Lessons learned since posting my salary history publicly
jvt.me
jvt.me
Sounds like a counter offer to me. I'd be very surprised if this "update for competitiveness" would have happened had it not been for a different offer.
If there's been turnover in managers or you've switched teams in a large corp, then you may have more luck. On the other hand, larger corps treat engineers more fungibly, and if they're looking to trim headcount via a directive from on high, they'll just let you walk out.
In terms of this being a loss of trust, it's not uncommon for managers to say "we're already paying you as much as we can afford" or "your compensation is already the highest that our rules allow for". If they are willing to go beyond that in a counteroffer, it pretty much reveals that they were previously being dishonest with you in order to get away with paying less.
This is either a loss of trust, or else trust never existed in the first place.
More likely, it's a case of non-generalizability. Profitable companies can normally afford to counter-offer in specific cases, but if the resulting raise became a rule in like-for-like employee relationships, the collective increase in payroll would not be affordable.
Thinking about it as trust forces you to accept the notion that "companies are people".
Maybe thinking about it as leverage is better.
Kinda reminds me of Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series. I believe there is a culture in that world, traders of which will do their best to make sure the person they're negotiating with gets the best deal possible. The people of this fictional culture don't do business with you if you try to get the best deal possible for yourself.
How often are companies the ones trying to get the best deal for themselves? How often would the people of that fictional culture do business with such a corporate entity?
A corporation by its very nature can not have the same values as a human.
I still don't understand this advice. As someone who has done this a few times at the same company, I have not witnessed it. Usually the whole point of an outside offer is to convince someone outside your management chain what you're worth (HR). At that point, the question isn't about loyalty, it's about the value of the work to the company on the whole (does your org even need an expensive engineer).
From the pov of the employee, they are just updating the price for their services.
What if society would treat companies raising prices as betrayal?
They often do just that. Usually through government actions that limit or cap price increases in goods, or policies that discriminate against companies based on previous behavior. Last time the US had a real run at it was the Nixon price/wage caps in the 70s, but it's definitely getting traction again when we're seeing corporate taxes at historic lows, profits at historic highs, and inflation popping up again as a real risk.
This whole "trust" thing is a big fucking deal, regardless of what folks might like to think, and it absolutely does extend to the relationship corporations have with the public.
I personally don't think the controls usually work the way they're intended (it's mostly bad news), but I don't mind the punishment aspect of them in regards to betrayed trust.
Companies gain efficiencies from reduced transaction costs; this is the basic theory of the firm, the reason we have firms at all.
One of the big ways transaction costs are reduced is by increased trust, trust at the human level. Interactions don't need lots of checks and guards and ass-covering because there's mutual trust, at a human level, that people are working together on a profit-making enterprise.
Breaking trust affects efficiency. If someone threatens to leave, you can't make future plans that assume they're in place. People aren't cogs that can be trivially replaced; on-the-job knowledge makes people more productive and takes time to acquire. So if someone's future presence is uncertain, timelines stretch, more people need to be allocated to it to account for risk of people leaving, and so on.
And this affects other trust relationships further out. A manager of a team or a product area may not be able to deliver on commitments that serve a strategic purpose of the company directed at a higher level.
It's not "purely business". Businesses run on trust; companies are collections of individuals with a higher degree of mutual trust, and the more trust they have, the more they can eliminate inefficiencies caused by lacking trust. That's why companies work at all.
How can we move to a society where talking about compensation isn’t illegal?
I currently work for a smaller private company. It doesn't pay me as much as a large corporation in the industry. Were my compensation public, I would forfeit the option to increase it significantly again.
I work here because I live next door, like the people and the work environment. It is worth it to me. Public registers would not reflect these choices. Otherwise I would need to keep up appearances and optimise my compensation. I like to keep these options.
Not relevant in Norway because everyone earns a lot. Sweden seems to be a country with significant social pressure, not really a role model for me.
That said, under no circumstances should it be illegal to talk about your compensation. Any company that forbids you to do so probably has some dark secrets here.
Not at all; you might feel that way, companies will certainly try to make you feel that way, but it's up to you to negotiate and ask for whatever salary you want and companies will generally pay it if it's within their budget. Specially if the company trying to hire you also had public salaries, why do you think it'd limit your growth?
