Shared salary spreadsheet reveals Microsoft employee earnings for a second year
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
This is more in the realm of gossip than journalism.
Having said that, I wasn't expecting those junior salaries to be so "low" (obviously well above the poverty line). I've been making about that or more when adjusting for cost of living.
(Hello, Haskell programmers!)
If these numbers are accurate they put things into perspective though.
I see people on here and other forums who will swear blind that even basic engineers at big US tech companies are earning $750k after just a couple of years.
To prevent confusion ("old 5 or new 5?"), they picked numbers that were clearly different from the old 1,2,3... system.
Also, note that the comp change to reduce stock and increase base happened sometime in 2003, not as part of the comp 2000 changes. That's also when the switch from stock options to awards happened.
Possibly. All the article says is
"the levels start at 59 and go beyond 80. Microsoft’s senior positions start at level 63, according to the crowdsourced tech compensation website Levels.fyi."
Later on, existing divisions were designated according to type. Infantry is the 'default' designation. Cavalry units were designated, then Armor, then Airborne, and finally Mountain. I have no idea when Artillery got its own designation. Some units subsequently were designated Air Assault, and this includes the 101st, but it kept the Airborne title to honor the unit history.
Other branches have other policies, but this is how the Army structure evolved.
Edit: Haha, went and checked. Damn the lying documentary I watched.
I am surprised by how poorly MS pays for the Seattle area.
How are you going to afford a million dollar house on any but the top of these salaries?
Where on earth is someone on $150k, renting, going to get £200k in cash?
starting total compensation: 150K. If your partner works a similar job, your combined annual income is 300K.
No income tax in Washington State, so Federal + FICA taxes would be ~70K (look up any online calculator).
Rent ~1800 per month or 22K per year (based on Zillow's data for 1bd/1ba in Redmond, WA). Living expenses of 2K per month or 24K per year.
You are looking at 300K - (70 + 22 + 24)K, or >180K potential annual savings. Let's double the living expenses or throw in student loan repayments on top, but saving 100-125K per year is easily doable for such a couple. And in a couple of years, you have 200-250K for your downpayment.
If you are young, you can easily live off $50k/year, if you don't have children, don't own a car, take the bus to work, and your employer provides health insurance. Food is not that expensive, and you can rent an apartment for 20,000-25,000/year.
If your take-home is 110k, you'd have saved up for a downpayment in 4 years.
You can also get a nice large (3000+ square foot) house brand new build in the burbs in a great school system right in Atlanta for around $300-$375K with an FHA loan and 3.5% down.
Note: I’m currently visiting my parents in Atlanta from Seattle and, by god, is it miserably hot here.
But there are other cities with nearly the same salary vs cost of living ratio...Nashville, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, Raleigh, etc.
I recently bought a quite big apartment (140 sqm, one balcony and a terrace with a view) at a minute walk distance from St. Peters in Rome for 460k and the mortgage rate is 0.73% at less than 12k/year
You can get a pretty decent house in the Bay Area for $1M in areas like East and South San Jose.
That salary, with stability, good benefits, and stock options, seems pretty good for entry level.
Though I guess there's no M in FAANG.
Now I am not sure on how hard it is to be promoted but it does look like you need several promotions at Microsoft to equal one promotion at Facebook or Google.
I have been recruited by a few FAANG companies (recruited in the sense that a recruiter reached out for an interview) and have only gone to public schools, nothing impressive.
I wouldn’t get passed a phone screen without prep for a software dev position.
I only recently ended up at a FAANG as a technical consultant. Even then, the recruiter reached out to me about a software engineering position and I asked about openings in the cloud division.
There's definitely a lot more land to build housing on in the PNW, despite also having some of the geographic constraints that the Bay does, although it hasn't exactly kept housing costs in check.
Maybe "a bit" of a libertarian flair, but also in many ways the urban areas are arguably MORE progressive than the "old conservative NIMBY liberals" in the bay.
Mostly all junior and that makes sense in terms of who is sharing. 60% said they were visible minority and 22% said their gender was an issue.
Does that lineup with recent Microsoft hires or is this dataset unrepresentative.
> Microsoft’s latest diversity report showed the company was mainly white and male, especially at the highest levels.
It is reasonable to believe that this data set is not representative.
