29 ms·

Hellofresh employees' open salary initiative

187 points by kaeruct 5y ago

gigatexal 5y ago
All salaries of all companies of all roles should be public. This info being kept from job seekers unfairly tips the balance of power to the job provider when negotiating salaries or even when deciding on which company to join.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I would be satisfied with distributional statistics per company by years experience and required educational, with job responsibilities coded in some coherent way (e.g. BLS). I really don't care if Barbara in accounting made more than Stan in Marketing. What I want to know is movements of the market. Currently the best source of this information is tech-based with biased incentives (levels.fyi, Glassdoor, in either direction) or recruiters, who have their own incentives. In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies.
  - the_lonely_road 5y ago
    I am pretty sure Florida publishes all state employees names and salaries. I know for sure you can look at every University employees name and salary from the clerks to the professors with a few seconds of googling and assume the same is true for all the other state employees. This should be a federal requirement for all employers in my opinion.
  - gigatexal 5y ago
    I would be happy with just knowing this, not so much what each person makes, but: title or level and min salary, median salary, and max salary for the roles in the company. Furthermore, each employee within a company should know what the salary bands are for their titles/roles. This should be common knowledge. I know and am honest with myself and my manager of my skills. If I know what min and max and median is on my team I can negotiate appropriately with how/where I fit in the team productivity-wise. I am not going to ask for the top end of my team for my title if I know I am not producing. Likewise do you want to lose talent to a competitor because they're making the bottom of the range but producing at the middle or near the top?
  - rmah 5y ago
    In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies. I read stuff like this about salaries, budgets, contracts, etc. regarding various US federal/state/local governments quite often. In reality, almost all that info is already publicly available. Often in excruciating detail. For example: the salary of ever single NYC employee (cops, teachers, etc) https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york. Every California state employee salary (and pensions) https://transparentcalifornia.com/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/. Many state and local government employee salaries are collected by https://openpayrolls.com/ https://openpayrolls.com/. Federal gov contracts at https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/ https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/. Most states have similar sites for their contracts. The issue in government transparency in the US is not transparency per se. It's that few people bother to actually dig through the raw data or perform good analysis of it.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      I wasn't clear in my original post, apologies. I was referencing private employer data that is reported for unemployment insurance purposes.
- Itsdijital 5y ago
  Imagine trying to fairly buy/sell anything in an opaque market.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Virtually any market with slight differences in each product.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, this is true almost always for the largest employer in the US: government. That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington: https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.
  - ggoo 5y ago
    Should have been a football coach...
    - pc86 5y ago
      I know this is a common refrain, but if you can build and run a successful sports organization at the university level you can potentially help bring in tens of millions of dollars to the school. It's very competitive, it's hard (in the sense that there's no playbook to do it the way you can grind leet code for a few months and walk into any junior or mid-level FAANG job), and like most people you're being paid less than the money you're bringing in.
      - mulmen 5y ago
        Do the sports programs bring in money for the university or for the sports teams?
    - nexuist 5y ago
      You can be. What's stopping you? Go out and start a competitive team that can win against other colleges that sink millions of dollars into their program. If that sounds like too much work, then, well, yeah.
- denismenace 5y ago
  Couldn't the same information be used by companies to signal each other and collude on price setting. For example they may start paying the same just based on a job class, which isn't a favorable outcome.
  - gigatexal 5y ago
    No. Because companies are already doing this. At least for my employer they’ve told us that they talk to their “peers” in the industry to set prices for labor. So more a yes and a no. BUT if candidates were able to know what the bands are they could move wages to a more fair equilibrium. Here’s how I think it would play out. There are two scenarios. If radical transparency were to be enacted AND all companies share the numbers before hand putting all their equivalent roles at the same salary levels then not much would change since I think this is already happening at least in Europe and specifically in Berlin. But if companies started publishing this data over time say over months such that all information about salaries and compensation outside of wages was revealed in say 18 months (giving the market time to adjust I.e folks to leave to go to higher wage paying firms) then workers could readjust their wages to a more fair market rate. This is how I think things would play out — or so I hope when in reality it’ll likely just be the former case. People will fight for salary transparency and the firms will give it to them but they will have shared salary information already because a Python engineer is a Python engineer whether they’re at a mid level company or a FAANG company. And then nothing will change other than folks will likely all try to cluster around the top end of their now disclosed salary bands — more folks will get marginal raises I guess but it’s not the large shift or readjustment of entire sectors and employees I had hoped for.
