Salary Transparency
xeiaso.net
xeiaso.net
Equifax selling your data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753
Here you can see the salary portion of compensation for H1B workers: https://h1bdata.info/
The less salary information we have, the more our ignorance can be abused.
- no security - no competition - no privacy - no recourse - unsubscribable spam - terrible phone processes force having an online account… which has no security
And the other credit bureaus are just as bad (┛ಠ_ಠ)┛彡┻━┻
Strong agree! I do this too: https://jefftk.com/money
* When I came back to Google my stock grant vested evenly over four years, creating a 'cliff' in year five. They don't do this anymore, I think because people tend to leave.
* My 2021 comp included several past years of stock grants, and the company's stock had been growing much faster than the market.
* The market overall is down since 2021.
I think I would have made about $470k in 2022 if I'd stayed the whole year.
2023 would have been higher, because it would have been my first year getting the full L6 comp.
(And I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I definitely wouldn't consider $400k "measly" -- even after donating 50% I had much more to live on than most Americans, let alone most people globally)
Here in NZ $140,000NZD would be a good wage for a software developer. That is about $80,000USD. $400k US is about $700,600NZD. That is a massive amount of money for one years work.
Edit: My sarcasm meter is broken. In reading other comments I seem to have missed the joke. Sorry.
Lots of places in the US are as far from those numbers as NZ. Google numbers should not be an reference point to almost anyone, anywhere or they're likely to be disappointed.
The median income for a dev in the US is 100k. That's going to skew down due to lots of juniors but it also includes everyone making several hundred thousand dollars a year. I am taking a pay cut down to 160 for better WLB on a product I have used for years as a customer and really care about, and I think if you ignore the outliers I am very well compensated at 12 YOE and existing domain knowledge.
Note: This is a very recent thing since the start of 2022. Salary guides from even 2020 probably show $30k-$50k less.
Pretty incredible to see how tight the market is right now.
Do they at least have some kind of redeeming character? Or is it literally at the point where being able to write some kind of code is sufficient?
(Am 1yr junior in Melbourne that should probably be looking around, it sounds like..)
1. We have to use recruiters to find candidates, we barely get any hits on our job ad, even though we are a pretty innovative company with a modern tech stack and pay quite well. The recruiters field us the most woeful candidates, but at least it's someone rather than no one. The pool for qualified senior engineers is low, so we're all competing for a shrinking pool of candidates relative to the jobs on offer.
2. Hiring for fit is important to me, so it's not so much that they aren't stellar in their interview technically, but the fact that people don't realistically state what their strengths and weaknesses are, and sometimes outright lie to you, means that I don't want to work with them. Humility is the bedrock of real growth, how can you really grow if you're lying to people around you about how competent you are? I've hired weaker candidates technically purely because they had an on honest approach to their abilities, and demonstrated a keeness for learning.
If you're at the junior level, my advice is to job hop as mad as possible until you have a few years/companies under your belt. Get a breadth of experiences at a few different places, it will help you contextualise everything you learn/don't know Once you hit 5-10 years experience, that's the time to start slowing down and really honing in on your experience and stay at places for longer. Completing projects end to end, and crucially, learning how to plan, estimate and deal with change over time.
This is in response to the ex Google employee not the author of the article.
(Also fine with they/them FWIW: https://www.jefftk.com/p/they-is-ok-by-me)
And the SDE isn't the only person making the money come in, it's just (usually) very easy to draw a line between new products and revenue, or code changes and lower infra costs. There are a lot of other people - hundreds - contributing to that $60MM but everyone here likes to pretend if the SDE isn't getting 98% of it they're getting screwed by The Suits.
I never understood why people thought there was a giant leap in value between employee #1 and a founder, in terms of value-add. (And if someone can explain it to me, I would be appreciative. I understand how it makes a difference when getting seed money, but not after that.)
Meanwhile, sometimes it is dependent on lots of people. Sometimes it isn't. A programmer is the only person who has the possibility to rewrite some code and make a process take 1% the same amount of time.
Depending on the industry, this can be a 99% reduction in cost, a 1% reduction or a massive, massive increase in revenue (HFT).
I'm very lucky to be in this position, though!
I don't know how you rose above the greed, but you remain a constant source of inspiration in the hope that someday I might.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Still, one single case 15 years ago doesn't prove the whole industry is permanently tainted.
It is a lot harder to lowball folks if they have to be upfront about what they are paying.
I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software engineer and I especially can't understand why someone would quit such a job. That is life-changing money. It's like winning the lottery.
Between real estate, and the equities market, a few million dollars can support your lifestyle indefinitely. But also factor in that this group of people can also be limited partners in Private Equity and Hedge Funds forever and get tiny pieces of a couple big bets (and I would seriously ignore articles that say the S&P beats them. YMMV, good luck!)
Yes, and it seems they used it to change their life.
Imagine how much money can be saved by shaving 5 percent off an annual AWS bill of 10 million dollars. (dont forget to factor in present value of future year's savings!) Now imagine a company like Google that spends way more than 10mil on infra. And even if your infra is cheap, virtually every tech giant has shown that shaving 100ms off a request is a massive boost to customer engagement metrics, so maybe it _shouldn't_ be that cheap. And product teams are just as valuable, if not more so.
