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One Job, One Pay – Globally
- bombcar 4y agoSo is the pay such that everyone outside of SF should apply or is it such that nobody inside SF ever will?
- deleted_account 4y agoHard to say, their job listings[1] don't include the salary. Their listings do say "All salaries are transparent within the company and are set above local market rates," so maybe all it takes is one high cost of living hire to raise the rates for all employees with the same title? [1] https://jobs.lever.co/GraphCDN/33bc14f9-4671-4540-8862-7d358896a259 https://jobs.lever.co/GraphCDN/33bc14f9-4671-4540-8862-7d358...
- runnerup 4y ago> set above local market rates This wording seems philosophically incompatible with "One Job, One Pay" (OJOP), even if it's not actually logically inconsistent with OJOP "per se".
- chris11 4y ago> We are anchoring our pay to the 60th percentile of San Francisco It works out as long as SF has the highest pay.
- mxstbr 4y agoOne of the easiest ways that we can hold ourselves accountable with minimum friction is through pay transparency. https://www.sueodio.com/pay-transparency/ https://www.sueodio.com/pay-transparency/ We’re rolling it out in the next week 2 weeks. We will begin publishing salary bands on every job posting. Internally, we will publish levels and sub-levels for every job.
- mattnewton 4y agoIt seems to me the way it would work in practice, is that they’ll probably have to give people in SF higher titles? Mostly hire people with senior pay bands in high CoL areas, and if those pay bands are competitive with the other offers they get (which may be less senior) then it works?
- quickthrower2 4y agoThat would be the definition of it not working. This HN post causing 1000 people around the globe to apply is what it means for it to work. People in SF with high COL probably will not apply. Unless they intend to move as soon as they get the job.
- mattnewton 4y agoI don’t disagree; just, I have seen talent hired at higher levels simply to justify the salary band and not because of the work and it seems like an easy escape hatch from this when recruiters want talent in competitive markets.
- quickthrower2 4y agoAh yes, introduce rules and people bend them to meet their targets.
- mxstbr 4y agoWe’ve already begun using this framework and have made offers to candidates with surprising non-obvious results. Here are some examples: - We offered one person $27K more than their asking salary because the data showed that they were underestimating their market value. - We offered someone 30K below what they were currently making - We’ve made a comparable market offers
- tick_tock_tick 4y agoSounds like a great way to attract mediocre talent and guarantee you won't get exceptional talent.
- marcinzm 4y agoSo you're saying there's no exceptional talent in countries that generally have lower pay?
- potatototoo99 4y agoNo, he's saying they are probably pricing themselves out of the global talent pool, by only being competitive in the cheapest countries.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ceeplusplus 4y agoIt is generally the case that said exceptional talent has already immigrated to HCoL US areas like SF/NYC, or that there are immigration/timezone restrictions preventing them from being hired by companies. It is very rare that someone who is talented can't get hired for a rate that they are worth.
- Aaargh20318 4y agoYou are assuming that all people with exceptional talent value money over being near friends and family.
- UmbertoNoEco 4y agoThis is one of the most discriminatory posts I have ever read in this site and that's saying something.
- sidlls 4y ago
- gorgoiler 4y agoIC comp ain’t complicated — you want people who are good at what you need them to do, and you need to make them a more attractive offer than your competition, so that they work for you instead of the other company. Remote work is fine for them. They probably prefer it to being interrupted all day with meetings. They know all about how boring such things can be from reading Dilbert. What do you do about leadership? Do global/permaremote companies have managers, staff eng, and c-level members who never meet more regularly than once a quarter? Does remote-work as a leader in a global/remote-first business mean frequent trips to airports? How does it work when your job is more than “make the CI faster”? If you do one thing for ICs and another for leaders, are you tacitly saying to all remote ICs that they’ll never progress to a leadership role? People say that remote IC work is mercenary and very much like contracting. To that extent, if you take a remote salaried position, are you doing yourself a disservice compared to taking the dispassionate, transactional, disposable contractor-style role without the contractor pay?
- wrs 4y agoThere are plenty of high-level remote leaders, even at large conservative companies, who don’t meet in person more than once a quarter. Especially after the last couple of years.
- pishpash 4y agoRemote work has led to more meetings than ever was the case in person. Google Calendar's default 30 minute meeting has made things a lot worse so that each interruption is now at least 30 minutes.
- immigrantheart 4y agoI will be watching your career with great interest.
