Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level

But I'm still really not sure what you're trying to argue. My claim is that a X% wage increase will be followed by an <X% increase in inflation and so far all anybody has done is backed up my claim.

This isn't even rocket science. For any product you'll spend say $10 on labor, $15 on marketing, $5 on parts for a total of $30. If your labor costs goes up to say $20 then the total cost is $40 and one could expect the price that the 200% increase in wages lead to a 25% increase in the products price (inflation).

> In the base specification (p. 162), which included only monthly and yearly controls, the cumulative wage-price elasticity from three months before up to three months after a minimum wage hike was estimated at about 0.07, meaning that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is associated with a 0.7 percent increase in FAFH prices. Aaronson, French, and MacDonald (2008) used microlevel restaurant price data for the period 1995–1997, during which two changes to the federal minimum wage were implemented, to generate a wage-price elasticity of, again, about 0.07. 3 Though the empirical literature is somewhat limited outside of these two formative works (see Lemos [2008] for a review), other studies have found similar results in other countries and other cases.

https://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+wage+increase+on+i...

Also doesn't start their work life with tens of thousands of debt at exorbitant rates that can't be discarded, childcare costs less, they get paid time off for leisure and for being sick, don't have to keep a rainy day fund of 6 months in case they get in a crash, get scammed with an ambulance ride and hospital bills, and lose their job over it, etc. etc.

There is so much more than just raw numbers for a salary it's kind of sad how many people use that as the only metric.

A tech worker in SV has healthcare covered and makes so much more than a Norwegian that they can afford SV rents.

> is healthier,

Life expectancy in Norway: 83. Life expectancy of northern Europeans in the US: 83 for men, 85 for women [1]. Wrong to look at life expectancy at a state level since it is based on cultural/ethnic traits and not based on your passport. Same numbers for East Asia - men (85), women (88) which is similar to East Asian countries (eg. Japan @85).

> lives in a society where everyone lives safer and more equally

More equally - not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Depends on the details. Though looking at the number of talented individuals flocking to the US from the supposedly egalitarian countries, it seems US is doing something good.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5026916/

Philosophically, whether an individual's ought to be private is an interesting but distinct question. This proposal has the disadvantage that it makes disclosures about individual people who might not want that disclosure made and which are not being made today.

If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power.

He got within a few thousand dollars. Respect, you’re good at your job. Also to his credit, I still got a hefty pay bump.

When negotiating a price, how much a buyer is able and willing to pay is always relevant for a seller. (And vice versa for a buyer).

One, at my current job, I offered my employer a sliding scale of 25 to 50 euros an hour, depending on what they paid their other median staff and what they thought the kind of work I'd be doing is worth (primarily dev support with a bit of documentation and coding). They chose the higher end of the scale. I greatly appreciated this, because it would be enough to help me go back to school without getting another part time job.

Sliding scales are a tool I've used several times in the past, and I like them because it favors mutual respect and relationship building rather than profit maximization for either side. I'm also grateful for the other professionals who've offered this to me in the past (lawyers and mental health professionals), and wanted to do the same.

Another anecdote: I once got a freelance gig by meeting another developer in a bar. They connected me to their employer, who offered to pay me $195/hr to make some WordPress templates. I thought this was ridiculously overpriced. I immediately negotiated it DOWN, but the person who introduced me was adamant that I not go too low because it might deflate their wages too. I wanted to charge $30 to $50 for this work, which was about market rate at the time. We ended up settling for $90/hr, which was still a ridiculous amount of money for adjusting CSS pixels in WordPress. Their client went bankrupt not long after (couldn't guess why lol).

The whole experience left me feeling so disgusted I went to work for a nonprofit shortly thereafter. I earned 3x less there, worked much harder being a full stack dev and a sys admin on the side, among other things, but I had a phenomenal team and was 10x happier. That was the job that led to the salary transparency initiative, where we discovered the nonprofit was cyclically exploiting young women new to their careers after their master's degrees, burning them out, and replacing them. On average they made less than $40k, sometimes much less, to my $65k as a dev. There was no real upward mobility there, while the CEO made more than half a million dollars and wasn't even in the same state much of the time. It really revealed unfair pay gaps and helped fuel the movement towards unionization. As one of the highest paid self reported staff there, I felt it was part of my community duty to help my colleagues earn what they're worth. All in all that was probably my favorite job ever, and I would've stayed forever if I could've.

After that I went to work for a Fortune 1000 for profit company who was dabbling in renewables. My salary went up by 50%. And through a less formal salary transparency effort (as in casual lunchtime chats), I learned that I made more than people who'd been there longer and were better coders. I just happened to enter at a better time (during covid). This helped them negotiate for better pay later on.

Anyway, this is all just to share different scenarios that can happen when people are forthright about their pay.

