Hellofresh employees' open salary initiative
hfsalary.org
hfsalary.org
It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I'm close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I'm at.
I say this seeing younger folks quibble over a difference of few hundred dollars in compensation and worry they are getting underpaid compared to their peers.
Note: Above is an example of highly paid individuals starting out so a few hundred dollar difference wouldn't matter.
'Counterproductive' depends on your perspective - considering fundamentally everyone is working to get paid (no matter how much you love your job), a 'productivity' metric for a worker (not the company) could be amount of money earned per working hour (GDP per hour is a metric of productivity for the nation - so why shouldn't earnings per hour be a metric of personal productivity?!).
Salary discussions informed with information can be highly 'productive' in that it is one of the best ways to increase your earnings per hour worked, with no change to the hours/effort you put in, if you are being paid less than people doing a similar role with similar skills/output.
Assuming you are working a 40 hour week, a 10% pay bump because of an informed discussion is equal to working an extra 5 weeks across the year in terms of earning (and that's assuming you get paid overtime!). And if a 30 minute conversation is worth 180 hours of work (or potentially thousands of hours if you work there a long time), that's pretty productive in the scheme of things!
That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington: https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx
Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.
What are the consequences of this? Is there vicious infighting, and sniping over raises? Uh, no. There is just simple compensation, and way less negotiation. When some job class needs a salary adjustment because the job market has changed, everyone benefits. It’s pretty great.
In private companies on the other hand there's usually a much larger margin for salary to be negotiated, which incentivizes the consequences you mentioned.
Do you feel their entire society is harmed and uncomfortable?
Your whole argue is basically it might make a few people uncomfortable for a generation. While completely ignoring any benefits for future generations.
There's a very specific culture in the US that favors income opaqueness, and it's not necessarily employer based. My sister in law is very uncomfortable having us know that she makes 70k a year for whatever reason. I know real life stories of people who make 150k in low cost of living area and people around them treating them like they can afford to pay for their dinner when they hang out because they make so much more then them.
We live in a society that has MUCH more pay inequality than a lot of other 1st world countries and we are a society that heavily values income and wealth over other social signals, and because of that money has become a sore subject.
Then you add the job situations where if you make a lot more than other people (maybe you literally deserve it because of the value you bring to the company) it can be an uncomfortable situation if peers find out because now the company has to justify why person X is worth more than Y without insulting them, risking a lawsuit, or making them leave.
To be clear, I am vastly for pay transparency for many reasons (especially minority and gender equality) but let's not pretend like it can just be airlifted into America's culture just because it works in other countries.
People who work in most professions do as they're told. They've been told to do this since they were in school, which was actually setup the way they are to funnel kids into factory jobs where they will -you guessed it - do as they're told.
Total openness about wages is one big step towards conquering income inequality. You can see it play out in the news lately w/ the strikes, the rise of /r/antiwork, the growth of unions, etc...
You can, but you wouldn’t. Even if possible, pulling up your colleagues salaries would usually be considered incredibly creepy in Nordic countries.
You can just invent a billion different job titles, but you could also just figure out what each person is happy to accept a job for and bump their salaries by the saving you make on not employing people to create and maintain and negotiate salary bands.
I used to contract for state government. They used contractors for all the "real development" because the developers on state payroll making $40k/yr were wholly unqualified to write any code. So they paid a contracting firm $80/hr to get someone making $100k/yr to come in and do it while the state employees managed the project and supervised the contractors.
If the government could just negotiate individual salaries for developers, they could pay them twice as much, fire the contractors, and get the work done for roughly the same quality, and cheaper.
I think the quality of people around me at UW is mostly just different. Domain expertise is much deeper - the image processing experts really know their stuff! While fundamental systems and devops stuff is pretty absent from anyone’s skillsets. I don’t think you can really simply say that the talent quality is better or worse - it’s different.
I work at UW because I prefer the content of the work over my past at AWS. It turns out there are lots of people like me, who agree that $120k is plenty, and who made a very cushy pile of cash in the past at FAANG.
