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I have never worked in a job where you can give a reasonable pay band and routinely made 1.5-3x what other people with the same title did, before bonuses. This

• robertlagrant 3y ago
  I don't really understand this either. As you say, it may work for very predictably-paid jobs.
• loa_in_ 3y ago
  The HN crowd, thanks to the ubiquitous and indiscriminating nature of the internet access and ability to self-select, comprises of academics and engineers but also of artists, philosophers, enthusiasts and people still finding their way in the world. That includes production and retail workers.
• mschuster91 3y ago
  The same work should bring the same payment, period. Everything else just ends up rewarding those with the best "negotiation" skill which is completely unrelated to one's actually work-relevant skills.
  • blfr 3y ago
    There is no such thing as "same work" outside of a production line and the like. You learn this in the initial weeks of your career. In every tech company there are programmers, project managers, and sales people who have the same titles but deliver vastly different quality of outcomes. And everyone knows this because they instantly pick the good ones whenever they have the slightest optionality. You have a new project, difficult client, some fuckup to straighten out, and everyone's eyes turn to the same person. It's such a common occurrence, you must have seen this. You must have seen people being fired without a single tear or with a sigh of relief and others quitting to widespread worry over who will manage to step in for them. People with the same roles on paper.
    • mschuster91 3y ago
      So what, you can use a well defined bonus structure. At least that is transparent and related to one's own work skill.
      • sokoloff 3y ago
        Let’s imagine that msc91 is the person we always turn to when the chips are down and they always deliver great results in the clutch situations while maintaining all of their regular duties as well. How long until we rationally decide to pay msc91 a monthly “in case the chips are down” bonus/retainer? Msc91 is made better off; the company and its customers are made better off and thereby, msc91’s colleagues are made better off. If we decide on principle that we won’t do that, how long until a better-funded or better product-market fit company comes along and hears through the grapevine of ex-msc91 colleagues that they should pay their overall higher wages to msc91 and get them to join? Now, all of the good things that could have happened in the prior paragraph are lost.
      • blfr 3y ago
        Interestingly, you can't. Although to be fair, plenty of managers still believe they can. Imagine a job where results seem fairly easily quantifiable: sales. You want to hire a great salesguy you know. His current salary is 168k and he collects another 85k in bonuses. How do you get him? You offer him 260 base and some unspecified bonus you will work out later. Why? Because he already knows what kind of bonuses he can collect where he is but only has a vague idea of your company's product potential. This uncertainty and unattainability of full information forces companies into either wide bands or made up titles. That's even before he goes to his current boss for a competing offer.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    Now define “same”, particularly for creative work where value created can be a factor of 10 or more off. There are qualified, employed SWEs that I’m 3x as good as. There are other SWEs who (correctly) look at me and draw that exact same conclusion.
    • Kerrick 3y ago
      Because you are able to confidently measure yourself as 3x as good as somebody else, and because you're able to confidently measure value created to be a factor of 10 or more higher, you're able to measure what's needed to define "same." (Hint: it's those things, but at 1x.)
      • sokoloff 3y ago
        I'm flattered that you think there are no SWEs who are capable of creating 3x as much value per year as I am. I think you're incorrect, but I'm flattered.
        • Kerrick 3y ago
          You misread my comment. If you can definitively say that there are some who can create 3x as much value as you, then you can also definitively say that value is measurable. The measurability of value is what was at question in this thread. “The same work should bring the same payment” is not incompatible with “some SWEs provide more value than others.”
  • pseg134 3y ago
    Well negotiation is definitely a work skill and every single person does it many times per day so it’s a valuable skill to improve. Most professional jobs allow for a range of working styles and productivity so it’s only natural people with the same job would be compensated differently based on the value they offer the company.
  • ahtihn 3y ago
    > The same work should bring the same payment, period. How do you reward good job performance?
    • cutemonster 3y ago
      If it's a small company, what about revenue and profit sharing over the next X years (so they do what's good long term not quarterly), weighted by how many days they've worked for the company?
  • fnimick 3y ago
    Or worse, it rewards those that are "in demand" elsewhere, and harms those that due to some factors outside of their control (sexism, racism) would receive less interest elsewhere, so they can be paid less to keep them here. I once spoke with someone who acknowledged this, but said it wasn't a bad thing - if the market has decided that someone is worth less, why should he pay them more than he has to?
• kuchenbecker 3y ago
  It's definitely possible with RSUs and refreshers. But it's more comparable to your Neighbor with a much lower mortgage payment because they bought several years ago and the asset appreciated.
• viraptor 3y ago
  That may be also a sign of poorly defined levels. If you're calling people the same i.e. set the same expectations, but pay them 3x different amount, something's weird with the org.
  • michaelt 3y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. I mean, titles don't really mean anything to developers. It's not like in the army where everyone knows the difference between a colonel and a general. You could run an organisation where everyone from a new graduate right up to Linus Torvalds has the same title, just a different level of pay.
    • jabradoodle 3y ago
      You could, but you would implicitly give them titles and have different expectations. No one is expecting a junior to define the technical roadmap for the next 6 months and coordinate it's implementation across 5 teams* and be the final judge on disagreements. Edit: typo
    • viraptor 3y ago
      > I mean, titles don't really mean anything to developers. To the developers themselves? Yeah, it does to many. To the company in general - there's a reason level descriptions exist. They define expectations for a given person. Let's say you create a new team for project X: you want someone who can plan the project out. Are you going to give that to any "developer" who all exist at the same level? If no, then you have different levels, you're just pretending they don't exist. It also makes things more clear for the pay. Let's say you get some good mid level dev who gets bumped many times for being really good. If they're just doing well at that level but not advancing, are you going to pay them more than senior devs with more responsibility at some point? Is that a wise decision?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • bpodgursky 3y ago
    > poorly defined levels Obsession over crisply-defined levels is a sign of an organization that is too far up its own a*** to actually get work done.
• sarchertech 3y ago
  If you’re making 3x what other people at your level are making, you’re at the wrong level. Unless you’re already at the highest level. If you’re worth that much more, I’m surprised that you don’t push for a higher level. The point of levels is to provide an external signal of competence. And perhaps this law will push companies towards doing a better job of that. In nearly 20 years of experience pay doesn’t generally correlate with performance. The people who I’ve seen with massive pay differences were the people who could negotiate well and knew how to play the game to come in with multiple offers. Those people aren't usually the most long term productive employees. Some of them are, but many of them are just better tangentially related skills. The biggest single difference in starting pay by far is having multiple offers. If you make it through selective company A’s hiring process, you likely could have made it through a few similar processes. Whether you bothered to do that or not, says nothing much to me other than how much you care about compensation. But most hiring managers have a serious case of FOMO and this works in the majority of cases.
  • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Or "levels" are a low-granularity schema that can't box in how people actually work in their jobs. The reality is that every person working in a position brings different things to the table. While larger businesses create defined level boxes and paths, they're really very rough and imprecise ways to describe people and often do a disservice to people who work hard but not in the way that the boxes "expect." So there are definitely cases when we see people's compensation out of sync with their level (in either direction) and it's sometimes a product of the company recognizing the value of an employee but having levels and tiers that don't match the employee exactly. Some companies, for example, tie higher pay to a management/leadership ladder. But you can be a solid-contributing or 10x or whatever software developer without going down the leadership road.
    • sarchertech 3y ago
      Sure they are low granularity. But one person making 3x what another of the same level does goes way behind a rough and imprecise description. That’s a complete breakdown of a level system.