> A majority — 194 out of 310 — total respondents said they were people of color. Also, 69 respondents reported feeling marginalized or at risk of being marginalized due to their gender or gender identity. In total, 22% of respondents said that their gender or gender identity had or might hinder them at work.
This indicates that it is not a representative sample of M$. Though which conclusions to make from it are much harder to say.
I think you're right about there being selection bias... people who are happy with their package don't spend their time filling out these spreadsheets (I didn't!)
Also, I note that if I had taken just my initial offer, my TC would have been much closer to the listed. But I went through the long and arduous process of sending one email to my recruiter asking for more money and here I am.
I guess I'm technically a "person of color" (Hispanic) but I have a ton of useful, valuable experience and so far as code monkeys go I'm pretty good at negotiation. I thought Microsoft was a horrible pit of vipers and a generally terrible company, but I definitely did NOT experience any racism.
Maybe the people who responded to the survey are generally just really bad at negotiation, and the HR people should've gone easier on them.. I don't think it's feasible to get a 50% pay bump without changing jobs, so they're all in a really awful position
I got unlucky and ended up on a particularly bad team, so I left before I could get any firsthand experience with it. It's weird if it works that way, though, since it's so easy to jump ship to another company and get way more money.. Microsoft's interview process is as hard as pretty much any other high end company (except maybe Google, which seems to expect you to grind on leetcode a lot more..)
Seeing that in 2020 reminded me of this https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22
I guess it's not as bad as they thought it might be
[edit: stock, not stock options]
https://www.levels.fyi/# exists but might be inflated a bit.
> A lot lower than I was expecting
... I need to emmigrate
Rephrasing: the market rate in Europe is lower than in the US. Between 1.5 - 2 - much, much more.
I mean, they normally aim to pay 90th percentile for the market, and that is definitely not true for London.
However, I did get a lot of offers at much less profitable companies for much, much better salaries based in London, hence why I'm pointing out this problem.
I mean, if you're fine with only hiring grads/relatively junior developers then the system works. I'm just observing that it didn't work for me, and for a lot of people I knew back it the days.
(The constant re-staffing of teams with new people after key members moved to the US was also maddening).
The part often left out of the discussion of how much better government benefits are in UK/Europe, is how much higher salaries are in the US.
I'd be surprised if most people at microsoft paid more than $100 a year in health expenses.
Premiums are about $12K for singles and $25K for families.
As a “high” (by UK standards not US ones) income earner in the UK the “cost” of your health insurance/benefits would be considerably higher than the cost in the US but the benefits won’t be dependent on your continued employment.
The reality is that the compensation in the UK/EU is overall rather pitiful especially when you account for the higher taxation and the employment costs to the employer are much higher which is one of the main reasons for the lower salaries rather than the employers don’t need to cover benefits.
For a taxable salary of £115K which is on the higher end of what you can get in the U.K. these days the employer NIC is £13,885 that’s 10% contribution on top of the salary alone the employee is then pays over £6000 in contributions also.
Also, I wonder if employees who feel they’re being paid well would have anything to gain by filling this out. So there may be sampling bias.
Are people good judges of how much value they bring a company? You may think you deserve more pay, but you may also have a high opinion of yourself or over-estimate your skill/contributions/merit.
I think making salaries public information is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it reduces information asymmetry and gives you more negotiating power, but on the other it could probably lead to sour grapes and/or hurt feelings among employees where there was none before.
When that is the case, it means that the ambient is so toxic that a peaceful coexistence is only possible due to a ridiculous amount of taboo and secrecy (this is social manipulation 101). I say, to hell with these workplaces; they'd better collapse sooner than later.
Then that’s the problem to fix.
IME skils/merit/value contributions have very little to do with salary. It's mostly negotiation tactics.
Having public data on salaries would help potential employees make more informed decisions about working for companies in the first place.
"Sour grapes" is only really a concern if there is a huge discrepancy between pay when job roles/responsibilities are similar.
I've yet to be convinced that hiding salary information is in any way beneficial to employees, only to employers (at the expense of the employee).
Translation: "if a company doesn't pay well, talented people won't want to work there" - why would a company that doesn't pay well release information that would disadvantage them like that? Unless you are suggesting they be forced by law to make all salaries public. But you can already get an idea of the salary bell curve at a given company with things like Glassdoor.
