Salary transparency at Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#241

Post by mwsherman » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 1:24 AM UTC

mwsherman wrote: post #84

bambax wrote: post #41

Slightly OT: it may sound like a good idea to increment browser history with every parameter change, but in fact it's not, as after a few simulations/tests one needs to hit the return button many times to go back to where they were.

Thanks! It should be doing that, if it’s not, it’s a bug. Drop me a note at matt at stackoverflow dot com, with a repro?

Actually I read this wrong. We decided on pushState deliberately, since it’s essentially a form submission, and so a history entry.

That said, one of our folks suggested same so I think from a UX perspective, we could go either way. It doesn’t _feel_ like a form submission, one could argue.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#242

Post by Nick-Craver » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 1:52 AM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #177

mrweasel wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on who you see as their competition. If their competition consists of 'average' tech companies, their salaries are probably fine. If their competition is Google, Facebook, et al. then yeah they're probably low. A new grad at Google can make 160-170k USD between salary+bonus+stock.

Stack Overflow employee here. This is just my view, but: I wouldn't want to work for Google r Facebook over Stack Overflow. Happiness is part of the compensation and is has real value in choosing where to work.

Would I make more dollars working for Google? Sure. But I couldn't work remote. And I can't make an impact like I can here. Right now I can rapidly push out changes to help millions of people and interact with them directly, every day. That's a really rare thing and something that you just can't do or do on the same level once you're part of a much more massive machine.

Does Google make an impact? Of course, you'd be crazy to argue they don't make a massive one. But I'd argue employees 1-50 were able to do a lot more to change the world with their hours in a week than employees 60,000-60,050 are able to. I want to improve people's lives, every day. I just can't do that or be as close to the result if I did it working somewhere like Google or Microsoft. There's value in these things, to me.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#243

Post by overcast » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 1:52 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #116

overcast wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should never calculate stock options, or bonuses into your base salary, ever. I don't care what anyone says. Bonuses, and stocks are exactly that. Bonuses and stocks. They are great when they are way up, and shitty when they are way down. For the first time in fifteen years, I didn't get a bonus, and the stock price is way down. Never, ever, let someone hiring you convince you otherwise. They tried this when I go…

I would agree about stock options. They're so risky as to generally be almost worthless. I don't agree about bonuses. Bonuses aren't guaranteed, but at well-established companies with healthy rewards cultures, there will be a target amount you can expect if you do your job. You should still discount bonus somewhat when comparing offers, but I would not discount it to zero.

It's not always dependent on your job. We work our ass off, travel around the world maintaining systems. However the company on a whole is hurting, because the oil and gas industry is hurting. I have nothing to do with that. Is that fair? Absolutely not. But it's not based on individual performance.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#244

Post by dpark » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 2:30 AM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #228

mwsherman wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A majority of our technical team (around ⅔) are remote, so the HQ in NYC is not the center of gravity that one might assume. Also the NYC office has chefs, so. ;)

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 wan…

>I unfortunately have to stay quiet about my true feelings about this kind of thing, even though it matters to me a lot.

"That's not a perk that I value because I prefer to make my own food."

You don't have to go into detail, explain that you think it's an ethical problem, tell them you are a vegan, or anything else. Just tell them you don't value it and won't use it.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#245

Post by seattle_spring » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 3:43 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #126

djb_hackernews wrote: post #55

Similar feedback, starting salaries seem about right, but beyond that seem low, the rating system isn't science and the CoL adjustment only for SF, NYC and London misses other expensive cities. For instance, like for like (new construction in the most desirable neighborhoods), Boston housing is just as expensive as SF and in general your money goes further in SF.

> For instance, like for like (new construction in the most desirable neighborhoods), Boston housing is just as expensive as SF No it's not. It's not even close. The median home in Boston is less than $500k. That's a gut/teardown in SF, where the median is $1.1MM. If you pick brand new construction in the most desirable neighborhoods in Boston, I'm sure you could easily spend north of a million. If you pick comparabl…

Every time SF housing prices come up, someone comes out of the woodwork to say how (Boston | Seattle | Austin) is just as expensive or even worse. They then compare some 1500 sq ft penthouse in the nicest, newest tower in their city to some slightly less expensive 19th century shithole of the same price in SF and say, "LOOK! Look! It's more expensive in my city! And MILK is 50% more here too, so it's way more expensive to live here obviously."

Every. Time.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#246

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 4:09 AM UTC

nasalgoat wrote: post #205

toomuchtodo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that in my experience a highly qualified Ops person will /also/ be a skilled developer, but a highly qualified Developer will /not/ be a skilled Ops person. I have ~15 years of ops experience, and I'm not a skilled developer. I bill ~$200/hr for infrastructure/AWS architecture/DevOps consulting (when not at devops day job), with limited need to be proficient at software development.