That explains the demand. On the supply side, people who can actually do the work are hard to find. There's a massive gulf between having a degree in CS and actually making good on improving complex software. I've watched like three teams fail to deliver on a GSLB[1] optimization tool. Two of the three iterations didn't recognize this as NP complete (bin-packing, essentially) and the third is learning the hard way that there's calculating an optimal response is only part of the problem -- you also have to change state without inducing outages on the receiving end, and a naive SAT solver won't produce that. Beyond that, bay area is expensive to live in, and is high tax. $634k becomes more like $300k, in a city where you might spend $5k a month in rent. So there's definitely a _floor_ to salaries.
Also: once all this is accounted for, retaining talent with equity grants has a side effect of accidentally pushing wages above target. Some places like Amazon seem to explicitly take this into account when issuing refreshers, others not so much. Which means to hire someone away from Google is really hard. But really easy to recruit from Meta at the moment, as their stock has fallen 60 percent so income has fallen as well. Beware of the double edged sword.
[1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/global-serv...
I've been in a startup where the product was so cool that we'd get people working for nothing but options because they were too burned out by $MEGACORP developer culture. The money developers were leaving was so ridiculous I figure we could have charged people to work for us and we'd still have gotten more applications than we knew what to do with.
disclaimer, i guess: i work at a sister project of the NAO
The real question is - why are they so high? There are literally tens/hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates that Google rejects in their hiring process. This makes the remaining candidate pool small enough that they have to offer half a mill to get them. If Google's hiring wasn't so restrictive, they could pay much less. However, since they're basically printing money, there's no incentive to go there yet.
Google's internal culture sounds awful to me*. Tons of kool-aid chugging, shadowy political battles, people obsessed with tech for the sake of tech... plus they don't generally interview for a specific position, instead you interview for Google at large and then have to find a team that wants you once you pass the bar.
Passing the bar is also obnoxious. Maybe there are a lot of transcendent super-geniuses out there who can do it without studying, but IMO the Google bar is tuned to baseline-assume that you can crank out a Leetcode Hard problem in a few minutes, then they throw extra twists in on top of that.
So you have to spend months of your precious free time cranking away at coding practice just to get an offer, and then hope that you can find a job you like once you're in. OR you can go to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Uber, etc and make just as much money.
* I can appreciate how it'd appeal to a lot of people though. One man's "Kool-aid chugging" is another's "Pursuit of social justice", one man's boondoggle is another's cool tech, one man's "shadowy political battles" are another's "Engineer-first Meritocracy"
Well, sure it is. The information asymmetry/individual motivation that you speak of doesn't make things somehow magically different, it merely helps determine, along with a myriad of other factors, the values for supply and demand.
> The real question is why are Google’s salaries so low?
Because that is where supply and demand meet, just as illustrated on the your econ 101 supply/demand curve. Quite simply, they don't have to pay more because supply is sufficient at that price to satisfy the demand.
> If he would donate $400k/year to the cause
I used to do that: https://jefftk.com/donations
I don't actually think it would be better altruistically: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...
If the engineer earns you or saves you 1.2 million why on earth wouldn't you be prepared to pay 600k for them?
But trying to keep a larger share means you lose out on all of it, as you will get outbid.
If they can save other companies 1.2 million as well (which they will because few companies are so unique) then their price will naturally creep up towards that value as others will be willing to pay more because it's a good deal.
Google receives a huge number of applications from unqualified people. They take the very few that are Google-level.
If you're too good, they will feel threatened and not hire you. It's all politics inside these megacorps. Engineers will never allow real talent to be hired on the same team as them... Why would they compromise their position within the company hierarchy?
They'd rather only hire moderate talent; just smart enough to get the job done but dumb enough to not get in the way of your next promotion.
For example, in 2015 I was able to buy a house that would have cost ~5x as much in a comparable location (25min commute to work, 10min from a subway station) in the Bay.
Sure, you need some baseline level of smarts, but it isn't some obscene 1/1000 genius. I'd be willing to bet that at least a quarter of all programmers are smart enough to work at FAANG and make 300-600k.
Interview/Leetcode problems are a lot like mystery novels or sudoku puzzles. Once you know the basic building blocks (data structures, algorithms, sneaky tricks) they're hard but not THAT hard.
Google's a bit of a different beast from the rest of the FAANG companies. They take it as a baseline assumption that you can easily crank through a super hard coding question, and throw a wrench into it while you're working on it. IMO it's still doable to pass the bar though.
After a couple of years in big tech and exposure to the tricks of the trade, you too will be able to do stuff that blows people's minds. Such as quit to take a 75% pay cut for a job that's personally meaningful
the data out there is so bad!
Even Levels.fyi takes both nominal offers as well as actual outcomes like W-2's, which can be wildly different in a volatile market. So nobody really knows anything.
(Another thing I'd love to see more people being transparent about!)
Every time I've seen people find out what others make there is a group that always first assumes they are getting hosed and are jealous. Even for numbers as small as .5% difference.