A lot of A players suck at negotiations, IMO. If they didn't, their career would advance much faster. It's much easier to negotiate if you have the goods, and very few people have the goods.
I'm saying that your ability to deliver is of foremost importance to your comp, more so than negotiation skills (which help, but not replace the ability to deliver). Why? See the first part of my post that you've deliberately misinterpreted. It may seem to you that you can fool your manager, but that's not the case, if they're paying attention.
I see what you did there. :-)
For exceptional folks it's silly to be the A players unless they have a buddy in the VP ranks who drags them up the ranks, as otherwise they would waste their best years on flat compensation and a bunch of petty bonuses. Exceptional folks should really slack off, become those C players, and build their own gig on a side.
It ensures that salary distributions can be justified, and that employees have goals they can strive towards rather than the current variable reward system where you work as hard as you can and hope your employer decides to reward you this year.
I mean, that's pretty much the whole issue as the company sees it, a frank discussion about a company like that only hurts the company. Because there isn't really a good way to rephrase "well, the gap here between you and Jim here is not because you produce less value or deserve getting paid less, but because we can just get away with paying you less".
And no, I am not dismissing that some engineers produce more value than others and hence they get paid more. This happens quite often. However, in a lot of cases, that's not the reason for why some are getting paid less. And those who produce little value and get paid less are typically very aware of that fact, so they don't tend to raise fuss over the compensation.
"what that dolt Hardcastle is getting 2 mill, there barely profitable I should be on more than that."
People are average judges, by definition :) I don't think that's very important though.
There are two ways of looking at this, IMO. In the Hayekian sense, information flow... especially price information makes markets work. This is one of the of the reasons literal markets exist(ed). Markets "clear." All the metal, meat, etc. that needs to be sold gets sold. Even in modern times, you can get great deals on closing days (often sunday) in a literal meat market. Prices move fluidly, and if market conditions dictate that lamb cutlets are 75% off.. that price travels like the market quickly.
The other major factor besides information flow is number of participants, fwiw.
The other way of looking at it is as power gaps. Employers have relatively more power in negotiations because they have more price information.
People may be, but individual persons are not. It’s the individual who is negotiating.
I remember a psychology study about the nature of impromptu pay raises. For the initial weeks they were extremely grateful. After six weeks or so IIRC they felt like they were entitled to that extra money all along. We are incredibly adept at rationalizing the outcome we want. Who wants to admit they don’t deserve a raise when handed to them?
People in aggregate may be good judges of value, but I don’t think too many individuals are. How many people do you know who will say they are insufficiently paid vs. paid too much?
I think the best way to gauge your worth is to periodically put your resume out and interview. If you get a lot of offers that dwarf your current pay you’re probably under paid. If not, you may just be a bad judge of your economic worth
It had a very interesting effect: no one wants to be paid in the bottom 50%, so every job offer (at the executive level) claims to pay in the top 75% or so. Which led to salary inflation.
I'm very curious to see if the same would happen here (and I think it started to happen somewhat with sites such as level.fyi sharing salary info). If you see (in aggregate) what others get for similar positions, you are more likely to get an offer above that average. Which over time, leads to everyone getting raises.
If it does lead to sour grapes, it's a benefit for the employee - she realizes that either the company is not one worth working for and she ought to leave, or that he is not worth it for the company and must improve performance or look elsewhere.
BTW before I get flamed I have seen the anonymised data for a big UK tech company >175k employees and there where obvious pay problems based on Sex, Race and Disability.
Companies will just show you the public chart if you try to negotiate.
Want to fix the problem? Learn how to negotiate your value to a company. This skill comes in handy in pretty much all aspects of life.
Wrong. The way to fix the problem is to organize. Collective action works.
Why would I want to do that? I already make many multiple times more than my peers due to my specialized skill set.
I remember my first job out of college. Somehow, salaries got leaked and I was making 40% more than my colleague, in the same position (he sat right next to me).
The difference was my experience and negotiating skills.
'Collective action' as you say just adds a middleman that won't do much for me..except prevent me from getting a raise on my own terms.
Again, no thanks.
Collectivism is typically preferred by people below median in whatever metric you are considering.
So, in that sense, OP is still correct - it's beneficial for workers to organize for collective action, so long as you draw the proper boundaries within which that collective action will operate.
