Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour.
Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed, and prevents valuable and exceptional people from joining the company because their salary expectations are not "to scale."
Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
It's great to have data for negotiating. I use a bunch of different data sources and options, and I also avoid organizations who say they "don't negotiate," because it means they literally just bully people.
Have at it.
The world would be a very very shitty place if we had to negotiate for everything on an individual basis. It's much more efficient to find the few people who actually have that skill and let them do it for the group (and we can spend more time actually trying to fucking improve the human species well-being instead of bickering on $$s).
> Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
uh.. ensuring that their team is productive by handling their well-being issues ?
And human nature being what it is, why won't those few people negotiate better deals for themselves while keeping peanuts for the rest? (see: class action layers, bosses of Unions etc).
You're confusing the skill of adversarial negotiation with cooperative negotiation. Cooperative negotiation is a critical business skill within the company. You are all on the same team and should have the same goals.
Competitive negotiation is a good skill to have for some external negotiations. If anything, being good at cooperative negotiation is far more important.
> Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
Same as above. You're again confusing adversarial negotiation for cooperative negotiation.
> Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed
In every org I've seen with open salaries, I've seen the opposite. That it raises all boats because everyone demands to get paid the same as the highest salary on the team.
That's not an ideal result either.
A better result would be that people get more comfortable with conversations about "here's why they make more than you, and here's what you could do to provide more value and earn more salary".
Someone shouldn't get paid more because they're a better negotiator. But they should get paid more if they provide more value.
I've heard a few stories from people at companies open about salaries that involve such conversations, but not nearly enough such stories.
To clarify, there was no confusion.
When someone says, "take it or leave it," it's bullying. When someone says, "we're paying you this because this is what everyone else gets and that's fair because I'm telling you it is," that's also bullying.
A negotiated price is a function of the true price at which parties arrive at a deal. How do you deal with liars? Find options that yield information about their intent. This is the real art. It's finding information oracles about their position independent of what they present. Some people are simple, most aren't.
In this sense, negotiation is the pursuit of truth.
Salary disclosure removes low outliers, but it doesn't do much to improve those near the mean. Having been disclosing my salary to colleagues (and generally recieving the same in return) I know that people who are close but not far below what they could get... don't really ask, or are satisfied with a below desrved raise.
It also shouldn't do much to affect high outliers. If you are able to convince your employer that you are worth X much, the fact that the other employees are being paid on average X/2 instead of X/3 shouldn't remove your value or negotiating position.
With respect to disclosure absolving managers of the need to negotiate - managers are rarely in a position to effectively negotiate, in fact many hypothesise that the benefit of the growth of the managerial class is to buffer the leadership class from having to negotiate with the majority of the worker class.
Does anyone have a link to the article that was something like "company lifecycles as described by the office" or some such? I can't seem to find it and its highly relevant.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Salary disclosure is also a prerequisite for having a public discourse about equal pay and equal rights based on factual information. You might call that to: "gang up", but I certainly wouldn't.
Our daughters, girldfriends, mothers and sisters are all living breating people in our lives - maybe even the most important ones we have where as a company is just a thing. My own startups are just a piece of paper, a tax information number, an organizational construct, nothing more. I can create another one in 2-3 days. Close a company and if there's customer demand, another one will just spring to life and fill the gap. I might be sad and in debt for a while, but society at large will not even notice. It doesn't matter.
Real world example: I'm paid almost twice the market rate for my current job. Why? Not because I'm better at it than my peers, but because when I started, I opted for more RSUs (public company) instead of base salary, and the company has grown tremendously. Folks who didn't take the same gamble have a much lower total comp now. Years ago no one knew this was going to happen, so my base salary was lower. If the market hadn't shifted the way it did, should I have been able to complain others are paid more than me? Seems like a gamble with no drawback which is a bit unfair for the others, no?
Some folks opt for more time off. People with the same title end up at a different place within the salary bands based on countless factors, many of which are very subjective (and if you put too many titles, then people will just negotiate the title instead of the salary, effectively doing the same thing).
People are also generally biaised when talking about themselves and aren't very good at fully understanding the context around the salary of others.
All these factors mean that an objective salary based purely on quantifiable factors won't end up 1:1 with how good people are at their job. Thus we have negotiations.
