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What tech needs is transparent salaries from businesses. Buffer leads the way (https://buffer.com/salaries https://buffer.com/salaries) and at my startup we ha

What tech needs is transparent salaries from businesses. Buffer leads the way (https://buffer.com/salaries https://buffer.com/salaries) and at my startup we have transparent salaries too (https://www.runn.io/careers https://www.runn.io/careers) I wish more tech founders would do the right thing - rather than trying to hide reality will only ends up unfairly hurting under represented groups and those who aren’t strong negotiators.

andsoitis 4y ago
Buffer might lead the way with respect to transparency but at first glance those salaries don’t look very competitive.
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  Salary transparency, like all levelling mechanisms, pushes salaries down. Your highest salaried team members are simply replaced by contractors as they realise that their remuneration is now tied to the impression it gives to their colleagues rather than the value of their own labor.
  - halper 4y ago
    We don't even need to speculate about it. In for example Sweden, everyone's tax return is public information. You just call the tax office and ask how much income someone declared last available year.
  - JohnCurran 4y ago
    It seems to me, in my uninformed layman opinion, that it would do the opposite. Maybe it would force the outliers down but perhaps bring the average up. These are two common scenarios I see: - Two employees at the same level on the same team. One is paid $X higher than the other. Employee one asks for raise based on the fact they do the same job as employee two - New hire is paid $X more than member of team who has been there receiving meager raises yearly. They can point to the new hire and request $Y more due to their experience That said, this is conjecture and not backed by anything. Are there published works on salary transparency = lower pay for employees?
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      You can observe it by counting the contractors in any company that has salary bands, or transparency, or any other similar system. Very few high performing employees are prepared to accept that their remuneration is being constrained to prevent the lower performing employees from getting jealous. They are strongly incentivised to either leave or become contractors, increasing their remuneration even more. Only the average performing and under performing employees readily accept such an arrangement, because they are either unaffected by it, or benefit from it. You don’t need to do a study to figure out that people avoid things that are detrimental to their own interests.
      - rsavage 4y ago
        This is only true if people are underpaid in their salary bands -- which certainly can happen. However, it doesn't have to. We are still small with our experiment, but we pay 95% percentile in our market, plus provide additional benefits well above the norm. We have no issues hiring and retaining high performing staff because we pay as much or more than they would get elsewhere in the local market.
    - hwbehrens 4y ago
      > These are two common scenarios I see: There is a 3rd scenario that I've occasionally seen: Two employees with the same title on the same team. Employee One is unhappy because they are paid 10% less than Employee Two, despite same experience and title. Employee Two ALSO unhappy because in practice they do 50% more work than Employee One for 10% more pay. I still don't see the parent's connection of transparency to lower pay, but there is a rich scientific literature on the concept of "Comparison is the thief of joy" -- I hypothesize that turnover rates might positively correlate with transparency because they could promote intra-team competitive feelings. The exception would be if there were a rigid structure that you know going in, similar to how e.g. government pay scales work. Since you know going in that the only input is seniority, you won't care that exceptional work is not rewarded because that was made clear from the get-go, and if that would have bothered you you wouldn't have accepted the offer in the first place. The natural counterargument to that is that if the only input to compensation is seniority, then there is reduced incentivization for performing "above and beyond", possibly cultivating a culture of mediocrity. It also would promote pay equity, however, since e.g. employees' implicit biases and social conditioning would not come into play under subjective evaluations.
  - willio58 4y ago
    Do you have empirical evidence of this? I struggle to understand how salaries being in a black box helps your chances getting paid more as an employee.
- JohnCurran 4y ago
  I feel I must ask where you live / what competitive salaries look like to you, because as far as I know, a software developer salary of $190,000 USD+ in Barcelona, Spain is eye-poppingly high
  - stopagephobia 4y ago
    I think he's talking about runn where the compensation honestly looks terrible: $43k as a junior and under $80k as a senior. I wonder if the goal of transparency there isn't to avoid wasting time with the majority of people who won't put up with a salary that low.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      Isn’t that still good? Just means they’ll get mostly local candidates.
      - noahtallen 4y ago
        I don’t think $43k is good in most local markets, even for juniors.
        magnio 4y ago
        Double the median income is not good enough for juniors?
        valenterry 4y ago
        Is that double the median income of juniors in similar tech positions or the general median that contains part-time workers and jobs that require no education at all?
        noahtallen 4y ago