I beg to differ. Most companies treat their IT employees as exchangeable cogs. Hell, there's an entire offshoring and h1b industry built around that fact, not to mention local dumpsterfires like Accidenture.
> yet people still act like they're forced to put in 70+ hours a week in a coal mine boggles the mind.
Well, many of us work 80+ hours a week and are happy because they're allowed the honor to work for SpaceX/Facebook/Google/... so yeah.
Companies don't just give great negotiators whatever number they want. They know how much they're willing to pay for a certain role. I've failed to hire people because they wouldn't take what HR would let me pay. Sucks, but those are existing company problems.
How is making salary numbers public going to change that? They'll still need to find someone to do that job, and if they publish too low a number they won't be able to hire the people capable of doing the job.
When you say in a later post that you made 40% more in your first-out-of-college job compared to a colleague due to your "experience and negotiating skills," I'm skeptical of the "experience" aspect since it was your first job. So I'm all for things that in that case would have put you two both making exactly the same amount. And then if your on-the-job skills are better, yours will go up faster; if they aren't, you aren't getting overpaid just for being better at an unrelated skill set.
To further the anecdotal train I can tell you I have a few first hand examples that prove you wrong: - Due to me negotiating well during the offer stage I received a title bump (to meet mandatory max salary range reqs) and had budget pulled from other open positions to pay for mine as I was now 40% (I'm guessing) above max pay for the position I interviewed for. - Before my latest job I've had one way candid conversations with coworkers (i.e., I know what they make) and I've always been significantly above them (25-40%) for the same level of experience or less.
I'm completely against making salary numbers public for obvious reasons.
They walked away from the offer we gave them instead, as was their right.
In the non-anecdotal part - yes, someone like you would be hurt with this. I consider that a net benefit. Your negotiation skills are not helping you write better software than me or anyone else, but they're redirecting money towards you instead of me.
I distrust organization because I want to be able to make more than people based on skill and output, but I am all in favor of problems at all with measures to tie salary more strictly to output, or to make that more transparent.
Heck, I've even managed people who made considerably more than people at their same title band, despite less experience - it was based on on the job performance, not years of experience or negotiation before being hired. The salary band for the range was wide so that it could accommodate both strong performers and poor ones.
Then how do you know how good you are at negotiating?
I can assure you your company knows exactly how much other companies in your area are paying for every role. Market participants with incomplete information get taken advantage of.
> You need to decide what your labor is worth.
Based on what?
> The number you’re willing to work for.
There's no set number. I'll take as much as an employer is possibly willing to part with. Since I can't know that number, the next best thing is to know how much they pay others and start negotiations at > than that number.
You're worth as much as your employer can/will pay for your skills. Why would you ever take any less, assuming you like everything else about the job? How much you value the non-money aspects of the job is irrelevant to the discussion of how much you should be paid. If you like the non-money aspects treat it as a bonus meant just for you, because it is.
You should be happy in your job, no question about it. But happiness vs money is usually a false dichotomy.
Too much time is spent trying to measure ourselves against others only to breed unnecessary dissatisfaction.
Not public companies, but public sector; seems to be that some folks do believe there's value in this kind of transparency.
Also like, personally I don't think a skill like negotiation should be a part of the "meritocracy" of Computer Science.
Thus, you don't need negotiation "skills". You need to interview at other companies, get offers, let all of them know what offers you got that you are ready to take. Nothing much more necessary. There are small negotiation tactics that may make small changes but those are not big - the largest gain is from interviewing at all. If you are not willing to interview, then that's your choice.
This is why I strongly recommend all folks to interview at other comparable companies once in a while. It's about the only way to keep your employer pay at least a fair market price. And this also helps everyone else. It helps others get better salary, and it ultimately makes the society more efficient by having people where they can create the most value.
But the broader point is, and I say this as someone who, broadly, is okay with the status quo of tech interviewing, the idea that to be compensated fairly, one needs to focus on all of these things that aren't actually improving my skills or value to the company I work for is counterintuitive.
I would like to be in a situation where the company says "this is how we structure compensation, here's how your performance plays into that, and so here are the levers you can pull to change your compensation". Even better if I can see where other companies in the market sit. Then, I can focus on increasing my value to $employer, which will hopefully reward me with more money. Only at the point that I feel that there are other, better offers that $company can't compete with (whether for $$ or ethical or interesting work reasons) do I have any need to interview elsewhere.
