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Show me the salary!

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Re: Show me the salary!

#151

Post by Vinod_Chandra »

In India, We have launched a site to promote salary transparency!

KitnaDetiHai.in (coincidentally means the same as show me the money in Hindi)

The site has gone viral in top bschools in India.

The idea was born out of the thought, just for a simple mobile purchase or for a meal, we compare prices and reviews to get the best deal. Whereas for one year of blood and sweat, when HR says this is the best in the industry they are no accurate sites to refer to ask for a fairer deal.

How do I trust the HR words, when one of her prime KPI is also how much money she could save for the company while rolling an offer out.

I would be happy to hear feedback from you folks!

p.s. In Glassdoor I can post as CEO of Apple, there is no authentication and why the data is so inaccurate, whereas in KitnaDetiHai after initial search its a compulsory LinkedIn Login to search more and even after that Machine Learning Algorithm's are used to identify outliers. If found so the user's access is removed and he cannot be a part of community at all.

Another Incentive here for users to enter right salaries is, we will suggest jobs which 1. Match hiked up no's from current salary. 2. Also fairly matching skills of the job against skills listed/endorsed on LinkedIn.

Re: Show me the salary!

#152

Post by brendangregg »

I'm sure these reasons happen, however, the most common reason recruiters don't talk salary to me seems to be that they know it is below market, and want time to sell all the other benefits. I treat it as a warning sign of a very low salary.

It also often wastes everyone's time. After going through multiple rounds of communication, the salary is finally revealed: often way too low, even after hearing about the benefits.

Other recruiters will talk salary early, and those jobs are usually the ones that pay well.

I don't waste time (mine and theirs) talking to recruiters who don't share salary information (expectations or ranges). There's a major tech company that needed my expertise (systems performance), for whom I never got past the recruiters because they wouldn't talk salary. (After several months, I don't think they ever filled that role.)

This all doesn't matter much to me now, as I'm at Netflix and very happy. Netflix does talk salary expectations.

Re: Show me the salary!

#153

Post by s73v3r »

johnward wrote: post #34
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #12

I've got a handful of general rules around salary that tell me not to apply for certain jobs: - I don't apply to jobs that don't list a salary range. This is a red flag that tells me that the employer doesn't have the budget to pay market rates and that applying and interviewing could be a colossal waste of time for both of us. I get that the employer may not be willing to pay what I want based on my experience, etc,…

I usually follow all of these. The one thing that gets me is when a recruiter calls me up. I usually talk to them because I don't want to be a dick and you never know they my actually be valuable one day. I tell them my salary. "oh well this one pays about 70% of that and it's an 8 month contract. I'd like to put you in for this". I'm not leaving a full time position for a contract position with less pay. I might con…

In my recent round of looking for work, the first thing I've asked the recruiter is what the pay range for the job is, and almost all of them have given it.

Re: Show me the salary!

#154

Post by s73v3r »

ryandrake wrote: post #136
Silhouette wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're unemployed, your pickiness factor has to be zero--any job is better than no job. This is true only if you also have nothing put away from the good times to cover your essential living costs for a while and give you a safety margin. Assuming you do -- and you need a very, very good reason not to in this business -- then taking the first offer that comes along just because you're currently unemployed is ver…

Yea, yea.. On the Internet, everyone has a fully-stocked 12-month emergency fund (and a supermodel girlfriend). In reality, nobody does. I can tell you, as someone who's been unemployed and a month away from living in my car, you take whatever job comes along. You can fret about your "optimal strategy" and "future negotiating power" while you are enjoying your next hot meal.

Just because you have no financial sense doesn't mean nobody else does.

Re: Show me the salary!

#155

Post by gambiting »

crpatino wrote: post #147
gambiting wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you said is true, and that's exactly why I am here. I get to work on one of the biggest games of 2015, but the financial hit I am taking for having a "fun" job is huge. And the demand/supply is a problem,but I think it's overplayed. Like I've said, I work for one of the largest studios in the country, so there is a thousand people applying for every junior position we have, but we have some intermediate/se…

The problem with senior positions being that older people have usually seen better and saner than you can offer, so your recruit pool is limited to within-industry pouching?

So logically.....if there is less supply for the senior positions and there is a problem filling them, why isn't pay increased for these positions?

Re: Show me the salary!

#156

Post by MagicWishMonkey »

amelius wrote: post #86
MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does what I did in the same situation, spend 5 minutes finding a new job before turning in his 2 week notice. I don't do the "lets re-negotiate my salary" bit, it's up to my employer to keep me at or above market rate for my skills, I shouldn't have to ask for it.

Ok, with the strategy of employers to be reluctant with publishing salary info, how do you currently determine your market rate? And given the fact that this market rate is not a clearly defined value (also thanks to employers' reluctance), don't you think it is necessary to at least negotiate with your current employer if you believe you're being paid below par?

The last time this happened to me (in 2011) I was with one of the big consulting firms and the guy in charge of recruiting put up notices everywhere with a job listing for my current position except with a 5-10% higher salary.