True, though it is closer to 3×
If you're actually interested in the numbers on different groups they're here [0]. For ex $120k is ~5.77x the median for a woman without a college degree.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
It doesn't, really, hence the “True” part of “True, though...”
See the table under "What are the income limits for the program?"
https://www.fostercity.org/commdev/page/frequently-asked-que...
FAANG has to pay so much that they can actually have trouble retaining people. This pattern I have described seems to be becoming more common.
Academia has pluses and minuses. Less pay, but the overall mission is more interesting. Really really smart coworkers, but not a lot of structure for growth, since almost everyone just thinks in terms of tenure. Laid back pace, but sometimes too laid back; I wish expectations were a bit higher. Overall I certainly like it more than my time at AWS, but recognize its not for everyone.
But you're really not in a good position to advocate for open salaries - you're an outlier. Most people deeply, deeply, deeply care about their salaries. It's what gets them out of the bed in the morning, it's what makes their partners respect them, it's what might perhaps provide for private schooling for their kids, etc. Most importantly, it's what makes them feel good about themselves. Yes, those are all wrong reasons, and yes, that's how most people are wired [1].
You'll notice that people who work in academia, military, government jobs, etc all have one thing in common - they are ok with not being able to make more than their peers. They get their happiness from other things in life. But the majority of people out there will happily go the extra mile to get an extra bump in their salary. Open salaries don't allow that - everyone is treated the same, everyone works the same, everyone's output is the same, everyone makes the same salary.
If it sounds familiar to communism, it is - where I was born, everyone's salary was also the same and there was nothing you could do about it. It worked great for people in academia and military (and, coincidentally or not, those are generally the strengths of a communist regime), and it demoralized most people working in other parts of economy where there was supposed to be some competition in the market (which again, coincidentally or not, are the weaknesses of a communist regime). Notably, you won't find a lot of salary transparency in more evolved communist regimes like China, and that perfectly correlated with their economic growth.
[1] Side note: I might sound like I am wired the same way, but I actually took a 6x reduction in salary about 10 years ago and have stayed much below my previous level ever since. Life was incredibly comfortable back then, but I am happier now.
This seems to be kind of a problem though? Both to be this person, and to have to work with them, and to have society composed of them. Billionaires are a drain on society and the economy, but the core issue is not the wealth inequality itself but the larger attitude in which "most people deeply care about money, first and foremost".
This has nothing to do with transparency. Just because one seller sells something at a certain price does not mean another has to, and same for the buyer.
The pay not being able to be negotiated is a combination of it being a political decision and lack of demand relative to supply.
When the government really wants someone, they start negotiating too.
Edit: one notable example of how it is politically impossible to pay appropriate to get the job done right the first time is the rollout of healthcare.gov and various health insurance websites by state governments. They could have paid enough to attract competent programmers, but the government decided to cheap out. Then it was a political fiasco when the project failed, and they had to open the government wallet to pay for competent programmers. But if they had advertised market pricing for programmers in the first place, and transparently, the the job would have been done right the first time.
I just looked up the Governor's salary for the state I contracted for, and it's less than a first-year FAANG salary. So in this case, no, they can't really negotiate anything under the current structure.
https://worldscholarshipforum.com/wealth/highest-paid-state-...
This isn't a bug, it's a feature intended to funnel taxpayer money into private companies. And I know this is usually a statement laced with malice, but it's not really - it makes sense (on paper) that if competent private companies exist the government should contract them instead of scaffolding its own development company inside of the existing bureaucracy.
In practice we know it would probably be cheaper to just hire 10-ish good developers per county for $1m/yr each and get them to do all the digital work for the state. But that's a harder sell that none of the existing private firms (read: campaign donors who stand to gain no money and lose talented employees) would spring for.