And then there's environmental factors. If companies aren't allowed to negotiate, you end up with a situation like this:
Company Foo pays 150k for a Sr Eng. Bob is paid 160k at his current job, and Foo is trying to poach him. Bob asks Foo for 165k. Without negotiations, Company Foo can either:
A) Tell Bob tough luck (which in the current market is a bad move. Software Engineers don't grow on trees)
B) Give all their Sr Eng (potentially hundreds or more) a 15k raise. But then the same thing will happen to Company Bar... When does it stop? Should everyone at all tech companies but paid precisely 150k? What if Company Foo and Bar are very different and why? It's very subjective.
Better signalling about compensation opportunity is good for employees and for employers who compensate well.
It's bad for shops who pay everyone the same or otherwise pay poorly.
Managers are already given an advantage in negotiations because they have data to refer to. And they use that data opaquely. As in "trust us, you are already paid well".
As a counterpoint, professional athletes and salespeople regularly share salary (or sales) figures. They are certainly not all paid equally.
Skills at zero-sum negotiation, like street-fighting skills, are among the most valuable and useful skills of all to those who possess them and to their allies. But skills at zero-sum negotiation by definition provide no value to society; the value they provide to their possessors is merely expropriated from someone else. This is a significant improvement over street-fighting skills, which provide negative value to society when exercised; a society with more street fights thereby becomes poorer and less happy.
> Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring.
This seems unlikely. Disclosure of the market-clearing price generally just reduces information asymmetry.
> Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
Managers whose special skill is zero-sum negotiation will destroy your company. Managers need to be able to build cooperation and trust, which is the opposite.
The managers I have seen who subscribe to the co-operation model tend to passively ride billions in valuation into the ground. The ones at successful companies are merely survivor bias from riding growth.
Also known as "organized labor"
That said I hate negotiation because:
1) I'm not a shark I want open honest talks
2) negotiation can be hacked (a lot of people have charm and can lie their way through) so here goes its 'value'.
It genuinely sucks life out of me when I have to play these games. To the point that I'm giving code for 1% of its market value to a small business because I actually have a human relationship with him.
I call BS.
You, as an employee seeking employment, don’t have much negotiating power. If you really did, then you won’t be seeking a job, that pays money, from someone else.
Your best and really only way to negotiate, is to stand firm with your salary demand. And be ready to walk if they try to game you. This is really, your only advantage.
It also helps if you’re skilled in what you do. And that you beat out your competition.
It helps even more if you’re in a niche field, that is in demand. Like some software development jobs, for critical functions in business. But still, you are salary capped, regardless of how good you are. The company may just opt for someone mediocre to do the job, for less pay.
But if you’re seeking a non-critical job, or if you’re in an entry-level role, then good luck, you are at a severe disadvantage. The employer will feel that you should be so lucky to take their offer.
The power to walk away is the greatest power of all. But if the chips are down, you have to eat, and so your BATNA is poor. This means having a job is the best time to look for the next one. If you need one, you're a price taker. If you don't, you are the price maker.
The hardest thing to accept is that it's mostly attitude.
wut. how exactly do you imagine people that don't have union contracts go about doing this?
>Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills
and conversely how are you at an advantage in negotiations when you have no price discovery? e.g. i bought this tuna sandwich for $10 and i feel great about it because i have no way of knowing that the sandwich shop next door has the exact same tuna sandwich for $5.
>Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed
what a hot take - "more transparency from the executive class actually hurts the labor class". brilliant.
It's like saying that tech conferences destroy value for people with tech skills because people share knowledge...
Negotiation skills are mostly useless when the market is regulated, just like most of the western World, excluding the US
My compensation depends on a nation wide contract and its base salary
The variable part depends on my skills, not as a negotiator, but on my abilities to do my job better than the average
I can ask a nice bonus because I produce more value than the average or the same value in less time to the company or the clients I work for
It's really not that hard to negotiate when you have something to offer.
A person in Nigeria is not being helped by the person in US disclosing their salary information.
The information is fascinating though. And we could have misread the subtext.
In the olden days of HN around 2010 I always used to think “Wait why do those folks make 5x what I make? I’m just as good and know just as much”
And the answer was “Because those companies make more or at least get more investment so the value delivered is higher”
I moved. Now I put more into savings every year than my just as talented peers back home make in total salary.
