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Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

open.bufferapp.com

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Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#121

Post by sliverstorm »

thenmar wrote: post #88
DominikR wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's say I'm a competitor, and I find that Niel (randomly picked) is someone I want to hire. All else being equal, I offer him $100k (website says he's making $88k). He comes to his boss to say "I like it here, can you match it? This happens all the time anyways, hiding the salary of the employee isn't going to make any difference in most cases. And is it so hard to guess what some (say iOS engineer) earns? The sa…

I think the fear is that it will create animosity by making the information so accessible. On some level, the junior-level dev knows he's not making as much as the guy with the PhD in an esoteric mission critical topic, but he has a kind of plausible deniability that lets him avoid thinking about it. If everyone's making 80k and everyone knows that Jane The Expert is making 300k, there's going to be friction. "Hey Ja…

Worked as an intern once, had one of the full-timers complimenting my work and saying I was just as sharp/skilled as him at the job. I knew he was getting paid a lot more than me. The multiplier was probably a whole number. Yes, he was on-call and I wasn't. Yes, there are always other good reasons too. But it still rankled to be doing close to the same work, and paid so much less. As you say I made sure to stay ignorant of the exact number to help ignore it.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#122

Post by [deleted] »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #90
untog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Chief Anything Officer should probably be paid more than engineers, or they shouldn't have the words Chief and Officer in their title. And that seems like a very developer-centric viewpoint. Yes, good customer service can add a lot to a company's bottom line. Some companies have huge engineering issues and need engineers to solve them. Some companies have huge sales issues and need sales people to solve them. Some…

I upvoted you, but now I regret it. Not because this was a bad comment, but because I realize now that I disagree. "Chief" and "highly compensated" are not necessarily joined at the hip. It should be possible to have a C-level exec with most of their compensation variable and dependent on company performance or certain metrics, rather than a whopping base salary.

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#123

Post by taybin »

benihana wrote: post #36

This sounds like absolute hell > Every internal email sent between any 2 people on the team has a certain list cc’ed that is accessible for everyone: For example if 2 engineers email with each other, they cc the engineers list, if it’s people on our customer support team they have a support email list cc’ed. Stripe was a great inspiration for this. (More about this) Openness and transparency and honesty are great. Bu…

Wouldn't this just lead to people emailing less and having private discussions face to face? We're humans and we have drama and we need to vent from time to time.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#124

Post by philsnow »

kenrikm wrote: post #111
DominikR wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's say I'm a competitor, and I find that Niel (randomly picked) is someone I want to hire. All else being equal, I offer him $100k (website says he's making $88k). He comes to his boss to say "I like it here, can you match it? This happens all the time anyways, hiding the salary of the employee isn't going to make any difference in most cases. And is it so hard to guess what some (say iOS engineer) earns? The sa…

Why is a Senior iOS engineer (Andy) on a "Intermediate: 1.1X" multiplier? - you can't be Senior and be intermediate in my book. Seems he needs his multiplier upped to the proper level. $107k is low for a iOS Dev in the Bay Area.

Could be seniority relates to breadth and tenure of experience whereas experience is related to skill at the particular position.

So an ios dev who spent the last 10 years elbow-deep in the innards of some database code or something would arguably be "senior" but not "experienced".

Just one way this could fall out, I don't know how buffer defines the terms.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#125

Post by swombat »

oijaf888 wrote: post #84
swombat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would only be upset because you currently work in a company with a culture that doesn't value transparency as a core value. If you worked in a company like Buffer or GrantTree, you'd be wondering why others are so secretive about their salaries, and find yourself more and more disliking the idea of working for a company which is not transparent. Habit is a powerful thing. Change your surroundings and you'll chang…

How much do you get paid? I don't see a blog post on GrantTree publishing employee's salaries. (I didn't spend a ton of time looking though, so apologies if I did miss it)

There are some posts describing our pay scale in my commenting history, and everyone in the company knows exactly how much everyone else is paid - though I'll grant you we haven't gone as far as writing a blog post about our pay scale, but perhaps we will some day!