searchableguy 5y ago
I think it's better to share salaries anonymously with the level and company information. It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I'm close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I'm at. I say this seeing younger folks quibble over a difference of few hundred dollars in compensation and worry they are getting underpaid compared to their peers. Note: Above is an example of highly paid individuals starting out so a few hundred dollar difference wouldn't matter.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Strange, most people prefer more information to less. Employees knowing more leads to them better able to negotiate (not just arrive at higher numbers initially, but clearly know what skills they need to better negotiate the next time). Unless they're being treated unfairly, there's no downside. Those people who were paid a few hundred dollars less - why were they paid less?
- Closi 5y ago
  > It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I'm close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I'm at. 'Counterproductive' depends on your perspective - considering fundamentally everyone is working to get paid (no matter how much you love your job), a 'productivity' metric for a worker (not the company) could be amount of money earned per working hour (GDP per hour is a metric of productivity for the nation - so why shouldn't earnings per hour be a metric of personal productivity?!). Salary discussions informed with information can be highly 'productive' in that it is one of the best ways to increase your earnings per hour worked, with no change to the hours/effort you put in, if you are being paid less than people doing a similar role with similar skills/output. Assuming you are working a 40 hour week, a 10% pay bump because of an informed discussion is equal to working an extra 5 weeks across the year in terms of earning (and that's assuming you get paid overtime!). And if a 30 minute conversation is worth 180 hours of work (or potentially thousands of hours if you work there a long time), that's pretty productive in the scheme of things!
- spenczar5 5y ago
dstroot 5y ago
I would be concerned about the correlation to increased resentment to increased transparency. If you want to know if you are paid fairly there is a “talent marketplace” to do price/value discovery. Employees do not have the full breadth of information managers use to set compensation and mangers cannot share their reasoning. Some employees are more motivated by title or other types of recognition other than comp as well.
- pc86 5y ago
  Isn't the end goal of title/recognition using that to get an even better job later, and presumably the compensation that comes along with it? At the end of the day, being Principal vs. Senior doesn't pay your mortgage off faster, get you a nicer car, or put your kids in a better school. Once we reach a certain point I think it obviously becomes more important - if you live in a LCOL area, making $300k TC as a Principal vs. $350k TC as a Senior, I'd probably go Principal too. But if you're still trying to set your life up, fund your retirement, finish off that 529 for your kids, etc., it seems short sighted to go after anything except a higher TC.
civilized 5y ago
Or they could just post their salaries on levels.fyi, which has had this information for years on thousands of companies.
- pc86 5y ago
  But then the organizers of this couldn't release it on Twitter 6 months from now for street cred, and have all the personal data to boot. A cynical take, for sure, but I can't think of any other reason why anyone would do this over something like you mentioned.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    I assume that they want very specific salary information, i.e. what Bob makes on Integrations vs what Susan also makes on Integrations vs just what people seem to make at SDE II.
    - pc86 5y ago
      I think the more important question is whether comparing Bob to Susan (or Sam, or whomever) is helpful. I would argue it's not, that it's even unhelpful, unless you know a whole hell of a lot about how Bob and Susan got to where they are right now. Did they have competing offers when they were hired? Did they negotiate a [non-]discretionary bonus into their package? Did they negotiate more PTO or profit-sharing in the form of a non-discretionary 401k contribution? These are all things that won't be immediately obvious but will affect their individual numbers. In aggregate, these aberrations get smoothed out. I don't see any benefit in comparing individuals to each other, but there's a lot of benefit in comparing individual to the average.
      - MattGaiser 5y ago
        But that is what a lot of these initiatives want. They want to be able to say "Bob got X, so I should get X."
- hammock 5y ago
cadence- 5y ago
Good companies show salary bands to internal employees. If they don’t do it, I think the reasons are pretty obvious. If you pay people fairly, why would you keep that information secret?
daniel-thompson 5y ago
Why bother? Recent salaries for SWE and SWM are already on levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/company/HelloFresh/salaries/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/HelloFresh/salaries/ Sidenote: I live in Austin and I get their spam in the mail all the time. I had no idea they were based in Germany! But that explains the crazy-low (by US standards) comp for these roles.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  With more Silicon Valley firms opening up in Europe, Berlin especially, I have heard that it's causing salaries for all engineers to be pushed hire as these new entrants start paying bonkers numbers. Apparently when Tesla opened in Berlin they were paying such high salaries that local companies got upset. I think it's come down some but why? It should go higher.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  levels.fyi is pretty useless (too few data points) for many international locations. For example, at point of writing there are exactly 12 salaries listed for HelloFresh in Berlin.
- eggie5 5y ago
  just saw an offer in Berlin for 150 base and 320k RSUs coming out to €230k annualized TC!!
- lskfjsldkfsdjfl 5y ago
