One Job, One Pay | Hacker News Reader

One Job, One Pay

stellate.co

15 pointsSujan8 comments

Discussed a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31601926 (99 points/162 comments)

Thanks, did not check as I think I remember HN telling me about that on submission. Seems I should check better next time.

Interesting discussion there fortunately.

I have a general rule that "it's not fair" is an invalid critique of any policy. It's okay to talk about relative levels of fairness, but not absolute.

This policy is a great example why (and to TFAs credit, the term "fair" does not show up, though "inclusive" is a related term).

At first glance, this policy seems completely fair, but people in general move around a lot less than one would think from a purely mercenary point of view.

I went to college in the Midwest, and two of the best in the CS department took low paying jobs to be close to family. This policy would have been a huge win for them. Given that SF has high tech wages, this is also a huge payout to all people who are willing to move to a low cost of living area.

This policy is less advantageous to people unwilling to relocate from high CoL areas, and those who are uncomfortable with their compensation being public knowledge. As a startup, this may or may not be a problem, but down the road they will certainly run into office politics issues that could be solved by just one of a raise or a promotion, and this policy removes that tool from the table.

That being said, this seems like a reasonable policy and I'm glad that more companies seem to be trying things like this, as it would be nice to have some evidence that this sort of thing is as helpful to as many people as intuition would suggest.

I've seen a few companies in the past that did this and what it amounts to is basically underpaying (60th percentile here) in HCOL and losing your best talent (the company is based in Mountain View here).

It also ignores a lot of the reasons why pay is lower in some places (free healthcare, etc.).

As much as I dream getting a Silicon Valley salary in a remote part of Spain, I don't think it's the right solution.

> "basically underpaying (60th percentile here) in HCOL and losing your best talent"

Any developer who leaves because they think that 60th percentile pay means they are being paid less than average is what is euphemistically referred to as "good attrition".

I never talked about average. Great engineers want the 90th or even 99th percentile.

Paying the 60th percentile means that you will not get the best people, that's it.

This seems like a bad trend for SF real estate prices. It only makes sense to pay 4k for an apartment if your job in that location pay so much more.

> We are anchoring our salary to the 60th percentile of San Francisco, CA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com