I've noticed that a lot of US organizations love to use "levels", but coming from the outside it's borderline impossible to know what those levels mean. We have IC levels, and I'm sure I'm on some level, but have zero clue as to what the level may be or mean.
In cases like this where you just have payment guidelines for a level 52, you might as well not know. What's level 52? Is that an intern or senior management?
I'm not sure about Microsoft specifically, but at other companies I've worked at (including the federal government) a level number is somewhat standardized across all roles, not just engineering.
So that means an entry level engineer would start at a higher level than a senior secretary, or whatever the case is.
I started off at MSFT over a decade ago and though I haven't worked there in quite a while I'll say that these numbers look very old to me - there's no way Level 59's base salary range is 74-110k today (e.g. about 3 years ago, a new-hire Lvl 59 friend of mine said he was on $115k base and he said he felt he was in the middle)
The publicly disclosed numbers on Levels.fyi are much closer to reality, IMO.
74k is definitely too low. In 2019, 59 was 98k. Usually goes up 1-2% each year. 115k sounds high. Each level technically has a 20% range up and down from the compa mid-point, but most offers are made dead-center. Intern return offers tend to be the juiciest 59s. In some cases college grads returning from their internships make more than those with 15-20 years of experience at 64. It's wild.
Am a manager at Microsoft so I can see where the policy-based midpoints are once regional adjustments are made. The base numbers look low by a rough 20% compared to what a Redmond HQ dev would get paid at the given level number. Bonuses are based on a level-dependent target percentage which you can find if you search for it.
And yeah, the Levels.fyi base pay distributions are closer to the truth.
Sorry, out of interest in staying somewhat anonymous here I’m going to avoid giving any details, but based on your question and criteria I’m inferring from other comments I’d say I probably don’t have what you’re looking for.
Microsoft uses a system of levels to denote seniority. Higher levels come with higher offers, according to the guidelines. Levels also vary by field and location, but generally, "senior" starts at level 63, "principal" starts at level 65, and "partner" starts at level 68, according to insiders.
Not all types of roles go up to level 70, but in engineering, an employee at this level would be considered a "distinguished engineer.'" There's also a level 80 for a "technical fellow," which is typically one of the highest-ranking executives at the company.
At this point is there any disadvantage to legislating that all companies should share a transparency report where they list their levels + avg, min, max, median salaries for each level?
So right now all the companies do share salary data with each other. They typically wash it through a 3rd party so it's not that blatant.
So, a change where the companies also posted their salary data publicly would only additionally inform employees not HR. But yes tech-HR has in the past gotten in trouble over salary fixing.
Exactly the contrary: if all wages are public, that wouldn't be possible, because only one company would have to violate that conspiracy to get all employees at other companies to start applying to them.
There are already companies collecting such information and making them available for their customers (who supposedly provide some collated data set to them in exchange). That's what all the "paying top of market rate" talk in various companies is based on.
So: the potential for collusion already exists, but unless regular folks can get access to the analysts' data sets as well, it's a very one-sided deal.
You don’t even always need a third party. My wife works in HR for the government and part of her job is literally to contact neighboring counties and send them requests for their salaries for various positions and levels while filling out salary requests from other counties.
Of course, being government, it’s all public information anyway so collaborating in this way is seen more of a performance increase vs manually accessing each counties salary information but it’s the same premise.
No, because they need to attract employees and employees would generally not be attracted to uncompetitively low compensation packages.
As a result, companies absolutely track how much employees of a type and level get paid elsewhere, so that they know where to aim compensation packages competitively.
Not sure if the parent's concern is valid but I think the argument would be that companies can conspire to all suppress wages so they don't have to compete on comp. That would be hard to do now because they can't "officially" conspire in this way (eg sign a binding contract with each other) because that would be illegal. Without an enforcement mechanism it is too easy for any one company to defect from the "gentleman's agreement" and offer higher wages. If all salary information was public though, then as soon as one company defected and offered one high-value employee a higher salary everyone else would immediately know it and start competing on salary again. So that makes the informal agreement more stable and leads to lower wages.
You see this all the time when the minimum wage is increased by say 10% then there is a general inflation of 1%. General inflation lags wage increases although at a reduced effect.
0.4% you say but that paper says 0.7%. However, lets be real 10% to 1% vs 10% to 0.7% still gets the same message across.
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.
I don’t particularly have a claim other than you can’t use minimum wage causes inflation as an axiom because it is theoretically contentious and doesn’t hold very strongly empirically.
The claim that it lags behind the wage change is empirically also not found.
> The claim that it lags behind the wage change is empirically also not found.
That's within the quote on the comment that you are responding to ... "cumulative wage-price elasticity from three months before up to three months after a minimum wage hike was estimated at about 0.07".
They found that increasing the minimum wage lead was followed by a 0.7% increase in prices 3 months later. 3 months later is "lagging".
Maybe you should use ChatGPT to write your comments, since the logic connection between them are so weak. Now it's about minimum wage? Perhaps revisit what this thread is about and the comment you replied to? Do you even know what minimum wage is?
I won't reply someone who just spew random words any further, sorry.
If it is legislated that everyone has to do it, then people looking to sell their labor can do so with perfect knowledge of where the market is at, reducing the negotiating strength of these shitty companies.
The raw numbers are different, I’m guessing (I haven’t looked). A tech worker in Norway also pays less for healthcare and housing, is healthier, spends less time in traffic and lives in a society where everyone lives safer and more equally, and has more power to walk away from a shit job than someone in the US. It’s a system that values autonomy for the most people over the power of a tiny sector of the economy to rake in maximum dollars, and wage transparency is just a small feature of that system.