  It looks like VMWare is paying low in Austin based on levels.fyi, did you get around that somehow?
moneywoes 5y ago
What if people deliberately lie?
- cj 5y ago
  Especially if the goal of this is to pressure management into increasing pay, people will absolutely lie, if only to stir the pot.
- nexuist 5y ago
  If we look at this from a game theory perspective it actually works in their favor. People want to make lots of money, if they lie they're going to lie about being paid more and not less. If enough people lie to affect the overall statistics, then everyone is going to be pissed off at their management for not getting paid as much as everyone else. At this point management has two options: reveal the actual salaries of everyone, to prove that actually everyone is getting paid less than what the stats show (oof), or keep the salaries hidden and deal with a workforce in which every participant believes they are chronically underpaid. Neither of these options are good for management, and the only way out is to hand out generous raises.
  - VintageLight 5y ago
    Or, claim the entered compensation is not accurate and maintain the status quo.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      Right, but that's the expected response. Of course the company is going to claim inaccuracy. It doesn't grant them any more credibility than they would already have if it turns out they are actually right. Another point for the organizers.
  - pydry 5y ago
    They can fire one or two people who put their salary on the form. They can say that it's because they lied and cannot be considered trustworthy and just hint that there are others. Strictly speaking telling the truth should be protected, but the backlash would probably inhibit that too.
sabhiram 5y ago
It pays for engineers to be able to inflate and justify their worth, especially when moving ships. It is not about everyone getting equal pay. It is about everyone having equal visibility. The former creates unmotivated employees, the latter creates one of two outcomes: 1. Satisfaction of relative comp for the amount of work done -or- 2. Understanding of what is valuable in this venture; how to spend your time Often times in larger establishments (after playing enough politics to gain visibility), I found myself in camp (2). What you think is important is seldom actually important to the powers that be. If you find yourself disagreeing with the last statement, go hug your management team / coworkers!
- youeseh 5y ago
  Considering that there has been a fair amount of collusion to suppress engineer salaries, are you surprised that engineers feel unmotivated? People work harder to hold onto something they value.
  - d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
    Do you have evidence for this? I feel it would be difficult to orchestrate collusion across thousands of private companies especially during our current skilled labor shortage.
    - mbot5324 5y ago
      > Do you have evidence for this? Ooooooh boy, do we! This type of behavior from the technorandians is about as well established as gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  What you think is important is seldom actually important to the powers that be. Underrated point. People should reflect on whether the powers that be might actually know what they are doing. Not always and everywhere, but be open to the possibility.
nexuist 5y ago
So I know there's no real way around this, but the email address verification is kind of a killer isn't it? Can't an Outlook admin just filter for all the inboxes that received an email from hfsalary.org and immediately report which employees signed up for this? I mean, I know on paper they're not allowed to retaliate against this, but wouldn't this impact how management feels about you getting more responsibility and raises etc.?
- drakonka 5y ago
  There's not really any need to go through emails by Outlook admins, since anyone can fill out the form and get access to the names and salaries of the participants. My impression is that the form fill-out is only needed to incentivize more people to share their salaries, not to hide from management. It seems like this being a public initiative is part of the point.
lordnacho 5y ago
There's a somewhat famous UK guy called Charlie Mullins who runs a plumbing Business called Pimlico Plumbers. I saw a clip the other day where he does this experiment with his own business, and the cameras film people finding out what their colleagues are earning. Some people feel quite shafted, others don't want to talk about it. In the end there's a not so satisfying solution. Or at least one that papers over the problem: they find some savings from their suppliers and give the money to the lower paid staff. But I thought it was an interesting experiment to watch.
- pydry 5y ago
  He's worth £100 million or so - for a business which basically just sends out plumbers. A huge chunk of that equity will be contingent upon pay secrecy.
- dasil003 5y ago
  Oh damn that guy is Charlie Mullins? I thought Pimlico Plumbers was Rod Stewart's side hustle.
baskethead 5y ago
Coinbase has a single salary per band. The only discretionary pay is performance based but everything has the same base salary and equity. I love this model.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  I feel like this gets tried in various ways at different companies. One of the antipatterns it tends toward is that people try to get moved away from teams that don't directly increase KPIs. Things like writing documentation, doing customer support, building internal tools, and other unsexy features get left behind. Meanwhile, all the most ambitious people move toward features that get people to buy things, click on things, focus attention on things, get angry at things, or be stuck on the platform.
- mulmen 5y ago
  This sounds about as appealing as unlimited vacation. Which is to say, not. I don’t want my immediate manager to have direct control over my pay or my vacation.
- high_derivative 5y ago
  I don't understand how this is different in any way from bands which employees are placed in based on performance? Im not trying to be combative, I genuinely do not see how this would realize any different outcomes. It just seems to shift definitions around. If employees A and B both are in the same band, both do not get promoted in a year, but have different performance ratings, I assume they will end up with different 'performance based pay' raises. Where is the difference to moving them to a different place in the band?
