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

businessinsider.com

171–180 of 224 posts

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

#171
post #75

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…

the societal consequence is that literally nothing happens. Same with the incomes, nothing whatsoever happens from having this be public.

Objectively not true. Scammers use that data all the time to target high net worth individuals. Especially high net worth old people living alone.

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

#172
post #167
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A credit score is determined by your loan totals/history. Every lender needs to assess credit-worthiness in some way, and they resort to the very similar schemes, with minor procedural differences based on cultural factors and historical accident.

Except that credit scores in the US include things such as evictions and credit card use, scores going down if you repay a loan in full and other bullshit, which a random bank determining your credit worthiness in France doesn't do. They ask for proof of income, check with Banque de France if you have outstanding debts or if you have failed debt payments, and that's it.

Evictions are not reported on a credit history report.

There is no single credit score in the US. Anyone can calculate whatever they want from a credit history.

There is no requirement for a lender to negatively view a borrower’s decision to buy pay off a loan. In fact, I doubt any even do.

Using a credit card is borrowing money, hence shows up on a credit report.

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are 100 SWEPR5s in the proposal above, Alice's nosy co-worker or neighbor only learns the range of Alice's salary. If Alice is the only one, they learn the precise value.

And that would be bad because… ?

...Alice may not wish for that information to become public, for whatever mix of reasons that she decides.

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

#174
post #152
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of perspective. From a worker point of view, being open about what we're earning will help bring to light if we're being exploited. From a business owner point of view, employees having this knowledge disturbs the power imbalance employers enjoy when it comes to compensation negotiations. I think more people than you'd expect in HN are in the latter camp. This site was launched as Startup News, after al…

Most users are workers who haven't figured out they aren't capitalists yet.

Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires.

Most haven't also realized that just because they work in software, it doesn't mean the world hasn't changed. The times of Microsoft's IPO creating tens of thousands of millionaires and multiple billionaires are gone. Until the next big platform pops up, things are not frozen, but stuck in mud.

The biggest Windows apps have probably been the same since 20 years ago. The biggest MacOS apps, same. The biggest iOS apps probably stabilized at least 5 years ago. Android, same.

Quoting kids: game's gone.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't get this weird paranoia about salary privacy. Opening it up helped everyone negotiate. To be clear Im not asking you to dox yourself. You havent proven that you aren’t paranoid though, because we have no idea who those figures belong to.

TLDR frontend dev in the US, mostly working with small businesses and nonprofits. About 20 years of experience on and off, much of it informal, and maybe 10 ish years of full-time experience. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37914768

I'm not very hard to dox but I'm also not very interesting. Just another dev in a sea of us :) Maybe a bit more talkative and transparent than some, that's all.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

You could have just said no.

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

#177
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Management’s job is to get rid of bad employees. Good employees do not have unlimited places to “flee” to. And full information is when markets allocate resources most efficiently.

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.

These "knowledge brokers" already exist and companies buy their info. This would only make it so employees could do the same.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should everyone at the same level earn the same? There are still differences in skill and willingness to work for a given range.

"Willingness to work for a given range" gets exploited by employers at the expense of employees. It helps prop up structural (gender/race) pay gaps and breeds distrust among employees as some salaries inevitably leak out.

The structural pay gaps exist because salaries are not public in the first place.

Paying less due to gender and race is already illegal. The only reason it prevailed is because proving it is difficult if you do not have access to the data.

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

#179
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. With full public information, bad employees benefit from being able to ask for more, good employees just flee elsewhere. Because it’s impossible to reason someone on their skills. Full information is hell on Earth.

So you would rather have your own compensation package be lower if it ensures that your coworkers packages are also low?

You'd be surprised and I can't find the study anymore, but this is a very frequent thing.

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

#180
post #25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already companies collecting such information and making them available for their customers (who supposedly provide some collated data set to them in exchange). That's what all the "paying top of market rate" talk in various companies is based on. So: the potential for collusion already exists, but unless regular folks can get access to the analysts' data sets as well, it's a very one-sided deal.

> paying top of market rate I thought that was just marketing puffery...

No, they actually buy that info from 3rd parties.

The puffery is that they say "top 10%" when they're " 'top' 40%".

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