Personally, I'm not a jealous person so I don't understand the group I mentioned. But, the emotions/reactions I've seen are always in the back of my head when thinking about opening salaries.
In general how much I care about feedback is weighted by some combination of how much I care about the person giving me the feedback and how important it seems. When someone on HN or elsewhere gives me feedback the former is low, so I'm mostly thinking about the latter. If the feedback is "you're wrong to be working on detecting novel pandemics because of detailed reasons XYZ" I'll take that quite seriously, but if it's just "you're a bad person for trying to earn a lot of money", especially without any sort of argument, I just ignore it.
Buffer leads the way (https://buffer.com/salaries) and at my startup we have transparent salaries too (https://www.runn.io/careers)
I wish more tech founders would do the right thing - rather than trying to hide reality will only ends up unfairly hurting under represented groups and those who aren’t strong negotiators.
These are two common scenarios I see:
- Two employees at the same level on the same team. One is paid $X higher than the other. Employee one asks for raise based on the fact they do the same job as employee two
- New hire is paid $X more than member of team who has been there receiving meager raises yearly. They can point to the new hire and request $Y more due to their experience
That said, this is conjecture and not backed by anything. Are there published works on salary transparency = lower pay for employees?
However, it doesn't have to. We are still small with our experiment, but we pay 95% percentile in our market, plus provide additional benefits well above the norm.
We have no issues hiring and retaining high performing staff because we pay as much or more than they would get elsewhere in the local market.
There is a 3rd scenario that I've occasionally seen: Two employees with the same title on the same team. Employee One is unhappy because they are paid 10% less than Employee Two, despite same experience and title. Employee Two ALSO unhappy because in practice they do 50% more work than Employee One for 10% more pay.
I still don't see the parent's connection of transparency to lower pay, but there is a rich scientific literature on the concept of "Comparison is the thief of joy" -- I hypothesize that turnover rates might positively correlate with transparency because they could promote intra-team competitive feelings.
The exception would be if there were a rigid structure that you know going in, similar to how e.g. government pay scales work. Since you know going in that the only input is seniority, you won't care that exceptional work is not rewarded because that was made clear from the get-go, and if that would have bothered you you wouldn't have accepted the offer in the first place.
The natural counterargument to that is that if the only input to compensation is seniority, then there is reduced incentivization for performing "above and beyond", possibly cultivating a culture of mediocrity.
It also would promote pay equity, however, since e.g. employees' implicit biases and social conditioning would not come into play under subjective evaluations.
I mean, fair point, my comment was US-centric. But developers in the US should advocate for much more than that!
Let me say that again, this country is in 35th place out of 193 by GDP per capita and this is how much people make here.
California's GDP will exceed Germany's soon. With less than half of the population. That'll make it the 4th largest economy in the world.
Anyways, median income in the US is near $50k/yr (around $1k/week: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf)
Need to remove your US bias. However - the whole point of transparent is that everyone knows.
If the salary is low for you, you will never apply. But you know exactly what you’ll be paid, and know it’s the same as everyone else doing the same role/level.
That is the benefit to being transparent - it doesn’t have to be the highest paid, it’s simply fair. equal and transparent.
I would say it is eyepopping for US techies who haven't made it into the "big leagues", but there are probably a million software devs in the US making that.
For example, I might be able to be an executive assistant, but I imagine the quality of life of an executive assistant is worse than what I do now, so I would want even more money to be an executive assistant.
It correlates big time. It's just that there are exceptions to the rule.
Runn pays the same regardless of location (with exchange rates locked in yearly, and only ever adjusted upwards)
Most people don't even know their salary is being reported by their company to a third party, which then packages and sells that data.
It is still legal to rescind or modify an offer after you discover salary history in most states with a "pay history" ban in place.
To answer your question the way I wish to: thanks to Equifax's TWN, candidate resumes, reference checks, background checks etc - the candidate is already showing all their cards.
Candidates often pad their resumes with skills they don't have. They'll pad their salary history. They'll hide things like stretches in jail. They'll list degrees they don't have. All to get a higher salary. The employer often doesn't realize for months that the employee wasn't as represented, and way overpaid.
It goes both ways.
I know you likely don't believe me, but I've been employer and employee, at min wage and professional wages. If you ever become an employer, you'll find out real fast how little power you have over employees. Anecdotally, I know employees with million dollar salaries. Is it credible that if corporations really had all this power, they'd be paid that much?
A significant fraction, even those with masters degrees, even those who claim to be accountants, are flummoxed by it.
There's a lot of resume inflation going on.
Yeah, it does. Accountants work with percentages all the time. And if they can't do literally trivial arithmetic, they aren't fit to be accountants.
He'd give them an hour.
So let's see. What's 10% of $20,000? Then double it? (There are many other shortcuts to the answer.)
As a verbal problem to answer in ten seconds? I'm more sympathetic with people freezing even if I certainly expect I'd be able to do it absent extreme pressure.
I find it interesting the different approaches that people take. They've ranged from "I know 2^32 is a little over 4B, so 2^30 is a little over 1B", "I know max signed 32-bit int is a little over 2B, so...", "2^10 is a little over 1K, so 2^30 is a little over 1B", to "that's literally impossible and there's no way I could give you so much as an indication as to whether it's positive or negative, even or odd; I'm not even sure it's an integer..."