  - peytoncasper 5y ago
    Largely because performance based pay does not have a fixed upside. Contrast this with a salary band which does have a fixed maximum.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
whiddershins 5y ago
How can we know the info is accurate.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spoonjim 5y ago
> The spreadsheet will be shared with your work email address. That means the company knows you’re doing this. It’s not legal for them to retaliate for it, but people do stuff that’s not legal.
goplayoutside 5y ago
In Norway, everyone's salary data -- well, net income for tax purposes -- is public information. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
- torvald 5y ago
  Albeit, you have a dedicated quota of searches – and the one you search for also gets a message that you search for him/her. So in effect, I'd suspect very few uses this to get the sense of your colleague 's pay. Rather, I'd guess its mostly used by journalists and the most curious to poke into public officials, rich people or simply celebrities.
- nightski 5y ago
  People always like to mention the nordic countries but how many people have been there? I was an exchange student in sweden in high school. It was very far from ideal, although the country was gorgeous and the people were extraordinarily friendly and helpful.
thenerdhead 5y ago
This happens with many companies when there is internal realization that the same labor is being paid unfairly. I’ll never forget hearing from a colleague whom I admired their work being paid half of what I was paid. The difference? They were much older and had no formal education. I was a new hire with a degree. This absolutely floored me and they gave our boss an ultimatum of matching the market rate. It worked out for them and their career. You should know your market rate at the current company you’re at. Most people don’t have that transparency today and seek new opportunities because of it. It absolutely feels terrible to know that a loyal productive employee is getting paid significantly less than a new hire who will jump ship in a year or two. If the company is going to min/max compensation, you have to take that into your own hands and play the game of getting what you’re worth in the market. Ironically most people do that by jumping ship temporarily and coming back with what they wanted in the first place. Managers should be actively looking out for their employees. It’s their main priority of retention. HR needs to give them enough budget to keep up with the market and not be greedy. It costs much more in the long run when there’s retention issues anyway.
- syshum 5y ago
  >>They were much older and had no formal education. I was a new hire with a degree. how long were they with the company? it could be age and formal education was not the factor in this situation but rather wage compression. This happens alot with long tenure, as market rates for a position outpace internal annual salaries it does not take long for market wages increasing at 10% annual where internal increase of 3-5% (and some years with pay freezes) cause people that have been with a company for 8 or 10 years to see a massive difference between their salary and what new people start at. It is always why people experience 20-30% pay bumps for changing companies, companies continue to refuse larger annual salary increases, only adjusting the pay when they attempt to find new talent on the market. >>Managers should be actively looking out for their employees. It’s their main priority of retention. HR needs to give them enough budget to keep up with the market and not be greedy. The reality is neither one of these people control this. Senior management sets the over all salary budget. With in that determines what individual can get. If Senior management say on the whole the salary budget can not increase more than 5% then you can not give every employee an 8% raise, you could give some and layoff a few, or you high performers 8% and some 3%, etc... Senior management needs to take retention seriously, most do not There is also a belief that "salary is not everything" and putting in a game room, or having some other "office perk" will retain people for lower costs than increasing their salary.
rahulgoel 5y ago
I think as a principle, symmetric information is quite important for good functioning of a market.
stakkur 5y ago
the only reason to obfuscate salaries is to pay people as little as possible and maintain control. any other argument is trying to pit employees self interest against others.
bloqs 5y ago
This company doesnt encrypt your passwords properly on signup.
geebee 5y ago
I've floated an idea previously here on HN: any company that applies for an H1B must make all salaries public the way public employees' salaries are public. By this, I mean total pay by name and position. I feel that if I private firm is applying for the power to bestow a public good - the right to live and work in the United States - on the grounds that a qualified worker can't be hired otherwise, it's reasonable for the public to want to evaluate the truth of this claim, which requires information not just about wages for that one position but for all wages paid in that company.
- alexpetralia 5y ago
  Are these not public? https://h1bdata.info/ https://h1bdata.info/
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    These used to include base pay only (at least that was the case for me)
  - coredog64 5y ago
    They’re also only for the position that is being proposed to be filled. The way companies write those LCAs is nuts. I’ve seen LCAs that don’t match the technology in use, or that paid tens of thousands more or less than I was making in ostensibly the same position.
hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
I think the problem with Hello Fresh is the quality of their food and drink. It is hotel quality. Smelly bacon, heat traeated orange juice. With a name Fresh, and a product Fully Packaged, there is a great disconnect between their 'mission' and their reality. This shows the calibre of management and their real mission.

