Buffer might lead the way with respect to transparency but at first glance those salaries don’t look very competitive.
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.
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.