Why would a company pay someone less because they've been in jail?
Funny enough, that comes back on a background check...if it was within 7-10yrs depending on source, if you want to pay for it, iirc. JP Morgan will go back as far as they can to seek out any sort of theft or fraud charge for ANY position. Ostensibly this is about transparency for developers, so alcoholics are pretty common in corporate jobs the higher up you go in salary.
It’s not that I’ll pay less because you were in jail a while, but rather that being in jail likely makes you less competitive skills and experience wise compared to someone who worked straight through.
I'll explain why I disagree with you and downvoted you (since you are making an argument in bad faith).
1. Padding a resume is sometimes necessary to bypass automated systems. If the choice is between slight embellishment and never getting an offer, then I believe it is morally justifiable to pad the resume just enough to conform to requirements. It's really an open secret - recruiters will openly tell you to do this.
Also, to go further on this, job requirements are very often written by less technical people (HR) who will make mistakes in the number of required years in tech, or have ridiculous requirements that would limit the candidate pool to maybe...10 people on this entire planet.
2. Padding the salary history is almost impossible and easily verifiable through pay stubs. I very much doubt this happens often enough at desirable jobs, especially where people's reputation is on the line.
3. They'll hide things like stretches in jail - Again, almost impossible to hide, considering court records are public record. Even you or I could check this and not proceed with offering them a job. If the company doesn't do this diligence - that's on them, they certainly have the resources to do so.
> The employer often doesn't realize for months that the employee wasn't as represented, and way overpaid.
What about cases where the employee ends up being better than expected and brings way more value to the company than the originally agreed upon offer? How quickly is that reconciled? It goes both ways, after all.
> It goes both ways.
While it does go both ways, it's like saying a pedestrian is also causing damage to the car during a collision. The amount of resources a company/corp has is insurmountably higher than any individual could hope to achieve (barring billionaires). This is why we have multitude of protections for employees (that corporations are continuously trying to circumvent)
> Anecdotally, I know employees with million dollar salaries. Is it credible that if corporations really had all this power, they'd be paid that much?
The mere fact that they are able to pay a million dollar salary to a single employee signifies one of the following:
1. The employee is indeed a genius who brings this amount of money in or more, or contributes to the company growth in a way to justify this.
2. The company enjoys something like monopoly presence on the market and can afford to overpay for truly mediocre employees. If this is the case, then it's hard to feel sorry for the company.
> Padding a resume is sometimes necessary to bypass automated systems
You're justifying lying. Not a good start for a relationship with your employer. Would you hire someone you knew was lying on their application?
> recruiters will openly tell you to do this
If they do, you know you're dealing with dishonest recruiters. Is that who you want to do business with?
> who will make mistakes
Just go to another company where you do qualify.
> Padding the salary history is almost impossible
Back before the internet, other people endlessly bragged to me how they got a better offer by padding their salary. When I interviewed for jobs, I'd bring a paystub to show the interviewer that my salary history was honest. They appreciated that. They were aware that such padding was routine.
> If the company doesn't do this diligence
A lot don't do that, especially smaller outfits.
> What about cases where the employee ends up being better than expected and brings way more value to the company than the originally agreed upon offer?
Simple. Document the value you brought to the company, go to the manager and start negotiating. If he won't budge, quit, and interview at the next company, being sure to present your evidence of the value you bring. P.S. if you really did bring the value, the company will be happy to raise your pay in order to keep you.
> The amount of resources a company/corp has
The only power a corp has over you is if you give it to them by being afraid to negotiate and afraid to walk away. They're not going to hire thugs to beat you and shoot your dog.
BTW, just for fun, I've been watching "Power", a miniseries about drug kingpins. I have to laugh at how they negotiate. It's always "do this for me or I'll kill you". Way to inspire loyalty! Or at least the silly Hollywood fantasy way.
While I agree with everything else you said, this strikes me as a poor strategy unless you have some highly assured leverage with which to negotiate your salary (e.g. you have lots of competing job offers, or you know that you're uniquely qualified for a job with few applicants).
that employee's coworkers and team members surely would realize how well the pay matches though. or at least, they could, wherever the employer makes that info public.
my own experience with internally-public compensation at a 70-engineer company: is that there's so much _error_ in setting salaries. i don't think my employer really cared if the salary they pay for equivalent work varies randomly by 20%: to them that's just the cost of doing business and they have enough margin to cover that. but when i see that my teammate, who's putting in literally 20-hr weeks and producing half the output as the rest of the team, is being paid 20% more than me? that's reason to feel that my employer isn't treating me fairly and to leave. that hurts my employer more than the 20% extra they're paying the other guy.
i felt like there was a catch-22 here: in theory erroneous salaries could be more quickly corrected if they were internally public. but it's risky to make salaries public before the employer is reasonably confident that they're accurate.
> that hurts my employer more than the 20% extra they're paying the other guy.
I.e. there's your leverage. Go make your case. No excuses!
i believe the company truly just did not have the resources to expend on getting everyone's salary as accurate as would take to make me happy. it was a flat organization, in such a way that only a handful of people were responsible -- on top of their other duties -- for the determination of salaries for those 70 engineers. i think they are on track to fixing this broadly, but just not in time for me.