There are some benefits with openness of compensation, but I would like to keep it private for me. I believe the lower end of salaries might profit from more transparency. As I have said, it should be possible to reveal it. Making it public by default wouldn't be my preference and I would feel the need to demand more from my current employer.
I am aware the secrecy is most often a vehicle for companies to supress wages. But I think selective and voluntary transparency can alleviate this.
To the person you were replying to: Please remember this is not the valley, sometimes an increase of 10k per year is noticeable.
Put it the other way; if you know a company is paying 60k/employee (at your level/role ofc), and they offer you 40k "based on your previous salary", wouldn't you also laugh on their face?
For anyone interested, a good search term is "anchoring" or "anchoring effect."
That's why a bunch of companies ask what your previous salary was in interviews and why you need to absolutely not give that number in pretty much all circumstances.
Like I got a 60% bump from my previous salary my last job search, in part because I hadn't gotten raises for several years at my previous company as they had wage freezes, and in part because I had been behind on compensation for a while due to having to take whatever halfway decent jobs I could get while unemployed, but if the prospective employer knew I was getting paid so little, they probably would have significantly lowered the salary they offered to me, and I'd still be behind the market rate for my skills, and the next time I went looking for a job I still wouldn't be offered enough to catch up to what I'm making now. It's a vicious cycle when they know your current salary.
Even for that 60% bump, that was after talking to 20 recruiters over the phone, 8 online code exams, 5 multi-stage interviews, and getting 2 offers, over an exhausting three week period, and juggling all those with a day job was super difficult, and I had to schedule enough of those during the work day that it got to the point where my former boss probably started to notice.
I'd hate to have to double, triple, or quadruple that effort just to get maybe a 30% bump if my previous salary was public knowledge.
I managed to get a significant salary bump even without having a job, because I made sure they understand from the beginning I'm happy to walk away.
After the dot com crash, I took lower paid work in the public sector, working on some interesting things.
I was approached by a recruiter to work for a company that was basically the best possible fit. They were working on a product category that I had helped to define at a previous start up, where I was the chief technical architect.
Once I told the recruiter my current salary, he was no longer interested. He even sounded aghast. Couldn't possibly put me forward for the role.
"In my previous job, I deliberately took a below-market rate to work in the public sector, as a form of service to my community. I don't consider that salary relevant for this discussion."
End of story. I'm fortunate to be in a place where broader salary statistics are available, so from there I simply redirected the conversation to "here's what I'm seeing as the range of market rates here, and why I think I deserve to be on the high end of that", and that was fine.
Remember: in this industry, your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is...just walk away, and answer the next recruiter who's begging for your time. If they can't consider putting you forward because of an arbitrary number from a non-comparable position, well, that's their problem and their loss.
They know that the typical case is that salary maybe increases by 10% (number pulled from thin air here) and calculate if the effort is worth it for themselves.
No, it doesn't, and it would matter less if employers had to print legally binding starting salary ranges for jobs (they can't pay you less than the range, and the top must not be less than their top earner in the job).
This isn’t a universal problem even in the U.K. but just an illustration of how the GPs point isn’t as inaccurate as you claim.
An option is to go with something along the lines "I have a number in mind that would satisfy, but as I'm sure you have looked at the market rates I trust you'll make a great offer if in the end you are interested"
I'm curious what you mean by this?
Any contract terms to the contrary are invalid, and actions taken against you for sharing are illegal, and UK employment tribunals take a very dim view of employer misbehaviour.
It depends on where you're based, but I doubt that it's actually illegal in most countries. I know that I'm legally allow to tell people how much I make. It is kinda interesting when your open about your own salary, but your coworkers aren't. Apparently I made less that other in the same position at my previous job, I was just never told by how much.
I'm reminded of Lincoln's "I can make a new general in three minutes": if you need to staff a hierarchy, and you have a bunch of young men to do it with (+), you take the ones that look like they have initiative and stick titles on them and let the results shake out.
I was also trying to remember which famous classical composer died young, and the answer turns out to be "most of them": https://www.classical-music.com/composers/composers-who-died...
(+) the industry has always been pretty terrible at hiring and promoting women, and the way we handle recognition is part of that
By highschool, you have as large of a gap in boys and girls enrolling in computer science AP classes and extracurriculars as it's going to get by adulthood. Additionally, in wealthier countries, with more gender equality, less women choose computer science degrees.
