Is it me or is the title misleading? I thought there was some sort of internal spreadsheet (ie. made by the accounting department or HR) with everyone's salary that got stolen/leaked, but really this is just survey data.
Yeah the title is a bit alarmist. Is it even a leak if MS is actively encouraging their employees to be transparent about this? Trying to draw conclusions from a younger subset of an informal Facebook survey doesn't inspire confidence either.
This is more in the realm of gossip than journalism.
Having said that, I wasn't expecting those junior salaries to be so "low" (obviously well above the poverty line). I've been making about that or more when adjusting for cost of living.
Does Microsoft really have eighty employee levels?
If these numbers are accurate they put things into perspective though.
I see people on here and other forums who will swear blind that even basic engineers at big US tech companies are earning $750k after just a couple of years.
No,
It goes from 59 to 70.
80 level also exists but it's just for the CEO, I believe there is nothing between 70 and 80 (maybe there is 73 or something like that, but at any rate it's not continuous).
It's a weird system
Airborne divisions were originally just seen as specialized infantry divisions. They were numbered in sequence with all other infantry divisions. Thus, its number does imply the existence of 100 other infantry divisions.
I believe that there WERE 100 other airborne divisions in the past, they just do not exist anymore. World War II required a lot of divisions airborne or otherwise.
No. Divisions 1-25 were regular Army, 26-50 were National Guard, and 51-108 were draftees. They were not designated according to MOS. Some of the divisions were never actually populated, so there are gaps even within this.
Later on, existing divisions were designated according to type. Infantry is the 'default' designation. Cavalry units were designated, then Armor, then Airborne, and finally Mountain. I have no idea when Artillery got its own designation. Some units subsequently were designated Air Assault, and this includes the 101st, but it kept the Airborne title to honor the unit history.
Other branches have other policies, but this is how the Army structure evolved.
In the book 'Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins' by Annie Jacobsen, she mentions this effect when the US Army stood up the secretive 10th Special Forces after WWII. Even though it was the first of its kind the idea was that if the U.S.S.R found out about it they would worry there were 9 other such groups.
You can find most of this online. For software engineers(managers) and Product/Program Managers you start at 59 and go up to 67. At 68 you are a partner and there are very few IC from this level on. At level 70 you are EVP level. At 70+ you are CVP. Support starts at 56 and can go up to at least 61-62. I don't know about the other disciplines.
Recalling my time there, one tweak-- EVP > CVP so those are backward. There are a hand full of EVPs but quite a lot of CVPs running around. TBH Past Partner (68) I'm not sure the levels really matter much and I forget the pure Software Eng equivalents to those higher levels (Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow).
I believe there was a large compensation change during the time of Steve Balmer when the stock was flat. The change switched the mix to more cash, less stock. Prior to that shift, levels started much lower. The levels were reset to 59+ after this change to reduce confusion over the previous compensation plans. That's my understanding. Yes, levels run 59 to 70 with anything above 70 being something like the CEO or a very early founder in a distinguished role.
Microsoft levels used to be 1-15 or something like that. In 2000, as part of "Comp 2000" update to levels and compensation, they changed the levels for a bunch of reasons (one of which was to make smaller, more frequent promos, which is why the bands now each span multiple levels). Each of existing levels was expanded to two or three separate levels. For example, a former level 10 position became either a level 58 or level 59 position. Employees were then placed in one of the newly created job levels. Managers were afforded some amount of discretion in this placement process.
To prevent confusion ("old 5 or new 5?"), they picked numbers that were clearly different from the old 1,2,3... system.
Also, note that the comp change to reduce stock and increase base happened sometime in 2003, not as part of the comp 2000 changes. That's also when the switch from stock options to awards happened.
I don't know about Microsoft, but at IBM for example engineers with a 4-year eng/CS degree start at band 6, but the bands below 6 do exist, just not for that role. I'm guessing it's similar at MS.
They don't have 80 levels, their naming scheme for engineering just starts at 59 and goes up from there. Certainly more levels than most other companies though. You can view the leveling breakdown at https://levels.fyi
>Does Microsoft really have eighty employee levels?
Possibly. All the article says is
"the levels start at 59 and go beyond 80. Microsoft’s senior positions start at level 63, according to the crowdsourced tech compensation website Levels.fyi."
There is sampling bias, so it is unclear if these salaries are representative. Reading the article it would not be unreasonable to conclude that those that participated in the survey are more likely to be those that are under paid.
