191–200 of 352 posts
Wow, an Android engineer making less than 100K that's crazy to me, but I'm not that familiar with UK salaries I guess.
45k for Android UK average
55k for Android London average
10k GBP is 16k USDDoes anyone have an opinion on how these numbers square with market rates? I make $113k/year as a juniorish engineer at a VC backed startup in SV. Am I hilariously overcompensated?
Seems unwise to have a CEO co-founder be the highest salaried employee at a startup. That person's equity position is probably at least an order of magnitude higher than the other employees. As an investor or employee, I'd find this alarming. http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/peter-thiel-best-predictor-... Call me old fashioned, but I think co-founders should be paid living expenses + 25%, even in a series-A funded st…
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"All else being equal" is a huge assumption. Will your company offer the same environment, flexibility, openness, remote work? You should first assume that Buffer keeps their employees very happy to be able to openly publish their salaries.
That's great, but what if Niel has a kid? Suddenly priorities are shuffled in a big way. Maybe he needs a 5% raise to afford ? Is it worth it to the company to lose the employee over 5% of salary?
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I had a boss bully his employees with fellow employee salary information. (i.e. bill took a pay cut because of the recessions, so should you...) 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…
Edit (add quote for clarity) > 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... More likely, the response would be along the lines of: "You'll get a raise when you qualify based on the criteria that have been clearly explained to you and the rest of the world."
Senior? Lead? VP? C-level? COO? CEO?
Master? Advanced? Intermediate? Junior?
Who decides that? What makes it objective? Can you dispute it if your boss happens to be a bitter idiot who is completely detached from reality? What happens if your boss and their boss have different views? What happens if you are a perfect employee, but you were a bit of dick at the last Christmas party? And what happens if you are very nice and social and everyone likes you, but you are not really much of a programmer?
This whole thing is BS. The only model that can possibly work is the scaffolder model - you get a worker for a job. If they're shit they get sacked the net day. If they're good, you have to pay them more to keep them from running away...
I have a feeling you will regret this soon. There are certain benefits in having a firm salary structure sponsored by a transparent system, but the loss of flexibility will hurt in ways you haven't experienced. Also, letting everyone know what their peers make can cause disgruntled employees.
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 honestly stuff like this that makes me feel like the only sane person around. Why would you do this? If the CEO is pushing for it, the employees will all smile and nod and go along with the crowd, but all this does is breed resentment. The idea of open salaries sounds good on paper, but it's simply idealistic. You can sing the happiness song and do all the lets-be-friends dances but at the end of the day we're p…
You're not.
> If the CEO is pushing for it, the employees will all smile and nod and go along with the crowd,
I don't know what to say. There are more kinds of working relationships than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Not everybody lives in fear of their CEO.
> You can sing the happiness song and do all the lets-be-friends dances but at the end of the day we're people competing for resources
Sure, but some of us cooperate with others in order to compete with everyone else, and that's good enough.
Of course, this doesn't work. Nobody is preventing you from asking your neighbors what they paid for their bread. Once you know what a "fair" price for bread is, then you know exactly how hard you need to work to afford bread, and you have little incentive to work any harder than that.
If you own a company, ideally you don't want your employees competing with each other. You want each of them to compete with themselves, pushing their abilities, growing, learning, improving. You don't want them to know exactly how much they need to do to earn that next promotion, because then they will have little motivation to do more than the bare minimum.
If you own a company, unlike the baker, you can have some amount of control over the flow of information. This control allows you to manipulate your employees motivations. Like any amount of control over anything, this control can be abused...but in capable hands it can also be wielded to great effect.
An open salary policy gives away that control entirely...
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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 igno…