Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

The mere act of an employer being so open and transparent about this would make them a more interesting option to me than any competing slightly better offers.

A couple of things that stood out.

1) I'd imagine stock options are part of the job, but I don't see that anywhere. Do new employee's get stock options? I'm guessing they keep this hidden as it allows them a bit more flexibility on offering signing bonuses to entice employee's they want to hire?

2) I don't see any section for bonus on the calculator. Do stackoverflow employee's not get bonuses?

3) Why are years of experience factored in at all? Shouldn't ability matter more? I mean you seem to get a different salary if you have 15 vs 16 years of experience. This just seems very arbitrary. Wouldn't a more granular bucket be better?

As to transparent salaries...

I've worked at two firms for the past 10 years and both have complete salary transparency. The sky hasn't fallen, and I don't hear very much complaining, though there still is some complaining, the upside of the complaining is that its over actual salary numbers rather than guessing numbers.

We allow people to pick from a couple of buckets of salary and bonus multipliers. You can chose a lower salary and get a bigger bump on your bonus vs a large salary and a lower multiplier on your bonus. This lets risk adverse people get more upfront and leave a bit of the upside on the table and people with a higher risk tolerance to bet on themselves a bit more.

Has anyone actually gone with salary transparency and seen a downside?

If I try to max out everything (engineering manager, 25 years of experience, max expertise), I still only end up with $210k. Are there stock options on top of the salary to provide a larger upside?

That being said, thanks for the transparency. It helps all of us.

The salaries generated by the calculator while transparent are not validated by the market and are laughably low.

Given the elasticity of supply and demand the salary mush be constantly evaluated against the market. This seems like just another trick to suppress wages for a qualified engineer.

In today's market, a person with multiple offers would command at least twice the listed compensation at any of the software majors.

I think SF is a bubble and very unhealthy to the whole IT industry. It basically raises the costs for everyone.

It makes no sense to hire a person in SF for much more (and he will not really benefit from it) just because you compete with multi billions dollar businesses that can cut costs somewhere else.

At some point people do not want to change the world with next Instagram. They just want to live nicely.