Here's how it goes with existing companies:
[Me] Hi, I'd like a raise.
[Co] Nope.
[Me] OK, here are examples of the value I'm providing and how it's increased over time.
[Co] Your current salary accounts for this.
[Me] Other companies offer 20% more and I'm only asking for 10%.
[Co] ...
[Me] OK, I have an offer from the other company. Last chance.
[Co] Well... Bye?
Here's how it goes as a new hire:
[Co] Here is your offer letter with your salary, bonus, and equity. (it's 0.2% more than my current TC)
[Me] <gulp> I think the market rate should be much higher, based on my experience and skills.
[Co] We don't agree.
[Me] Can you be flexible with the equity?
[Co] No.
[Me] Can you offer a signing bonus?
[Co] No.
[Me] Can you be flexible with the base pay?
[Co] LOL No.
[Me] What about hours, time off flexibility, and so on...
[Co] Look, do you want the job or not? There's a line forming behind you, my dude.
I hate that a skill (negotiation) that is unrelated to my actual job has to be one of the primary drivers of my compensation.
> I have an offer from the other company
So take it!
> Can you be flexible with the base pay?
A better way is to make a counter-offer. May I recommend the book "Never Split The Difference" which has a lot of good information about negotiating. Remember your most important power is being able to walk away.
It will be really difficult for all individuals to share their salaries if some of them are on low salaries and fear not being able to scale up if they publish those.
There's also an intrinsic bias in sharing salaries in that the well-paid folks are more likely to share theirs because they feel validated by the value itself.
What is real salary data™ - contrary to the flawed regulations in a few states, which basically allows putting something like 1$ - 100'000$, we require companies to be more specific and have a max range of 30-40k.
Interestingly, the majority (approx. 2/3) of companies are completely fine with publishing this information (if they are forced to) and out of the remaining 1/3, half can be convinced, and the other half is a lost cause (basically, management will not allow it)
[1] Our job boards:
Levels.fyi has some salary data too I think, and there's more and more being shared in Indeed and LinkedIn.
From this person's website, as a recruiter I would get the impression that they are smart but probably volatile/unreliable/???
Seeing that someone who is quite succesful and to me admirable got terminated multiple times was very reassuring there.
Of course, many companies would prefer desperate employees who are afraid to hit the bricks instead. But is that really who you want to be working for, given a choice?
But, the demand is so high compared to apply, it apparently hasn't kept the author from finding work.
Someone quitting within weeks usually has a discussion with HR the first few days and stay there only long enough to hire someone else. That's I think a sign that the person has decent communication and just wont let you down at a random time because they're too pissed to do their job anymore.
In this specific case, looking at the short job spree and the much longer tenure coming afterwards, I would not see it as a "throw the resume in the trash" kind of issue. Perhaps just bad interviewing skill (couldn't properly judge the company) and bad luck.
The worst job I ever had was to be an excel administrator.
They had business critical spread sheets which only ran against certain version of excel and windows. A great way to learn the ins and outs of virtualization two years out of university. A sad day for humanity overall though.
The job was sold as cloud native DevOps.
I am all for salary data to defeat discrimination.
What the OP is doing isn't salary data. It's a blog of their life story.
And it reflects terribly on them.
Do not do what OP has done. Submit your salary data to an anonymized public platform if needs be.
To be honest, it's an employer who found this page during the resume screening process would likely flag your resume as a pattern job hopper, at least in the pre-2017 years. The multiple terminations within the first 90 days would be a red flag to most employers.
So the fact that nobody brought it up is likely survivorship bias: Resume screeners who did find this page probably just quietly declined to proceed with the interview process.
I work with a boatload of extremely talented, top recruiters and, unless searching your name returns crimes, getting fired doesn't matter.
If you're the type of employer to hyperfocus on dumb details like this, then we're all better off not working for you.
The point for the recruiter is to close positions fast. The point for the interviewers is to get out of the interview and back to work. The hiring manager wants to increase the size of their team without having to deal with a fuckup.
But how much is the hiring manager even involved in the interview?
I've been part of interview processes in some companies, and while I would not care about a couple of holes or being fired once or twice, I would definitely care about 9 jobs in 3 years.
It shows either that the person is hard to work with, and in this case I'd rather have someone else, or that the person prefers to jump ship very often, and in this case I'd rather not pay the price of onboarding.
But in 2017, if I actually need someone in because we're a small structure and recruiting errors are costly ? I'll definitely go for a less risky candidate.
9 times in 3 years, it at best means that you're really really bad at judging and picking workplaces.
But from the outside, if out of 9 places all are shitty, the problem might not be the workplaces.
I’m constantly baffled by HN assertions that nothing should matter in an interview.
If 3 early terminations and 9 jobs in 3 years are “dumb details” then I don’t even know what these people would consider relevant when it comes to work history.
Juxtapose this with the “Ask HN” posts from people asking how to deal with incompetent or difficult coworkers, where the response is usually a chorus of “GTFO”.
