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New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

open.buffer.com

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Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#71

Post by pc86 »

graton wrote: post #50
imsofuture wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved out of a high CoL area to somewhere I actually enjoy living. And brought the salary band with me. No chance I'd work at Buffer, given they'd halve my salary because of my zip code. Other remote jobs don't. No brainier.

They state they pay 85% for Average CoL area and 75% for Low CoL area. So they wouldn't halve a developer's salary who moved from San Francisco to somewhere else. Working in San Francisco gets 100%. Now I don't know how their SF salaries compare to other companies though.

@imsofuture said they'd halve their salary, which is likely true. Every remote salary calculator I've ever used, even being generous with my qualifications and the vague dropdowns like "below average or above average experience" gives me a rate 15-40% below what I'm making now, even for the next level up.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#72

Post by toomuchtodo »

clp16 wrote: post #56
romanovcode wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not applaud if my company would decide to make my salary open.

Why?

The information asymmetry puts you at a competitive disadvantage as a candidate when you start looking for your next gig. California law prohibits employers from asking, but Buffer is nevertheless releasing the data publicly. It's terrible corporate behavior.

On the other hand, this is great material for both internal and external recruiters to start poaching away Buffer employees to orgs that have the budget to pay them market rate.

"I see you're making ~20-30% below market rate. Would you be interested in talking about a new role?"

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#74

Post by beberlei »

pc86 wrote: post #69
beberlei wrote: post #47

Initially when I saw this open salary approach and especially the calculator I was intrigued. But you cannot make salaries into a formula and get 100% good results. The approach Basecamp (37signals) has with picking a location, then paying people based on 95% percentile (top 5%) market rate regardless of where they live is just much easier to explain to employees than some arbitrary multiplier thing that just leads t…

I think a multiplier is fine as long as it's for where the person actually lives, and is based on the actual overall COL as opposed to "well this isn't SF or NYC we we're automatically chopping 15-25% off your salary lolol"

i find cross country comparisons that lead to multipliers very hard and often arbitrary, because of differences in taxes, social security, health insurance and of course the exchange rate.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#75

Post by Swizec »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #59
danvoell wrote: post #42

There is a lot of typical HN negative analysis in this discussion. Let's step back and applaud the fact that this is open. Who else does that? People don't do it because they are afraid of this type of negative analysis. This is a very cool comparison for those who don't have concrete numbers to take into HR. Thanks for sharing Buffer!

Maybe they should be afraid of this negative analysis. You don't get a pass on bad decisions just because you're making them openly. From my cursory glance, I have a bunch of problems here: 1) Most egregiously, it looks like they're slashing a bunch of salaries. Not the CEO, of course, but a lot of others seem to be going down. I would be immediately headed for the door in that scenario. Talk about a way to keep only…

> I'm pretty confident I could significantly outearn the CEO if I lived in SF or NYC.

Yes you could. But not for a company the size of Buffer.

Here's the thing a lot of us often forget to realize: The value you bring to the company is proportional to the value the company extracts from the market.

Can your code improve Walmart's revenue numbers by 0.001% per year? Awesome, that's worth $4,858,700 based on Wikipedia numbers. I'm pretty confident you can get a gigantic salary with those results.

Can your code improve Buffer's revenue by 3% per year? Awesome, that's worth $468,000 according to their dashboard[1]

That's still a lot of money and I don't know if Buffer would negotiate because they like to use their formula. My point was that the value of your contribution can be orders of magnitude different for the same amount/quality/level of work and skill.

[1] https://buffer.baremetrics.com/

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#76

Post by chrisan »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #59
danvoell wrote: post #42

There is a lot of typical HN negative analysis in this discussion. Let's step back and applaud the fact that this is open. Who else does that? People don't do it because they are afraid of this type of negative analysis. This is a very cool comparison for those who don't have concrete numbers to take into HR. Thanks for sharing Buffer!

Maybe they should be afraid of this negative analysis. You don't get a pass on bad decisions just because you're making them openly. From my cursory glance, I have a bunch of problems here: 1) Most egregiously, it looks like they're slashing a bunch of salaries. Not the CEO, of course, but a lot of others seem to be going down. I would be immediately headed for the door in that scenario. Talk about a way to keep only…

> 3) Large COL adjustments make no sense to me. So I work for a remote company and choose to live somewhere cheaper and they think that the value I'm providing is less? The end result of this is that remote devs get screwed on average, while the best remote devs avoid companies like this, rightfully so.

Ya I don't get this logic. High COL areas are high because there are _lots_ of perks living there. It is much more desirable to live in SF than to live in East BF Mississippi. You are basically rewarding someone by living in a high COL.

When selecting remote jobs, I'm looking for compensation for the value I bring. The dollars I earn from my value should be up to me how to spend them: living in SF with all of the glorious food and such or living somewhere cheaper and saving money to retire earlier but having to pick between Applebees or Fridays (vomits).

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#77

Post by jandrewrogers »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #19

Another company that does open salary calculations is Gitlab: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/#compensation (this is a random developer job, you can check out other positions @ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ ) Here's the feature ticket: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/831 Disclaimer: I don't work for Gitlab, but I am a pretty biased rabid fan.

The calculator has San Francisco at >60% higher pay than Seattle because of a "rent index". That's disconnected from reality.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#78

Post by nicolasd »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #59
danvoell wrote: post #42

There is a lot of typical HN negative analysis in this discussion. Let's step back and applaud the fact that this is open. Who else does that? People don't do it because they are afraid of this type of negative analysis. This is a very cool comparison for those who don't have concrete numbers to take into HR. Thanks for sharing Buffer!

Maybe they should be afraid of this negative analysis. You don't get a pass on bad decisions just because you're making them openly. From my cursory glance, I have a bunch of problems here: 1) Most egregiously, it looks like they're slashing a bunch of salaries. Not the CEO, of course, but a lot of others seem to be going down. I would be immediately headed for the door in that scenario. Talk about a way to keep only…

> but they definitely seem to be underpaying in general

Interesting that you say that. I can't speak for US area, because I live in Europe. Looking at the Spain salary, which is about 110k seems pretty good to me. Working as a senior frontend dev in my area (which has similar costs of living as Barcelona) gets you payed about 30-40% less than that.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#79

Post by allandubey »

Why??? Openess in work culture is great! Telling the whole world about how much each individual earn is a slap on their privacy... Just because you can, you shouldn’t. Be ready to welcome attrition.... Let me post the link of this page on each employee’s linkedin fb accounts...lol.. anything in the name of innovation.

Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

#80

Post by hobofan »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #59
danvoell wrote: post #42

There is a lot of typical HN negative analysis in this discussion. Let's step back and applaud the fact that this is open. Who else does that? People don't do it because they are afraid of this type of negative analysis. This is a very cool comparison for those who don't have concrete numbers to take into HR. Thanks for sharing Buffer!

Maybe they should be afraid of this negative analysis. You don't get a pass on bad decisions just because you're making them openly. From my cursory glance, I have a bunch of problems here: 1) Most egregiously, it looks like they're slashing a bunch of salaries. Not the CEO, of course, but a lot of others seem to be going down. I would be immediately headed for the door in that scenario. Talk about a way to keep only…

> Large COL adjustments make no sense to me.

In the past I've been interviewed by several startups which when the point for salary negotiations came asked: "What do you _need_ to earn?". Somehow some companies (if not even most companies overall) seem to think that that's an acceptable line of thinking, and Buffer seems to be one of them. Their "dependent grant" seems to go into the same direction: "Oh you have a dependant? Then you naturally _need_ to earn more."

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