187 points by kaeruct 5y ago

All salaries of all companies of all roles should be public. This info being kept from job seekers unfairly tips the balance of power to the job provider when negotiating salaries or even when deciding on which company to join.

tomrod 5y ago
I would be satisfied with distributional statistics per company by years experience and required educational, with job responsibilities coded in some coherent way (e.g. BLS). I really don't care if Barbara in accounting made more than Stan in Marketing. What I want to know is movements of the market. Currently the best source of this information is tech-based with biased incentives (levels.fyi, Glassdoor, in either direction) or recruiters, who have their own incentives. In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies.
- the_lonely_road 5y ago
  I am pretty sure Florida publishes all state employees names and salaries. I know for sure you can look at every University employees name and salary from the clerks to the professors with a few seconds of googling and assume the same is true for all the other state employees. This should be a federal requirement for all employers in my opinion.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  I would be happy with just knowing this, not so much what each person makes, but: title or level and min salary, median salary, and max salary for the roles in the company. Furthermore, each employee within a company should know what the salary bands are for their titles/roles. This should be common knowledge. I know and am honest with myself and my manager of my skills. If I know what min and max and median is on my team I can negotiate appropriately with how/where I fit in the team productivity-wise. I am not going to ask for the top end of my team for my title if I know I am not producing. Likewise do you want to lose talent to a competitor because they're making the bottom of the range but producing at the middle or near the top?
- rmah 5y ago
  In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies. I read stuff like this about salaries, budgets, contracts, etc. regarding various US federal/state/local governments quite often. In reality, almost all that info is already publicly available. Often in excruciating detail. For example: the salary of ever single NYC employee (cops, teachers, etc) https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york. Every California state employee salary (and pensions) https://transparentcalifornia.com/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/. Many state and local government employee salaries are collected by https://openpayrolls.com/ https://openpayrolls.com/. Federal gov contracts at https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/ https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/. Most states have similar sites for their contracts. The issue in government transparency in the US is not transparency per se. It's that few people bother to actually dig through the raw data or perform good analysis of it.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    I wasn't clear in my original post, apologies. I was referencing private employer data that is reported for unemployment insurance purposes.
Itsdijital 5y ago
Imagine trying to fairly buy/sell anything in an opaque market.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Virtually any market with slight differences in each product.
spenczar5 5y ago
For what it’s worth, this is true almost always for the largest employer in the US: government. That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington: https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.
- ggoo 5y ago
  Should have been a football coach...
  - pc86 5y ago
    I know this is a common refrain, but if you can build and run a successful sports organization at the university level you can potentially help bring in tens of millions of dollars to the school. It's very competitive, it's hard (in the sense that there's no playbook to do it the way you can grind leet code for a few months and walk into any junior or mid-level FAANG job), and like most people you're being paid less than the money you're bringing in.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      Do the sports programs bring in money for the university or for the sports teams?
  - nexuist 5y ago
    You can be. What's stopping you? Go out and start a competitive team that can win against other colleges that sink millions of dollars into their program. If that sounds like too much work, then, well, yeah.
denismenace 5y ago
Couldn't the same information be used by companies to signal each other and collude on price setting. For example they may start paying the same just based on a job class, which isn't a favorable outcome.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  No. Because companies are already doing this. At least for my employer they’ve told us that they talk to their “peers” in the industry to set prices for labor. So more a yes and a no. BUT if candidates were able to know what the bands are they could move wages to a more fair equilibrium. Here’s how I think it would play out. There are two scenarios. If radical transparency were to be enacted AND all companies share the numbers before hand putting all their equivalent roles at the same salary levels then not much would change since I think this is already happening at least in Europe and specifically in Berlin. But if companies started publishing this data over time say over months such that all information about salaries and compensation outside of wages was revealed in say 18 months (giving the market time to adjust I.e folks to leave to go to higher wage paying firms) then workers could readjust their wages to a more fair market rate. This is how I think things would play out — or so I hope when in reality it’ll likely just be the former case. People will fight for salary transparency and the firms will give it to them but they will have shared salary information already because a Python engineer is a Python engineer whether they’re at a mid level company or a FAANG company. And then nothing will change other than folks will likely all try to cluster around the top end of their now disclosed salary bands — more folks will get marginal raises I guess but it’s not the large shift or readjustment of entire sectors and employees I had hoped for.

searchableguy 5y ago

I think it's better to share salaries anonymously with the level and company information. It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I'm close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I'm at. I say this seeing younger folks quibble over a difference of few hundred dollars in compensation and worry they are getting underpaid compared to their peers. Note: Above is an example of highly paid individuals starting out so a few hundred dollar difference wouldn't matter.