- tschellenbach 4y agoTL/DR: we pay lower than market rate salaries in all regions where salaries are high. I do think that as productivity and tools improve around remote and async work salaries in remote friendly jobs will equalize.
- smeej 4y agoI worked at a company that did this, and I left in part because they wouldn't just come out and say, "We don't actually want to hire American employees." Instead they recruited American employees with promises of fast advancement to higher pay, but never actually advanced them. It's absolutely their prerogative to make a decision like that, only to be competitive in low-wage markets, but they should just own it. I think being upfront about this like Graph is doing is a much clearer approach.
- ascorbic 4y agoIt's more like "we're ok with not hiring people in the Bay Area". The salaries will be competitive in most of the US
- smeej 4y agoI don't know what the wage range for these roles is, but at the company where I was, they weren't. They were fantastic wages for southeast Asia, and competitive wages in parts of Europe and South America, but were solidly 30%+ below our competitors who were also based in the U.S., never mind that the wages were so stagnant retail jobs became competitive with us after awhile.
- rsanek 4y agoAre you saying that they're lying about this claim in the article? > We are anchoring our salary to the 60th percentile of San Francisco, CA Why would paying higher in other regions necessitate lower than market rates in high-salary regions?
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoThis is the Infosys model for hiring. I don't know if they publicized it or not, but it's the same thing. Everyone gets paid the same no matter what. You live in Mumbai? $36,000/year. New York? $36,000/year. Paris? $36,000/year. They did this intentionally to facilitate the easy acquisition of visas sponsored by the companies getting these cheap tech workers. It's a total scam and completely destructive to the local tech worker economy/market.
- sokoloff 4y agoI don’t think it’s an optimal strategy, but I fail to see how it’s a “total scam” in any way, shape, or form. “This is what this job is worth to me. Are you in?”
- nathanvanfleet 4y agoAre you pretending that information asymmetry or exploiting people because of their situation isn't an ethical problem?
- sokoloff 4y agoWhat’s the exploitation? A company offers a job; if the job is appealing to the candidate, they freely take it. That’s true whether it’s a $250K/yr offer or a $36K/yr offer. In the vast majority of cases, the alternative to a company offering $36K/yr is not for them to offer $250K/yr but rather to not offer a job at all. If anything, I’d argue that a company offering a consistent salary for the job anywhere in the world is acting more ethically than one offering $X in Mumbai and 5*$X in Paris.
- russelldjimmy 4y agoWhen one asks a question in the format, “Are you pretending that [obvious problem] isn’t an ethical problem?”, it makes me wonder if that person is really interested in understanding or is just interested in accusing someone else and picking a fight. If it’s the former, then maybe consider that other people don’t see the issue as the same [obvious problem] as you do, instead of assuming that they do, and then basing further reasoning on that bad faith assumption. If it’s the latter, then continue doing what you’re doing.
- foolfoolz 4y agopaying people out of market rates is a bad idea - some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living - attrition for these employees drops to near zero because it’s better pay than they can get anywhere - these employees will have motivation to keep their job at all costs, so when they are disengaged doing the absolute minimum to ensure they won’t get managed out - when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x? - incentive for local teams and managers to hire their friends to extremely cushy jobs and perpetuate i think this is backwards. remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output. overpaying won’t bring you additional output, but will bring other challenges
- bgirard 4y ago3x -> 3.15x is a 5% raise. That's hardly a promotion.
- foolfoolz 4y agothat’s a healthy faang base increase for a promotion
- timsuchanek 4y ago- some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living > Agreed. And other factors like taxes and quality of living are all playing a role for what the person will ultimately receive. Interestingly enough, oftentimes these balance each other out. Higher taxes? Usually better infrastructure. Lower taxes? Maybe hospitals less good. We might not agree in all points, but where we apparently strongly agree is on this point: "remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output" We agree with that. The only next step we do from there, is that for us, it matters, that for the same output, the company pays the same compensation. Why not go further? Why not think a step further from paying the same and adjusting it based on factors like cost of living, quality of living? Because that's very hard to quantify. We say, that the boundary of this decision is, how much we as a company pay to the human on the others side. We can't control what exactly will arrive, there are different taxes, health insurances etc, which all have an impact on what you ultimately earn.
- ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y agoSmall companies can try lots of interesting things, and they may or may not work out for them. Gravity Payments famously has their $70k minimum salary[0]. Duolingo insisted on gender parity in CS hires[1]. But if Amazon or Microsoft tried the same thing, it might not work. I’m more interested in what geopay is going to look like industry-wide than what one small company is doing, but they might make an interesting data point. [0]: https://gravitypayments.com/thegravityof70k/ https://gravitypayments.com/thegravityof70k/ [1]: https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gender-ratio-for-new-software-engineer-hires/ https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gende...
- UmbertoNoEco 4y agoFunny how Amazon or Microsoft are perfectly happy to have mostly the same prices worldwide. Let me know when I can call them both to be priced at my country COL. There is always a justification or theoretical argument to avoid giving workers more rights.
- candiddevmike 4y agoThere's a lot of drama around gravity payments. The CEO has some serious problems and raised the wages as part of a larger political game with cofounders: https://www.hundredeightydegrees.com/dan-price-business-fraud https://www.hundredeightydegrees.com/dan-price-business-frau...
- rsanek 4y agoInteresting claim, but a typo in the first few paragraphs of this article [0] immediately makes me doubt its veracity. [0] "Price, his brother Lucas and their father Ron worked as sales agents for a another credit card processor named Axia Payments"
- smeagull 4y agoIt's really recognition that remote roles are essentially competing for people globally, so your competition is every other company hiring globally. The reason a lot of wages were lower for some cities, was a lack of competition for their hires. Now there's competition everywhere. Salaries will rise as a result. These guys are just skipping to the conclusion.
- raymondgh 4y agoThis is awesome. Equal pay for equal work is fair and just. An effective interview process and leveling system will be extremely important. If an engineer from SF really is so much better than one from Cleveland or Bangalore, the hiring manager needs to be able to assess them accurately and start them at the right levels for their abilities.
- shric 4y agoIf only accurate assessment of abilities before start was the slightest bit feasible.
- havelhovel 4y agoIs it really fair and just, though? Is it fair, for example, for a business financed with Silicon Valley money, leveraging Californian infrastructure, enjoying US legal protections, to offer Americans a wage that only meets the needs of developers in Nigeria or Bosnia? If my money doesn't go as far in the US as it would in India, I'm being penalized for simply being born in the wrong place. Who do you think will take these jobs? In my opinion this is woke-washed outsourcing, and US-based developers should be boycotting any business that does this.
- barry-cotter 4y ago> If my money doesn't go as far in the US as it would in India, I'm being penalized for simply being born in the wrong place. If you get paid more purely because you were born in the US and not India you’re being unfairly enriched for being born in the right place.
- havelhovel 4y agoSince you only responded to one sentence in my comment, it appears as though you've missed the point. You certainly haven't convinced me I'm wrong.
- mxstbr 4y agoWe are internally publishing levels and sub-levels with explicit skills & traits for each.
- ram_rar 4y agoI am all for removing location based pay. But the devil is in the details. There is a reason why location based pay exist. Every country taxes salary differently. Taxes in CA is different from Florida and Taxes in US / EU/ Asia are widely different. So if the pre-tax amount to employee is 100k. In CA you'll probably get around 60k and in florida ~80k. (These are rough numbers, but I hope you get the idea). This might seem like employee in florida is making more than CA. But the net cost to company is the same.
- bgirard 4y agoPay is based on market conditions. Not cost of living or taxes. That's particularly true for location based pay. That's why you end up with certain areas with very high cost of living and very low pay. This myth needs to stop.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoCost of living forms market conditions. The myth that market conditions are some detached force divorced from reality need to stop
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago> I am all for removing location based pay. As long as the pay moves UP. Not down. Then I will support removing location-based pay.
- warkdarrior 4y agoOh sweet child!
- Archelaos 4y agoThis whole, complex strategy does not make much sense economically. Let's asume you want to hire someone with an average skillset: If you are trying to hire where the avarage rates are high, you could not compete with other companies. If you are hiring where the avarage rates are low, you are paying more than your competitors without additional benefits. The same line of thought applies for lower than average or higher than average skillsets, respectively. So on average, you have a choice of hiring someone lower than average from a high income region or someone higher than average from a low income region. The latter is always better economically. In the end, (all else being equal) market forces should drive you towards the traditional off-shoring strategy of just hiring as much as possible in the lowest income regions, but with an additional penalty if you dare to hire from a not so low income region.
- barry-cotter 4y agoIf that’s the case why does Google have offices in Zürich or London? Once you leave your home country it’s all off shore.
