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Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

open.bufferapp.com

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Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#221

Post by laureny »

grecy wrote: post #202
tikhonj wrote: post #134

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…

> It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. 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 k…

> Having employees not discuss salary is all about the employer having more power/control, and the employees having less.

You seem to imply that just because the employees know all the salaries, they have more control. This is not accurate.

They have more knowledge but certainly not more control.

If anything, the fact that the salaries are the result of a simple equation means that the employees have close to no control over the money they make. Also, a lot of factors contribute to the productivity of an employee, most of which cannot be accounted for in a simplistic equation, things such as working long hours, working on weekends, good attitude, willing to take on unpopular tasks, etc...

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#222

Post by dinkumthinkum »

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.

They might as well force the employees to disclose what they spend the money on.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#223

Post by dinkumthinkum »

swombat wrote: post #65
bjpless wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. Hard to imagine all employees signing off on this release for the sake of a HN article. But I hope that they did. I would be very upset if my salary were published unbeknownst to me.

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…

What a bunch of HacknerNews groupthink nonsense or at the very best, hippy dribble. You think it is just some sort of cultural problem for someone that they may not really want the whole world to know what they make? It's one thing for the echo chamber here to be way outside of reality ... it's another to think it is normal.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#224

Post by umsm »

wpietri wrote: post #211
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…

As a boss I'd love this. It's my job making sure everybody is paid fairly. If Niel came to me and told me about a competitive offer, I'd say, "well, let's look at the market; maybe we've fallen behind." And then we'd sit down and refresh the data that drove our current pay levels. If things had changed significantly, then it would be time for raises. If not, then we'd talk about why a company might be paying well abo…

I don't think that many bosses think like that.

What if the company is not that profitable, can you still stay competitive? Are you willing to risk the future of the company?

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#225

Post by corry »

Serious question: Why aren't equity positions posted too?

To me, that's part of the trade-off that the startup founder / leaderships takes (for good or ill), and seeing salary in the absence of actual equity positions is only half the picture.

Hopefully they all know each other's equity positions internally and just chose not to share publicly... otherwise it would seem like a betrayal of the open culture if the actual ownership structure of the company wasn't openly known and discussed.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#226

Post by dinkumthinkum »

taybin wrote: post #123
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.

Shhh ... don't bring up the real world on HN. :)

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#227

Post by phillmv »

laureny wrote: post #221
grecy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. 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 k…

> Having employees not discuss salary is all about the employer having more power/control, and the employees having less. You seem to imply that just because the employees know all the salaries, they have more control. This is not accurate. They have more knowledge but certainly not more control. If anything, the fact that the salaries are the result of a simple equation means that the employees have close to no cont…

>They have more knowledge but certainly not more control.

Knowledge is power, as they say.

Industry wide wage negotiation is basically a collective action problem; publicizing your wages lowers the barriers/cost for negotiating for higher wages. Most people are, by definition, paid less than their marginal value and thus have some leeway for a raise to begin with.

Besides, it works for CEOs: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/10/21/131021ta_...

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#228

Post by kosei »

laureny wrote: post #221
grecy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. 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 k…

> Having employees not discuss salary is all about the employer having more power/control, and the employees having less. You seem to imply that just because the employees know all the salaries, they have more control. This is not accurate. They have more knowledge but certainly not more control. If anything, the fact that the salaries are the result of a simple equation means that the employees have close to no cont…

Though I think that's why this is a good solution: it still provides the company with wage control while creating transparency for the employees.

Re: Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer

#229

Post by city41 »

laureny wrote: post #221
grecy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. 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 k…

> Having employees not discuss salary is all about the employer having more power/control, and the employees having less. You seem to imply that just because the employees know all the salaries, they have more control. This is not accurate. They have more knowledge but certainly not more control. If anything, the fact that the salaries are the result of a simple equation means that the employees have close to no cont…

I disagree they don't have more control. If the salaries are out in the open, then pay disparages would need to get addressed. Those who are severely underpaid would look for another job, so the company would need to give them a raise and fix the situation. I've known plenty of very good employees who were severely underpaid simply because they didn't know any better.
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