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.
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.
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.
Anyways, median income in the US is near $50k/yr (around $1k/week: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf)
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.
I mean, fair point, my comment was US-centric. But developers in the US should advocate for much more than that!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
Runn pays the same regardless of location (with exchange rates locked in yearly, and only ever adjusted upwards)
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?
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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).
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.
Levels.fyi has some salary data too I think, and there's more and more being shared in Indeed and LinkedIn.