> A majority — 194 out of 310 — total respondents said they were people of color. Also, 69 respondents reported feeling marginalized or at risk of being marginalized due to their gender or gender identity. In total, 22% of respondents said that their gender or gender identity had or might hinder them at work.
This indicates that it is not a representative sample of M$. Though which conclusions to make from it are much harder to say.
I started a year ago fresh out of college at L60 and my TC this past year was ~220k. I've never been expected to work over 40 hours, and my engineering manager allows days off basically at-will (in addition to the prescribed 15 vacation). I also just got promoted, raising my expected TC for next year to ~250k.
I think you're right about there being selection bias... people who are happy with their package don't spend their time filling out these spreadsheets (I didn't!)
Also, I note that if I had taken just my initial offer, my TC would have been much closer to the listed. But I went through the long and arduous process of sending one email to my recruiter asking for more money and here I am.
Damn dawg, I was there as a level 61 (or maybe it was 62? I can't remember..) a few years ago, and my total compensation was something like $180k in Redmond. I negotiated a little, but didn't push that hard
I guess I'm technically a "person of color" (Hispanic) but I have a ton of useful, valuable experience and so far as code monkeys go I'm pretty good at negotiation. I thought Microsoft was a horrible pit of vipers and a generally terrible company, but I definitely did NOT experience any racism.
Maybe the people who responded to the survey are generally just really bad at negotiation, and the HR people should've gone easier on them.. I don't think it's feasible to get a 50% pay bump without changing jobs, so they're all in a really awful position
I was under the impression that your TC stays similar as you get rolling RSU grants
I got unlucky and ended up on a particularly bad team, so I left before I could get any firsthand experience with it. It's weird if it works that way, though, since it's so easy to jump ship to another company and get way more money.. Microsoft's interview process is as hard as pretty much any other high end company (except maybe Google, which seems to expect you to grind on leetcode a lot more..)
Yes, my signing bonus is spread out over the first 4 years, so my TC will not go down until at least year 5, by that point I'd expect promotions/bonuses to cover the gap, or more likely I'll have moved on to a different company (nothing against msft, just not trying to stay in one place for too long)
Jesus. I think I've vastly underestimated the opportunity cost of sticking with digital marketing rather than making the shift to developer. My thinking was always "yo it took you 5 years to consistently get 6 figs wherever you go, do you want to have to do that all over again?" But You're telling me they let brand new right out of college folks make a quarter mil? Mother of god.
Microsoft is known for paying lower than FAANG, and most employees are in a significantly lower cost-of-living area (specifically, much lower cost of home ownership) than Facebook/Google/Apple/Netflix/etc. employees.
Also, I wonder if employees who feel they’re being paid well would have anything to gain by filling this out. So there may be sampling bias.
FWIW Levels.fyi has Microsoft at $164k vs Google and Facebook at $188k total comp. But if you consider the California income tax, that would knock that total down about $15k. So its really a 164k vs 173k. But with a significantly lower cost of living. Microsoft looks like it comes out ahead in pay.
Now I am not sure on how hard it is to be promoted but it does look like you need several promotions at Microsoft to equal one promotion at Facebook or Google.
These are entry level salaries? I guess the cost of living in Ohio is dirt cheap but I would guess an entry level salary to be half of that now. Edit: I guess the cost of living is way less than half though.
definitely. FAANG mostly recruit from top-tier programs (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) and usually pay $150-200 for a starting salary for someone from one of those programs
Of all the people I know at FAANG companies and that I interacted with while at Google, only one of them has a degree from one of those schools (a MS from Stanford done while they were already at Google). The idea that they mostly recruit from top-tier programs is false. Certainly being at those programs is a huge help, but by no means even remotely close to a requirement.
I have been recruited by a few FAANG companies (recruited in the sense that a recruiter reached out for an interview) and have only gone to public schools, nothing impressive.
Recruiters throw a very broad net. They reach out to everyone. At one point, I’ve gotten emails for software dev positions from Google, Microsoft and Facebook. I graduated from a no name school decades ago, my light LinkedIn profile showed a list of no name companies where I was just your average SaaS CRUD C# developer.
I wouldn’t get passed a phone screen without prep for a software dev position.
I only recently ended up at a FAANG as a technical consultant. Even then, the recruiter reached out to me about a software engineering position and I asked about openings in the cloud division.
I think you definitely need to be at the absolute top of your field to even consider working at somewhere like Google though. That's probably bifurcated between people coming from top schools and independently talented people like I guess yourself.