- alephnan 4y agoBut Google pays differently depending on where your office is …
- quickthrower2 4y agoIt makes sense because it is disruptive and people are not static spreadsheet entries of location and max pay. And most tech workers are savvy to what tech companies can make and that they are fighting for talent. The very talented person in the cheap country who was going to fly to the US to earn more now applies for this job, so this company wins. The SF resident who hates SF and who is up for living abroad but wants to save for retirement still: same thing.
- imtringued 4y agoYou call it complex but what you are suggesting is geographical price discrimination which is obviously far more complex because you need salary information for the location Obtaining that information is difficult so your company will just determine the median salary of the entire country instead of adjusting it based on the city. You leave less money on the table, precisely because the bureaucratic burden has massively increased.
- blueyes 4y agoKeeping the same pay for every region will either: 1) bankrupt any startup hiring in SF and NYC 2) prevent startups from hiring in SF and NYC You can't have both.
- andrew_ 4y agoNonsense. This is FUD in my estimation. I've work for remote companies who don't pay regionally since 2010. None of them have gone out of business, none of them have been bankrupted by paying people the market rate.
- boopboopbadoop 4y agoSo bucket 2 then?
- Aeolun 4y ago> prevent startups from hiring in SF and NYC I think most are willing to make this tremendous sacrifice.
- runnerup 4y agoYou can exclusively hire the SF and NYC engineers into levels that aren't offered to applicants from Bangalore and Lisbon and still satisfy "One Job, One Pay".
- rsanek 4y agoWhy not? It seems like your claim is based on one of two assumptions, neither of which I find particularly compelling: a) any startup hiring in SF and NYC will go bankrupt b) the devs you hire outside of SF and NYC for the same HCoL salaries are not worth the pay, and over time will cause business failure or is there another option?
- andrew_ 4y ago
- timsuchanek 4y ago
- ledauphin 4y agothey say they're going to be transparent about equity stake. does this extend to founders and investors, I wonder? If not, I don't think this is transparency.
- timsuchanek 4y agoTim, Co-Founder here. Yes, this applies to everyone within the company, including the founders and investors.
- J7jKW2AAsgXhWm 4y agoI am sure the one pay won’t fit San Francisco, their loss
- summerlight 4y agoWhen it comes to equal pay in all region, I usually find that people tend to think it as Bay Area level (or at least US metro level) pay for everywhere. But a more realistic consequence would be developing country level pay for everywhere. There are tens of millions of developers outside the developed countries which will gladly accept one third of the market rate in developed countries. If you live in Europe or US and speak European languages, you gotta accept the fact that this geographical/linguistic barrier has been a critical factor for your annual salary.
- craigds 4y agoIt's probably something in between though. There's probably a point in between Developing Country Pay and Bay Area Pay where the company can get quality work done for the price they're willing to pay. Obviously, they're less likely to get Bay Area developers, but I don't really see how that's a problem - there are plenty of good devs elsewhere. Maybe this is a good incentive for Bay Area devs to move somewhere cheaper :)
- twblalock 4y ago> Maybe this is a good incentive for Bay Area devs to move somewhere cheaper :) Why give up Bay Area salaries, and the large Bay Area job market, to make less money somewhere else for the only company that would pay it? One of the reasons people stay in the Bay Area is the ease of finding new jobs in tech. If you don't like your job, you don't need to put up with it, because there are plenty of other options. On the other hand, if you move out of the area and there are only a few employers who will hire you where you live at a salary you can live with, you do not have that ability. And good luck moving back -- if you spend a few years out of the Bay Area housing market, the cost of moving back would blow your mind.
- cudgy 4y ago> On the other hand, if you move out of the area and there are only a few employers who will hire you where you live at a salary you can live with, you do not have that ability. And good luck moving back -- if you spend a few years out of the Bay Area housing market, the cost of moving back would blow your mind. If this was true, there would be few young developers and recent grads, which is not the case. Owning a home is overrated, especially with the current prices.
- Proven 4y ago
- lwotton 4y agothis company has less than 10 employees - you could fit them all in a mini bus
- timsuchanek 4y agoActually 11 by now ;)
- cyanydeez 4y agoSounds great till a MBA shows up and starts hiring community school drop outs from Russia
- tarr11 4y ago“We don't just release publicly available bands. The transparency continues internally; every employee knows how much everyone is getting paid, including equity.” Can someone provide a link to these publicly available bands?