Which some people like, and will excel in such an environment, however also can lead to other problems. I prefer performance based pay, vs tenure. If a engineer is turning out project after project, completing task after task why should they be paid less simply because they were hired 3 years ago, where Dave down the hall has been there 30 years but has 1/2 the output making significantly more because of tenure
Are the wheels of the car more productive than the frame? I agree with those that say this is a discussion not worth ones time. I can always go to another team, or go at it myself, if the pay isn't what I want.
no it is not really, but to use your car analogy, should a wheel on the car that is flat, and slowing the car down be paid the same as the 2 wheels that are operating to spec?
Because non-performance based pay tends to flat tires....
In industries that have tenure-based pay, you often cannot do this because you reduce your pay when you switch companies because you reset your tenure.
What you’re describing is an uncommon scenario (at least in the US) where within a given industry some employers are paying for tenure and others are paying for performance. This is uncommon because pay for performance tends to win out because it attracts the best talent, at least in highly paid fields. Pay for tenure probably results in higher average pay across a role but lower pay for the top performers.
The hard part is expecting people close to you to be honest to management.
For context is a typical north american phenomenon and not common everywhere.
Governments may not be, but universities most definitely are. Unless/until we move over to a system of 100% tax-funded universities sports teams are an important source of revenue for them.
If anything, those are some of the most repressed wages in the economy…
For example, pro athletes all make different amounts of money, individually negotiated, but the amounts are public.
And as for infighting and jealousy, it is very existent: not over money, but often promotions given out due to patronage, seniority ranking for choosing work duties, people abusing probationary procedures to retaliate against others... public service has plenty of misery for people on the wrong end of things, and it's a major factor for why unions are still strong there.
Public service salaries are public because it's public money. That's it. Don't glorify it.
You have named many problems with working in public service. That doesn’t seem really relevant, though; I certainly am under no illusions that this is a perfect environment, just that salary transparency is not disastrous.
If everyone got paid the exact same amount, there’s no penalty to publishing the salary number (that everyone already knows).
The problems start to drift in when salaries are individually determined (hopefully based on contributions to the company).
I’d like to see an anonymized dump straight from one or more of the big payroll companies. I think I’d find that a little more believable.
Typically in an offer letter the dollar figure shown will be a 4-year grant, submitters are supposed to divide that number by 4 to give the annual comp, but I suspect some don't realize this and submit the full 4-year grant + annual salary. This is solved by verifying the offer letter, but that's only one form of verified salary.
They also let you verify via W2, and with W2 you are seeing stock appreciation plus stacked refreshers, so this can be very hard to assess, especially with a decade-plus bull run in tech stocks. Naive observers looking at the data would be shocked how many of those 7-figure salaries actually came from $300-$400k total comp offers that benefitted from stock appreciation.
Those people who were paid a few hundred dollars less - why were they paid less?
No, that's culture not nature.
People are competitive and compare themselves to others everywhere. If you think otherwise, then 1) share something real that supports your belief, and 2) consider that whatever bubble you’ve constructed for yourself is misleading you.
(oh and if you still insist on anecdata, I know plenty of people who consider distasteful to compare your wealth to your neighbors, both from Europe and from Asia)
And yet you still can’t provide a single concrete example of a non competitive society.
It has not gone unnoticed that you’re moving the goalposts and suddenly you’re comparing relative levels of competitiveness which is wholly different from your claim that it is not natural to be competitive. Don’t complain when someone knocks down the strawman you set up yourself.
> I know plenty of people who consider distasteful to compare your wealth to your neighbors
Nearly no one compares their wealth to their neighbors directly. This is bad taste even in the US. Asking someone their salary is generally considered quite taboo unless you’re in the process of negotiating a salary worth a new company.
> both from Europe and from Asia
This is interesting since I can find you endless threads online from Europeans asking if American engineers really make so much and why they make so much more. This sounds like comparison to me.
I can also find endless articles discussing the rise of status symbols (iPhones, luxury cars) among the middle class in China and India as their wealth rises.
No, you set that goalpost by yourself. Read the thread again.
You should know your market rate at the current company you’re at. Most people don’t have that transparency today and seek new opportunities because of it. It absolutely feels terrible to know that a loyal productive employee is getting paid significantly less than a new hire who will jump ship in a year or two.
