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #84
ekianjo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information asymmetry is a natural thing. It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them. If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power.

> Information asymmetry is a natural thing. What does this mean? Why does natural even matter? Humans changed a lot of things that are “natural” to better their lives. >It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them. Temporarily embarassed billionaires. Aka you like to think you are the 1% who can out negotiate an employer because you are so in demand. 99% of people…

No he’s right. It used to be in my state that prospective employers could ask for salary history with proof. If you are leaving a place because of bad pay or just that you want to make more money the discussion was always tethered around your previous pay.

A few years ago my state made it illegal to ask for that information, and can now only ask our salary expectations. It’s now tethered around what you want to make.

This led to a HUGE increase in my comp.

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