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Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

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Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#161

Post by mathattack »

tristor wrote: post #33

At my self-assessed skill level and years of experience, they're offering $11k/yr more for a "Developer" than a "Site Reliability Engineer". I find it interesting that they value someone in a "Developer" position higher than someone in a "Site Reliability Engineer" position. Having been an Ops person for my entire career and at the same time a competent developer in numerous languages and environments, I find this un…

Could this be market supply/demand? That banks in NYC are paying more for developers and less for site-ops (similar reasons mentioned elsewhere on cost vs profit center) and to hire and retain these folks, they need to pay accordingly. In this sense, it's the career interest in Siteops that lowers their pay, despite the skills.

This happens in the real world a lot. Two people major in Mathematics. One has an additional education certification and goes to teach in a school. The other gets an IT job at the same school. The guy with the IT job gets paid more. (You could insert social work, music, or any of a dozen other underpaid fields)

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#162

Post by mathattack »

chimeracoder wrote: post #103
edlucas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add another link to the pile, the most useful database I've found of base salaries for comparison is the publicly available H1B data. You should account for the costs to the company of sponsorship in addition to the base. The data is available down to the company and title: http://www.h1bdata.info/

That's a good source, but last time that link was posted on HN, someone pointed out that there's a downward bias in that data, because on top of the costs of sponsorship, companies may still end up paying the employee more than what they state in the initial application.

Yes - they also miss bonuses, equity, and "I think we can pay less to get someone from overseas".

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#163

Post by bpchaps »

caminante wrote: post #150
yen223 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the profit centre vs cost centre problem. Companies are incentivized to spend more on developers, since developers build features, and features drive sales, and sales drive profit. SysOps folks keep the site up, but once you start hitting >99% reliability, throwing more money at sysops isn't going to increase revenue.

From a "job security" lens, the sysops crew needed to keep the site up will be the last to go during downsizing.

Not always. I was one of the only devops/linux admin at a past job and was in one of the first rounds of layoffs. It's a bit dangerous to think that just because you're critical, you're immune - on paper, you're probably also one of the most costly.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#164

Post by dpark »

JasonPunyon wrote: post #40
ryandrake wrote: post #32

Before everyone inevitably piles on about how such-and-such a salary "seems low compared to That One Guy At Google I Know That Makes $300k", keep in mind average Bay Area salaries for software people in the Bay Area are not as large as you think. T.O.G.A.G.I.K. makes several standard deviations above the self reported mean of $100K-$105K [1][2] and BLS reported median [3][4] (around ~$125K or so depending on job func…

I'd also like to point out that...we're a largely remote company. We don't index our salaries to the most expensive time and place to hire developers ever. We don't have to support Bay Area rent, or duel it out with AppAmaMicroGoog to keep our people from getting poached. We hire people everywhere in the world and through that lens, we're competitive. I live like a king in Buffalo, NY.

SO is based in NYC, right? Do you not have trouble retaining local devs there on these salaries? Or do you just have no one who actually lives and works in NYC?

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#165

Post by Sharlin »

caminante wrote: post #150
yen223 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the profit centre vs cost centre problem. Companies are incentivized to spend more on developers, since developers build features, and features drive sales, and sales drive profit. SysOps folks keep the site up, but once you start hitting >99% reliability, throwing more money at sysops isn't going to increase revenue.

From a "job security" lens, the sysops crew needed to keep the site up will be the last to go during downsizing.

There are plenty of managers with the "why are we paying them when everything just works?" mentality.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#166

Post by geodel »

vonmoltke wrote: post #39
thecolorblue wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks to me that it incentivizes working outside of SF, or NY. $110k for a developer with 5 years experience in Cleveland is just about right, if not on the higher end.

Whaa... I must be doing something wrong, because I'm in Dallas with 14 years of total engineering experience and 8 years of software engineering experience but have yet to break $93k.