HWR_14 5y ago
Strange, most people prefer more information to less. Employees knowing more leads to them better able to negotiate (not just arrive at higher numbers initially, but clearly know what skills they need to better negotiate the next time). Unless they're being treated unfairly, there's no downside. Those people who were paid a few hundred dollars less - why were they paid less?
Closi 5y ago
> It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I'm close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I'm at. 'Counterproductive' depends on your perspective - considering fundamentally everyone is working to get paid (no matter how much you love your job), a 'productivity' metric for a worker (not the company) could be amount of money earned per working hour (GDP per hour is a metric of productivity for the nation - so why shouldn't earnings per hour be a metric of personal productivity?!). Salary discussions informed with information can be highly 'productive' in that it is one of the best ways to increase your earnings per hour worked, with no change to the hours/effort you put in, if you are being paid less than people doing a similar role with similar skills/output. Assuming you are working a 40 hour week, a 10% pay bump because of an informed discussion is equal to working an extra 5 weeks across the year in terms of earning (and that's assuming you get paid overtime!). And if a 30 minute conversation is worth 180 hours of work (or potentially thousands of hours if you work there a long time), that's pretty productive in the scheme of things!
spenczar5 5y ago

dstroot 5y ago

I would be concerned about the correlation to increased resentment to increased transparency. If you want to know if you are paid fairly there is a “talent marketplace” to do price/value discovery. Employees do not have the full breadth of information managers use to set compensation and mangers cannot share their reasoning. Some employees are more motivated by title or other types of recognition other than comp as well.

pc86 5y ago
Isn't the end goal of title/recognition using that to get an even better job later, and presumably the compensation that comes along with it? At the end of the day, being Principal vs. Senior doesn't pay your mortgage off faster, get you a nicer car, or put your kids in a better school. Once we reach a certain point I think it obviously becomes more important - if you live in a LCOL area, making $300k TC as a Principal vs. $350k TC as a Senior, I'd probably go Principal too. But if you're still trying to set your life up, fund your retirement, finish off that 529 for your kids, etc., it seems short sighted to go after anything except a higher TC.

civilized 5y ago

Or they could just post their salaries on levels.fyi, which has had this information for years on thousands of companies.

pc86 5y ago
But then the organizers of this couldn't release it on Twitter 6 months from now for street cred, and have all the personal data to boot. A cynical take, for sure, but I can't think of any other reason why anyone would do this over something like you mentioned.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I assume that they want very specific salary information, i.e. what Bob makes on Integrations vs what Susan also makes on Integrations vs just what people seem to make at SDE II.
  - pc86 5y ago
    I think the more important question is whether comparing Bob to Susan (or Sam, or whomever) is helpful. I would argue it's not, that it's even unhelpful, unless you know a whole hell of a lot about how Bob and Susan got to where they are right now. Did they have competing offers when they were hired? Did they negotiate a [non-]discretionary bonus into their package? Did they negotiate more PTO or profit-sharing in the form of a non-discretionary 401k contribution? These are all things that won't be immediately obvious but will affect their individual numbers. In aggregate, these aberrations get smoothed out. I don't see any benefit in comparing individuals to each other, but there's a lot of benefit in comparing individual to the average.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      But that is what a lot of these initiatives want. They want to be able to say "Bob got X, so I should get X."
hammock 5y ago

cadence- 5y ago

Good companies show salary bands to internal employees. If they don’t do it, I think the reasons are pretty obvious. If you pay people fairly, why would you keep that information secret?

daniel-thompson 5y ago

Why bother? Recent salaries for SWE and SWM are already on levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/company/HelloFresh/salaries/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/HelloFresh/salaries/ Sidenote: I live in Austin and I get their spam in the mail all the time. I had no idea they were based in Germany! But that explains the crazy-low (by US standards) comp for these roles.

gigatexal 5y ago
With more Silicon Valley firms opening up in Europe, Berlin especially, I have heard that it's causing salaries for all engineers to be pushed hire as these new entrants start paying bonkers numbers. Apparently when Tesla opened in Berlin they were paying such high salaries that local companies got upset. I think it's come down some but why? It should go higher.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ThePadawan 5y ago
levels.fyi is pretty useless (too few data points) for many international locations. For example, at point of writing there are exactly 12 salaries listed for HelloFresh in Berlin.
eggie5 5y ago
just saw an offer in Berlin for 150 base and 320k RSUs coming out to €230k annualized TC!!
lskfjsldkfsdjfl 5y ago
It looks like VMWare is paying low in Austin based on levels.fyi, did you get around that somehow?

moneywoes 5y ago

What if people deliberately lie?