But the incentives aren't aligned that way, and it's annoying.
Not only they are not aligned, they are fundamentally adversarial.
- Companies want to pay as little as possible as long as they can get away with it.
- You want to get as much as possible.
- There's no "objective" criteria possible that can judge someone's salary/pay.
So it is fundamentally impossible to get what you're asking for. Fundamentally. Like, no amount of your wish or arguing or effort can make it so. Meritocracy (for a pay) is a lie. It's never been true. Merit does have significant effect - as capable people will tend to get advanced, etc - but it does not and can not guarantee better pay, as merit is only an indirect factor that determines your pay.
That said, https://levels.fyi seems decent enough to give you reasonable ranges, if the company you work for and their competitors are there.
I disagree. I'm aware that that's the general opinion, but no, this isn't strictly true. A company can be interested in treating its employees well, and being upfront with them about pay is, to many, a comparative advantage (especially if the pay is also competitive).
> There's no "objective" criteria possible that can judge someone's salary/pay.
Generally correct, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. As long as you and the company agree on the method of evaluation in advance, it's fine. That is, given:
1. A predetermined (if fuzzy) algorithm for determining pay
2. Transparency on what other people are being paid
You have approximately full information. You know the game you're playing, you know the rules, and you can verify that the company is being honest.
To some extent this is pushing things down the stack a bit, since the company can lie about performance to favor certain people, but this still limits the effectiveness compared to no transparency.
I de-facto have this where I work now (enough people share their salaries that one can reverse the formulas used to calculate compensation). Empowering people to be able to ask why they were only paid $X, when their performance suggests they should have been paid $>X is valuable, and any manager worth their salt should be able to give an answer if there's a legitimate reason.
We'll have to agree to disagree here. And I'm afraid it's not an "opinion" but a fundamental fact due to the structure. I'm not saying companies are not or can not treat their employees well - they absolutely can and do. But a company is interested in treating its employees well as a strategy to be competitive against other competitors when acquiring and retaining talent is more important, and they can only do so while they are competitive. Once that changes for whatever reason, they will have no choice but to stop treating their employees as well. That's just the economic reality. This economic expansion in Silicon Valley lasted so long, and the demand for software engineers have been high enough for long enough, that I've seen young folks like you who have no idea what a true downturn can do, and I'm afraid you are one of those youngsters with a rose-tinted fantasy view of the economic system.
> Once that changes for whatever reason, they will have no choice but to stop treating their employees as well.
Yes, but there is more than one way to do this. For example. Instead of secretly lowering pay for some people, you can do so transparently and explain why it's necessary to furlough or fire or reduce raises or bonuses. It is possible to be transparent even in tough times. And there are companies that have done that. "Economic realities" don't force companies to lie to their employees. That's on leadership and values.
Although it does not seem that the data here, according to the article, is representative of Microsoft. It is difficult to draw hard conclusions from it, although the data is far from useless.
HN is obsessed with contractor salaries via Infosys etc. being low.
https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...
has just over 2000 entries for Software Engineers. Admittedly, it’s time since launching in 2017, but that’s still a simple average of more than 600 samples a year.
Is levels.fyi just not widely known?
Usually, the value of the information is high when everyone knows everyone is equivalent.
The aim is to create the effects of Dodd-Frank on CEO pay.
Whether that's the right way to do it is a matter of perspective but at least it's a number that doesn't constantly change. And with tech stock prices doing what they do, it's been very conservative over the past 4 years...
I've been "awarded" stock that never vested, or went down in value.
I find this interesting that they are using Google Sheets instead of Excel.
The one big area where Google Docs is superior to Microsoft, is having a bunch of people be able to edit a single document.
If you want to organize around a project your employer wouldn't like, use tools your employer doesn't provide.
(I haven't ever gotten a job via LI, but know many who have.)
If MS management found out and didn’t like this, how would they take down a Google sheet? They couldn’t.
How would they take down a O365-sheet? Oh right. Instantly.
Well, it is an engineering company based in Washington. This just in: Mitsubishi HQ mostly Japanese and male(!!!).