There are lots of programmers globally, the top few percent is probably on the order of a couple of football stadiums worth of people. You are probably closer to that then you suspect.
I used to think that Microsoft/Google/etc only hired amazing super-geniuses and I could never walk among their hallowed halls. It turns out, though, whiteboard coding is a skill you can develop just like most skills. The evil logic puzzles they used to ask at Microsoft are a skill you can improve as well, but hopefully you won't run into those.
This probably feels great to say... but in reality 99.99% of developers will never be anywhere near the standard for Google even if they waste years grinding at Leetcode.
I also disagree. If you are able to pass leetcode style test you have a very good chance at getting into a FAANG. It seems to be all they really care about.
That may be the original etymology, but to this day Microsoft isn't considered a top-tier tech employer compensation-wise. So lots of engineers saying "FANG" or "Top N" or whatever aren't including Microsoft in it for that reason. So there's basically two different but related definitions going on here, but we're specifically talking about their desirability as an employer, not "the biggest tech stocks".
And they pay less as a result. It's always been out there that MSFT, Apple & Amazon pay less than F, N & G unless your a special case. But you get paid more if your special case everywhere anyway.
The fact that this includes stock makes it that much more surprising. Microsoft’s stock has grown like 5x in the last four years, (2x over the last two).
An offer that was worth $150k when you were hired is probably making you lots more now if there were lots of stock. But apparently the stock awards are like $3k-$10k?
For anyone other than the absolute top performers, Microsoft's stock grants weren't that great. I left a couple of years ago at L63 with decent reviews and had perhaps 40K of unvested stock total. I went to Google as L4 for a 40% increase in total comp with a similar offer from Facebook. If I had went as L5 the difference would have been even crazier. Stock refreshes have been significantly higher here.
Microsoft, just like everyone else, has a High Deductible plan. As American healthcare plans go, it's fine, but if you need to go to the doctor at all expect the first few thousand to come directly out of your pocket/Health Savings Account.
Conversely, they contribute a certain amount to HSA every year. So, depending on how much one needs, it's quite possible for none of it to have come out of your pocket.
Google and Microsoft both give you $1000 in your HSA to offset that. If you don't use it, you get to keep it. Deducitbles are $1400 now, so still you pay max $400 + 10% of how much you go over till $2800. So around $540. Which isn't bad at all.
FANG aside, Americans make more than any other country in the OECD on median, after adjusting for healthcare and education benefits and government transfers.
Your deductibles and HSA contributions will be lower than my National Insurance contributions yet alone the employer ones and considerably so.
As a “high” (by UK standards not US ones) income earner in the UK the “cost” of your health insurance/benefits would be considerably higher than the cost in the US but the benefits won’t be dependent on your continued employment.
The reality is that the compensation in the UK/EU is overall rather pitiful especially when you account for the higher taxation and the employment costs to the employer are much higher which is one of the main reasons for the lower salaries rather than the employers don’t need to cover benefits.
For a taxable salary of £115K which is on the higher end of what you can get in the U.K. these days the employer NIC is £13,885 that’s 10% contribution on top of the salary alone the employee is then pays over £6000 in contributions also.
Even so, they adjust for cost of living (edit: and local market rate). Salaries in the US are just higher than in Europe. I think Switzerland is the only exception.
They don't "ignore" anything. The market is what's relevant to them
. SWE salaries and not banking salaries. SWE salaries in finance would be even worse in London.
This is very efficient and is calibrated every year. It makes no sense to account for salaries in fields that don't compete. If someone wants to be paid higher they could happily move to the US. The algorithm accounts for all of this.
I'm glad you think so. Having worked with a megacorp that took this approach, the primary reason I'm not still with them is that all the decent jobs in tech were in London, and moving there would have required me to take a relative paycut (the wages were the same but the CoL was much higher).
However, I did get a lot of offers at much less profitable companies for much, much better salaries based in London, hence why I'm pointing out this problem.
I mean, if you're fine with only hiring grads/relatively junior developers then the system works. I'm just observing that it didn't work for me, and for a lot of people I knew back it the days.
(The constant re-staffing of teams with new people after key members moved to the US was also maddening).
With 20% downpayment, a $30 year 800K mortgage at 3.75% is $3700/month. That's $44K per year. Not impossible on $150k yearly compensation. And even easier if the family is dual-income on top of that.
If you are young, you can easily live off $50k/year, if you don't have children, don't own a car, take the bus to work, and your employer provides health insurance. Food is not that expensive, and you can rent an apartment for 20,000-25,000/year.