But yeah if it doesn’t bring you personally more money I guess it’s not even worth thinking about
> A tech worker in Norway also pays less for healthcare and housing
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.
you are the one that brought up negotiating power in the context of pay transparency. In fact it is the one thing only consequence you listed in the original post. It’s unfair of you to throw back in their face that they addressed the one and only factor you listed.
It is undeniable that a tech worker in Norway negotiates for a wage with better information than the same worker in a country without income transparency.
To claim that the effects of this transparency should be measured by a simple comparison of raw average salaries between the two countries is to use a metric that includes all of the confounding variables I mentioned and more. I am simply explaining why it is a poor metric, and explaining that the value of state-mandated transparency is in personal autonomy, not in “will it magically elevate my individual salary potential in one country above what it would be in all other countries”.
> A tech worker in Norway also pays less for healthcare and housing,
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.
People in general don't like to have the hard conversations where they tell Bob that Sue is better than him and she makes more money. It's easier to just normalize transparent salaries lower. If everyone is transparent it will change over time though.
> Look, Bob. Sue has made X super valuable contributions in the last quarter, and she has done A and B, and she's the expert on that special topic. That's why she's paid 3% more than you, I hope you understand. If you want to get closer to her pay salary, look into improving yourself on XY, doing more AB work, etc.
Giving concrete reasons and targets to achieve is actually beneficial, and it can help motivate people. If there are no concrete reasons, well, then it's just pay discrimination for nothing more than gut feeling which is shitty, and Bob is right to feel bad about it.
I worked for several hedge funds with transparent comp that have been some of the most lucrative of my career. If we are just throwing around anecdotes.
I’m opposed to disclosure laws that would be prone to expose the income of individual people.
If Alice is the only SWEPR5 at a company, that proposal publishes her salary. If Bob is clearly the best SWEPR4, Cathy the middle, and Dave just barely got promoted to that level, their salaries are also individually published.
I don’t object to good faith ranges being required in job listings, but I oppose anything that would tend to publish an individual’s data that they should be able to keep private.
(That’s before even getting to the fact that salary is nowhere near the full compensation picture.)
I think the question is more why should an individual's salary be private?
Personally, I think money is power, and I want to know about power disparities to better protect myself. But I understand there are factors to consider.
Upthread proposer asked "is there any disadvantage[?]" I listed one (or two, if you count "this won't accomplish much because of the equity comp portion").
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 an individual salary ought to be secret, why does the US insist on advertising the salary of so many people (not even just the salary range either - but the individual name = $xxxxxx)
If a salary shouldn't be secret, why does the US insist on allowing some people to keep their salary secret?
Advertising the salary of people paid by the government as a means of accountability to the taxpayers? No problem. If you don't like it, don't live on the taxpayers' payroll.
Advertising the salary of sports figures as a means of enforcing competition-protecting salary caps? No problem.
Advertising the salary of people for which there is no current requirement, for which there is a current practice of non-disclosure, and for which there is no taxpayer accountability benefit? I think that merits discussion rather than a advance conclusion of "a few of us think it's a good idea, so get bent".
> If an individual salary ought to be secret, why does the US insist on advertising the salary of so many people (not even just the salary range either - but the individual name = $xxxxxx)
Because that information has benefits for labor as a whole. Conversely, "I want my salary to be a secret" isn't a good reason to keep it private and I don't see any good reason why it nerds to be private. Nobody is asking for what you jack off to, because it isn't relevant for salary negotiations and it's actually something that's reasonably expected to remain private. Nobody is asking about the rest of your life. Why are you so defensive?
I am not “defensive”. I am merely pointing out that you don’t have any right to know any particular details about me, including my salary, no matter how “useful” you consider it to be.
And you don't have the right to absolute privacy and secrecy just because it's more convenient to you, especially when they're extraneous things like your salary and not your private life. Ridiculous.
No. With full public information, bad employees benefit from being able to ask for more, good employees just flee elsewhere. Because it’s impossible to reason someone on their skills.
Management’s job is to get rid of bad employees. Good employees do not have unlimited places to “flee” to. And full information is when markets allocate resources most efficiently.
What does this mean? Why does natural even matter? Humans changed a lot of things that are “natural” to better their lives.
>It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them.
Temporarily embarassed billionaires. Aka you like to think you are the 1% who can out negotiate an employer because you are so in demand. 99% of people will be at a disadvantage no matter what.
No he’s right. It used to be in my state that prospective employers could ask for salary history with proof. If you are leaving a place because of bad pay or just that you want to make more money the discussion was always tethered around your previous pay.
A few years ago my state made it illegal to ask for that information, and can now only ask our salary expectations. It’s now tethered around what you want to make.
> If you are leaving a place because of bad pay or just that you want to make more money the discussion was always tethered around your previous pay.
The employer wanted you to think that, but it was actually tethered around your other job offers and your willingness to say no.
If you have access to information for what other employers are paying, and are potential other options for your employment, the employer will know you know this.
More importantly, you will not have to waste your valuable time figuring out what other employers are paying, so you have to do less work to figure out the market.
The employer most likely already knows the market, that is part of their daily duties, and know that applicants have to do a lot of work to figure out the market. Hence trying to use people’s previous pay to lowball them, since they know that people only know that.
Even if data is freely available evrerywhere it means it becomes a valuable occupation to collect it and exploit it and this is what a knowledge broker is.
Why is this framed negatively as “exploiting”? What is the problem with a business springing up that collects labor pricing information and provides a resource to labor sellers on where the market is indicating more demand for labor?
Right now, labor buyers can buy the same exact information, and as a result, labor sellers are being exploited.
This is the opposite of my experience with salary transparency both as an employee and a manager. It tended to made unproductive employees leave when they realized that the company did not consider them as critical as they imagined themselves to be which saved a ton of effort because we rarely needed to resort to PIPs or firing. It also made it clearer to productive employees how much their work was valued.