That being said, if I wasn't privy to this information it wouldn't take much to find out what the other people on my team are making. I don't think I've ever worked in an environment where salaries were considered top secret information.

Re: Show me the salary!

#157

Post by CalRobert »

ovulator wrote: post #138
LoSboccacc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

once it happened worse to me, I specified my minimum acceptable price at the first contact, went trough three interviews, then they offered 87% of what I asked.

Of course they did, that is how negotiation works. You don't go up from the sticker price. You don't say what the minimum you will work for is, you tell them what your other offers are, then you have an auction and they have to bid up.

This works really well with a liquid market. It can be harder for people who are talented in specialized professions. My wife, for instance, is highly skilled in a very specialized skillset, but it's academic, and jobs that match her skills come up a few times a year in the whole state. Even though the applicant pool is small, the illiquidity means it's difficult to say you're going to someone else. Actually, I wonder to what extent markets with very specialized (and comparatively rare) talents are affected by this illiquidity as opposed to mere supply and demand?

Re: Show me the salary!

#158

Post by bjackman »

mallyvai wrote: post #123
fukupayme2 wrote: post #55

A big problem here in London is the willingness of big firms, especially financial ones to pay market rate in all conditions. An example: I work at an IB, doing Python/Quant development. We are presented with two candidates to interview. Candidate 1 is ok, has a year or two of Python but otherwise mostly Java background. Did so-so in the algo and numerical discussions, was ok in the problem solving categories. He was…

Market rates are complicated, and it's not unusual for employers to do this. For high-value people, the big guys (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) can and will match crazy high counteroffer numbers a lot of the time. It sucks, and this leads to the exact scenario you're describing. The justification these places use is that, "We don't ever want to lose good people simply because of money." The flip side of this is that it'…

Offer Drive looks interesting. You should either internationalise it (right now the salary field only accepts numbers and doesn't specify what currency, and there's no "country" field) or clarify that it's only for your country (presumably the USA, but there's actually no clue about that on your site).

Brit here, wanted to take part but wasn't sure if my submission would be meaningful.

Re: Show me the salary!

#159

Post by Silhouette »

ryandrake wrote: post #144
Silhouette wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, nobody does. I'm sorry for the situation you found yourself in, but that isn't remotely true. I've been working independently for a while, and I've sometimes discussed how much is worth putting somewhere safe in the current economic climate with friends in broadly similar positions. The idea that anyone wouldn't do that was universally regarded as crazy. Of course there might be exceptions. If you're star…

That's awesome that you can do that, congrats! It's definitely a great goal for anyone, to one day get to that point, I totally agree.

Just for anyone who is reading this and wondering if they could or should be saving up this kind of fund, here's a very simple but not unrealistic example.

Suppose you're working in software development in the UK, recently graduated and now with a little experience but still quite early in your career.

If you're outside London and living in a shared place, maybe your salary is £30k, and your monthly living costs for rent, bills, and essentials like food and travel are £1,500. Your net monthly income after taxes and student loan repayments is probably about £1,850.

So, you have a surplus of £350 per month. If you set that aside throughout your next year of employment, sticking it in an ISA (a tax-exempt savings account), then by the end of that year you have nearly three months of safety margin.

Suppose, ignoring inflation to make the maths easy, that your salary increases at about 10% that year, without any negotiation or changing jobs. Now your take-home pay is probably about £2,000 after deductions, giving you a £500 surplus each month. If you saved that away the following year, you'd have more than 6 months of safety margin set aside within 2 years of starting to save.

Of course these are just example figures, hopefully not unrealistic for someone early in a software development career in the UK today, and they ignore any one-off major expenses you might have like getting a car serviced and MOT'd once a year or taking a foreign holiday. But even if you do those things, you can surely still save something, and when it comes to having a bit in reserve in case your career hits a bump, anything is better than nothing.

Edit: After checking a few prices, it turns out that some costs of living have gone up much less than I expected since I was that young. :-) So actually £1,500 is probably a lot more than you really need to spend on essentials under the conditions I mentioned, even if you're living in a tech-focussed area, and saving a few months' worth of essentials expenses should be much quicker than I worked out above.

Re: Show me the salary!

#160

Post by johnward »

bhayden wrote: post #77
johnward wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually follow all of these. The one thing that gets me is when a recruiter calls me up. I usually talk to them because I don't want to be a dick and you never know they my actually be valuable one day. I tell them my salary. "oh well this one pays about 70% of that and it's an 8 month contract. I'd like to put you in for this". I'm not leaving a full time position for a contract position with less pay. I might con…

I find telling recruiters my salary is a really bad idea. They then tell the company I am applying to what my salary is, which is a really shitty way to start off salary negotiations. I actually just don't work with recruiters anymore due to such a shitty experience.

Yeah my new rule of thumb is to avoid telling them what I make and try to tell them what it will take for me to leave my current position. I think I'm underpaid so I don't want to start by telling them how underpaid I am.
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