        Median US income is $1k/week, which is more than this. (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf) I mean, fair point, my comment was US-centric. But developers in the US should advocate for much more than that!
- Art9681 4y ago
  6 figure salary for an executive assistant in Tennesse is quite nice. A lot of engineers I know dont make that much and the skillset gap required between both professions is quite large IMO.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Skillset gap is not what determines price. Supply and demand ratios do, which does not necessarily correlate with skillset gap. For example, I might be able to be an executive assistant, but I imagine the quality of life of an executive assistant is worse than what I do now, so I would want even more money to be an executive assistant.
    - deltasevennine 4y ago
      >Skillset gap is not what determines price. Supply and demand ratios do, which does not necessarily correlate with skillset gap. It correlates big time. It's just that there are exceptions to the rule.
collegeburner 4y ago
aren't people who are strong negotiators generally more valuable anyway?
godelski 4y ago
Do you and buffer pay the same regardless of location? Honestly that always seemed more fair to me than "cost of living" adjustments which often fail to capture a lot of the nuances of actual differences in costs of living.
- rsavage 4y ago
  Buffer don't currently pay same regardless of location -- but they have published a blog post stating they will. Runn pays the same regardless of location (with exchange rates locked in yearly, and only ever adjusted upwards)
WalterBright 4y ago
Why should the employer be required to show all their cards, but the candidate not?
- googlryas 4y ago
  Candidates do essentially have to show their cards - employers verify your salary history with products like "the work number". Most people don't even know their salary is being reported by their company to a third party, which then packages and sells that data.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I thought there was a law in some states preventing that.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      Yes, but it is less than half of the states(though I'm not sure what percent of the population are covered), and even then, many of the bans are phrased such that pay history questions are only banned before an offer is made, or it is voluntary but employees may not know their rights. It is still legal to rescind or modify an offer after you discover salary history in most states with a "pay history" ban in place. https://fitsmallbusiness.com/salary-history-ban https://fitsmallbusiness.com/salary-history-ban
- 1991g 4y ago
  To answer your question as posed: to fix the power/information imbalance that is used to pay people less than they are worth. To answer your question the way I wish to: thanks to Equifax's TWN, candidate resumes, reference checks, background checks etc - the candidate is already showing all their cards.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > the power/information imbalance that is used to pay people less than they are worth Candidates often pad their resumes with skills they don't have. They'll pad their salary history. They'll hide things like stretches in jail. They'll list degrees they don't have. All to get a higher salary. The employer often doesn't realize for months that the employee wasn't as represented, and way overpaid. It goes both ways. I know you likely don't believe me, but I've been employer and employee, at min wage and professional wages. If you ever become an employer, you'll find out real fast how little power you have over employees. Anecdotally, I know employees with million dollar salaries. Is it credible that if corporations really had all this power, they'd be paid that much?
Aeolun 4y ago
Honestly, I think it’s more amazing that you give a grand total of 2.5 months of paid leave a year (6 weeks paid, 4 weeks sick) .
joshuamorton 4y ago
With recent laws in California, NYC, soon nys, and the existing one in Colorado, only Washington needs to pass one for all the priciest tech hubs to have mandated transparency in job postings and internally. It's really promising.
lucasfcosta 4y ago
I strongly agree with this approach. It will be really difficult for all individuals to share their salaries if some of them are on low salaries and fear not being able to scale up if they publish those. There's also an intrinsic bias in sharing salaries in that the well-paid folks are more likely to share theirs because they feel validated by the value itself.
- Varqu 4y ago
  We are also on this side and on the job boards we run [1], the companies are required to publish real salary data™ (and we also gather stats based on that). What is real salary data™ - contrary to the flawed regulations in a few states, which basically allows putting something like 1$ - 100'000$, we require companies to be more specific and have a max range of 30-40k. Interestingly, the majority (approx. 2/3) of companies are completely fine with publishing this information (if they are forced to) and out of the remaining 1/3, half can be convinced, and the other half is a lost cause (basically, management will not allow it) [1] Our job boards: https://swissdevjobs.ch https://swissdevjobs.ch https://germantechjobs.de https://germantechjobs.de https://devitjobs.uk https://devitjobs.uk
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
I think you're right there - the transparency needed is from the companies, not the individuals. Otherwise it becomes a competition, and people stop sharing salary themselves because some doofus claims to be on 750k/year starting salary straight out of college. Levels.fyi has some salary data too I think, and there's more and more being shared in Indeed and LinkedIn.
dt3ft 4y ago
Kudos! This is the way it should be done.

andsoitis 4y ago

Buffer might lead the way with respect to transparency but at first glance those salaries don’t look very competitive.