I'm pretty sure they know what you made if you worked at a large company anyway. For small ones they can probably guess better than the job seeker can. Excluding insider info because it goes both ways.
They can guess based off ranges. They dont have a list with your name and exact salary. In fact it’s explicitly illegal for them to ask in many states so this would circumvent that law.
My line of thought is that while I can look at Glassdoor or whatever so can they. But they can also get a department to do what I'll be doing 40hrs/week. Maybe I can ask a friend at that company but there's nothing really stopping my interviewer from asking his friend at my (ex)company the same thing.
Too late. Experian already buys and sells your salary information, and potential employers pay them to see it. I believe the product is "Employment Insight" but it could be one of their others.
I've literally seen the salaries flow from payroll straight onto their servers.
Incidentally, Norway appears among the countries with the lowest perception of corruption in the world: #4 among 180 countries (0). It would be interesting to look if there is any correlation with other countries where income records are publicly available.
Salaries are not the entire income. Corruption is usually some income in addition to a salary, but it may still be reflected in the tax record (that is, it's usually some service, board position, etc, not a suitcase full if cash).
Thus public tax records give a better transparency picture than salary records.
But you can't look it up anonymously. You have to authenticate with your national ID number, and the person will be notified about who looked up their income.
Taxable income is public information in Sweden, and you can basically buy a catalog containing the previous years income for everyone in a given area if you'd like.
Stuff like addresses and so on is also public information in Sweden, for what it's worth. This always makes me feel a bit strange when hearing people considering releasing someone's address to be doxxing and something horrible - like you can just look up any person in Sweden, and the societal consequence is that literally nothing happens. Same with the incomes, nothing whatsoever happens from having this be public.
I have a very hard time believing that sales-people and trades-people don't take it into considering when negotiating or quoting a price. One of the reasons a car sales person wants to "check your credit" early in the process is to get your credit rating and address - which helps them guess your price sensitivity - and many home services certainly take into account the area you live in even when it is irrelevant.
Yeah, "checking your credit" doesn't exist, really, outside of the US. When making loan decisions, your income and loan totals/history are the main things considered, not an arbitrary score by private third parties that couldn't keep the data safe if their lives depended on it.
A credit score is determined by your loan totals/history.
Every lender needs to assess credit-worthiness in some way, and they resort to the very similar schemes, with minor procedural differences based on cultural factors and historical accident.
Except that credit scores in the US include things such as evictions and credit card use, scores going down if you repay a loan in full and other bullshit, which a random bank determining your credit worthiness in France doesn't do. They ask for proof of income, check with Banque de France if you have outstanding debts or if you have failed debt payments, and that's it.
Of course there's no requirement, but everyone knows that paying off a loan early can, in some circumstances[0], lower your credit score. Nobody is taking the time to look into your score and see why it was 810 last month and is 780 this month. They just use the 780 and move on, so it can absolutely affect the rate you get, and whether you get approved or not. No creditor is overriding a denial because they spent time investigating your recent score change.
[0] Usually the credit score is a measure of how likely you are to hold credit over time. It is not a "how good are you with money" or "how much money do you have" score, it is a "how likely are you to pay this back under the agreed-upon terms" score. Part of that score is the mix of different credit types, so if you pay off your final installment loan (e.g. car, house, private loan, student loan), your mix of credit types just went from N to N-1, hence a temporary, minimal drop. This is also why paying something off early can negatively affect it (in certain models, but I don't think this happens much anymore). This is always used by people to explain how credit scores are stupid and evil and idiotic and evil and stupid, but its effect is always overblown, and your score almost always rebounds within a few months.
A lender or seller does not have to use any specific credit score. Many businesses calculate their own credit score based on borrowing/repayment history, and some do not calculate a score at all.
Actually addresses being public are causing issues. Sweden has a lot of problems with gang violence, and gang members often register their public addresses to other peoples addresses, causing innocent people to be killed. The address you enter is in no way being verified beyond it needing to be a valid address.
40 euros/hour right now. Last job was USD $98k/year. Before that it was $65k. Before that it was $42k.
I was part of a team that led a salary transparency initiative at a previous job, and it eventually led to the creation of a union there, but not until after I left for unrelated reasons.
I don't get this weird paranoia about salary privacy. Opening it up helped everyone negotiate.
Sorry for replying to myself, but I wanted to share a couple more anecdotes about pay.
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 wan...
TLDR frontend dev in the US, mostly working with small businesses and nonprofits. About 20 years of experience on and off, much of it informal, and maybe 10 ish years of full-time experience. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37914768
I'm not very hard to dox but I'm also not very interesting. Just another dev in a sea of us :) Maybe a bit more talkative and transparent than some, that's all.
With such a low rate for an experienced frontend dev I'm not surprised he is an advocate for salary transparency.
Transparency can benefit those with lower and harm those with higher than median salary.
I'm more concerned about the societal impacts overall, personally. One, I'm not exceptional by any stretch, and have always just sought a median wage. Two, I never chased a high salary, and it saddens me that the industry has become so enshittified and dependent on predatory exploitation and speculatory bubbles to fuel crazy salaries. I don't think that's anything to be proud of. Our jobs aren't very hard relative to many other fields, and we don't contribute much to society as many other professions. We were just caught up in a gold rush. I'm hoping it stabilizes and communities become livable again. The way tech was headed was incredibly toxic.
While I support all efforts at increasing information transparency, I disagree that prices need to be the same. It is possible that humans are sufficiently different in the quality of the labor they are selling that a buyer might price them differently.
For example, I am willing to pay a higher price for someone has 10 years of experience and is less likely to make mistakes or other desirable qualifies more than someone who has 0 years of experience, even though they are doing the same work.
