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The Programmer Salary Taboo

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Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#81

Post by madcaptenor »

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…

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 random number and reports the sum of all the salaries.

This depends on people being able to do arithmetic after a few beers, though.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#82

Post by Tycho »

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 $…

Hmmm... when I graduate I'd definitely take a £18000 p/a job. I mean it seems at this age getting your foot in the door, getting started and putting some 'commercial experience' on your CV is far more important than the actual salary.

On the other hand, if I could make a living doing freelance web development, then I could build that up until I have an income that employers would need to match (rather than just throwing me the low end of the offered salary-range).

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#84

Post by michaelochurch »

lukev wrote: post #61
michaelochurch wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. First of all, workplace social conflicts develop very fast and are often irrational in nature. If salaries are public knowledge, then people have time to accept that there's just that one incompetent guy making 20% more than he should and within a few hours they forget about it. It's mildly annoying, but as long as people are happy with what they're making and with their own job security, they aren't goin…

>people have time to accept that there's just that one incompetent guy making 20% more than he should and within a few hours they forget about it. Really? I'm not sure about that. >My contention is that people discover a lot of this information anyway and get more angry in a private-salary system. I've never personally heard of a person getting upset upon discovering someone else's private salary. I know lots of peop…

For me, what I can't stand is when an incompetent has more power and influence than I do. That will have be quitting on the spot. If he's making slightly more money than I am, but no one takes him seriously and his shitty ideas aren't being imposed on me or the rest of the team, then why do I care? He's not in an enviable position. As a highly-paid incompetent, he'll be the first one let go when there's a need to lay people off.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#85

Post by michaelochurch »

madcaptenor wrote: post #81
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…

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 because there's no such thing as a "random uniform" integer.) Now let's say that Person 1's salary is 100,000 and that large random number is 9,999,935. Now Person 2 gets handed 10,099,935 and knows that Person 1 makes at least $99,936, because the "large random number" couldn't have been any higher than 9,999,999. If modular arithmetic is used, with the modulus being the upper bound on the "large random number", then nothing like this is ever given away. Person 2 gets handed 99,935... which could be 9,999,935 + 100,000, or 4,935 + 95,000, or 9,099,935 + 1,000,000, or 99,934 + 1. (Of course, the modulus needs to be big enough that there's no doubt that it's going to be larger than the sum of the salaries.)

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#86

Post by Hovertruck »

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 $…

Depends on your situation. I got my first job at a mid-late stage startup in DC when I was 18 and that was about $35k as a strictly-frontend developer, which was definitely good enough for me.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#87

Post by euroclydon »

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 who's got the skills to single handedly deliver a major component of a product you have committed to make. You don't have but 50-60K left in the salary budget and the hires you've made so far don't exactly make you look like a genius.

The kid has no idea what he's worth, which is north of $130K, and asks for $55K. What do you do?

Ask the board for more money to give him what he's worth?

Fire someone else to give him what he's worth?

Or, hire him for $55K?

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#88

Post by jinushaun »

Reading all the replies on HN reminds me why companies like to outsource. Americans are expensive and have a strong sense of entitlement. This race to make more money for the sake of money just leads to accelerating inflation across the board. As far as I am concerned, salary is just a number and people can live just fine on $50,000 if they we weren't such a consumerist society.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#89

Post by cookiecaper »

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…

I just want to say that I think that most of the replies to this question are silly. Just hire the guy, small variances in salary shouldn't be a problem and you don't want to have people who are so petty about compensation. You don't have to "ask the team"; just don't hire people whose feelings get hurt over 10k.

The point of transparent salary is to provide a general gauge of salary fairness, not to allow people to obsess about equality, money, and why someone does or doesn't deserve a little bit more than someone (or everyone) else.

Personally, I don't think a "posted salary" policy is a great idea; it would just cause a feeling of pettiness and entitlement and divert the employees' focus. I think you should just hire people at fair rates, and then it's no skin off your back if the numbers get out. If the person undervalues himself, you should offer a rate commensurate with the value and income he'll generate on behalf of the company instead of doing the immoral thing and leveraging his ignorance for financial or political benefit.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#90

Post by cdr »

m_myers wrote: post #74
dstein wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to CNN's cost of living calculator ( http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm... ): $100,000 in Mountain View, CA = $58,302 in Austin, TX = $73,992 in Seattle, WA = $71,306 in Chicago, IL = $61,660 in Cleveland, OH And from a quick skim down any real estate listing for Mountain View, CA I think these numbers might be a bit on the high side.

Interesting; it turns out I make right around MV$100,000. Never realized that. But given two roughly equal-valued salaries, I think the higher absolute salary is still superior. Savings, for instance, don't scale with cost of living; saving 20% of $100,000 is much different from saving 25% of $40,000.

Also, if you relocate from Mountain View, I suspect you'd be able to keep more of your salary than the cost-of-living decrease would strictly dictate.
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