AmericanChopper 4y ago
Salary transparency, like all levelling mechanisms, pushes salaries down. Your highest salaried team members are simply replaced by contractors as they realise that their remuneration is now tied to the impression it gives to their colleagues rather than the value of their own labor.
- halper 4y ago
  We don't even need to speculate about it. In for example Sweden, everyone's tax return is public information. You just call the tax office and ask how much income someone declared last available year.
- JohnCurran 4y ago
  It seems to me, in my uninformed layman opinion, that it would do the opposite. Maybe it would force the outliers down but perhaps bring the average up. These are two common scenarios I see: - Two employees at the same level on the same team. One is paid $X higher than the other. Employee one asks for raise based on the fact they do the same job as employee two - New hire is paid $X more than member of team who has been there receiving meager raises yearly. They can point to the new hire and request $Y more due to their experience That said, this is conjecture and not backed by anything. Are there published works on salary transparency = lower pay for employees?
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    You can observe it by counting the contractors in any company that has salary bands, or transparency, or any other similar system. Very few high performing employees are prepared to accept that their remuneration is being constrained to prevent the lower performing employees from getting jealous. They are strongly incentivised to either leave or become contractors, increasing their remuneration even more. Only the average performing and under performing employees readily accept such an arrangement, because they are either unaffected by it, or benefit from it. You don’t need to do a study to figure out that people avoid things that are detrimental to their own interests.
    - rsavage 4y ago
      This is only true if people are underpaid in their salary bands -- which certainly can happen. However, it doesn't have to. We are still small with our experiment, but we pay 95% percentile in our market, plus provide additional benefits well above the norm. We have no issues hiring and retaining high performing staff because we pay as much or more than they would get elsewhere in the local market.
  - hwbehrens 4y ago
    > These are two common scenarios I see: There is a 3rd scenario that I've occasionally seen: Two employees with the same title on the same team. Employee One is unhappy because they are paid 10% less than Employee Two, despite same experience and title. Employee Two ALSO unhappy because in practice they do 50% more work than Employee One for 10% more pay. I still don't see the parent's connection of transparency to lower pay, but there is a rich scientific literature on the concept of "Comparison is the thief of joy" -- I hypothesize that turnover rates might positively correlate with transparency because they could promote intra-team competitive feelings. The exception would be if there were a rigid structure that you know going in, similar to how e.g. government pay scales work. Since you know going in that the only input is seniority, you won't care that exceptional work is not rewarded because that was made clear from the get-go, and if that would have bothered you you wouldn't have accepted the offer in the first place. The natural counterargument to that is that if the only input to compensation is seniority, then there is reduced incentivization for performing "above and beyond", possibly cultivating a culture of mediocrity. It also would promote pay equity, however, since e.g. employees' implicit biases and social conditioning would not come into play under subjective evaluations.
- willio58 4y ago
  Do you have empirical evidence of this? I struggle to understand how salaries being in a black box helps your chances getting paid more as an employee.
JohnCurran 4y ago
I feel I must ask where you live / what competitive salaries look like to you, because as far as I know, a software developer salary of $190,000 USD+ in Barcelona, Spain is eye-poppingly high
- stopagephobia 4y ago
  I think he's talking about runn where the compensation honestly looks terrible: $43k as a junior and under $80k as a senior. I wonder if the goal of transparency there isn't to avoid wasting time with the majority of people who won't put up with a salary that low.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Isn’t that still good? Just means they’ll get mostly local candidates.
    - noahtallen 4y ago
      I don’t think $43k is good in most local markets, even for juniors.
      - magnio 4y ago
        Double the median income is not good enough for juniors?
        valenterry 4y ago
        Is that double the median income of juniors in similar tech positions or the general median that contains part-time workers and jobs that require no education at all?
        noahtallen 4y ago
        Median US income is $1k/week, which is more than this. (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf) I mean, fair point, my comment was US-centric. But developers in the US should advocate for much more than that!
Art9681 4y ago
6 figure salary for an executive assistant in Tennesse is quite nice. A lot of engineers I know dont make that much and the skillset gap required between both professions is quite large IMO.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Skillset gap is not what determines price. Supply and demand ratios do, which does not necessarily correlate with skillset gap. For example, I might be able to be an executive assistant, but I imagine the quality of life of an executive assistant is worse than what I do now, so I would want even more money to be an executive assistant.
  - deltasevennine 4y ago
    >Skillset gap is not what determines price. Supply and demand ratios do, which does not necessarily correlate with skillset gap. It correlates big time. It's just that there are exceptions to the rule.