If the company is going to min/max compensation, you have to take that into your own hands and play the game of getting what you’re worth in the market. Ironically most people do that by jumping ship temporarily and coming back with what they wanted in the first place.
Managers should be actively looking out for their employees. It’s their main priority of retention. HR needs to give them enough budget to keep up with the market and not be greedy. It costs much more in the long run when there’s retention issues anyway.
how long were they with the company? it could be age and formal education was not the factor in this situation but rather wage compression.
This happens alot with long tenure, as market rates for a position outpace internal annual salaries it does not take long for market wages increasing at 10% annual where internal increase of 3-5% (and some years with pay freezes) cause people that have been with a company for 8 or 10 years to see a massive difference between their salary and what new people start at.
It is always why people experience 20-30% pay bumps for changing companies, companies continue to refuse larger annual salary increases, only adjusting the pay when they attempt to find new talent on the market.
>>Managers should be actively looking out for their employees. It’s their main priority of retention. HR needs to give them enough budget to keep up with the market and not be greedy.
The reality is neither one of these people control this. Senior management sets the over all salary budget. With in that determines what individual can get. If Senior management say on the whole the salary budget can not increase more than 5% then you can not give every employee an 8% raise, you could give some and layoff a few, or you high performers 8% and some 3%, etc...
Senior management needs to take retention seriously, most do not
There is also a belief that "salary is not everything" and putting in a game room, or having some other "office perk" will retain people for lower costs than increasing their salary.
I would say that the company preyed on their age & education to low ball them. I knew what I was worth and asked for it and got it.
In my experience, it's less senior management and more payroll defining company policy especially at big tech. Senior managers get those pools to work with. Yes there are bonus/merit pools based on performance throughout the groups, but what I'm referring to is the company proactively matching market rate for employees they actually want to retain. Too many people leave purely for compensation and this is well before the pandemic/reshuffled market. Those retention gaps cause so much churn because those responsibilities are now spread throughout the remaining members. It's a cascading problem of not being able to hire fast enough, even at the biggest companies with the best benefits out there.
Merit bonuses hardly even keep up with inflation and are disguised as "you doing a good job, here's a 2-3% raise!". It's a winner-take all game even in the most privileged of positions in the workforce. Companies make even some of the best managers immoral by concealing or feigning ignorance about this information. You have to play ball just to get what you want or else you'll be walked over like a doormat.
It is not about everyone getting equal pay. It is about everyone having equal visibility. The former creates unmotivated employees, the latter creates one of two outcomes: 1. Satisfaction of relative comp for the amount of work done -or- 2. Understanding of what is valuable in this venture; how to spend your time
Often times in larger establishments (after playing enough politics to gain visibility), I found myself in camp (2). What you think is important is seldom actually important to the powers that be. If you find yourself disagreeing with the last statement, go hug your management team / coworkers!
Ooooooh boy, do we! This type of behavior from the technorandians is about as well established as gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Underrated point. People should reflect on whether the powers that be might actually know what they are doing. Not always and everywhere, but be open to the possibility.
To be clear, IMO, people want equal total comp per input. We have to consider all inputs like, including the person themselves (some comp is worthless to me personally, eg certain health benefits for situations I will never have, or considerations for needs that I do not have.
* average and best/work weeks of hours worked
* stress load
* future value of today's learnings
* inconvenience factors - like do I have to work during my kids' <important event>
* feel good factor -- obviously personal Am i working on shiny fluffy things or bombs?
* extrinsic compensation like "clout" or "status" -- Do you think working at google might give you some "cred" or greater viability in the dating pool? that's a form of comp
I'm sure the list goes on an on, hence one reason that seeing Engineer 5 yrs exp, $X comp is too little info to compare what you _should_ be paid, though informative of what you _could_ be paid if you conformed to all the variables of that job .
I really don't care if Barbara in accounting made more than Stan in Marketing. What I want to know is movements of the market. Currently the best source of this information is tech-based with biased incentives (levels.fyi, Glassdoor, in either direction) or recruiters, who have their own incentives.
