Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

You don't want to work for a company that operates that way anyway, if you can avoid it.

"He's more skilled than you" sounds far more toxic than either of those "bad" reasons you gave as examples.

The $200K level is really, really not mythical in NY. Many software jobs at all kinds of companies, ranging from start-ups to pure tech firms to food service organizations to finance companies to advertising firms will pay a software developer around $200K/yr in base pay, and usually there is some opportunity for bonus and equity as well. You probably also only need 3-4 years of experience to get your name in the hat for these positions too; I'm not talking about only developers with like 10 years of experience.

To put it in perspective, I earned a base salary in the very high $100K's when working for a large education company in Boston, having only 3.5 years of experience at the time.

The cost of living in New York is something like 30% higher than Boston, so before I would even consider any job in New York at all, even just to keep my wage at the same level relative to cost of living, you're talking about a salary certainly above $200k. Sure, places are free to dupe youngsters who just think it's cool to live in NY and are happy to take a discounted salary in order to get that personally-valued benefit. But a lot of thoughtful people who would make great employees for you won't do that -- won't even consider your job at all or do any of the hiring process unless they know it at minimum offers them a pay level that keeps their quality of life consistent. Otherwise they'll just stay where they are, or they'll work in some different geographic area where the pay isn't so distorted from the true cost of living as in New York.

I do love all the work that Stack Exchange does to keep using fully private offices though. Despite disagreeing with the salary levels, I would still say Stack Exchange is one of the best organizations around purely because it's like the last bastion of hope that we might move away from the demonstrably unhealthy dystopia of open-plan office madness, and further because they're in Manhattan, they help eliminate the demonstrably incorrect claim that a lot of places make, which is the excuse that they need open-plan offices because of real estate costs.

Do you explain the dollar value of the food prepared by the chefs to new hires, and offer to make up their compensation by that dollar value if the chef services are ever terminated in the future?

I've worked at and interviewed with companies that had fringe benefits like this before and always found it off-putting. I'm a grown human mammal -- getting food for myself is my job, not your job as my employer. If you want to be nice enough to do that because you think it makes me happy, or it is kind, or it boosts productivity, or it subtly manipulates me into staying at the office later or something, that's all fine -- but then it should have no bearing on what compensation I'm paid, and should not function as either an incentive nor a disincentive to work for you.

But it tends to always be presented like this. It's asymmetric. The employee is asked to essentially forsake income they would have otherwise gotten for a short-term benefit that has no guarantee of continuing in the future nor converting into cash if it's discontinued. It just strikes me as paternalistic (good ol' papa company is taking care of you, heh heh heh) and a little inconsiderate -- masked with some veneer that actually it's supposed to be considerate.

Totally as an aside to my points above, as a vegan whose primary hobby is cooking, I never much enjoy chef-prepared company food anyway, even when vegan options are available. I strongly prefer to cook everything I eat for myself, and so I would simply be paid less than other employees who are paid their salary and are paid via the food benefit that does work with their dietary choices.

Of course, because of the low-status nature of being vegan and the one-sidedness of job interviews (e.g. you can't raise an ethical question like this with HR thinking uh oh this guy's some kind of ethical hard ass who won't be pliable, abort, abort), I unfortunately have to stay quiet about my true feelings about this kind of thing, even though it matters to me a lot.

Not only that, but to me that entire rubric for the self-assessment of skill is extremely off-putting. It's also baffling to me that the salaries they peg against are salaries of start-ups and certain VC-backed companies.

Why isn't it the case that you base your salaries against every other place in the world trying to hire the same people you are? It's not defensible to say, well we pay $130k for that kind of developer because AZ companies also pay in that range, and so does Blue Apron, ENSO Financial, and Spotify (or whomever). That's silly. Because DE Shaw, Google, Coatue, Two Sigma, Comcast, Capital One, Amazon, Facebook, or a host of others might be willing to hire that same developer for that same type of role with similar benefits and they are certainly paying more than this.

You're always competing for talent against anyone else trying to hire the same people. Not against one particular niche set of companies who are similar to you in some superficial on-paper ways. That just seems like a very unfortunate way of determining what their idea of a "market rate" is.