- hartator 4y agoAs a side note, they don’t publish compensations on their job posting: https://jobs.lever.co/GraphCDN/13868118-dc74-409b-b726-519236b7cc3d https://jobs.lever.co/GraphCDN/13868118-dc74-409b-b726-51923...
- immigrantheart 4y agoIf this goes through, and more and more companies do this, I think a lot of immigrants would want to go back to their cheaper home country instead of staying in the USA. I know I want to. There are many great engineers in 3rd world countries. I wonder what the long term implication of this will be, both for USA and the 3rd world countries. On the other hand, I am hearing the drum of de-globalization being sounded from afar...
- stackbutterflow 4y agoI think compensations outside the US will continue to increase. The current decade is going to be a good time to be a SWE in a Low CoL country. Top talents in the US will continue to be well compensated. The one who will see their salaries decrease or stagnate and opportunities leak outside the country will be the average US developer who can't justify being paid > 50% more.
- the_only_law 4y ago> The one who will see their salaries decrease or stagnate and opportunities leak outside the country will be the average US developer who can't justify being paid > 50% more. That’s why I’m planning my exit.
- immigrantheart 4y agoHow are you planning your exit? I’m curious.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- needle0 4y ago> It is not about who you are, what you are, what your background is, or where you live. It IS, however, about what language you speak.
- timsuchanek 4y agoAgreed.
- ascorbic 4y agoRight, but communication with your co-workers is a vital part of being able to do the job well.
- coffeedan 4y agoSeems strange to say “One Job, One Pay” and then not say what that pay is.
- timsuchanek 4y agoWell, we don't need to make salaries public in order to have internal transparency.
- coffeedan 4y agoNo, but we do if you want me to believe this.
- asd88 4y agoCompanies doing this are shooting themselves in the foot by not letting the market dictate pay. They either will waste a ton of money by giving everyone Bay Area-level pay, or will just be unable to hire in high cost of labor locations without compromising talent quality.
- zdragnar 4y agoFunny, most companies don't actually hire people from the bay area
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Companies doing this are shooting themselves in the foot by not letting the market dictate pay. Companies doing this are letting the market dictate pay: the global market. If there is no particular need to have people working in a particular place, there is no reason to pay a premium to get labor in HCOL locations (which, the fewer employers are paying a premium to get labor there, will cease to be as much HCOL areas, too.) > They either will waste a ton of money by giving everyone Bay Area-level pay, or will just be unable to hire in high cost of labor locations without compromising talent quality. If employers stop paying a location premium when the premium location provides them no added benefit, people won't be able to command premium pay to live in premium locations.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoReading a lot of comments about saying goodbye to exceptional devs etc etc. But the policy is One Job, One Pay. If you get an exceptional dev and you want to pay them as such, simply label their job as "Exceptional Dev". Is this easy? No. But it does define the role more, what the company wants/needs the role to be. And now if you find an equivalent in ANY country, they get the same pay. But they'd better live up to the terms of the job because everyone in the company knows your job and what you are being paid. If you act like "average dev" then be sure that people will argue for your pay to match.
- phs318u 4y agoWe globally have (relatively) free movement of money, goods and services. What we don't have globally is (relatively) free movement of people (for work). I do believe, that if the world were to add free movement of people to the first lot, within a generation you'd get normalisation of incomes and lots more besides (laws relating to workplace rights, OHS, environmnental etc). Of course that pain that would be suffered in that generation would be pretty huge as entire populations started moving. It's a pretty big perturbation to settle into a new stable state.
- _tom_ 4y agoWhy do I doubt that they are doing this with their C-level compensation?
- sokoloff 4y agoI think they will. Every one of their CEOs, CTOs, and CFOs will be paid the same as anyone else at the company holding that same title, without regard to where in the world they live. (If there is only one job, any company automatically has a One Job, One Pay philosophy.)
- mxstbr 4y agoOur C-level compensation is transparent internally[0] and anchored to the market data, just like all other roles. I will say that for anyone else thinking about doing this, there is a lot less market data available for those positions. We had to combine market data from multiple providers to get to a good baseline. [0]: https://www.sueodio.com/pay-transparency/ https://www.sueodio.com/pay-transparency/
- coffeedan 4y ago“One Bridge, One Price” - I’m selling the Brooklyn Bridge. Same price, no matter where you live - trust me.
- rational2 4y agoIs the company planning to pay taxes to tax jurisdictions where the employees are located? Those taxes help pay for things like unemployment benefits, regulations such as protecting rights of workers?