So no, it's not the fault of the industry. Man and women just have different interests for complicated reasons. You can verify it with your own two eyes - in any big corporation, (and in many smaller companies), there is a big drive to hire women, there are events exclusively for women, career groups, opportunities exclusively for women.
I wonder if, in a parallel universe, HR departments of schools are beating themselves up for not hiring enough men, college admissions departments are asking themselves if they're failing the boys of the current generation, or hospitals thinking if they should have a more inclusive culture in nursing.
Somehow I doubt it.
Haven't heard much of 'staff' and principle seems reserved for Fortune N types.
If you have 10 years of weak coding experience and have managed to finish a PhD, you'd probably start at least at a mid level, not junior, and quickly get up from that.
That's a "team lead" which is a particular skill of its own - I'm definitely a senior (age, experience, skills, breadth of knowledge, etc.) but absolutely not a "team lead" (or any kind of management) because that is a skill that eludes my brain.
The majority of software engineers don't dedicate themselves solely to practice and improvement of their skills so can't compete with somebody that does
Others will have a few years of experience and a "senior" title but may never obtain those traits.
The problem is those areas are often conflated under a single "senior" title at companies. But you definitely know who's going and who's staying when the layoffs come.
I mean they aren't wrong, after all a Fresh Grad gets $200K Total Comp from FANNG. That is nearly double ( adjusting for exchange rate ) the "Senior" software engineering roles in the blog post.
I would assume the title is based on merit and ability, not X number of years regardless of how good or not they are.
Property prices in London are distorted by how much is owned by the top 1% or 0.1%, such as the Duke of Westminster who owns 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia.
These statistics are used to pit workers against each other and enforce crabs in the bucket mentality that works in favour of big corporation who then can keep wages low.
Even if you are in 1% you are still far from being "rich".
The workers are really screwed in the UK and then you have tax thresholds not adjusted for inflation for over a decade, so it's getting worse.
The OFSTED maximum children per childminder ratio is six, so looking after three kids necessarily takes half a person's salary before overheads. This is often forgotten in the childcare costs discussion by all political sides.
Specially because many of the jobs require you to be based in London.
You can't fix the problem of things being insanely expensive by increasing wages. That just makes prices go up.
House prices have near enough doubled in the UK over the last 10 years. Average house price at the start of 2020 was 240k, now it's bordering 300k. Do you honestly think that wages have seen growth even close to that?
Every time there's a major price increase you can point to a congruent increase in the amount of money available to buy houses. I don't think it's a coincidence.
I don't think it's fair paying a larger proportion of your income just cause you make more.
But what's worse are brackets such as the ones in the UK. Up to ~50k you pay 20%, but anything above that will be taxed at a 40% rate, which is, plain and simple, theft.
90k seems low compared to American salaries, but if the employer has to pay 50k in UK taxes to hire you, well, that (partially) explains it.
> £90k seems low compared to American salaries
It is. But you do get unlimited health-care for you and your dependents. Also note until recently it was worth $115k-ish USD and now it's worth $99k-ish.
Finally note that his £90k is actually £110k with stock, which is a strong London developer salary outside of banking.
Healthcare in the UK is not a solved problem at all - long waiting times and lots of stuff that should be covered in theory but in practice can't be accessed by many people (mental health, dental treatments). I'm paying a lot in taxes and NI, I have private health insurance through my employer and in many cases I still need to pay out of pocket for treatments.
People in the US often criticize the wait times in the UK or Canada like it's better here, but it's often really, really not.
Some of my conservative friends have voiced that we need to radically change our healthcare but some still insist on their "freedoms".
It is a postcode lottery and if you have a more complex problem than a cold, then you still rather want to go private, effectively paying twice.
Many treatments also are only available private - like for chronic pain - forget about getting medical cannabis on NHS.
A salaried tech job in the US would also include private health insurance for you and your dependents
https://listentotaxman.com/?year=2022&taxregion=uk&age=0&tim...
Edit: Also we brits /know/ our salaries are low compared to the US. Also the majority of us get very confused when someone claims that they’re on £200k plus bonuses as a devops in London and we’re left utterly confused as those salaries are like from another planet for us
I'm in the US and glancing at my pay slip, it looks like these taxes come out of my gross salary. It really looks like I'm paying them and not my employer
What's going on is a combination of social services using taxes and the US being one of few places putting a huge value on software devs. The US is an outlier, not the other way around.