You should definitely ask for raise and explore other opportunities etc but bear in mind that stories and discussions about salaries on HN is mostly about high end of S/w industry. For lot of us salaries are quite a bit lower than what is discussed here. Also cracking interviews and showing above ordinary skills to get job at top end firms is beyond capabilities of most of generic software developers.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#167

Post by hardwaresofton »

kmontrose wrote: post #119
hardwaresofton wrote: post #107

Yeah so this seems great, except that's not what should be setting the price of developers. Supply and demand (for the most part) sets the price (and should, IMO) of developers, and that's what I want, not some rubric. Outside of transparency, this strikes me as no different from the "grade" systems at various big companies like HP, IBM, etc. If you want to pay me fairly, pay me what the market says I'm worth. Things…

There's a pretty strong connection between the numbers the tool has and market rates - it's not like the numbers are pushed top down, they come from actually participating in the hiring market. The calculator normally gets a few revisions a year, one of the things that prompts that is market rates changing (others are things like hiring for new skills, or new roles being created). What's nice about the calculator is,…

All of what you're saying is reasonable, but I think the premise is wrong -- what you can do doesn't determine how much you are paid, at the very least it's not the most important factor.

You could be the greatest COBOL programmer with the best people skills, but if there are no COBOL jobs, the rubric is 100% wrong (assuming your salary is 0 because you're unemployed). In the same vein, you could be a completely average developer (even a bad one, however you measure that), but if the market is absolutely starved for developers, you should (and likely will) be paid a lot. I think SO's appraoch obscures that fact.

There's no way they can update it enough to keep up with market (and it's arguably in the company's best interest in the short term to do this), and I'm worried that how this is being presented is lulling developers into a false sense of safety when they need to be on their guard.

But it's also likely that I'm being overly pessimistic/exaggerating the danger here. SO seems like a company that has enough breathing room to truly care about it's employees, and as such I think they will do their best to revise the calculator to benefit their employees. However, I really do think that the logic you're using equally applies to all the usual grade/level yearly review based systems... That's exactly how it works in larger companies (not that it's a bad thing) now, I don't think the rubric is a differentiator.

My point is that if you're one of the people that isn't a new hire, but aren't thinking critically about your salary where it is in relation to the market for people with your skills (whatever they are), please do. Don't leave it up to any company, however well-intentioned, to pay you what you should be making.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#168

Post by [deleted] »

dpark wrote: post #164
JasonPunyon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also like to point out that...we're a largely remote company. We don't index our salaries to the most expensive time and place to hire developers ever. We don't have to support Bay Area rent, or duel it out with AppAmaMicroGoog to keep our people from getting poached. We hire people everywhere in the world and through that lens, we're competitive. I live like a king in Buffalo, NY.

SO is based in NYC, right? Do you not have trouble retaining local devs there on these salaries? Or do you just have no one who actually lives and works in NYC?

[deleted]

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#169

Post by mrweasel »

ryandrake wrote: post #32

Before everyone inevitably piles on about how such-and-such a salary "seems low compared to That One Guy At Google I Know That Makes $300k", keep in mind average Bay Area salaries for software people in the Bay Area are not as large as you think. T.O.G.A.G.I.K. makes several standard deviations above the self reported mean of $100K-$105K [1][2] and BLS reported median [3][4] (around ~$125K or so depending on job func…

Seems low? Seems ridiculously high and I'm in Denmark, a country with extremely high salaries.

I make almost half of what Stack Overflow would pay, that seems wrong. It wouldn't make sense that Stack Overflow could move the developers to a more expensive country and pay less.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#170

Post by JasonPunyon »

dpark wrote: post #164
JasonPunyon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also like to point out that...we're a largely remote company. We don't index our salaries to the most expensive time and place to hire developers ever. We don't have to support Bay Area rent, or duel it out with AppAmaMicroGoog to keep our people from getting poached. We hire people everywhere in the world and through that lens, we're competitive. I live like a king in Buffalo, NY.

SO is based in NYC, right? Do you not have trouble retaining local devs there on these salaries? Or do you just have no one who actually lives and works in NYC?

We have offices in NYC, London, and Denver. If I'm remembering correctly, I can count the number of developers who've left the company on one hand. We currently have ~20 engineering staff in the NYC office. Retention doesn't seem to be a huge problem.
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