Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets • Hacker News Board

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#171

Post by humanrebar » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #158

Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all. Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour. Disclosure lowers all boats in tha…

> ...prevents valuable and exceptional people from joining the company because their salary expectations are not "to scale."

Better signalling about compensation opportunity is good for employees and for employers who compensate well.

It's bad for shops who pay everyone the same or otherwise pay poorly.

Managers are already given an advantage in negotiations because they have data to refer to. And they use that data opaquely. As in "trust us, you are already paid well".

As a counterpoint, professional athletes and salespeople regularly share salary (or sales) figures. They are certainly not all paid equally.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#172

Post by Normal_gaussian » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #158

Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all. Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour. Disclosure lowers all boats in tha…

I disagree.

Salary disclosure removes low outliers, but it doesn't do much to improve those near the mean. Having been disclosing my salary to colleagues (and generally recieving the same in return) I know that people who are close but not far below what they could get... don't really ask, or are satisfied with a below desrved raise.

It also shouldn't do much to affect high outliers. If you are able to convince your employer that you are worth X much, the fact that the other employees are being paid on average X/2 instead of X/3 shouldn't remove your value or negotiating position.

With respect to disclosure absolving managers of the need to negotiate - managers are rarely in a position to effectively negotiate, in fact many hypothesise that the benefit of the growth of the managerial class is to buffer the leadership class from having to negotiate with the majority of the worker class.

Does anyone have a link to the article that was something like "company lifecycles as described by the office" or some such? I can't seem to find it and its highly relevant.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#173

Post by hypervis0r » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

derangedHorse wrote: post #131

theredlion wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting question. I'm personally aware of several large companies in my area which, due to diversity pressure, blatantly discriminate in favor of minorities and women. The performance required from a white man in an interview for the same job is higher. That is to say that a white man will be openly discarded in favor of a minority/woman with a similar background when applying for the same job. This is…

It's the opposite in my experience (at least outside of the bay area). All the engineers on my team seem to want to hire people who are like them, and are not incentivized to give minorities an easier time. The standards seem to be higher when the candidate isn't a white or Indian male.

Why would you give minorities an "easier" time? Why not the same as everyone else?

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#174

Post by tsycho » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #158

Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all. Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour. Disclosure lowers all boats in tha…

While I disagree (or maybe don't understand) the rest of your points apart from the mean reversion one, I did find your comment thought provoking. We should think about the unintended consequences of disclosure, even as we appreciate its positive aspects.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#175

Post by tsycho » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #52

tchaffee wrote: post #22

When I started my career in software engineering, I increased my salary 300% in one year as a result of ignoring taboos and talking to peers about what they were earning. Anecdote yes, but perhaps useful to some who look at these numbers and wonder if they could earn more. Chances are you could. The taboo around talking about salaries is to the benefit of companies and who do actually have that information already. N…

When I was a junior sysadmin in London I earned 26k; If not for a senior engineer talking openly about salary I would not have had the guts to ask for a significant increase. At the time the very senior people in the company were earning 75-85k, and the mid-levels between 32-45k. I was fortunate enough to be taught very well, I became senior in that company in a very short amount of time, but I never got the raise th…

Orthogonal to your anecdote, tech salaries in London are ridiculously low :(

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#176

Post by cactus2093 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

This makes me stop to reflect on the question of how much money does one really need?

Surely at least enough to cover your basic needs like food and shelter. To be housing secure it seems reasonable to want to buy rather than just rent. It’s wild that this is one of the hottest, highest paying industries, and most of the people in this thread working in SF couldn’t afford to do so (by some napkin calculations it takes $333k a year in SF to afford to buy a house [1]).

I don’t think most people fully appreciate how extreme of a change this new reality is. I think most would agree with my initial premise, that you should be able to be housing secure from your job. But they’d also say that $300k+ is an absurd amount of salary, surely you must just be very greedy if you think you need that much. And oh btw all market rate housing is evil, we should only build subsidized affordable housing.

So even though sf salaries are the highest in this list, almost all of these people still have a reasonable argument that they need to be paid more to meet their basic needs given the current situation.

[1] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/16/17361746/salary-needed-buy-h...?

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#177

Post by IggleSniggle » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #172

motohagiography wrote: post #158

Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all. Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour. Disclosure lowers all boats in tha…

I disagree. Salary disclosure removes low outliers, but it doesn't do much to improve those near the mean. Having been disclosing my salary to colleagues (and generally recieving the same in return) I know that people who are close but not far below what they could get... don't really ask, or are satisfied with a below desrved raise. It also shouldn't do much to affect high outliers. If you are able to convince your…

That article has really stuck with me over the years. Here it is:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#178

Post by loriverkutya » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

tsycho wrote: post #175

dijit wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a junior sysadmin in London I earned 26k; If not for a senior engineer talking openly about salary I would not have had the guts to ask for a significant increase. At the time the very senior people in the company were earning 75-85k, and the mid-levels between 32-45k. I was fortunate enough to be taught very well, I became senior in that company in a very short amount of time, but I never got the raise th…

Orthogonal to your anecdote, tech salaries in London are ridiculously low :(

I’m not sure why you think this, tech salaries are not low compared to the London average.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#179

Post by komali2 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #143

komali2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was always strange for me, and is a regular drunken debate between my roommates and I. If a company operates in a global market, why should it pay dramatically different salaries in different cities? For example, our London engineers make like 70k to our 140. But we both work on the same product. We both make the company the same amount of money. I've always thought it was just another bit of bullshit capitalist…

> We both make the company the same amount of money. This is a common mistake. Compensation isn’t directly related to the value you produce. The value you produce for the company only sets an upper limit on long-term compensation. Instead, your compensation reflects your opportunity cost of staying with the company. The company seeks to pay you the minimum amount required for you to continue working with them versus…

Thank you for the deep dive.

I'm curious what the effect of a global market and the ability for, say, a software engineer, to work 100% remote have on the "car mechanic" argument. If car mechanics could universally work on my car from anywhere in the world, it seems to me they'd all be charging the same.

So yeah, either they'd all charge whatever the dude in SF is charging, or the dude in SF couldn't compete with the woman in hanoi's rate (she's happy to cut her rate cause her bread is cheaper at the market), and thus moves out of SF.

Which I also think is ok. Perhaps that would result in a lower cost of living for places like SF? Perhaps that would lead to a greater distribution of people across the planet?

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#180

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #168

scarface74 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t have to be blatant or any one person acting in bad faith. That’s the whole meaning of systemic $x-ism. It’s a well known phenomenon that men will apply for a job if they are only 60% qualified but women only apply for jobs for which they are 100% qualified ( https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless... ). Also women don’t negotiate as hard.

If women behave differently, why would you expect universally equal outcomes?

In an ideal world, If two people have the same job and have the same skills and bring the same amount of internal knowledge to the company they should be paid the same. Their salary shouldn’t be affected by their negotiation ability.

As far as women not applying, that’s the classic pipeline problem. You have to get women to apply.

Also if jobs come from referrals, if men mostly know other men, they are going to recommend other men.

That’s the whole point of systemic $x-ism. The HR department is not purposefully excluding women and people are not purposefully referring men over women.

Anecdotally, working at small companies for over 20 years, I’ve only worked directly with 5 female developers that I know well enough to refer. When I was hiring contractors for a small department, only one female applicant came across my desk in over a year.

On the other hand, I worked with one female developer who was very good but didn’t want to leave for more money because of work life balance reasons and she had small kids. I’m well aware that women more often make that choice than men.