collegeburner 4y ago

aren't people who are strong negotiators generally more valuable anyway?

godelski 4y ago

Do you and buffer pay the same regardless of location? Honestly that always seemed more fair to me than "cost of living" adjustments which often fail to capture a lot of the nuances of actual differences in costs of living.

rsavage 4y ago
Buffer don't currently pay same regardless of location -- but they have published a blog post stating they will. Runn pays the same regardless of location (with exchange rates locked in yearly, and only ever adjusted upwards)

WalterBright 4y ago

Why should the employer be required to show all their cards, but the candidate not?

googlryas 4y ago
Candidates do essentially have to show their cards - employers verify your salary history with products like "the work number". Most people don't even know their salary is being reported by their company to a third party, which then packages and sells that data.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  I thought there was a law in some states preventing that.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Yes, but it is less than half of the states(though I'm not sure what percent of the population are covered), and even then, many of the bans are phrased such that pay history questions are only banned before an offer is made, or it is voluntary but employees may not know their rights. It is still legal to rescind or modify an offer after you discover salary history in most states with a "pay history" ban in place. https://fitsmallbusiness.com/salary-history-ban https://fitsmallbusiness.com/salary-history-ban
1991g 4y ago
To answer your question as posed: to fix the power/information imbalance that is used to pay people less than they are worth. To answer your question the way I wish to: thanks to Equifax's TWN, candidate resumes, reference checks, background checks etc - the candidate is already showing all their cards.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > the power/information imbalance that is used to pay people less than they are worth Candidates often pad their resumes with skills they don't have. They'll pad their salary history. They'll hide things like stretches in jail. They'll list degrees they don't have. All to get a higher salary. The employer often doesn't realize for months that the employee wasn't as represented, and way overpaid. It goes both ways. I know you likely don't believe me, but I've been employer and employee, at min wage and professional wages. If you ever become an employer, you'll find out real fast how little power you have over employees. Anecdotally, I know employees with million dollar salaries. Is it credible that if corporations really had all this power, they'd be paid that much?

Aeolun 4y ago

Honestly, I think it’s more amazing that you give a grand total of 2.5 months of paid leave a year (6 weeks paid, 4 weeks sick) .

joshuamorton 4y ago

With recent laws in California, NYC, soon nys, and the existing one in Colorado, only Washington needs to pass one for all the priciest tech hubs to have mandated transparency in job postings and internally. It's really promising.

lucasfcosta 4y ago

I strongly agree with this approach. It will be really difficult for all individuals to share their salaries if some of them are on low salaries and fear not being able to scale up if they publish those. There's also an intrinsic bias in sharing salaries in that the well-paid folks are more likely to share theirs because they feel validated by the value itself.

Varqu 4y ago
We are also on this side and on the job boards we run [1], the companies are required to publish real salary data™ (and we also gather stats based on that). What is real salary data™ - contrary to the flawed regulations in a few states, which basically allows putting something like 1$ - 100'000$, we require companies to be more specific and have a max range of 30-40k. Interestingly, the majority (approx. 2/3) of companies are completely fine with publishing this information (if they are forced to) and out of the remaining 1/3, half can be convinced, and the other half is a lost cause (basically, management will not allow it) [1] Our job boards: https://swissdevjobs.ch https://swissdevjobs.ch https://germantechjobs.de https://germantechjobs.de https://devitjobs.uk https://devitjobs.uk

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

I think you're right there - the transparency needed is from the companies, not the individuals. Otherwise it becomes a competition, and people stop sharing salary themselves because some doofus claims to be on 750k/year starting salary straight out of college. Levels.fyi has some salary data too I think, and there's more and more being shared in Indeed and LinkedIn.

dt3ft 4y ago

Kudos! This is the way it should be done.