In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies.
title or level and min salary, median salary, and max salary for the roles in the company.
Furthermore, each employee within a company should know what the salary bands are for their titles/roles. This should be common knowledge.
I know and am honest with myself and my manager of my skills. If I know what min and max and median is on my team I can negotiate appropriately with how/where I fit in the team productivity-wise. I am not going to ask for the top end of my team for my title if I know I am not producing. Likewise do you want to lose talent to a competitor because they're making the bottom of the range but producing at the middle or near the top?
I read stuff like this about salaries, budgets, contracts, etc. regarding various US federal/state/local governments quite often. In reality, almost all that info is already publicly available. Often in excruciating detail.
For example: the salary of ever single NYC employee (cops, teachers, etc) https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york. Every California state employee salary (and pensions) https://transparentcalifornia.com/. Many state and local government employee salaries are collected by https://openpayrolls.com/.
Federal gov contracts at https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/. Most states have similar sites for their contracts.
The issue in government transparency in the US is not transparency per se. It's that few people bother to actually dig through the raw data or perform good analysis of it.
Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.
If that sounds like too much work, then, well, yeah.
For example they may start paying the same just based on a job class, which isn't a favorable outcome.
BUT if candidates were able to know what the bands are they could move wages to a more fair equilibrium. Here’s how I think it would play out.
There are two scenarios. If radical transparency were to be enacted AND all companies share the numbers before hand putting all their equivalent roles at the same salary levels then not much would change since I think this is already happening at least in Europe and specifically in Berlin.
But if companies started publishing this data over time say over months such that all information about salaries and compensation outside of wages was revealed in say 18 months (giving the market time to adjust I.e folks to leave to go to higher wage paying firms) then workers could readjust their wages to a more fair market rate. This is how I think things would play out — or so I hope when in reality it’ll likely just be the former case.
People will fight for salary transparency and the firms will give it to them but they will have shared salary information already because a Python engineer is a Python engineer whether they’re at a mid level company or a FAANG company. And then nothing will change other than folks will likely all try to cluster around the top end of their now disclosed salary bands — more folks will get marginal raises I guess but it’s not the large shift or readjustment of entire sectors and employees I had hoped for.
But I thought it was an interesting experiment to watch.
They can say that it's because they lied and cannot be considered trustworthy and just hint that there are others.
Strictly speaking telling the truth should be protected, but the backlash would probably inhibit that too.
I feel that if I private firm is applying for the power to bestow a public good - the right to live and work in the United States - on the grounds that a qualified worker can't be hired otherwise, it's reasonable for the public to want to evaluate the truth of this claim, which requires information not just about wages for that one position but for all wages paid in that company.
That means the company knows you’re doing this. It’s not legal for them to retaliate for it, but people do stuff that’s not legal.
Sidenote: I live in Austin and I get their spam in the mail all the time. I had no idea they were based in Germany! But that explains the crazy-low (by US standards) comp for these roles.
Apparently when Tesla opened in Berlin they were paying such high salaries that local companies got upset. I think it's come down some but why? It should go higher.
For example, at point of writing there are exactly 12 salaries listed for HelloFresh in Berlin.
I don’t want my immediate manager to have direct control over my pay or my vacation.
If employees A and B both are in the same band, both do not get promoted in a year, but have different performance ratings, I assume they will end up with different 'performance based pay' raises. Where is the difference to moving them to a different place in the band?
Contrast this with a salary band which does have a fixed maximum.
Similarly, salary bands can have soft caps, where growth becomes harder as you're further from the minimum, but never becomes impossible. Neither approach is necessary better, but all are used in different places.
A cynical take, for sure, but I can't think of any other reason why anyone would do this over something like you mentioned.
The only non-tech positions are supply chain management, finance, HR, marketing, sales. Basically the same as any other tech company.
Edit: it looks like they DO have these types of positions, and they dominate the open roles. Software engineers is one of the smaller categories.
Thanks for the downvote, whoever.