Isn’t difference in experience one aspect that is represented by different levels? In other words, it’s not the same work if experience vastly differs.
It could be, but I do not see why it has to be. And “vastly” is a nebulous term, maybe an employer wants to classify “levels” more or less broadly, and wants to reward within “levels”, I don’t know, I just don’t see a need to prescribe a very specific system of employee management.
The problem with your example is that you are making the assumption that someone with 10 years of experience is less likely to make mistakes in practice than the person with 0 years of experience. I've seen several examples over my career where the technically "more experienced" individual is not truly the better suited for the job. You won't know that until you hire them and, in my opinion, is a good reason for why you should pay someone based on the job (so long as they qualify for it). It doesn't mean that everyone needs to make exactly the same amount, because I think there is an argument to be made for someone who has more tenure at a company to retain them and for their role-specific experience. But that shouldn't be a >5% difference.
Also, I don't see how people can't see that this is precisely the logic that contributes to women generally getting paid less for doing the same job. Anecdotally, I joined a company and had about 7 years of experience. My "peers" in performing exactly the same duties as me had probably about 25 years of experience. I was responsible for the 2nd largest revenue generating P&L that generated the highest profit margin (which I actually turned around from losing money in 6 months). I found out I was getting paid $70k less than "my peers." 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? This is the kind of stuff that routinely happens to women.
> I've seen several examples over my career where the technically "more experienced" individual is not truly the better suited for the job. You won't know that until you hire them and, in my opinion, is a good reason for why you should pay someone based on the job (so long as they qualify for it).
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.
> No, your example is bad management incentivizing bad employees and turning away good employees.
Well I definitely agree it was bad management. And I did leave when I realized that despite my performance, they weren't going to compensate me appropriately. To excuse it away as "oh, that's bad management" is being willfully ignorant to the truth that this kind of stuff does happen, in general, more to women. I was in a position where I was fortunate that I could leave and find a better opportunity. But not all women have this luxury. Many need their incomes and don't have the time to look for other opportunities that will value them appropriately.
> Women being paid less due to being women is illegal discrimination.
It's great there are laws to protect women from illegal discrimination. But it's not like that just "magically" corrects itself. You have to bring a suit. Or you just have to leave if you don't want to deal with it. It's like saying "well that's wrong." Sure, it is, but the effort is disproportionately on the "wronged" person to fix it.
> 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.
Well yes, and I thought I had. But as I said, it wasn't until I had been at the company, better understood what my "peers" were doing and then finding out that they were paid SO much more than me that I realized I needed to go somewhere else. But I believe the point that many others are making is that if there are been better salary transparency, I could have saved myself some time by realizing they weren't going to value me and what I brought, so I could have passed on the opportunity altogether.
>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.
Research continues to fail to support this. At what point is your experience a self-fulfilling prophecy?
No, you clearly should have been making more, which is the other side of the "compensation for jobs that differ should not be mandated to be the same" argument.
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?
> I have software engineers on my team who are literally creating twice as much business 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?
I'm not exactly sure I would say they are performing the same duties then. Are they all responsible for generating business? I would argue they aren't actually doing the same job. This could be the difference between their salaries being the same versus their compensation being the same. Generating business can be a highly variable achievement from year-to-year, so providing total compensation that is higher for those generating more business than others. If their primary job is to do software engineering, then I would imagine their salary would reflect that job. Additional compensation could be given for doing essentially additional responsibilities over and above their job. You could give the feedback to your other software developers to explain the difference in their total compensation vs. salary. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean when you say "creating business" though.
Was a missing word typo/editing error. "creating twice as much business [value] per year"
Pure software engineering type roles, no sales/sales engineering. Just simply being better at value creation via software engineering.
I'm sure you've worked with the "whizzes" and the "whiffers". People who can effortlessly create elegant, reliable systems vs people who struggle to craft limp-along systems that look and behave as if they are comprised of bailing wire and load-bearing bubble gum.
Generally as a business scales it makes sense to add processes and standardization. But levels do not have to dictate equal salary. People are different, with different motivations, assets, and leverage.
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.
"Willingness to work for a given range" gets exploited by employers at the expense of employees. It helps prop up structural (gender/race) pay gaps and breeds distrust among employees as some salaries inevitably leak out.
The structural pay gaps exist because salaries are not public in the first place.
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.
They're at the same level, but maybe not doing the same job. Even if they're nominally in the same "job code" the actual mechanics of what they are doing, the sensitivity of their work, the skills required for success, the markets/industries they are operating in, the pay scale where they live, the level of functional support they are receiving may all be substantially different. Of course there may also be other decisions such as upping salary to entice an employee not to accept that other job offer they got (do you want to remove pay leverage of looking for jobs elsewhere by mandating same salaries?), or any such other consideration.
Individual pay isn't some 2+2=4 math equation, it's multifactorial. Now any company with good internal controls would have people in some sort of band where for comparable (not identical) work there's a range of normalcy relative to the value the work provides in the given markets the labor is occurring.
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.
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.
> the actual mechanics of what they are doing, the sensitivity of their work, the skills required for success, the markets/industries they are operating in
Surely these are all criteria that should determine your level. What's the point of levels if you're saying each level consists of arbitrary other levels?
I agree that a range should be public, but an employee's salary should remain within the range for their level. If they're demonstrably more valuable to the company, they should be promoted within a transparent structure.
All of these things can substantially vary within a single internal level (or external benchmark grade). Why would your physical location determine your level? Why would your career level change if you're doing the same type of work as someone, but using a technology or skillset that is more rare and thus commands a higher premium in the marketplace? Another example: two people doing the same type of accounting work, but one of them has to get national security clearance for the group they cover - same level, same job, but the barriers to entry for one of those jobs will create a substantial compensation variance (but the level doesn't change).