If your take-home is 110k, you'd have saved up for a downpayment in 4 years.
starting total compensation: 150K. If your partner works a similar job, your combined annual income is 300K.
No income tax in Washington State, so Federal + FICA taxes would be ~70K (look up any online calculator).
Rent ~1800 per month or 22K per year (based on Zillow's data for 1bd/1ba in Redmond, WA). Living expenses of 2K per month or 24K per year.
You are looking at 300K - (70 + 22 + 24)K, or >180K potential annual savings. Let's double the living expenses or throw in student loan repayments on top, but saving 100-125K per year is easily doable for such a couple. And in a couple of years, you have 200-250K for your downpayment.
Hmmm... does add up can't deny that. But in reality I don't see many of my professional friends saving anywhere near to this kind of cash. Childcare, loans etc seems to really eat into it.
Save 50k a year for 4 years isn’t that hard making $150k. Take home is 100k. Rent with a roommate is 2000. Monthly expenses is 2000(mobile service, food).
But you can make $135K-$150K easily in most major cities in the US a software engineer with 5-8 years of experience as just a SaaS CRUD developer.
You can also get a nice large (3000+ square foot) house brand new build in the burbs in a great school system right in Atlanta for around $300-$375K with an FHA loan and 3.5% down.
I recently bought a quite big apartment (140 sqm, one balcony and a terrace with a view) at a minute walk distance from St. Peters in Rome for 460k and the mortgage rate is 0.73% at less than 12k/year
WA has no personal income tax. Also a bit of a libertarian flair overall, why MSFT is openly defense friendly, which means local government has allowed for building housing everywhere.
To be honest, speaking as a transplant, it is really great up here. We moved from Austin and haven't regretted it for a second (and the whole family loved Austin too). Instead of having a miserable summer that lasts from April to October, we have a miserable winter that lasts from November to March. Taxes are about par, government is (imho) quite a bit more sane, the job market is broader and deeper, public schools are better, and the scenery is gorgeous when not hidden by clouds.
Can you explain the math here ? If you make $500k, at 9% progressive, it will be like 6% flat with all deductions. So tax will be $30k. Then you take a 10% pay cut. So you are losing $50k. So you lose $50k, and gain $30k. That’s negative $20k. Even if you keep your salary same, your mortgage has to be roughly $2.5k/month. That’s a 1 bedroom condo.
I can't really parse the second half of your statement.
There's definitely a lot more land to build housing on in the PNW, despite also having some of the geographic constraints that the Bay does, although it hasn't exactly kept housing costs in check.
Maybe "a bit" of a libertarian flair, but also in many ways the urban areas are arguably MORE progressive than the "old conservative NIMBY liberals" in the bay.
It's expected. MS has been a large company for a while, which means two things: revenue per employee is not necessarily high, and visibility of individuals can be murky. As a result, packages are heavily skewed towards most senior people. I bet the partner engineers, for instance, make quite decent income.
the amount of internal denial about the pay gap between us and FANG companies is pretty silly. a lot of high performers get the principal-band bump tangled in front of them for years as an incentive. (level 66+. level 65 is the first "principal" level but doesn't get the non-linear comp boost yet).
I might be wrong, but reading online, Microsoft seems to be talked about as if pay is a lot lower than similar big tech companies and held in a low regard than say, Google or FB.
Its fascinating how much lower Microsoft compensation appears to be compared to others, even Amazon. I guess the stock has been doing well, but can Microsoft truly attract the best talent with these numbers?
Most people find Amazon to be an overall improvement to the world. Not everyone is as lazy as the French or a privacy activist, the majority of people like having things that add value or convenience over old ways of doing things and they understand that not every job is a cakewalk.
Right got it. Most people are mindless consumers who want to consume more efficiently. And thankfully Amazon is right there to help with all of my consumption needs!
Also, what's up with the dig at the French dude?
Good. Salaries should be public record as an accountability measure. You can't fix the problem of your employer unfairly paying you less than your colleagues if you don't know what your colleagues make.
> You can't fix the problem of your employer unfairly paying you less
Are people good judges of how much value they bring a company? You may think you deserve more pay, but you may also have a high opinion of yourself or over-estimate your skill/contributions/merit.
I think making salaries public information is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it reduces information asymmetry and gives you more negotiating power, but on the other it could probably lead to sour grapes and/or hurt feelings among employees where there was none before.