For context, I consider myself maybe a slightly above average frontend developer in the USA. I have twenty years of on and off experience, but often more off than on, and no formal CS schooling. Tech was never really my passion (renewables is), but it helps pay the bills. I grew up in a more collectivist society, consider myself a leftist economically, and favor small egalitarian and cooperative workplaces rather than the typical American model of cutthroat capitalism that primarily pits workers against each other, and against management, in favor of unseen anonymous shareholders or owners.

I want to be paid a fair, livable wage in exchange for hard work. I want others around me to be able to do the same. I don't want to be paid an exploitative wage that's either too low or too high. Too low and I'm starving. Too high and my employer is fueling a bubble that skyrockets costs of living and destroys communities. I don't want a gilded society with the ultra rich and the servant classes. Would much prefer a community where people all made enough to get by and could float between careers that they're good at or needed (teachers, vet techs, medical assistants, nonprofits, career civil servants), etc. Salary transparency helps with all of that. The only people secrecy helps are those who are either overpaid for their work or who own labor and want it to race to the bottom. I would much rather we move towards something like government GS pay scales with clearly defined levels and requirements.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

To be clear Im not asking you to dox yourself. You havent proven that you aren’t paranoid though, because we have no idea who those figures belong to.

We go through life making a lot of guesses and utilizing a lot of prior probabilities. Work history is, in my experience, one of the stronger signals available to us.

If an employer initially pays an employee less due to less track record, then finds out the employee is as good as other employees, and does not adjust the pay, then that employer is stupid and will eventually lose the good employees to places with better management. Assuming employees have access to sufficient labor pricing data and can see they can earn more elsewhere.

> But that shouldn't be a >5% difference.

What is the basis for this cutoff?

> Are you going to tell me that despite performing the exact same job and actually performing it objectively "better" that I should have made less money?

You should have made whatever the maximum you could negotiate. If this employer did not want to pay you more, you should switch employers. A good employer would have paid you much more than the others.

>This is the kind of stuff that routinely happens to women.

No, your example is bad management incentivizing bad employees and turning away good employees.

Women being paid less due to being women is illegal discrimination.

Are you saying that "despite performing the exact same job and actually performing it objectively 'better' that they should have made the same money"?

I have software engineers on my team who are literally creating twice as much business [edit to add: value] per year despite being at the same level. (The actual peak to trough ratio is probably higher than that, but it's at least 2x.) Why should they be paid exactly the same or even within 5% of each other?

Personally, throughout my career I've actively tried to earn less than coworkers. It gives me more wiggle room to goof off, makes my similar accomplishments look/feel a bit more impressive, and helps keep me off the chopping block at layoff time. I actively don't want to be paid the same as somebody with the same job title/level as me.

And I can understand why someone who adds more in terms of output and contribution would want to earn more than someone else who adds less.

Of course, there's (what I see as) good pay inequality and bad pay inequality (that which is driven by systemic injustice, discrimination, etc.). If a company thinks standardized salaries are the best way to fight that, that's a choice they're welcome to make.

Paying less due to gender and race is already illegal. The only reason it prevailed is because proving it is difficult if you do not have access to the data.

These things are related certainly, but they cannot be considered interchangeable of you will find yourself over-paying for labor or losing recruiting battles to your talent competitors due to underpaying. Believe me - most organizations would love nothing more than to just pay everyone the same and be able to retain their desired stuff and stay competitive in the market. Compensation activities are a drain.

Organizational leveling criteria and compensation criteria are certainly related, but not interchangeable. Organizational leveling criteria is a reflection of your internal hierarchy of authority, decision making, and accountability. Compensation criteria considers that to a degree, but also accounts for more externalities, individual organizational differences, and at times a reflection of strategic priorities.

Most haven't also realized that just because they work in software, it doesn't mean the world hasn't changed. The times of Microsoft's IPO creating tens of thousands of millionaires and multiple billionaires are gone. Until the next big platform pops up, things are not frozen, but stuck in mud.

The biggest Windows apps have probably been the same since 20 years ago. The biggest MacOS apps, same. The biggest iOS apps probably stabilized at least 5 years ago. Android, same.

Quoting kids: game's gone.

For every rockstar 10x developer who actually is worth much more because they are truly exceptional, there's probably a bunch of others that just happened to have good. career trajectory, or entered during a bubble peak, or have a better diploma, or the right connections, or are skilled negotiators or whatnot.

The hope is that salary transparency will bump their colleagues doing similar work at similar quality up to similar pay. The fear is that it can create workplace resentment, or lower everyone's wages, or invite retaliation, etc.

IMO those are short term growing pains that wouldn't last once transparency is normalized, like in government pay.

But it will be useless because they cannot play with it. Even now they ask you what your pay was.