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.
Pay scales are ranges not points. You want to be able to reward good performers higher than lesser performers, even in the same level, so that the incentives are aligned. Promotions to a next level are part of this but those only happen every few years for most people.
From a worker point of view, being open about what we're earning will help bring to light if we're being exploited.
From a business owner point of view, employees having this knowledge disturbs the power imbalance employers enjoy when it comes to compensation negotiations.
I think more people than you'd expect in HN are in the latter camp. This site was launched as Startup News, after all.
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.
Yes, but I'd say that until a new platform pops up, at least 80% of what's on existing has been staked out by at least medium sized companies, if not mega-corps.
Those remaining 20% can still make for decent living, I won't deny that.
> They're the same level, they should earn the same.
No, they shouldn't. They should earn exactly as much as they can get their employer to pay them. I've worked hard in my career, I've negotiated hard for pay at new jobs, raises, bonuses, promotions, etc. Some people don't. If I'm not going to be able to negotiate my pay, by definition I'm going to be making less. Why in the world would I want that?
That's communism. In companies, one's salary is related with his/her output or salary negotiation skills.. Dave, Cathy and Bob could be in the same level, where the salary range fluctuates between 60k - 95k. Who is where, depends of the both factors mentioned above.
> If Bob is clearly the best SWEPR4, Cathy the middle, and Dave just barely got promoted to that level ...
I think you're making a big presumption that the "clearly the best" gets the most income!
(Although the more usual argument against transparency proposals is that everyone thinks they're "clealry the best" so all except the highest paid would be annoyed.)
Salary is about 90% of the compensation picture for almost everyone in the US. If you add in things like 401(k) matching and employee-paid insurance premiums, you've got about 99% of the picture covered (in addition to having something far too complex to publish on any individual level). The vast majority of companies offer no stock, no or minimal/token bonuses, and no perks with any real financial value.
Lots or reporting requirements only take effect once a firm reaches a certain size. This makes a lot of sense given that tiny firms (say less than 10 employees) may not have formalized wage scales, in-house administrative staff, and have a harder time amortizing compliance costs. So yes, there are disadvantages to consider.
I think the legal requirements is declaring pay ranges for which the companies agree to hire (IDK if they must reveal current actual pay). A range can conceal enough for a particular employee not to feel exposed.
Even the lowest paid employees at the state and federal level already have their pay revealed, and it hasn't caused a problem yet. As far as I know, only orgs like the CIA (and similar) where their employees aren't public are hidden from public view.
It's probably the highest paid ones who don't want others to know... goes against equal pay for equal work and all that.
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.
I don't see how it couldn't result in lower wages over time, especially for folks who are good at negotiating, have planned their career/company moves out over years or decades to maximize salary, etc. Businesses have a budget for payroll, not every business owner is Scrooge McDuck hoarding their gold coins. You have a distribution in pay for lots of reasons, and if you try to eliminate that you're going to end up with the same amount of money spread across the same amount of people in a slightly different way, but everyone at the upper end loses out.
That's because the state doesn't generate revenue, it isn't the state's money, and the people have a right to know how their taxes are being spent. I'm not saying that invalidates your broader point but it is an important distinction. It's by definition something completely different than a coffee shop with 15 part-time employees and one owner, or a budding new web agency with a half dozen full-time designers and coders.
Hasn't caused a problem... among a sample group who knew that their salary would be public information before choosing that career. If you change the rule so that no one even has the choice of salary privacy, is nothing lost? I'm skeptical.
Good money being: any company that tries to do things properly (or, relatively properly).
Bad money being: profit, profit, profit. Take risks and misreport. Don’t put anything in writing. Pay bonuses under the table. Etc etc etc.
Not only does the good money need to spend a lot more money to comply, they also wind up wasting a lot of money on “fake” compliance or “over-“ compliance. For example, insurance companies often find ways to make companies insure the same risk multiple times. Or consultants over-analyse and say “This whole thing is a risk for your company. It needs to be fixed. I can do it for you.”
Good money will pay consultants to prepare excruciatingly detailed salary transparency reports, and they’ll live with the cost of their honesty (“you pay women less than men!!!! it doesn’t matter that your state has very few qualified women in that field!!! pay them all the same!!!”).
Bad money will do just enough to be compliant, and they’ll fudge the numbers (with sneaky fringe-benefit bonuses to their employees so they don’t care).
The information is specific to a unit and published monthly (e.g. if 6 units were rented out, there are 6 entries in the database). It’s quite helpful when looking for a place to rent because you can look up the exact building see what people are paying.
The data is obscured a bit because units are described as “50 to 70 sq m”, so while you can guess if it’s a 1 bed or 2 bed, you cant tell if it has 1 or 2 bathrooms, what floor it on, whether it comes furnished or not.
But you can look at a group of transactions that are similar to the unit you’re looking at and get of what the market rate is.
Would be interesting to see people rough idea of YOE to Level mapping for MSFT.
Everything from Level 50 through 60 looks pretty junior, like grad hires and possibly outside HCOL areas. Surprised there is so much granularity.
I do also find the base to stock ratios interesting.
I guess base pay caps out in FAANG the same way it does in fintech / Wall Street tech. $360k base is a lot of money obviously, but its interesting you can have like a $1M signing bonus & $1.25M TC but never get about $360K base.
Level 59 is entry-level for an SE (e.g. an undergraduate hire), Level 58 is for Interns. People at Level 59 are expected to reach Level 60 within 2 years or they'll basically get managed-out, but once you get past Level 61 people generally take things more slowly.
In West Coast circles (Blind.app, et al) Microsoft's reputation is that it's still "the country club" where you go if you want a stable career without too much excitement (or stress) - if you play your cards right (and dodge the occassional round of layoffs) you can still live the baby-boomer dream having a single-employer-for-life untill you retire.