Though we do get unlimited free healthcare and a statutory minimum of 28 days paid leave, and up to 28 weeks paid sick leave. Not quite swings and roundabouts - I'd like a higher salary, but there are some benefits to not living in the US.
I had a peer who was doing the same work as me early in my career and I found out they were paid 2x less, so I helped coach them to ask for a market adjustment and they easily got it. Not only was it demoralizing for them hearing how much I was paid when we shared, but seeing how happy they were after they got what they asked for is something I’ll never forget.
What ruins it for everyone is when people go to LinkedIn to be “radically transparent”(aka brag online) about their 500k USD total comp package in SV. Not only is it fairly rare, you also have to gamify your career to get there.
It was noted that this wasn't a counter offer, it was a "your salary is being updated anyway for competitiveness", but I'd misinterpreted the exact wording, as it sounded like a counter at the time.
For this to be true the author's salary would need to have increased regardless of whether they left. That would mean, if they chose to go, they'd earn a bit more during their notice period[1]. If the author's salary didn't increase during their notice period, or if the role didn't have the subsequent higher salary when it was advertised to find a replacement, then it was an offer designed to counter the author leaving, and I think it's very dubious to call that anything other than a counter-offer.
[1] In the UK we to have 1, 3 or 6 month notice periods depending on seniority. None of this "2 weeks and I'm gone!" efficiency like the USA. Very high level (eg c-suite) roles sometimes have even more.
Notice periods can also by asymmetrical - the employer can let go of the worker without notice period, but worker if they want to quit need to give 2-8+ weeks.
Wut? In Denmark we have a law specifically stating that not only are employees free to talk about their salary, it is also particularly illegal to fire them for doing so. A contractual clause disallowing this would in itself be illegal.
His history should be a good kick up for the butt for those staying at One company for a while (me included!)
Of course with a bajillion worth of stock options to go with it.
For comparison, i'm actually paid 25k€ with 2 year of experience (Junior software developper), and a really good salary in this field in France is something around 48k€
Last point, the minimum salary in France is 1.5k€ per month, around 18k€
I believe it widely change depending on the country.
US companies have a smaller hiring pool and more competiveness.
US companies in Europe exploit workers from all around the world at the lowest price they can and call it "market salary" and "that's how things are".
Then they'll rave about fighting inequality and "the wage gap" but no one will address that in the US you have double the salaries for usually less taxes.
And no, what is done with those taxes is generally not good enough nor "way better than in the US" to justify the travesty in terms of high taxes.
Housing crisis' abound and landlord classes and politicians are one, protecting their own interests.
I have quite a similar journey working in England, so it looks typical.
and a new grad at non tech / non banking makes ??
When talking about money, it's not just money that matters. Social rules and emotions are in there too.
https://4programmers.net/Forum/Kariera/233131-ile_zarabiacie
Arond 3600posts
Does anyone know what this damage was? I didn't read the original post, but I thought it'd at least be alluded to somewhere on this page. All I could see was that someone suggested checking the legality of disclosing their salary, but that turned out OK in the end.
Comparing London vs SV on other aspects: you get great health insurance at these companies, better than NHS; housing prices are the same level of crazy; SV tech co's will give you at least 3 weeks of vacation + 10 holidays; SV has far worse dating scene but SF is not bad; taxes should be comparable;
[1] strictly in a monetary sense. Please stay in London if you have an awesome social network there or love English culture or prefer English weather or have trouble getting a US visa.
[2] Source: I am hiring L5s and I have comp data for the US.
I bet if his pay was closer to the UK minimum wage he wouldn't be publishing any salary history.
PS: And always be very careful with individual anecdotes! There were whistles blown - from multiple sources - about extreme abuse at a famous science institute in Germany [1], and the single review on Glassdoor about it at the time was one guy singing it praises.
[1] https://www-sueddeutsche-de.translate.goog/wissen/belaestigu...
People get an idea of what's possible. If you're making £50k and you see an anecdotal report of a £90k salary in the same market, that tells you something about the progress that you can make. Comparing yourself to an average isn't always helpful.
> Is Glassdoor skewed/misleading?
For a well known company that I worked for the Glassdoor average was lower than the company's actual graduate salaries.
He might be but it doesn't mean that everyone doing it would be - I'm contemplating publishing mine (assuming I can remember that far back) and trust me, there's no bragging rights there at all.