cj 5y ago
Especially if the goal of this is to pressure management into increasing pay, people will absolutely lie, if only to stir the pot.
nexuist 5y ago
If we look at this from a game theory perspective it actually works in their favor. People want to make lots of money, if they lie they're going to lie about being paid more and not less. If enough people lie to affect the overall statistics, then everyone is going to be pissed off at their management for not getting paid as much as everyone else. At this point management has two options: reveal the actual salaries of everyone, to prove that actually everyone is getting paid less than what the stats show (oof), or keep the salaries hidden and deal with a workforce in which every participant believes they are chronically underpaid. Neither of these options are good for management, and the only way out is to hand out generous raises.
- VintageLight 5y ago
  Or, claim the entered compensation is not accurate and maintain the status quo.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Right, but that's the expected response. Of course the company is going to claim inaccuracy. It doesn't grant them any more credibility than they would already have if it turns out they are actually right. Another point for the organizers.
- pydry 5y ago
  They can fire one or two people who put their salary on the form. They can say that it's because they lied and cannot be considered trustworthy and just hint that there are others. Strictly speaking telling the truth should be protected, but the backlash would probably inhibit that too.

sabhiram 5y ago

It pays for engineers to be able to inflate and justify their worth, especially when moving ships. It is not about everyone getting equal pay. It is about everyone having equal visibility. The former creates unmotivated employees, the latter creates one of two outcomes: 1. Satisfaction of relative comp for the amount of work done -or- 2. Understanding of what is valuable in this venture; how to spend your time Often times in larger establishments (after playing enough politics to gain visibility), I found myself in camp (2). What you think is important is seldom actually important to the powers that be. If you find yourself disagreeing with the last statement, go hug your management team / coworkers!

youeseh 5y ago
Considering that there has been a fair amount of collusion to suppress engineer salaries, are you surprised that engineers feel unmotivated? People work harder to hold onto something they value.
- d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  Do you have evidence for this? I feel it would be difficult to orchestrate collusion across thousands of private companies especially during our current skilled labor shortage.
  - mbot5324 5y ago
    > Do you have evidence for this? Ooooooh boy, do we! This type of behavior from the technorandians is about as well established as gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
bradleyjg 5y ago
What you think is important is seldom actually important to the powers that be. Underrated point. People should reflect on whether the powers that be might actually know what they are doing. Not always and everywhere, but be open to the possibility.

nexuist 5y ago

So I know there's no real way around this, but the email address verification is kind of a killer isn't it? Can't an Outlook admin just filter for all the inboxes that received an email from hfsalary.org and immediately report which employees signed up for this? I mean, I know on paper they're not allowed to retaliate against this, but wouldn't this impact how management feels about you getting more responsibility and raises etc.?

drakonka 5y ago
There's not really any need to go through emails by Outlook admins, since anyone can fill out the form and get access to the names and salaries of the participants. My impression is that the form fill-out is only needed to incentivize more people to share their salaries, not to hide from management. It seems like this being a public initiative is part of the point.

lordnacho 5y ago

There's a somewhat famous UK guy called Charlie Mullins who runs a plumbing Business called Pimlico Plumbers. I saw a clip the other day where he does this experiment with his own business, and the cameras film people finding out what their colleagues are earning. Some people feel quite shafted, others don't want to talk about it. In the end there's a not so satisfying solution. Or at least one that papers over the problem: they find some savings from their suppliers and give the money to the lower paid staff. But I thought it was an interesting experiment to watch.

pydry 5y ago
He's worth £100 million or so - for a business which basically just sends out plumbers. A huge chunk of that equity will be contingent upon pay secrecy.
dasil003 5y ago
Oh damn that guy is Charlie Mullins? I thought Pimlico Plumbers was Rod Stewart's side hustle.

baskethead 5y ago

Coinbase has a single salary per band. The only discretionary pay is performance based but everything has the same base salary and equity. I love this model.

karaterobot 5y ago
I feel like this gets tried in various ways at different companies. One of the antipatterns it tends toward is that people try to get moved away from teams that don't directly increase KPIs. Things like writing documentation, doing customer support, building internal tools, and other unsexy features get left behind. Meanwhile, all the most ambitious people move toward features that get people to buy things, click on things, focus attention on things, get angry at things, or be stuck on the platform.
mulmen 5y ago
This sounds about as appealing as unlimited vacation. Which is to say, not. I don’t want my immediate manager to have direct control over my pay or my vacation.
high_derivative 5y ago
I don't understand how this is different in any way from bands which employees are placed in based on performance? Im not trying to be combative, I genuinely do not see how this would realize any different outcomes. It just seems to shift definitions around. If employees A and B both are in the same band, both do not get promoted in a year, but have different performance ratings, I assume they will end up with different 'performance based pay' raises. Where is the difference to moving them to a different place in the band?
- peytoncasper 5y ago
  Largely because performance based pay does not have a fixed upside. Contrast this with a salary band which does have a fixed maximum.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago

whiddershins 5y ago

How can we know the info is accurate.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spoonjim 5y ago

