151–160 of 352 posts
In the same way, posts like these are created to be the first to break a specific norm (i.e. do not post employee salaries publicly) in order to ride the wave of traffic (and hopefully a few additional users).
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$150k is middle class in NYC. If you work in Manhattan, it's a small place with a short commute or a normal-size place (by national standards) with a long commute. If you don't work in Manhattan or can work from home most of the time, you can have a pretty luxurious lifestyle, yes. Also, being single with no one to support isn't the average case. I'd argue we should assume that each working person supports one other…
$150k is only middle class in NYC in the weakest possible sense of the phrase “middle class”. Even if we restrict to manhattan, $150k puts you in the top ~20% of household income (which often includes two wage-earners). Median income in Manhattan is right around $70k. I know that nearly everyone in America (except maybe for Bill Gates) believes that they are middle class, but at some stage one needs to accept that if…
I was referring to what that salary gets you in terms of standard of living and so on. Cost of living in all of New York, Manhattan especially, is high. $70k doesn't get you very far in Manhattan, especially if you don't have multiple roommates (which you wouldn't if you had a family).
Contrast that to what a family can do with $70k in Cleveland, San Antonio, or Raleigh. It looks closer to what $150k looks like in Manhattan, which is my point.
I've always felt the culture of hiding salaries was doing a significant disservice to employees. It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. In turn, this makes the entire labor market less efficient for the employee. This also makes the employer less accountable to the employees. The employer can easily pay somebody significantly more or les…
I can't fathom what being aware of your coworkers salaries could possibly do for positive team building. Somebody is going to be upset, egos will be triggered. Yes, in day to day business we're typically aware of the fact that an engineer or programmer makes more than a customer support or cashier. But here it's thrown in the employees face. "John sits next to me, he takes 3 hour lunches and he's paid $110k! I can't believe it. Screw John!"
Show up to work in a new Porsche sometime and while some people will think it's the coolest thing ever and give you a pat on the back, jealously may rear its ugly head with others.
I just don't see how this is a positive thing in the least.
One example I've heard discussed (I think by Dan Arieli) is how transparency in CEO pay has failed to bring CEO salaries down. One problem is now CEOs can see what other CEOs are getting paid and naturally every CEO will want to be paid higher than his peers.
I used to think open salaries would be a good thing but lately I'm not so sure. You definitely want to tread very carefully there as there are many implications and unexpected consequences.
I've always felt the culture of hiding salaries was doing a significant disservice to employees. It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. In turn, this makes the entire labor market less efficient for the employee. This also makes the employer less accountable to the employees. The employer can easily pay somebody significantly more or les…
As far as I'm concerned, salary is a completely private matter that is no one elses business, and no good could possibly come from sharing it.
I see this openness at buffer essentially being a tool for management to deny raise requests, etc... with... If we do it for you, we have to do it for everybody... which is a just a BS excuse to not face the reality that every persons value and work situation is different, and should be treated differently.
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No, the fear would be that employees look at someone with a 3x salary differently than they would if they didn't know what his salary was. It's just a distraction. I don't know how much my boss makes. It could be half what I make, it could be triple. I don't really care. If I found out suddenly that it's triple what I make, then maybe I'd look at him differently. Does he bring in 3x value to the company compared to m…
Perhaps this is a good thing? One of the leading factors in wage disparity between men and women (other than outright sexism) is a difference in negotiating style. Men ask for more, more aggressively, and more often. If a female employee sees that her direct counterpart is making 15% more than her for some reason, perhaps this would cause her to ask for parity. Or, better yet, by making salaries a function rather tha…
Another side benefit of this approach is recruiting. I've always felt that "salary negotiable depending on experience" is such a waste of ink. Being transparent let's individuals who have expectations way out of alignment opt-out entirely. Then you get a nice clean signal for when your pay is out of alignment with the market...good candidates don't apply.
I used to work in government (US municipality) and every single employee's salary (10s of thousands of people) was public record.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$150k is middle class in NYC. If you work in Manhattan, it's a small place with a short commute or a normal-size place (by national standards) with a long commute. If you don't work in Manhattan or can work from home most of the time, you can have a pretty luxurious lifestyle, yes. Also, being single with no one to support isn't the average case. I'd argue we should assume that each working person supports one other…
This is so laughable. The median salary in NYC is $50,000 per household. This includes tons of people who work in Manhattan (I've met more people who work in Manhattan and live in other boroughs than otherwise - the daily commute numbers back that up.) As another poster mentioned, even just Manhattanites make $70,000 a year for the household. I personally know many people living in Manhattan making far less. $150k is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$150k is only middle class in NYC in the weakest possible sense of the phrase “middle class”. Even if we restrict to manhattan, $150k puts you in the top ~20% of household income (which often includes two wage-earners). Median income in Manhattan is right around $70k. I know that nearly everyone in America (except maybe for Bill Gates) believes that they are middle class, but at some stage one needs to accept that if…
Yep. For less than that amount I had a floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn, 20-30 minute commute via subway, paid off 10 year student loans in It's that's "only" middle class, the world is in serious trouble.