201–210 of 352 posts
Lesson - all people game the system for their own benefit.
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…
Absolutely.
Having employees not discuss salary is all about the employer having more power/control, and the employees having less.
I've always thought it's a little like an adult giving candy to a child and then say "Now, don't tell anyone I gave you this!".
Why doesn't the adult want anyone to know about the candy exchange? Because they benefit from keeping in concealed.
EDIT: I also think this is a generational thing. Everyone I know over 40 wouldn't dare talk about their salary, or how much they paid for their house, etc. Everyone I know under 30 will happily talk about it to anyone and everyone. Give it a few more decades, and this will be the norm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Oh really? And what makes one 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 w…
I agree that the "seniority" and "experience" sections are unclear in OP. For true openness, they need to provide an objective scale for these two items.
I don't think that this ever gets to (or approaches) perfect fairness, but neither has any compensation strategy anyone has ever devised [citation needed]. Still, I think it's a good faith effort, and the real world ramifications will be interesting and potentially useful in answering the questions relating to objectivity in determining salary.
This doesn't scale well when your company grows to hundreds of employees or even thousands.
Setting up a pay scheme now to handle thousands of employees would be very premature optimization.
* Buffer is not somebody's weekend project
* It needs 16 (yes, SIXTEEN) people to run that thing
* They actually have revenue. In millions. $2.3 Millions!
* Their company values are based on How to win friends and influence people.
Aside from that, open salaries are pretty naive idea, if not completely dumb and dangerous. The lives you live everyday is in effect a game (as in "game theory" game). When you are talking to person, selling goods or buying one you are in the game. Like in any game, information is your advantage and your opponents weakness. This is exactly why privacy matters. If insurance company knows you eat too much pizza, they would want to get a higher premium from you. Similarly if a car dealer can look you up and figure out your salary, he can adjust his negotiation tactics. A plumber making half the money you do would want to charge you more than others. And so on. When all these people would look for their next jobs, their next employer would know how much salary to offer them.
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I disagree completely. You should, as the potential employee, be well aware of the market pay and what you are willing to be paid to perform the job that you're applying for. Not to mention their job postings actually list a salary window ($88-110k for Backend/Frontend). What the person sitting next to you is paid should bear absolutely no impact on your life or your work ethic. If you're happy to make $88k and the g…
>If you're happy to make $88k and the guy doing the same job next to you is making $110k, I don't see any problem One problem is that the first person is often female, not white or foreign. Another is the demotivational effect when the first person eventually does find out they are underpaid versus colleagues or the market - and they generally do. And then they will leave. It gets worse when the lower paid person is…
I absolutely hate salary systems that give an advantage to people who are pushy, jerky, entitled, or privileged. Some of the best developers I know are pleasant, friendly, modest, don't like confrontation, and pay more attention to the work and the team than how much they're pocketing. Those people shouldn't be paid less.
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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…
Sure, upper middle class. What's wrong with a CEO making upper middle class wages? The point is it's respectable wages for a professional, but hardly as high-on-the-hog as $150k in Kansas City.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Setting up a pay scheme now to handle thousands of employees would be very premature optimization.
But how do you deal with the newcomers? As you grow you keep getting more and more and that system they have will be harder to implement and eventually may end up just like other companies. It isn't something they shouldn't be thinking right now. It does make the current employee happy, but will this work when 10 more people are joining, 20, 30?
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.
My company, GrantTree, is also run with open salaries (internally, though I posted the salary scale in an HN comment before). There was some disgruntlement when everyone was underpaid, but there's been remarkably little disgruntlement from individuals asking for more money for just themselves. This had been so for over a year now, so not conclusive, but starting to accumulate some data.