The downside is you have to put up with Microsoft's ineptitude. I was on a Microsoft project for about 6 months and it was a terrible experience. Everyone was out for themselves, asking questions was treated as an annoyance. Condescension at every turn. It was a small team and perhaps not representative of all of Microsoft, but it was a bad enough experience that I'd never consider working there in any capacity.
My experience was the opposite. I was surrounded by veritable gods of the industry but you wouldn't know it in-person; I even shared a hallway with at least 2 people who had their own Wikipedia articles.
Microsoft is a massive company. Each org and team are very different. I worked there for a few years and my team was extremely old school (waterfall, no automation, all manual QA, heavy upfront planning, etc) while I had friends in other parts of the company where it was pretty much the exact opposite. The same can be said about talent density, innovation, etc.
For software engineers, 59 is entry level (e.g. a college hire). Promotion to 61 (SWE 2) usually happens in 2-4 years of experience. Promotion to 63 (Senior) is usually 5-7 YoE. Promotion to 65 (Principal) is highly variable but a capable person who climbed the ladder all the way from 59 and didn’t get stuck with a crappy team/manager along the way would usually get there around 9-10 years, give or take.
The base pay is effectively capped because salaries are taken out of money that is taxed. That's why CEO's used to stop at $1M. (Maybe they still do.) Everything else is stock because it's "free" money for the company to give away.
Context is key - for that level, they're pretty bad numbers compared to the rest of big tech. Equivalent at Meta/Google/Amazon would be making vastly more. Microsoft usually punches well below its weight for compensation.
They return the favor with a chiller work-life balance and Washington State's lower taxes (obv not applicable to the large campus in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara)
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadIs there some story behind 52-70 instead of 1-19? Or is it just arbitrary?
In cases like this where you just have payment guidelines for a level 52, you might as well not know. What's level 52? Is that an intern or senior management?
So that means an entry level engineer would start at a higher level than a senior secretary, or whatever the case is.
---
Level 70:
Level 69: Level 68: Level 67: Level 66: Level 65: Level 64: Level 63: Level 62: Level 61: Level 60: Level 59: Level 58: Level 57: Level 56: Level 55: Level 54: Level 53: Level 52:The publicly disclosed numbers on Levels.fyi are much closer to reality, IMO.
And yeah, the Levels.fyi base pay distributions are closer to the truth.
Are you on a cool product team and hiring? I'm considering rejoining the mothership
Microsoft uses a system of levels to denote seniority. Higher levels come with higher offers, according to the guidelines. Levels also vary by field and location, but generally, "senior" starts at level 63, "principal" starts at level 65, and "partner" starts at level 68, according to insiders. Not all types of roles go up to level 70, but in engineering, an employee at this level would be considered a "distinguished engineer.'" There's also a level 80 for a "technical fellow," which is typically one of the highest-ranking executives at the company.
So, a change where the companies also posted their salary data publicly would only additionally inform employees not HR. But yes tech-HR has in the past gotten in trouble over salary fixing.
So: the potential for collusion already exists, but unless regular folks can get access to the analysts' data sets as well, it's a very one-sided deal.
I thought that was just marketing puffery...
The puffery is that they say "top 10%" when they're " 'top' 40%".
Of course, being government, it’s all public information anyway so collaborating in this way is seen more of a performance increase vs manually accessing each counties salary information but it’s the same premise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
EDIT: forgot to mention I'm not advocating for it.
As a result, companies absolutely track how much employees of a type and level get paid elsewhere, so that they know where to aim compensation packages competitively.
You see this all the time when the minimum wage is increased by say 10% then there is a general inflation of 1%. General inflation lags wage increases although at a reduced effect.
It’s closer to 0.4% for every 10% increase and the inflation happens almost immediately.
https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/260/
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.
The claim that it lags behind the wage change is empirically also not found.
That's within the quote on the comment that you are responding to ... "cumulative wage-price elasticity from three months before up to three months after a minimum wage hike was estimated at about 0.07".
They found that increasing the minimum wage lead was followed by a 0.7% increase in prices 3 months later. 3 months later is "lagging".
This is such a random comment I don't know how to respond to besides a "No?"
There's plenty of research on this topic [1] and it all agrees that an increase in the minimum wage is followed by an increase in costs of goods.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+minimum+wage+incre...
I won't reply someone who just spew random words any further, sorry.
https://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+wage+increase+on+i...
In reality "transparent comp" becomes an excuse for companies to not negotiate.
This is how it already works in Norway. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
You're not going to be able to, because it's impossible.
But yeah if it doesn’t bring you personally more money I guess it’s not even worth thinking about
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.
To claim that the effects of this transparency should be measured by a simple comparison of raw average salaries between the two countries is to use a metric that includes all of the confounding variables I mentioned and more. I am simply explaining why it is a poor metric, and explaining that the value of state-mandated transparency is in personal autonomy, not in “will it magically elevate my individual salary potential in one country above what it would be in all other countries”.
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/
> Look, Bob. Sue has made X super valuable contributions in the last quarter, and she has done A and B, and she's the expert on that special topic. That's why she's paid 3% more than you, I hope you understand. If you want to get closer to her pay salary, look into improving yourself on XY, doing more AB work, etc.
Giving concrete reasons and targets to achieve is actually beneficial, and it can help motivate people. If there are no concrete reasons, well, then it's just pay discrimination for nothing more than gut feeling which is shitty, and Bob is right to feel bad about it.
If Alice is the only SWEPR5 at a company, that proposal publishes her salary. If Bob is clearly the best SWEPR4, Cathy the middle, and Dave just barely got promoted to that level, their salaries are also individually published.