Like you said, there’s a reason hiring managers focus on these details: It’s because we have to protect the team, and bringing in someone who has a history of causing problems or failing to deliver puts everybody at risk.
> If you're the type of employer to hyperfocus on dumb details like this, then we're all better off not working for you.
I’m sorry, but evaluating candidates like this is the entire point of the interview process.
You’re also massively downplaying what’s going on here: I’m not referring to a single termination a long time ago after working somewhere for a long time, I’m referring to the pattern of firings within the first 3 months.
Firing someone within the first 3 months of a job is extremely rare. Two of these happened with a little more than one month on the job. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked at a company that fired anyone that early for anything other than flagrant workplace violations, which is why it’s a big deal to have one early firing on your resume, let alone 3.
I’m sorry, but these aren’t dumb details. I think you’re forgetting that the hiring process isn’t just about protecting the company, it’s about protecting the team. It’s also the hiring manager’s job to screen for someone who might have interpersonal issues or a failure to deliver results in a workplace environment that would negatively impact the team.
Screening people is fine, but the signal here is incredibly weak -- so weak I wouldn't even look back that far. It's one thing if a person has never held a job for more than three months in ten years. Sure, lots of red flags. But the example here is not remotely noteworthy.
If I was the hiring manager skimming this resume I'd assume they were either in a bad place in life (I've lived in situations which made work incredibly difficult) or were perhaps going through something (illness, addiction (which is an illness)) or perhaps just ended up at a few consecutive shitty gigs, which statistically speaking is incredibly likely: most jobs are shitty. I wouldn't even give this a second thought.
The hiring process is all about gathering signal. Will this person be a good fit? Will they succeed? The things you are focusing on do not indicate in any way those things. If you disagree, then you are deeply misguided and I would run, very quickly, away from anything resembling employment at your company.
Additionally, as someone who has been on the hiring side, unless you're getting let go from multiple positions in a short (fiveish years) time span, I don't care. Most people get fired at some point in their career. It can be for so many reasons that it doesn't mean anything unless it forms a pattern.
The last thing I can say about it is make sure you have a very good explanation of what happened just in case someone does ask. Don't put all the blame on the employer/boss/team. Take some responsibility but make it clear that it was a one off situation that you have learned from and won't be repeating. The fact you understand why you were let go and what you learned from it so that I won't have to fire you for the same thing is a big plus when I'm considering if I want you on my team.
My gut says that most people do in fact leave at least one company in their careers under less-than-ideal circumstances.
My approach is just to be honest: "I was terminated from xxxx. Here's what I did wrong, here's what I would do differently today, and here's how I think they could have handled it to better."
For the second one... I mostly focus on how that experience motivates me to be as transparent as possible with my employer and seek solid metrics to judge my own performance.
I don't know if those events being on my history have negatively impacted me or not. I don't think I've ever been passed over during interviews because of them, but it's entirely possible that I was filtered out before getting to that point.
The bottom line is that I know where my strengths and weaknesses are. I know what value I bring to the table and more importantly I know how to communicate that. I'm not afraid to speak up and acknowledge when I'm wrong, and I do my best to use empathy in dealing with others in similar circumstances.
I've long told the story in interviews about the time I accidentally wiped out a production database, and how I was able to work under pressure to very quickly fix the problem. I say another company has already "paid for that part of my education" - I learned from the experience and am very confident I won't be making that mistake again. Those two terminations? Those were also part of my education. I learned from them, and won't be making those mistakes again either.
You do not specify if it was on-site or remote, that could be a nice addition!
Also, your most recent jobs/salaries are in CAD. Did you move to Canada? Or is it like working for CA company but on the US?
I am physically located in Canada at the moment.
It’s absolutely possible they were all just terrible companies, but…
But publishing it here doesn’t make a difference, presumably the same information is on their CV.
Let me first say I think it's a terrible idea to publish this information publicly. The hiring company holds all the cards already, you don't need to give them additional power by showing yours. Companies understand this very well. But I get this has been done more for ideological reasons rather than practical ones.
Regarding the possibility that all companies were bad, that's actually important information that could point to the candidate's difficulty in evaluating opportunities. If that's an important part of the job which you're hiring for, you absolutely are going to take that into consideration.
I've been in the biz 13 years and only had 4 jobs but I felt varying degrees of "doing the job I wasn't hired to do" by two of them. This actually seems to have almost meme-status from others on the internet talking about their new jobs. Lots of these people stick around these jobs because, "Hey, I have a job!" but that's not for everyone. Some people, like the author of this post, have a bunch of cool personal shit under their belts (check the homepage) and afford to be picky.
The TL;DR here is that job interviews aren't always about an employer trying to impress a potential employee.
I imagine if someone on a very high SWE salary published this, people (family, friends, the public) would treat them differently. I also am curious if there would be safety concerns?
But it doesn't matter. If they didn't list the terminations, would you still be curious? If they lied and said they were laid off, when in reality they slept on the job and stole pens, would it matter?
Ultimately employers still rely on trust via interviews, and possibly reference checks, but most importantly by often having some sort of trial period (a year, six months) or simply being at-will. Isn't working? So long, no hard feelings.