> Having public data on salaries would help potential employees make more informed decisions about working for companies in the first place.
Translation: "if a company doesn't pay well, talented people won't want to work there" - why would a company that doesn't pay well release information that would disadvantage them like that? Unless you are suggesting they be forced by law to make all salaries public. But you can already get an idea of the salary bell curve at a given company with things like Glassdoor.
Employers are legally enjoined from stopping their employees from sharing this info with each other and once this info is floating around keeping it off the internet ought to reasonable become challenging.
Your experience does not match mine as a manager. At any given moment a manager worth his/her pay is acutely aware who does what they said they'd do, who is capable of more than others, who solves more problems, who causes less fallout, who deserves that promo and raise and so on. There are always one or two people out of a dozen who, if they were to disengage, would doom the productivity of the team. So you want to keep your A players happy. The rest, you divide into two buckets essentially: B players aspiring to be A players, and everybody else. You keep the former happy. You don't really care about the latter and give them whatever is the default they'd normally get.
A lot of A players suck at negotiations, IMO. If they didn't, their career would advance much faster. It's much easier to negotiate if you have the goods, and very few people have the goods.
"So" is a tell for cognitive dissonance: whenever someone starts their response with a "so", in 100% of the cases what follows is the opposite of what the person they're responding to said. A deliberate misinterpretation.
I'm saying that your ability to deliver is of foremost importance to your comp, more so than negotiation skills (which help, but not replace the ability to deliver). Why? See the first part of my post that you've deliberately misinterpreted. It may seem to you that you can fool your manager, but that's not the case, if they're paying attention.
For average folks, their ability to deliver is of little importance. What sets their compensation is the market rate. They can slack off for a few years, do bare minimum, then move to another FANG and double their pay, because such is the new market rate. Their past performance means shit. Their ability to perform on interviews and get competing offers means everything.
For exceptional folks it's silly to be the A players unless they have a buddy in the VP ranks who drags them up the ranks, as otherwise they would waste their best years on flat compensation and a bunch of petty bonuses. Exceptional folks should really slack off, become those C players, and build their own gig on a side.
So you're saying that any reply that starts with "so" is willfully dense, and never exists to point out a logical flaw or unintended consequence of the written argument?
A sudden release of numbers might cause that, but ideally the culture is built around transparency and salary gaps are actually an opportunity to have discussions with your manager like "what can I do to close the performance gap and make the same amount as X?"
It ensures that salary distributions can be justified, and that employees have goals they can strive towards rather than the current variable reward system where you work as hard as you can and hope your employer decides to reward you this year.
> it could probably lead to sour grapes and/or hurt feelings among employees where there was none before.
When that is the case, it means that the ambient is so toxic that a peaceful coexistence is only possible due to a ridiculous amount of taboo and secrecy (this is social manipulation 101). I say, to hell with these workplaces; they'd better collapse sooner than later.
> Are people good judges of how much value they bring a company?
People are average judges, by definition :) I don't think that's very important though.
There are two ways of looking at this, IMO. In the Hayekian sense, information flow... especially price information makes markets work. This is one of the of the reasons literal markets exist(ed). Markets "clear." All the metal, meat, etc. that needs to be sold gets sold. Even in modern times, you can get great deals on closing days (often sunday) in a literal meat market. Prices move fluidly, and if market conditions dictate that lamb cutlets are 75% off.. that price travels like the market quickly.
The other major factor besides information flow is number of participants, fwiw.
The other way of looking at it is as power gaps. Employers have relatively more power in negotiations because they have more price information.
People may be, but individual persons are not. It’s the individual who is negotiating.
I remember a psychology study about the nature of impromptu pay raises. For the initial weeks they were extremely grateful. After six weeks or so IIRC they felt like they were entitled to that extra money all along. We are incredibly adept at rationalizing the outcome we want. Who wants to admit they don’t deserve a raise when handed to them?
People in aggregate may be good judges of value, but I don’t think too many individuals are. How many people do you know who will say they are insufficiently paid vs. paid too much?
I think the best way to gauge your worth is to periodically put your resume out and interview. If you get a lot of offers that dwarf your current pay you’re probably under paid. If not, you may just be a bad judge of your economic worth
In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.
There already is a sub-set of people whose salary is public: top executives of public companies (their compensation is listed in the public disclosures).
It had a very interesting effect: no one wants to be paid in the bottom 50%, so every job offer (at the executive level) claims to pay in the top 75% or so. Which led to salary inflation.