I don’t object to good faith ranges being required in job listings, but I oppose anything that would tend to publish an individual’s data that they should be able to keep private.
(That’s before even getting to the fact that salary is nowhere near the full compensation picture.)
If Alice is the only one, they learn the precise value.
Personally, I think money is power, and I want to know about power disparities to better protect myself. But I understand there are factors to consider.
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 a salary shouldn't be secret, why does the US insist on allowing some people to keep their salary secret?
Advertising the salary of sports figures as a means of enforcing competition-protecting salary caps? No problem.
Advertising the salary of people for which there is no current requirement, for which there is a current practice of non-disclosure, and for which there is no taxpayer accountability benefit? I think that merits discussion rather than a advance conclusion of "a few of us think it's a good idea, so get bent".
Where
for example
Full information is hell on Earth.
If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power.
What does this mean? Why does natural even matter? Humans changed a lot of things that are “natural” to better their lives.
>It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them.
Temporarily embarassed billionaires. Aka you like to think you are the 1% who can out negotiate an employer because you are so in demand. 99% of people will be at a disadvantage no matter what.
Also, https://theworknumber.com/
> If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power.
What is the purpose of a “knowledge” broker, if the thing they are brokering is already available to everyone?
A few years ago my state made it illegal to ask for that information, and can now only ask our salary expectations. It’s now tethered around what you want to make.
This led to a HUGE increase in my comp.
The employer wanted you to think that, but it was actually tethered around your other job offers and your willingness to say no.
If you have access to information for what other employers are paying, and are potential other options for your employment, the employer will know you know this.
More importantly, you will not have to waste your valuable time figuring out what other employers are paying, so you have to do less work to figure out the market.
The employer most likely already knows the market, that is part of their daily duties, and know that applicants have to do a lot of work to figure out the market. Hence trying to use people’s previous pay to lowball them, since they know that people only know that.
Right now, labor buyers can buy the same exact information, and as a result, labor sellers are being exploited.
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.
I've literally seen the salaries flow from payroll straight onto their servers.
0: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank
Thus public tax records give a better transparency picture than salary records.
Stuff like addresses and so on is also public information in Sweden, for what it's worth. This always makes me feel a bit strange when hearing people considering releasing someone's address to be doxxing and something horrible - like you can just look up any person in Sweden, and the societal consequence is that literally nothing happens. Same with the incomes, nothing whatsoever happens from having this be public.
Every lender needs to assess credit-worthiness in some way, and they resort to the very similar schemes, with minor procedural differences based on cultural factors and historical accident.
There is no single credit score in the US. Anyone can calculate whatever they want from a credit history.
There is no requirement for a lender to negatively view a borrower’s decision to buy pay off a loan. In fact, I doubt any even do.
Using a credit card is borrowing money, hence shows up on a credit report.
[0] Usually the credit score is a measure of how likely you are to hold credit over time. It is not a "how good are you with money" or "how much money do you have" score, it is a "how likely are you to pay this back under the agreed-upon terms" score. Part of that score is the mix of different credit types, so if you pay off your final installment loan (e.g. car, house, private loan, student loan), your mix of credit types just went from N to N-1, hence a temporary, minimal drop. This is also why paying something off early can negatively affect it (in certain models, but I don't think this happens much anymore). This is always used by people to explain how credit scores are stupid and evil and idiotic and evil and stupid, but its effect is always overblown, and your score almost always rebounds within a few months.
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).
- https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/on2Rpg/uppgifter-krimin...
- https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/kriminella-kan-skriva-sig-p...
Shootings through apartment doors is relatively common, here are a few of the incidents from 2023:
- https://www.incharts.se/en/shootings/shooting/stockholm-2023...
- https://www.incharts.se/en/shootings/shooting/malmo-2023-10-...
- https://www.incharts.se/en/shootings/shooting/jarfalla-2023-...
- https://www.incharts.se/en/shootings/shooting/botkyrka-2023-...
- https://www.incharts.se/en/shootings/shooting/stockholm-2023...
- https://www.incharts.se/en/shootings/shooting/upplands-bro-2...
- https://www.incharts.se/en/shootings/shooting/sodertalje-202...
- https://www.incharts.se/en/shootings/shooting/stockholm-2023...
But I think you receive that mail by post that you have to send back when you change address right?
So I guess the people living there weren't totally extraneous?
Objectively not true. Scammers use that data all the time to target high net worth individuals. Especially high net worth old people living alone.
I was part of a team that led a salary transparency initiative at a previous job, and it eventually led to the creation of a union there, but not until after I left for unrelated reasons.
I don't get this weird paranoia about salary privacy. Opening it up helped everyone negotiate.
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 wan...
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.
I'm not very hard to dox but I'm also not very interesting. Just another dev in a sea of us :) Maybe a bit more talkative and transparent than some, that's all.
For example, I am willing to pay a higher price for someone has 10 years of experience and is less likely to make mistakes or other desirable qualifies more than someone who has 0 years of experience, even though they are doing the same work.
Also, I don't see how people can't see that this is precisely the logic that contributes to women generally getting paid less for doing the same job. Anecdotally, I joined a company and had about 7 years of experience. My "peers" in performing exactly the same duties as me had probably about 25 years of experience. I was responsible for the 2nd largest revenue generating P&L that generated the highest profit margin (which I actually turned around from losing money in 6 months). I found out I was getting paid $70k less than "my peers." 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? This is the kind of stuff that routinely happens to women.
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.
Well I definitely agree it was bad management. And I did leave when I realized that despite my performance, they weren't going to compensate me appropriately. To excuse it away as "oh, that's bad management" is being willfully ignorant to the truth that this kind of stuff does happen, in general, more to women. I was in a position where I was fortunate that I could leave and find a better opportunity. But not all women have this luxury. Many need their incomes and don't have the time to look for other opportunities that will value them appropriately.