Obviously it helps to weed out bad apples but don't read into it too much. If the person is fired because they performed poorly in a hostile environment, they could still thrive in the right environment. We've all had shitty jobs.
I’m curious specifically because they voluntarily chose to list the terminations on a public website, then left a comment inviting everyone to ask questions.
What kind of discrimination do you refer to here?
* What is the scope of the distribution? Industry, company, friend group?
* What are the social dynamics of their company/industry like?
* Is there a partitioning mechanism that reduces the stress of having a wide range of salaries for the same conceptual job type?
* Coming across as bragging
* Having people who earn less than me be jealous/envious/resentful
* Making it harder for employers to justify my salary because people will be publicly envious about it and cause a stink. This could be anything from coworkers/candidates/random people saying "well why are you paying Knaek $X and not me?" (I have experienced people harassing my employers for lesser reasons) all the way to people seeing my industry as a political outlet for their envy
* It's leaking strategically valuable information, probably more valuable than the info I would get in return (plus no solution to free rider problem)
* It might help less aggressive people negotiate a larger slice of a finite salary budget, which has a negative impact on me
And so on
> It might help less aggressive people negotiate a larger slice of a finite salary budget, which has a negative impact on me
While it might indeed have a negative impact on you, if they deserve a higher salary, I'd personally feel bad for them too. I am fully aware that salary is highly related to negotiation skills (which is why job hobbing is so popular: you can at least always honestly say "my current salary is X, I'll only switch for more" — even if you are bad at negotiating), but that's the thing that's unfair.
So I like to consider those openly sharing their salaries as in service of those who do proper work and none of the shitty stuff you bring up, but simply can't negotiate their salaries properly.
Whether that's worth it is another matter altogether.
And tbh I don't like salary transparency because it usually tightens the range of comp for a position. I've always been on the right side of the curve (getting promoted faster etc) so that would suck for me.
Well yes, that's kind of the point. It's supposed to be a good thing, since the theory is that salary variance is caused by unseemly factors rather than simple skill variance.
The most bizarre one was a very formal review where I was told I needed to stop taking long lunches and be at my desk. I asked where in my contract it said I had to work at a desk rather than a picnic table. They couldn't point it out. In the end they terminated me four weeks before the end of my year long contract and had to pay out 6 weeks of severance.
I'm still deeply confused about the whole thing.
I once had a coworker concoct a story about me and report it to management because I interrupted him during a yoga session in the office gym...
Anyway, the less people like that know about the details of my employment, the better.
Of course this year it’s much less with the market being down.
Not at all, it's culture.
In many places in the world there is no such level of envy and competition between friends and family. Where do you live?
Note that my original comment didn't mention envy. I merely stated that peoples behavior changes in subtle ways around those with more or less means than them.
I find this snippet mildly hilarious. As though it's a realistic risk that someone is going to be building an app or API dependent on this guy's blog post, and then might take legal action.
From external appearances, I'm not too concerned about Xe. They'll be able to find an interesting role if Tailscale fails to pan out.
I wonder what effect this would have if non-tech workers did the same. Going back to Massachusetts (guess where I live), a recent law prohibits employers from asking about your previous salary, presumably so they can't then low ball you based off that.
Hiring people takes a lot of work. You have to recruit and interview a large number of people, interview them until you've settled on the best candidate for the job, get them to accept an offer, and then send polite rejection letters to everyone else.
If the candidate you hire then quits within a few months, you have to start the process all over again. Even worse, you've also lost several months of progress that you were hoping to make on this project with the new hire, as well as another month while you try to re-fill the position. On top of that, you already rejected your 2nd and 3rd choice candidates, who probably have taken other jobs already or are otherwise not interested.
Beyond that, a pattern of short jobs with large gaps in between can be a warning sign of behavioral or personal issues that make the person difficult to work with. This shouldn't be assumed from a few short jobs on a resume, but if someone has 9 different back-to-back jobs of less than 12 months each, the interview process should do a very deep investigation into why those jobs didn't last very long so you can decide if your company will stand a better chance at retaining this employee than the last jobs.
That's a good callout for the positions with very short tenure. If you can tell in <30 days that it's not going to work out, there's a good chance that the company will be able to cut their losses and call back some of the other applicants, short-circuiting the hiring process and saving everyone involved both money and time. It could totally be positioned as considering the employer's interests.
In a busy job market like we've had the last couple of years (and arguably before that in a lot of places) you can get away with having a resume like this and use job hopping to boost your income. But IMO long term this gets harder and harder to explain especially if the trend continues especially outside of junior or non-senior/staff type roles.
Saves time for both parties. OP is obviously still getting hired.
You have been fired 3 times, quit 4 times, demoted once, and twice had contract not renewed. At what point do you conclude that maybe your problem isn't "pay discrimination", but that you've personally had some negative impact in the outcome of your career salaries?
We recently released the anonymization toggle and it allows for your entry to automatically hide details such as the company, level, or exact years of experience until we have enough data points to make it safe to show.
Disclosure: I’m one of the founders of Levels.fyi
With that said, I'm very hesitant to share my compensation or financial information personally. Like many in technology I'm very well compensated but perhaps unlike many I grew up poor and many if not most of my social acquaintances have far less money, then I do.