Edit: many of those peers freelance remotely for US companies and also have very healthy savings. It’s the ones who stayed fully local that are screwed
People joining in continue this trend, often with quips like "I make $145k a year, I'm underpaid". WTF? How is that underpaid? Oh? You probably mean "underpaid in a very specific area in the US"?
The resulting "developer salaries" is a dick-measuring contest with no context or purpose.
Oh and where I live there’s no need to gaze away from the homeless living on the streets. Our taxes pay for many social workers doing their best
There should be a term "iniquity signaling," for going out of your way to derail a conversation about systematic discrimination to complain about other people "virtue signaling," as if it were the worst problem facing society (or even a problem at all). And why doesn't flag waving and bible thumping ever count as virtue signaling?
Isn't writing a resume and a cover letter for a job application the purest, most self-indulgent form of financially motivated "virtue signaling"? How are you supposed to get a job and pay the rent without doing that?
It might inspire them to move, or work remotely, etc.
EDIT to clarify: what makes me uncomfortable about this is not the broad range of salaries. I don't find that surprising at all. It's gathering all this information together and associating it with people's names (and complete bios!) that bothers me. Some of them may find they want to delete those tweets later.
Nothing can come good out of sharing my salary with current coworkers.
Care to expand?
Also this list has a very small sample size, and very few people from big tech, otherwise the pay would skew significantly higher.
When someone in Germany casually says 50k per year pre tax, they typically mean pre deductions (tax and social/health insurance) and the effective received money is more around 25k per year.
People in the US underestimate how much of ones salary a European has to give up for that safety net.
It doesn't come close to offsetting the far higher US skilled salaries figures compared to Europe.
When US university costs were far lower circa year 2000, that also didn't imply a narrower gap with Europe on skilled salaries. University costs are a phenomenon caused by the US Government destructively backing ever higher education loan increases, causing a spiral of fees by universities. It wasn't caused by higher US wages (which have existed for a very long time).
That is better explained by a simple fact: the US has far higher economic output per capita than Europe.
Before this decade is out, the US will double the GDP per capita of France, Japan, UK. Unless they all snap out of stagnation soon. It's not that the US is growing super fast, it's that most developed countries haven't been growing much at all for the last ~12-13 years.
Nearly half the federal budget is spent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And there are numerous other programs: unemployment, housing assistance, snap, etc.
There are also state and local programs as well as private charities.
The compensation in somewhere like California is still high due to the cost of living such as the high rents, travel, childcare and most importantly healthcare which isn't free unlike some places like the UK it is but paid via taxes. This is why some people don't understand when they see a certain celebrity programmer on this spreadsheet that works for one of the FAAMNGs and is apparently 'paid less' in the UK but some lesser known devs in the US are 'paid more' in the same company.
Again it turns out that it depends on the country they are in and it seems to be similar to something called 'Purchasing Power Parity'.
If a company operates in a global market, why should it pay dramatically different salaries in different cities? For example, our London engineers make like 70k to our 140. But we both work on the same product. We both make the company the same amount of money.
I've always thought it was just another bit of bullshit capitalist policy by companies. Another way to save a dime. My roommates argue about lower cost of living etc.
The ONLY argument I've been at all convinced by is if one imagies a co-op of several individual contributors that happen to be distributed. All provide equal value. Some live in Hanoi, some in San Francisco. They have a limited pool of income to distribute, and they decide they want to do so based on the metric of Comfort Of Living, which thus results in Hanoi employee taking home less so their SF colleagues can have an comfort of living.
But the clincher there is the extremely limited static income. That's the excuse I think companies make, but any time I've seen the financials, I've seen plenty of room to pay everyone fairly. If the company can't afford to give everyone SF salaries, then how can you justify hiring any SF engineers?
It smacks of classism, it smacks of corporate plutocracy.
I'm really thankful to both developers who shared their salaries as well as to whoever compiled this spreadsheet.
This reveals one of the challenges in these comparisons, by the way: total comp can vary dramatically due not only to initial signing bonuses (which can result in a total comp “cliff”) but also due to time-at-level: e.g. if you were just promoted to level n and your peer was at n for four years, your peer’s net cash flow includes four previous n-sized RSU grants, whereas yours is 3x of n-1 grants.
