Open Salaries: Outcomes • Hacker News Board

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#141

Post by sheepmullet » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #130

sheepmullet wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a counter example, I can point you to wallstreet or finance in Chicago, and show you 100s of people where people at the same level make as much as a 2x pay difference. If you think people in finance don't know what their peers are getting paid you are fooling yourself. They are overall much more mature and transparent about pay than we are.

I agree with the maturity part, but not the transparency part. If you told a trader their salary was going to be posted publicly, decided by the rest of the employees (including junior employees), and that they couldn't negotiate it then they'd laugh in your face. Giving up the ability to negotiate your salary is giving up your whole leverage. It's a ruse played by smart entrepreneurs to sucker engineers into taking…

> but not the transparency part.

I think most people in finance have a good idea of what their peers are being paid and a good idea of what they need to do if they want to earn more. People are paid fairly objectively and managers are upfront about what they value (at least within a firm).

That doesn't mean employees know exact percentages or bonuses and it certainly doesn't mean they know total comp in $.

When I moved into software development my first manager was shocked that I wanted to plan exactly how to get to the senior level, what I would need to demonstrate, and what kind of pay they offer at the next level up.

He couldn't answer any of my questions and it was like I was the first person who had talked about concrete career goals with him.

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#142

Post by jsprogrammer » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 10:26 PM UTC

moduspwnens14 wrote: post #94

ryandrake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't down vote, but the comment would be better if it were expanded with some details about why he thinks people who are good at their jobs should avoid open salary workplaces. I would think nearly all employees benefit from open salaries. For most companies, the salary information asymmetry is an effective way to keep the salaries of high performers DOWN. If you don't know that the mediocre guy who sits next to…

> I didn't down vote, but the comment would be better if it were expanded with some details about why he thinks people who are good at their jobs should avoid open salary workplaces. I've tried a handful of different ways to explain this (before backspacing out this comment box and trying again), but here's the best I can come up with: You always have the ability to negotiate for higher pay. If you've spent much of y…

According to the article, anyone can negotiate for a raise at any time. All you have to do is execute the negotiation process.

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#143

Post by kasey_junk » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 10:34 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #36

aantix wrote: post #32

If you're any good at your job, you should avoid these open companies like the plague. Don't piss away your leverage..

This got downvoted, and the tone is a bit harsh.. but it does speak a bit of truth. What happens to the guy in open salary co who is legit 50% better than everyone else? Do his peers vote to give him 50% more money? Or does it settle on sort of a union style pay scale, where everyone with the same # of years of work makes the same money (which is great for the worst performances, and terrible for the best performers)

It's a false dichotomy. The reason is "legit 50% better" is not something we currently know how to measure.

So yes, it trends towards more coarse grained measures (years of work doesn't have to be one) at the expense of the "best" performers.

If you see lots of your best performers leaving for more money elsewhere you have 2 options, raise everyone up, or come up with better coarse grained measures.

I'm of the opinion that if you can come up with good objective measures for performance of software devs, you should immediately stop doing whatever made up business problem you are currently working on, and switch to judging software devs. You could literally charge whatever you want.

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#144

Post by morgante » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 10:37 PM UTC

sheepmullet wrote: post #141

morgante wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the maturity part, but not the transparency part. If you told a trader their salary was going to be posted publicly, decided by the rest of the employees (including junior employees), and that they couldn't negotiate it then they'd laugh in your face. Giving up the ability to negotiate your salary is giving up your whole leverage. It's a ruse played by smart entrepreneurs to sucker engineers into taking…

> but not the transparency part. I think most people in finance have a good idea of what their peers are being paid and a good idea of what they need to do if they want to earn more. People are paid fairly objectively and managers are upfront about what they value (at least within a firm). That doesn't mean employees know exact percentages or bonuses and it certainly doesn't mean they know total comp in $. When I mov…

I agree with your anecdotes, but I think it's not because tech is less transparent but because most developers have no mind for career or salary optimization and treat their jobs like games rather than business propositions.

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#145

Post by swissoak » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 10:41 PM UTC

szynszyliszys wrote: post #61

dominotw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but we decided to go for open salaries anyway What happened to the people who didn't want to reveal their compensation. Was is it revealed anyways?

There was a choice and these people would just not see the salaries list and participate in salary raise process. But we went all in, everyone was ok with revealing their salaries.

So there was the implicit threat that if you didn't join, you wouldn't be eligible for raises? Also, how could you enforce them not seeing the list? It's illegal for an employer to deter the discussion of compensation amongst employees.

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#146

Post by swissoak » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 10:49 PM UTC

We can see from this article (50% raises happening after implementation) that even in the most cognizant companies wanting as much fairness as possible in salaries, you have huge discrepancies and hugely underpaid people because they can get away with it. They only time it was fixed was when they were essentially shamed into doing it, even if that shaming was self-inflicted.

Why did it take implementing this program to give those people a 50% raise? Was it not obvious prior to this that they were below market rate? Did Lunar do the traditional salary negotiation discussion with new hires prior to open salaries?

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#147

Post by michaelt » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 10:59 PM UTC

davidgrenier wrote: post #2

I'd like to get push-back to the idea of everyone earning the same salary. Why wouldn't it work from some people who seem to have some experience like you have?

If a company has removed its own ability to reward me for putting in extra effort, busting my ass to produce extra value would make me kind of a sucker, don't you think?

Every scheme I've heard of to get around that has had had some major flaw or other. Usually by failing to capture some important area of endeavour; or by relying on some combination of easily gamed metrics (like tickets closed or evaluations by co-workers); or requiring employees to capture excruciatingly detailed metrics; or by having incentives too small to be worth pursuing; or by including a large management fudge factor that makes the rest of the system pointless.

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#148

Post by SamUK96 » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 11:07 PM UTC

I work for a tech company in london. The wage inequality between senior and non-senior staff is disgusting, and as you can tell, it does indeed induce bitterness in me.

Heck, i'm on 15k/y and most of the seniors get atleast 100k/y + perks.

All that wage inequality does is create warring factions within the company that will eventually tear it apart, from my own recent experience.

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#149

Post by michaelt » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 11:10 PM UTC

hx87 wrote: post #76

brianwawok wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I am not sure you need transparency for this? Can usually get close to ranges if you ask a few coworker friends and/or interview around.

> Can usually get close to ranges if you ask a few coworker friends and/or interview around. Isn't that transparency, although in a very biased and limited form? Why would having more transparency reduce your leverage? It's easier to play the right cards when you know what cards are in play.

  Why would having more transparency reduce your leverage?

You: "I've gone above and beyond, and produced $X of value. I'd like a raise of $0.1X please"

Boss: "If I did that, I'd have to give your 20 peers the same raise. You'll need to produce at least $20X value if you want a raise of $0.1X. I can give you a raise of $0.005X if you like"

Re: Open Salaries: Outcomes

#150

Post by stale2002 » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 11:14 PM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #123

scarmig wrote: post #75

Hmm. My experience tells me that a lot of this depends on the details of the team, and that there isn't a right-for-everyone policy. My story: I worked for a company that paid a bit below market salaries, for the SF Bay Area. I was on a team with two more junior engineers. At one point one disclosed to me that they felt underpaid. That led to a salary discussion where I explained that the company habitually underpaid…

> You could say the takeaway is don't work for companies out to screw their workers, but that's most of them. By definition, if most companies are underpaying their workers, they're actually paying market rate.

Not necessarily. Employees aren't always aware of how much other companies pay.

I define underpaying as "other companies in the market would gladly poach these employees". But just because there are tons of companies willing to poach them, doesn't mean that the employees know this information.