> Women being paid less due to being women is illegal discrimination.
It's great there are laws to protect women from illegal discrimination. But it's not like that just "magically" corrects itself. You have to bring a suit. Or you just have to leave if you don't want to deal with it. It's like saying "well that's wrong." Sure, it is, but the effort is disproportionately on the "wronged" person to fix it.
> 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.
Well yes, and I thought I had. But as I said, it wasn't until I had been at the company, better understood what my "peers" were doing and then finding out that they were paid SO much more than me that I realized I needed to go somewhere else. But I believe the point that many others are making is that if there are been better salary transparency, I could have saved myself some time by realizing they weren't going to value me and what I brought, so I could have passed on the opportunity altogether.
Research continues to fail to support this. At what point is your experience a self-fulfilling prophecy?
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?
I'm not exactly sure I would say they are performing the same duties then. Are they all responsible for generating business? I would argue they aren't actually doing the same job. This could be the difference between their salaries being the same versus their compensation being the same. Generating business can be a highly variable achievement from year-to-year, so providing total compensation that is higher for those generating more business than others. If their primary job is to do software engineering, then I would imagine their salary would reflect that job. Additional compensation could be given for doing essentially additional responsibilities over and above their job. You could give the feedback to your other software developers to explain the difference in their total compensation vs. salary. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean when you say "creating business" though.
Pure software engineering type roles, no sales/sales engineering. Just simply being better at value creation via software engineering.
I'm sure you've worked with the "whizzes" and the "whiffers". People who can effortlessly create elegant, reliable systems vs people who struggle to craft limp-along systems that look and behave as if they are comprised of bailing wire and load-bearing bubble gum.
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.
Individual pay isn't some 2+2=4 math equation, it's multifactorial. Now any company with good internal controls would have people in some sort of band where for comparable (not identical) work there's a range of normalcy relative to the value the work provides in the given markets the labor is occurring.
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.
Surely these are all criteria that should determine your level. What's the point of levels if you're saying each level consists of arbitrary other levels?
I agree that a range should be public, but an employee's salary should remain within the range for their level. If they're demonstrably more valuable to the company, they should be promoted within a transparent structure.
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.
From a worker point of view, being open about what we're earning will help bring to light if we're being exploited.
From a business owner point of view, employees having this knowledge disturbs the power imbalance employers enjoy when it comes to compensation negotiations.
I think more people than you'd expect in HN are in the latter camp. This site was launched as Startup News, after all.
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.
I think this game's got a lot more time left in it.
Those remaining 20% can still make for decent living, I won't deny that.
No, they shouldn't. They should earn exactly as much as they can get their employer to pay them. I've worked hard in my career, I've negotiated hard for pay at new jobs, raises, bonuses, promotions, etc. Some people don't. If I'm not going to be able to negotiate my pay, by definition I'm going to be making less. Why in the world would I want that?
I think you're making a big presumption that the "clearly the best" gets the most income!
(Although the more usual argument against transparency proposals is that everyone thinks they're "clealry the best" so all except the highest paid would be annoyed.)
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.
I'm sure all sorts of entities would like to know exactly what your income is.
But it will be useless because they cannot play with it. Even now they ask you what your pay was.
If I know exactly how much you make, I know exactly how much to raise rent.
Good money being: any company that tries to do things properly (or, relatively properly).
Bad money being: profit, profit, profit. Take risks and misreport. Don’t put anything in writing. Pay bonuses under the table. Etc etc etc.
Not only does the good money need to spend a lot more money to comply, they also wind up wasting a lot of money on “fake” compliance or “over-“ compliance. For example, insurance companies often find ways to make companies insure the same risk multiple times. Or consultants over-analyse and say “This whole thing is a risk for your company. It needs to be fixed. I can do it for you.”
Good money will pay consultants to prepare excruciatingly detailed salary transparency reports, and they’ll live with the cost of their honesty (“you pay women less than men!!!! it doesn’t matter that your state has very few qualified women in that field!!! pay them all the same!!!”).
Bad money will do just enough to be compliant, and they’ll fudge the numbers (with sneaky fringe-benefit bonuses to their employees so they don’t care).
Since all tenancies need to pay a stamp tax to be legit contracts, the government lists every contracts rental price on a website.
https://www.ura.gov.sg/property-market-information/pmiReside...
The information is specific to a unit and published monthly (e.g. if 6 units were rented out, there are 6 entries in the database). It’s quite helpful when looking for a place to rent because you can look up the exact building see what people are paying.
The data is obscured a bit because units are described as “50 to 70 sq m”, so while you can guess if it’s a 1 bed or 2 bed, you cant tell if it has 1 or 2 bathrooms, what floor it on, whether it comes furnished or not.
But you can look at a group of transactions that are similar to the unit you’re looking at and get of what the market rate is.
I do also find the base to stock ratios interesting. I guess base pay caps out in FAANG the same way it does in fintech / Wall Street tech. $360k base is a lot of money obviously, but its interesting you can have like a $1M signing bonus & $1.25M TC but never get about $360K base.
In West Coast circles (Blind.app, et al) Microsoft's reputation is that it's still "the country club" where you go if you want a stable career without too much excitement (or stress) - if you play your cards right (and dodge the occassional round of layoffs) you can still live the baby-boomer dream having a single-employer-for-life untill you retire.
That part isn't true. Some people stay at L59 for much longer and there isn't any "automatic out", at least in the US.
Yes, I had a bad case of imposter syndrome too.
>Annual stock award range: $0 to $945,000
Wow. Those numbers are huge
Still peanuts but you don't work at MS to maximize $$$ but rather for WLB
(I also want to know wtf is happening with their levelling system in general)