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Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

blog.stackoverflow.com

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Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#151

Post by marcosdumay »

dimino wrote: post #76
Gmo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company has transparent salaries since the beginning 14 years ago. Funnily, in the words of one of the co-founders, it's more a mere accident than a clear will from the beginning : "we did not really plan it that way, but back then, it was easier to let the document listing the salaries open for everyone than restricting its access to a few persons" and they decided to keep it that way ever since :) We always ask…

> We are also experimenting with allowing people to choose their salary after 3 years in the company (there's a process and some caveats of course). Why wouldn't everyone ask for the maximum amount your company is willing to give? I don't really care if Mark from billing is getting paid 1/3rd of what I'm asking for, what I care about is if you'll give it to me...

> Why wouldn't everyone ask for the maximum amount your company is willing to give?

Is there really a problem with that? Shouldn't everybody be getting this already?

I bet the GP's company can retain good people, and can afford to train them, so they can retain even better people.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#154

Post by walshemj »

8draco8 wrote: post #26
NKCSS wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Location, location, location; I live in .nl and with about €55k, I'm at the upper end of the job market here (14 years experience).

You are right but you have to also consider US working hours. Apparently it's not unusual to work 60 hours a week while here in Europe we have ~40 hours working weeks. If I have to choose I would definately stay on my UK salary that is about half what this calculator is showing for my experience and keep 40hr working week.

I used to work with a CTO who had worked in the Valley and in the UK and he said he got no more work out of people in the US than the UK.

And bear in mind in the UK this was British Telecom with civil service type holidays and perks - working there did remind me of the Laundry Files :-)

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#155

Post by cuddlybacon »

> For our experiment, we redesigned the Stack Overflow Jobs ads to display salary ranges. We were curious: just how much effect does this information have? [...] We expected to see an improvement, but we were surprised by the size: a 75% average increase in clickthrough rate (CTR) when we showed a job's salary range.

I'm surprised they're surprised :P. I'm not actively looking for a job, so when I search I am mostly searching to get a feel for what skills are in demand and what salaries are like. For someone like me, seeing a wage in an ad would get me to click it so I can see what is expected of that wage in that region.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#156

Post by darklajid »

borplk wrote: post #68
darklajid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These salaries seem SUPER high. Developer with 10 years experience at 120k? I'm making less than half of that and don't feel particularly ripped off. (I guess both of our comments don't help a lot in general, except to show that you personally don't seem to consider an application at SO while I'd love to do just that)

but where though?

Correct, as others noted: I'm from Germany.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#157

Post by crispyambulance »

Salaries, job-titles, and all things related to hiring are _INTRINSICALLY_ subjective and that's the way it should be (and really the only way it can be).

Even though the stackoverflow folks are using "a formula", there's still a lot of subjective judgment in scoring the skill-levels and stuff like years of experience (5 years at company-X isn't necessarily the same thing as five years at company-Y).

As far as I can tell, stackoverflow is successful at their mission, has a good reputation and doesn't have retention problems. That's great for stackoverflow and the folks that work there. And while it is better than most places, other companies are doing just as well and don't have transparency in their salaries. Is transparency _really_ that important? I don't think so.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#158

Post by JustSomeNobody »

jc4p wrote: post #143
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, I sincerely doubt we'd make an offer to a candidate that assumes their skills are all at the top of the range. "Fives" are extraordinarily rare, most employees have no fives, and the ones that do have one five. I don't understand the rationality behind this. Why have (nearly) impossible to reach ratings? I mean, by this logic, the most talented people will only ever be a 4, yes? So make 4 the limit. You j…

I also work at Stack Overflow. I don't think anyone can be _the_ very best and I think that's not a reasonable or attainable goal. We value T shaped developers, and our salary matrix values both spreading breadth (e.g. as a mobile dev if I up my skills in sysadmin or data science) or depth (which is a bit harder to do if you're already experienced) which fits into that nicely.

I don't know how to _not_ come off sounding argumentative here, so don't take this harshly, but:

> I don't think anyone can be _the_ very best and I think that's not a reasonable or attainable goal.

... kinda proves my point of not needing a "five" rating.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#160

Post by meggar »

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #67
darklajid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These salaries seem SUPER high. Developer with 10 years experience at 120k? I'm making less than half of that and don't feel particularly ripped off. (I guess both of our comments don't help a lot in general, except to show that you personally don't seem to consider an application at SO while I'd love to do just that)

My starting salary was higher than your 10 year experience salary. You are WAY off the grid, even with quality-of-life arguments factored in. Unless you work less than 30 hours a week, you ARE getting ripped off. I don't know anyone who started with less than 60k other than my brother who was 3rd man in at a bootstrapped startup. If you enjoy your job, awesome. However, you're very easily in the bottom half of starti…

I'm being ripped off too. graduated during the recession after the dotcom bubble, took the first dead-end dev job I could find, not exactly marketable experience.
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