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The Programmer Salary Taboo

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Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#21

Post by teej »

joezydeco wrote: post #15

My teeth always grind when I read articles like this. Yes, you can make $100K at Google. In Mountain View, California. How does that correlate to someone doing the same job in Austin, Seattle, Chicago, or Cleveland? The cost of living swings greatly when you depart the west coast. Decent wage databases will add another variable to the position and experience axes: the geographic area where the job is offered. (Exampl…

A cost of living adjustment is one of the easiest calculations to do. Is it as simple as this (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+in+mount...), or did I misunderstand your point? It doesn't seem that complicated to take a $100k salary point and normalize for cost of living.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#22

Post by trustfundbaby »

droz wrote: post #9

Not sure how much value this gives existing employees. If you go up and see that you are making less than your coworkers, then it's a moral destroyer. If you are making average but feel like you are doing more work than everyone else, again moral destroyer. If you are making bank, all the sudden you are now in everyone's cross-hairs- boom! moral destroyer (depending on the kind of person you are).

It hurts your morale in the short term, but it should give you the impetus you need to a. work harder b. negotiate harder when it comes to that yearly performance review and/or possibly c. leave if you feel you're being underpaid and the company isn't willing to pay you what you think you're worth.

I don't think full salary disclosure will ever happen, but I'm just saying, it wouldn't be bad if it did. I for one would just like to know, for example, what a iphone/ipad developer makes on average (then a high and low end) in ... say ... Austin Tx vs New York or something like that.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#23

Post by eof »

xnxn wrote: post #8
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 $…

> only paid $45,000 a year Reading this kind of thing on HN makes me feel ill; my W-2 says $47k. Maybe I need to make some changes.

renegotiate/find a new job? With 1.5 years of 'starving freelance' experience I got my first programming job at 55k and was able to negotiate to 70k within 6 months.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#24

Post by impendia »

In academia, it is common for professors' salaries to be listed in public databases that are searchable by anyone.

I don't particularly draw any conclusion from this; indeed, there is some debate as to whether this is a good thing overall. My impression is that it doesn't make much difference one way or another. In any case, it may be interesting to HN readers to know that this is the norm in the public sector.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#25

Post by michaelochurch »

jseliger wrote: post #17
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rather suspect that full salary transparency would result in a race-to-the-top.

I was just going to say something like this. In The Logic of Life , Tim Harford writes about how CEO pay reformers thought that making CEO pay public would cause companies to reduce pay because high pay was so outrageous. The opposite happened. Why? Because who wants to be in the bottom 50%? Practically no one. If you open up salary information, everyone is going to want to be "above average," even in companies that…

Fog Creek has a "ladder" system based on some fairly objective criteria. Based on years of experience and certain assessments of project scope and skill level, each employee gets a number between 8 and 16 that determines pay. This means that compensation is based on performance.

Now, the only point of controversy is whether the employee and employer agree on performance. If there's a discrepancy there, at least there's something meaningful to discuss and, if the difference is irresolvable, then they should separate.

This isn't perfect, but the gossip-driven salary-discovery system is even more imperfect and has the same problems.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#26

Post by nostrademons »

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 situation where each individual worker would be better off if everyone shared their salaries, but each individual worker is slightly better off if they don't share their salaries.

FWIW, my first programming job only paid me $32k a year. But I was straight out of high school (no college), and I thought it was a princely sum because I was getting paid more than my Ivy-League grad high school teachers were getting.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#27

Post by AretNCarlsen »

viggity wrote: post #19
xnxn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only paid $45,000 a year Reading this kind of thing on HN makes me feel ill; my W-2 says $47k. Maybe I need to make some changes.

Try contracting. Seriously. Go to a local user group and talk with people who contract and see what the going rate is in your area. Its probably 2x to 2.5x of what you're getting now.

Though you have to pay your own taxes -- probably 30%, in the end -- and your own medical.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#28

Post by jessedhillon »

benihana wrote: post #16
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 $…

>FWIW, my first programming job only paid $45,000 a year. What a ripoff. How is that a ripoff? That seems right at about average for starting salary programming.

My first programming job paid $75k in 2007. It was not at some big name firm but a run-of-the-mill ad agency and I was doing PHP web dev. It was in SF and I had just graduated from UC Berkeley about six months prior to hire.

Unless he (or she) is working as a game dev, he is grossly underpaid. (Even if he is doing game dev he'd be underpaid, just the standard for pay would be much lower for his industry.)

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#29

Post by harryh »

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 already hired.

In a situation with relatively secret salaries it might make sense to go ahead and pay the 110k. It's only a 1% increase in your yearly budget which probably isn't a deal breaker.

But in a situation with relatively public salaries you're in a bad spot. You can either not hire him thus prolonging your search, or you can hire him and face potential moral/teamwork problems. Maybe you can hire him and bump everyone else's salaries up to 110k but a 10% budget increase might not be feasible. So the company is a bit screwed in this situation. And to the extent that the companies success is also the success of individual employees the individual employees might be a little screwed too.

I've made this scenario simpler than what reality would generally look like but the same principal holds.

In nearly every situation in which I've had insight into engineer's compensation I know for a fact that fairness has always been a top priority. But it's worthwhile to see that it sometimes can't be the only priority and to understand how the salary taboo fits into this.

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