Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah so this seems great, except that's not what should be setting the price of developers. Supply and demand (for the most part) sets the price (and should, IMO) of developers, and that's what I want, not some rubric.

Outside of transparency, this strikes me as no different from the "grade" systems at various big companies like HP, IBM, etc. If you want to pay me fairly, pay me what the market says I'm worth.

Things also get super messy when you get people to try and review/make objective assessments of their own skills and others'.

"Most of us are a 1 or a 2" -- aiming high is great and all, but I would be pissed if I was the most consistently good engineer in the company yet didn't get some multiple of my salary because the "best" at the company is a 2 because of the ridiculously high bar that is set. Also I can definitely see a system like this trampling all over developers who should be paid more but THINK they're not that valuable, or afraid to assert themselves.

This calculator just makes me think it serves as an effective way to pay people less than what they're worth, and convince those same people that they're getting treated fairly. You should not be counting on your company to pay you what you are worth, regardless of whatever rubrics or whatever they show you.

There's a pretty strong connection between the numbers the tool has and market rates - it's not like the numbers are pushed top down, they come from actually participating in the hiring market.

The calculator normally gets a few revisions a year, one of the things that prompts that is market rates changing (others are things like hiring for new skills, or new roles being created).

What's nice about the calculator is, if the market rates change, everyone gets a raise (and knows they should). It's not just the new hire (who's mostly recently on the market), it's everybody in the same skill track.

The calculator also keeps us honesty about what matters for compensation. When the yearly salary review comes around, you can point at things you've done in the last year _and_ at where it says they should matter. It means fewer surprises, less frustration, and less fear that you're being too aggressive or too passive in salary discussions.

All of what you're saying is reasonable, but I think the premise is wrong -- what you can do doesn't determine how much you are paid, at the very least it's not the most important factor.

You could be the greatest COBOL programmer with the best people skills, but if there are no COBOL jobs, the rubric is 100% wrong (assuming your salary is 0 because you're unemployed). In the same vein, you could be a completely average developer (even a bad one, however you measure that), but if the market is absolutely starved for developers, you should (and likely will) be paid a lot. I think SO's appraoch obscures that fact.

There's no way they can update it enough to keep up with market (and it's arguably in the company's best interest in the short term to do this), and I'm worried that how this is being presented is lulling developers into a false sense of safety when they need to be on their guard.

But it's also likely that I'm being overly pessimistic/exaggerating the danger here. SO seems like a company that has enough breathing room to truly care about it's employees, and as such I think they will do their best to revise the calculator to benefit their employees. However, I really do think that the logic you're using equally applies to all the usual grade/level yearly review based systems... That's exactly how it works in larger companies (not that it's a bad thing) now, I don't think the rubric is a differentiator.

My point is that if you're one of the people that isn't a new hire, but aren't thinking critically about your salary where it is in relation to the market for people with your skills (whatever they are), please do. Don't leave it up to any company, however well-intentioned, to pay you what you should be making.

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