from Hacker News

New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator

by polysaturate on 12/6/17, 1:57 PM with 159 comments

• by eximius on 12/6/17, 3:08 PM

  Wow, this is really terrible. This looks like a PR explanation for why they're slashing everyone's salaries. A cursory glance shows everyone either staying the same or dropping.

  > One of the toughest decisions we made with the new formula was to remove the annual 3% loyalty increase given to teammates for each anniversary from their start date.

  > We looked at a lot of options and in the end decided to remove it as it created an unsustainable, compounding affect on pay.

  3% is at or just above inflation. If you can't afford to give these raises, you will see severe wage stagnation and, hopefully, a mass exodus of employees elsewhere.

• by ryanwaggoner on 12/6/17, 3:49 PM

  I know this is cynical, but this really just reinforces my suspicion: the open salary thing is actually an attempt to underpay through a formula that's presented as objectively fair. Over time, it ends up gravitating your workforce towards average or below-average performers. There's no room for top talent here, because there's no subjectivity in this formula.

  If you're a fantastic dev (or whatever), why would you work here when other companies will pay you a lot more?

• by beberlei on 12/6/17, 3:33 PM

  Initially when I saw this open salary approach and especially the calculator I was intrigued. But you cannot make salaries into a formula and get 100% good results.

  The approach Basecamp (37signals) has with picking a location, then paying people based on 95% percentile (top 5%) market rate regardless of where they live is just much easier to explain to employees than some arbitrary multiplier thing that just leads to endless discussions.

  https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d...

• by hajile on 12/6/17, 3:01 PM

  Why do companies continue to pay out higher salaries to devs in high cost of living areas? In this case, their payscale pays out 30-50K more in high cost living areas vs low cost areas.

  Rather than blow revenue rewarding bad life choices, offer to move them to an area with lower costs of living. Do that for only 10 employees and you have 300-500K EVERY SINGLE YEAR to re-invest into your company. In practically any other industry, this kind of saving would be obvious.

• by hardwaresofton on 12/6/17, 3:14 PM

  Another company that does open salary calculations is Gitlab:

  https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/#compensation (this is a random developer job, you can check out other positions @ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/)

  Here's the feature ticket: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/831

  Disclaimer: I don't work for Gitlab, but I am a pretty biased rabid fan.

• by danvoell on 12/6/17, 3:28 PM

  There is a lot of typical HN negative analysis in this discussion. Let's step back and applaud the fact that this is open. Who else does that? People don't do it because they are afraid of this type of negative analysis. This is a very cool comparison for those who don't have concrete numbers to take into HR. Thanks for sharing Buffer!

• by awareBrah on 12/6/17, 3:41 PM

  This is interesting. One implication is that if I was in the dating market, I’d be worried my date would google me, find that I work for buffer, and instantly know how much I make. While that information isn’t exactly super important or secretive, I just think I’d rather reveal that kind of info on my own terms.

• by cf on 12/6/17, 3:24 PM

  I'm not sure I agree with some of these figures. Vancouver and Nashville are somehow considered to have similar cost of living.

  https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

• by allandubey on 12/6/17, 4:02 PM

  Why??? Openess in work culture is great! Telling the whole world about how much each individual earn is a slap on their privacy... Just because you can, you shouldn’t. Be ready to welcome attrition.... Let me post the link of this page on each employee’s linkedin fb accounts...lol.. anything in the name of innovation.

• by wyager on 12/6/17, 3:14 PM

  I strongly disagree with cost-of-living-adjustments when employees have the choice of where to live. People shouldn’t be punished for living in less expensive places.

  If your company is willing to pay you more for living somewhere else even if they don’t gain anything from it, it means they’re underpaying you right now.

• by peshooo on 12/6/17, 2:53 PM

  Recently there was a discussion about salaries in SF. And the numbers there were much bigger. What gives?

• by seattle_spring on 12/6/17, 4:17 PM

  If I worked somewhere that tried to rationalize why they were cutting all of the employees salaries but leaving the executive salaries in-tact, I would leave immediately.

• by jatsign on 12/6/17, 2:52 PM

  I like the idea of transparent salaries, but does a "transparent" formula ever become so convoluted, and open to gaming, that the company may as well just not bother?

  It can be argued that not disclosing salaries is a way to suppress wages; an asymmetry of information. Is open salary information where "everyone at the same level gets the same salary, but there's some gotchas" another way to do the same thing?

• by eagletusk on 12/6/17, 3:28 PM

  Whoa $121k in Spain that's a superstar salary for a programmer there.

  Average for programmer according to glassdoor is 35,000 euro = ~42,000 usd.

• by eterm on 12/6/17, 3:11 PM

  What's an advocate in this context? It's their biggest department, bigger than marketing?

• by philipps on 12/6/17, 4:14 PM

  I am a fan of open salary models inside the organisation, but don’t see the value in sharing it publicly. It’s something we implemented at the non-profit I co-founded and it has increased the sense of ownership and buy-in from everyone on the team. One reason for not sharing the actual amounts is that non profits generally pay less than for profit companies and I don’t want our team to be pegged to their non profit salary when they decide to move on.

• by nsxwolf on 12/6/17, 4:24 PM

  Salary transparency leading to lower salaries... I had been led to believe to expect the opposite.

• by sidlls on 12/6/17, 4:31 PM

  The transparency is great.

  Here's a question: why doesn't Buffer pay the "low CoL" developers more? It doesn't seem right that "low CoL" workers get paid so little compared to their peers.

• by ronreiter on 12/6/17, 3:37 PM

  So if I'm worth 500k a year to Buffer they will not be able to pay that to me. So stupid.