As for me, my cofounder and I both take out the maximum we can without paying lots of unnecessary tax in the UK, which adds up to about £30k per person per year, net.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#126

Post by sokoloff »

cmwelsh wrote: post #108
suprgeek wrote: post #55

Excellent concept - but one major Caveat. Why in the world would you publish it for all the world to see? Keep it internal to the company - you have an expectation of privacy from your employer and this post just ruined it completely. I hope they got written signed releases from every one of those folks whose private info they broadcast to the world.

It's not hard to guess what a software developer is making these days (hint: a lot).

Yes, but $120K, $240K, and $360K are all "a lot" to different people, are all plausible software dev total compensation numbers, and yet people would still perhaps think differently if they knew their friend made 1x, 2x or 3x $120K.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#128

Post by riffraff »

vladgur wrote: post #98

Wow, these salaries seem to be pretty low. I mean a senior IOS engineer making $107K in SF? Id expect them to easily increase their salary by 30% by jumping ship.

I was thinking that they seem disproportionately high for some of the other locations (45k$/year in hanoi is a _lot_ of money)

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#129

Post by CodeMage »

rcoder wrote: post #68
JonFish85 wrote: post #29

Let's say I'm a competitor, and I find that Niel (randomly picked) is someone I want to hire. All else being equal, I offer him $100k (website says he's making $88k). He comes to his boss to say "I like it here, can you match it?" What does his boss do? Especially, if he's valuable to the company... What if I have a very specialized skill that doesn't fit nicely into your matrix? Let's say market pay for my skill is…

Three things: First, most recruiters/hiring managers ask for current comp (or at least a salary range) early in the discussion, so it should be easy for them to offer well over someone's current pay. This simply removes one bargaining tools (lying about current comp) for an employee considering a move elsewhere. Second, matching outside offers very quickly becomes a slippery slope. Anyone who figures out that such a…

> First, most recruiters/hiring managers ask for current comp (or at least a salary range) early in the discussion, so it should be easy for them to offer well over someone's current pay. This simply removes one bargaining tools (lying about current comp) for an employee considering a move elsewhere.

"Lying about current comp" is not the only tool for an employee considering a move elsewhere. Nor is it, in my opinion, the best tool for that.

You can get pretty good results by refusing to disclose your current comp and it has an added benefit of keeping you honest. Open salaries would ruin that negotiation tool.

Also, matching outside offers is not necessarily a slippery slope. Not everyone who gets an outside offer and considers it is motivated by pure greed. Sometimes people's situation changes and they would prefer to stay at the same company, but the company needs an additional incentive to meet their new requirements.

For example, if you really like working at company Foo, but you just had a kid and you're noticing that your budget is too tight for your peace of mind, you might need a raise. Now, you might be an asset to your company and your boss genuinely understands your situation, but he or she simply doesn't have enough leverage to give you a raise outside the regular process. If you have an outside offer, that gives your boss the leverage and you might be able to negotiate a raise that would allow you to stay. And if they truly can't afford it, you have the choice of accepting the outside offer.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#130

Post by michaelt »

owenmarshall wrote: post #80
JonFish85 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add on top of that, who says that this kind of transparency breeds trust? Transparency is great in some areas, terrible in others. Take away bathroom stalls to find an area where this isn't as true (extreme example). I trust co-workers when they do what they say they will, when they are respectful & smart, when they show up on time, when they tell me when I screwed up in a nice way, etc. I could care less what the…

>I could care less what they make--to me it would be a distraction. Are you 100% sure that you've valued yourself accurately? I played "show me yours and I'll show you mine" with a coworker once and he discovered that we were both working the same position but he was paid $8K less than me. The difference was that I negotiated my salary like crazy and he didn't. Information asymmetry is the best way for companies to e…

If I am one on a team of 20 engineers and I want an extra $10,000 p.a. for all my colleagues, I need to persuade the company to spend $200,000 p.a.

If I negotiate for myself, I only need to persuade the company to spend $10,000.

A proven ability to keep your mouth shut could strengthen your negotiating position if you're using a quantifiable value-based approach.

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