It's not that my friends and family probably don't know this intellectually, like I'm sure if you asked them, they'd probably tell you that was the case, but I'd imagine if you quizzed them on how much I make per year they'd guess $90k, maybe $100k.
I worry that tying my actual compensation to my name publicly would lead to all sorts of awkward at best and relationship ending at worst interactions.
I've always felt fairly compensated for my work and I can't say I really have a desire to know what my peers make. Isn't there a quote about jealousy being the thief of joy?
With that said, I do think there's tremendous value in aggregated anonymous salary data like Levels provides. I think that it helps identify systemic biases and as a hiring manager frankly helps me calibrate to how the market overall is valuing talent. So again, thank you so much for the tool. I like it a lot better than the way OP shared their information.
EDIT: removed link to the source code with a suggestion to file a PR. I have apparently erred.
EDIT 2: the fix is deployed.
And not trying to get too personal but this may be hinting at why so many of your jobs are incredibly short tenure.
You might get some seemingly strange or flippant reactions to this, and since you wrote it, I figured you might benefit from some insight into why some people might react negatively.
GP pointed out a tiny bug in good faith. Your reply asking them to fix the bug they found in your code comes across (to me, I'm sure not everyone sees it this way!) as a little presumptuous or entitled, I think because there's no expectation in this context that GP was signing up to "do work" (check out the repo, make a change, submit a PR to you) for your project.
A less... feather-ruffling response might have thanked GP for the bug report and maybe also mentioned the repo link in case GP or anyone would like to contribute, vs. straight-up asking GP to do the work.
Maybe someone else can weigh in with more detail. Or disagree vehemently with the vibes I'm trying to illuminate :)
A better response would have been "whoops, fixed! thanks for pointing that out"
I actually looked for about 1s to find a way to make a PR then got distracted by some work :)
I love it. Is that your actual title?
Principal Engineer doesn’t sound nearly as fun as Supreme and Exalted Overlord.
I just used "Senior Software Engineer" on my resume for that role. I got nervous once when I got this total RotoRooter colonoscopy of a background check for an offer I accepted, but it didn't raise any flags.
As a freelancer I might gain something by knowing the going rate of others with the same experience. But I am not sure that me publishing my hourly rate would benefit my relationship with the permanent employees of the place I am working.
- Can help negociate salary as a candidate
- Shows which companies really treat their employees well
- Might reduce discrimination (but only in salaries)
- You can brag about it
Cons:
- Salary is one of the only measurable element about a job, so you could be able to easily compare salaries, but not compare ethics, how relevant the job is to you, if the company is committed to protecting the environment, etc., so it might pile up on the unhealthy pursuit of more money that's already terrible for the environment and many other things
- Salaries depend on many things, skill is very hard to measure, so YMMV
- Salaries depend on company budget, not only on candidate skills
- Beyond a certain point, chasing even more money often indirectly leads to depression, and unethical company practices
- People online are extremely judgemental, if you have a high salary, they will bombard you with questions about your lifestyle and if you donate to charity. Even if you do, they'll continue because your choice of charities is not the same as them. Because you made a little commitment to be transparent, you'll feel that you have to answer because not doing so would not be transparent, and eventually they'll delve into personal stuff that's really unconfortable, and your lack of answer will tell them what they wished to know, and that you might have wanted them not to know
There may be all kinds of biases, but in my experience, when salary transparency is available, it's always in tech, and always top 10/20% salaries. The missing data points will paint unrealistic expectations for tech roles, and reinforce imposter syndrome, IMHO.
So it's fine if you do it, but I won't do the same, and I hope nobody pressures me to do it (peer pressure could happen if a significant portion of people did it).
A lot of companies do a thing I like to call "geopay". In its most cynical view, it subsidizes home prices in a given area, which adds to the employees net worth more than someone from an area where cost of living is low if both own homes. In its most optimistic view, it allows for income equalization in the short-term.
Most companies these days do less "geopay" and more "how much are my direct competitors for talent paying", which is even worse. That said, I don't use these numbers to job hop. Instead, I use them to remind my employer that geopay isn't ethical even if they refuse to listen.
That's very honest of you. I know you didn't ask but taking a job just to work with a microcelebrity seems a bit short-sighted, was it worth it in the end?
I wonder if learning from him/her was your plan, did you learn something?
But for personal? "Never talk about how much money you make, you either make more or less than them. Either way it makes for a very awkward conversation".
Look at what happens to lottery winners, the ones who go public.
Opening that conversation is laudable.
> But for personal? "Never talk about how much money you make, you either make more or less than them. Either way it makes for a very awkward conversation".
It's true, but also in large part cultural. Culture changes, though. We should discuss transparency's merits. What are the potential downsides versus benefits of having a more open salary approach?
I found that for freelancing, having an open-price policy is beneficial. For example, it filters out low-paying clients. And by providing this information to your competition, you also level up the entire field. Competition works better with a certain level of solidarity and fairness within a given field.
Lottery experiences aren't relevant.
Awkward conversations can be useful. Also in this case there's a web page so what is the topic of conversation?
So, you work with Kubernetes?