Of course transparency is still good, but it’s easy to misunderstand what causes a comp difference; in the case of the fast-promoted engineer they may appear to earn less per year despite having a steeper career trajectory than a slower peer.
You might consider CA a hellscape for other reasons, but the cost-of-living-adjusted salaries for big tech in SF, Seattle, and NYC are higher than anywhere else in the country.
The taboo around talking about salaries is to the benefit of companies and who do actually have that information already. Negotiations in which one party has more information usually go better for that party. So it's good to see a new generation of engineers being comfortable talking about this, and in a very public way.
If not for a senior engineer talking openly about salary I would not have had the guts to ask for a significant increase. At the time the very senior people in the company were earning 75-85k, and the mid-levels between 32-45k.
I was fortunate enough to be taught very well, I became senior in that company in a very short amount of time, but I never got the raise that the seniors got, but when I was looking at other companies, I knew what I was "worth" realistically. I'm eternally thankful for the internal culture at that company during that time, because I would not have had nearly the amount of confidence necessary to ask for such a (seemingly) large amount of money.
Incidentally, I’ve always thought this was one of the reasons US salaries are so high. Employees in the US are almost comparable to contractors in Europe (who are paid significantly more than permanent employees).
Surely at least enough to cover your basic needs like food and shelter. To be housing secure it seems reasonable to want to buy rather than just rent. It’s wild that this is one of the hottest, highest paying industries, and most of the people in this thread working in SF couldn’t afford to do so (by some napkin calculations it takes $333k a year in SF to afford to buy a house [1]).
I don’t think most people fully appreciate how extreme of a change this new reality is. I think most would agree with my initial premise, that you should be able to be housing secure from your job. But they’d also say that $300k+ is an absurd amount of salary, surely you must just be very greedy if you think you need that much. And oh btw all market rate housing is evil, we should only build subsidized affordable housing.
So even though sf salaries are the highest in this list, almost all of these people still have a reasonable argument that they need to be paid more to meet their basic needs given the current situation.
[1] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/16/17361746/salary-needed-buy-h...?
1) you should be able to be housing secure from your job
2) $200k+ is an absurd amount of salary
The solution isn't paying MORE salary to further inflate real estate costs and price out ever more service workers that you depend on as a city. The solution is opening offices in one of the many LCOL tech hubs and/or having a remote-first culture.
Open an office in Kansas City (for network infra secret advantages) or Baltimore (for ed/med/gov/NYC access at low cost) or, if you're hiring new grads anyway, any random "big university" town, and see what kind of crazy talent you can attract and retain with 100k.
Real estate prices should not be driving costs for a software company. It's insane.
Of course, neither the housing prices nor the salaries on offer were anywhere near today's levels.
I only work a few months a year.
If you really wanted that data you could write (or have someone write if you prefer) a tool that pulls the data in to a relational database.
I believe this is intended to help people negotiate. Those of us who have a network of friends in tech get this information informally that way, but salary sharing like this gives people who don't have that network a starting point (albeit one riddled with selection bias and low sample size).
I don't think it's helping clueless people to know what they could earn, these kind of information are available everywhere, such as Glassdoor, and they are anonymously published.
This one made me smile.
Im sure if there was a study it would show those who job jump are making a ton more then those who are loyal to a company.
This is not true at FAANGs, where a large part of your compensation comes from multiple RSU grants vesting concurrently. Even if you never get a promotion or significant raise, your total compensation after 4 years will be much higher than when you started.
Efforts like this may have quality issues but do help to reduce the imformation disparity between corporations and employees.
From my experience (I manage folks in one of those companies) it seems to be pretty accurate.
I just tried to download it, but it still require me to sign up.[0,1]
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000699/google-spreadsh...
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-xIgk7Mw1S5DXTZSbKBg...
Are there engineering positions in the aerospace sector that pay FAANG salaries?
It’s a service where you get salary estimates from companies actually trying to hire for your skill set right now
So many datasets I'm interested in looking at, but they all require me to send data to google to look at.
What is the purpose of this list? Bragging rights? In which case, fine. But if it's anything else, the approach will need to be drastically refined. Collecting salary information on Twitter doesn't seem like a terribly reliable starting point. And it's impossible to compare, for instance, a US salary with a UK salary without a hell of a lot of context. 100K != 100K, even after currency conversion.