> The spreadsheet will be shared with your work email address. That means the company knows you’re doing this. It’s not legal for them to retaliate for it, but people do stuff that’s not legal.

goplayoutside 5y ago

In Norway, everyone's salary data -- well, net income for tax purposes -- is public information. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239

torvald 5y ago
Albeit, you have a dedicated quota of searches – and the one you search for also gets a message that you search for him/her. So in effect, I'd suspect very few uses this to get the sense of your colleague 's pay. Rather, I'd guess its mostly used by journalists and the most curious to poke into public officials, rich people or simply celebrities.
nightski 5y ago
People always like to mention the nordic countries but how many people have been there? I was an exchange student in sweden in high school. It was very far from ideal, although the country was gorgeous and the people were extraordinarily friendly and helpful.

thenerdhead 5y ago

This happens with many companies when there is internal realization that the same labor is being paid unfairly. I’ll never forget hearing from a colleague whom I admired their work being paid half of what I was paid. The difference? They were much older and had no formal education. I was a new hire with a degree. This absolutely floored me and they gave our boss an ultimatum of matching the market rate. It worked out for them and their career. You should know your market rate at the current company you’re at. Most people don’t have that transparency today and seek new opportunities because of it. It absolutely feels terrible to know that a loyal productive employee is getting paid significantly less than a new hire who will jump ship in a year or two. If the company is going to min/max compensation, you have to take that into your own hands and play the game of getting what you’re worth in the market. Ironically most people do that by jumping ship temporarily and coming back with what they wanted in the first place. Managers should be actively looking out for their employees. It’s their main priority of retention. HR needs to give them enough budget to keep up with the market and not be greedy. It costs much more in the long run when there’s retention issues anyway.

syshum 5y ago
>>They were much older and had no formal education. I was a new hire with a degree. how long were they with the company? it could be age and formal education was not the factor in this situation but rather wage compression. This happens alot with long tenure, as market rates for a position outpace internal annual salaries it does not take long for market wages increasing at 10% annual where internal increase of 3-5% (and some years with pay freezes) cause people that have been with a company for 8 or 10 years to see a massive difference between their salary and what new people start at. It is always why people experience 20-30% pay bumps for changing companies, companies continue to refuse larger annual salary increases, only adjusting the pay when they attempt to find new talent on the market. >>Managers should be actively looking out for their employees. It’s their main priority of retention. HR needs to give them enough budget to keep up with the market and not be greedy. The reality is neither one of these people control this. Senior management sets the over all salary budget. With in that determines what individual can get. If Senior management say on the whole the salary budget can not increase more than 5% then you can not give every employee an 8% raise, you could give some and layoff a few, or you high performers 8% and some 3%, etc... Senior management needs to take retention seriously, most do not There is also a belief that "salary is not everything" and putting in a game room, or having some other "office perk" will retain people for lower costs than increasing their salary.

rahulgoel 5y ago

I think as a principle, symmetric information is quite important for good functioning of a market.

stakkur 5y ago

the only reason to obfuscate salaries is to pay people as little as possible and maintain control. any other argument is trying to pit employees self interest against others.

bloqs 5y ago

This company doesnt encrypt your passwords properly on signup.

geebee 5y ago

I've floated an idea previously here on HN: any company that applies for an H1B must make all salaries public the way public employees' salaries are public. By this, I mean total pay by name and position. I feel that if I private firm is applying for the power to bestow a public good - the right to live and work in the United States - on the grounds that a qualified worker can't be hired otherwise, it's reasonable for the public to want to evaluate the truth of this claim, which requires information not just about wages for that one position but for all wages paid in that company.

alexpetralia 5y ago
Are these not public? https://h1bdata.info/ https://h1bdata.info/
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  These used to include base pay only (at least that was the case for me)
- coredog64 5y ago
  They’re also only for the position that is being proposed to be filled. The way companies write those LCAs is nuts. I’ve seen LCAs that don’t match the technology in use, or that paid tens of thousands more or less than I was making in ostensibly the same position.

hazza_n_dazza 5y ago

I think the problem with Hello Fresh is the quality of their food and drink. It is hotel quality. Smelly bacon, heat traeated orange juice. With a name Fresh, and a product Fully Packaged, there is a great disconnect between their 'mission' and their reality. This shows the calibre of management and their real mission.