The Programmer Salary Taboo

Post by rapind » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 1:28 AM UTC

ajg1977 wrote: post #153

brooksbp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone please shed some light on what would be a good strategy to follow if you were in his position talking to HR, manager, CTO? What's the best way to save yourself once you've realized you're worth nearly double, triple, or quad your current comp pkg?

Honestly, the best way to obtain your newly-discovered market worth is to leave and find another job. In almost every job your only chance of negotiating a competitive salary is before you start. Sure, you can talk to HR and your manager and perhaps see some form of bump in salary, but if you're significantly underpaid then a) it's likely other people are too and they won't want to rock the boat, b) there's a decent…

Post by mcantor » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 1:48 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #26

jrockway wrote: post #2

I've always wanted to write exactly this blog post. Keeping your salary confidential is great for big companies, but it benefits you in no way. You should be making what your coworkers make. If you make less, you're being fucked, plain and simple. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can remedy the situation. Sadly, some people go their whole careers without doing so. FWIW, my first programming job only paid $…

But it does benefit you, personally: by not having your information out there in public, you can claim whatever you want when you go into salary negotiations, and the hiring company has no way of knowing that you'd be perfectly happy with a significantly lower salary. Generally, whichever side has less information public about them is at an advantage in negotiations. Unfortunately, this leads to a prisoner's dilemma…

Post by madcaptenor » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 2:02 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #85

madcaptenor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another method I've heard: person 1 picks a large random number, adds their salary to it, writes down the resulting number, and passes it on to person 2. Person 2 adds their salary to the number, writes down the new sum, and passes it on to person 3. This continues until the result gets back to person 1. You end up with the large random number plus the sum of everyone's salary. Person 1 then subtracts the large rando…

This is better because it determines the average but not distribution. Imagine what would happen if there were five $70k salaries and one $165k salary for six people doing the same work. People would suddenly get very uncomfortable. One technical gripe: you forgot that the arithmetic needs to be modular to guarantee anonymity. Let's just say the large random number is chosen between 0 and 9,999,999. (You need a range…

Post by technotony » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 2:11 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #55

Here's a trick I once heard to share salary with your coworkers without the uncomfortableness of finding out you are over or under-paid. Over beers with several of your coworkers, each write down your salary on a piece of paper and then mix them up. Randomly draw them out of a hat and then read them to each other. If you're all roughly peers, then you get all the benefit of knowing the salary range of the group, with…

Post by kgo » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 2:20 AM UTC

euroclydon wrote: post #87

harryh wrote: post #29

Consider a hypothetical scenario for the person on the other side of the table: You are hiring up an engineering team and hope to hire up a team of 10 engineers paying 100k/yr each. So far you've hired 9 people at 100k and are working on filling that last slot. You find someone perfect but he has a competing job offer and is asking for 110k/yr instead of just 100. He's no better than the other 9 people you have alrea…

Here's what I though you were going to say: You're hiring up an engineering team. You have five slots. Four are filled at market salaries. The four people range in productivity from marginal to good-at-stuff-no-one-else-likes, but none of them are that great. You almost have to keep the four folks, because they're entrenched in deliverables and plus, they've shown their dedication to the company. In walks a candidate…