Curious where you're getting that hourly without also doing coding. I'm a terrible programmer but I have 20 years of massive scale op experience.

> Curious where you're getting that hourly without also doing coding.

Both startups and enterprises.

> Henry Ford once balked at paying $10,000 to General Electric for work done troubleshooting a generator, and asked for an itemized bill. The engineer who performed the work, Charles Steinmetz, sent this: "Making chalk mark on generator, $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999." Ford paid the bill.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#247

Post by p4wnc6 » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 4:13 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #244

p4wnc6 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wan…

> I unfortunately have to stay quiet about my true feelings about this kind of thing, even though it matters to me a lot. "That's not a perk that I value because I prefer to make my own food." You don't have to go into detail, explain that you think it's an ethical problem, tell them you are a vegan, or anything else. Just tell them you don't value it and won't use it.

Even just what you suggest is going to raise a red flag for anyone in HR, without a doubt. A "team player" would eat the company-provided food (... or would just shut up about it ... really is how HR and managers tend to think).

They might be fine if you merely said you'll probably bring your own food due to a special diet. But any inkling that you don't personally love the fact that they provide food means you're not on board with their culture.

And, if you go any further at all and suggest that maybe they should not factor in the monetary value of the food benefit when they consider your base salary offer or something, they will have a huge problem with it.

This is sadly not hyperbole, although I'm sure it's not this bad at every company. But I can say from firsthand experience of being treated quite poorly for being a vegan (and having to sit through many lunch meetings at which I was told there would be a vegan option and then there wasn't, stomach gurgling ten PowerPoint slides in), that you can never tell, and a non-trivial number of companies will simply not like you if you ever express a preference.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#248

Post by vmarsy » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 4:26 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #234

hellofunk wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Income tax for a California resident is quite a bit higher than Dutch income tax for most income brackets. Dutch income tax more closely resembles the tax bracket in midwest America. My income tax percent in Holland is slightly lower than it was in the U.S. and my pay is a bit higher than it was in the U.S.

Are we looking at the same Netherlands? A quick search tells me California's highest bracket is 13%. In NL you're lucky to get ~25% effective rate as a knowledge migrant, going steeply up to 52%.

13% would be the state income tax.

On top of that you need to pay the federal income tax, as well as social security and Medicare tax!

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#249

Post by eldavido » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 4:58 AM UTC

tristor wrote: post #123

Scarbutt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and that's one problem with this "salary transparency" stuff, "my work is just as important or even more important than his, why I'm getting paid less?" I could argue against you too, for example, you say "competent developer in numerous languages and environments", that's really just a small fraction of what computer science is really about.

I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a valuable and fair discussion that is in some way the entire point of salary transparency. Those who bring the most value to the company in theory should be the ones who are compensated the highest. It's always a difficult question on how you determine who brings what value though, which is why compensation is such a contentious subject to discuss. I should clarify I'm not…

"Who brings the most value to the company" is the most utterly loaded question ever.

Companies are complex systems with many moving parts and team dynamics. If a new feature gets released, do you attribute incremental revenue to the dev who coded it, the product manager who specified it, the sales team who sold it, the marketers who described it, the executives who hired the people who did any of the things above, etc?

Bottom line: "value creation" is a totally sociological construct having more to do with the organization's culture (who's most highly valued) than any objective metric of "value add". You need to be in a place where the people empowered to make decisions about pay perceive that the work you're doing is valuable. No more, no less.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#250

Post by eldavido » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 5:02 AM UTC

tristor wrote: post #123

Scarbutt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and that's one problem with this "salary transparency" stuff, "my work is just as important or even more important than his, why I'm getting paid less?" I could argue against you too, for example, you say "competent developer in numerous languages and environments", that's really just a small fraction of what computer science is really about.

I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a valuable and fair discussion that is in some way the entire point of salary transparency. Those who bring the most value to the company in theory should be the ones who are compensated the highest. It's always a difficult question on how you determine who brings what value though, which is why compensation is such a contentious subject to discuss. I should clarify I'm not…

Also, separately, you need to consider BATNA [1]

If 10 guys all showed up on your door with a magic box that would give your business $100k in added shareholder value, you'd be rational to pay somewhere between 0 and $100k for it. The top end is determined by how much new value is added, but what you end up paying would have to do with how each person priced it -- if there were more of them, the thing would probably cost less unless the providers of it colluded.

Just keep in mind there's a push and a pull and, even if a factor adds a lot of value, it can be cheaper than a less-value-added one, because factor prices are set by supply and demand, not their relative value-added output (which can also depend on how well they're used, which is why some companies can pay so much better for exactly the same work as others)

(Which is really a broader recipe for success in business generally: figure out how to employ factors of production -- people, capital, etc -- more profitably than they cost to purchase in the relevant markets, and BAM, you've got a profitable company)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...