I'm very curious to see if the same would happen here (and I think it started to happen somewhat with sites such as level.fyi sharing salary info). If you see (in aggregate) what others get for similar positions, you are more likely to get an offer above that average. Which over time, leads to everyone getting raises.
Why isn't this a concern for publishing CEO salaries? Arguably this is a huge reason CEO salaries have skyrocketed in comparison to non-executive comp. I think everyone should be on the same level playing field in terms of access to information. So if CEOs have their salaries published, then publish those for workers. If workers don't have their salaries published then CEOs shouldn't either.
A company generally only has one CEO. There are hundreds, in some cases thousands, of employees with the same job function and salary grade at MS. The problem comes when those people start comparing their salaries to each other, not to other companies.
I see this as a way to identify bad management and corruption actually. So a C-class employee has an A-level salary? Either that person is a master negotiator or has dirt.
> And then they can have frank discussions with their employers on why the diversity of salaries for similar levels of work.
I mean, that's pretty much the whole issue as the company sees it, a frank discussion about a company like that only hurts the company. Because there isn't really a good way to rephrase "well, the gap here between you and Jim here is not because you produce less value or deserve getting paid less, but because we can just get away with paying you less".
And no, I am not dismissing that some engineers produce more value than others and hence they get paid more. This happens quite often. However, in a lot of cases, that's not the reason for why some are getting paid less. And those who produce little value and get paid less are typically very aware of that fact, so they don't tend to raise fuss over the compensation.
It actually gives you less negotiating power because even if you're a good negociator the company will be penalized if you're not a fashionable person to be giving extra pay. The push for transparency is a result of the equity inquisition wanting to remove roadblocks that impede attacking competency based systems.
Crowds are certainly better judgements of value than individual people are.
If it does lead to sour grapes, it's a benefit for the employee - she realizes that either the company is not one worth working for and she ought to leave, or that he is not worth it for the company and must improve performance or look elsewhere.
It also reduces employee bargaining power - having a proper anonymous audit of all employees however will be a good thing as it will expose problems.
BTW before I get flamed I have seen the anonymised data for a big UK tech company >175k employees and there where obvious pay problems based on Sex, Race and Disability.
It seems a bit extreme (and, frankly, dangerous) to give every idiot on Twitter access to salary information on every W-2 employee at every public company. Especially in our current culture of online discourse and with our current norms (or lack thereof) about the line between professional and personal lives and views.
I think it's extreme to call it extreme, seeing as it is the norm for federal employees and most state employees - including, for instance, academics and other researchers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and football coaches.
All salaries should be public record? I get your point and why this argument is made but personally, no thanks. I don't want my personal financial information or income information to be shared with just anyone. No thanks.
What I get paid is nobody's business except mine and my company's. That you can't negotiate your salary worth isn't my problem. Get better negotiating skills.
Why does it matter so long as you feel the deal is fair? If you feel like youre being paid crap then leave but if you’re being paid crap and dont care because its still more than enough why worry about it?
Too much time is spent trying to measure ourselves against others only to breed unnecessary dissatisfaction.
This implies you can't determine your value based on contribution, so just use coworkers as a relative measure. Doesn't seem to make passengers happy wrt airline tickets so not sure about salaries...
> Am I being paid much more than my co-workers? I don't want to know
Then how do you know how good you are at negotiating?
I can assure you your company knows exactly how much other companies in your area are paying for every role. Market participants with incomplete information get taken advantage of.
You need to decide what your labor is worth. The number you’re willing to work for. Negotiations is a class I’d recommend people do. It’s very enlightening. But my general strategy is define a number and add 10%. Let company make an initial offer then counter. Usually you meet in the middle so your 10% padding gets you there. Companies have many levers such as salary, sign on, bonus, stock, etc to be flexible. You’re trying for a win-win. All this means what your peers might earn is irrelevant as no two job offers are ever the same for experienced people in soft/hardware.
If that's seriously how you negotiate job offers, I suspect you're leaving money on the table. I'm terrible at negotiating and even I know that.
> You need to decide what your labor is worth.
Based on what?
> The number you’re willing to work for.
There's no set number. I'll take as much as an employer is possibly willing to part with. Since I can't know that number, the next best thing is to know how much they pay others and start negotiations at > than that number.
It all depends on the individual. Leaving money on the table is a false concept. If you accept a job for a salary and are happy to take it then the salary is right. What others earn is not relevant. When you are looking to move to another job there are multiple factors you need to consider. Are you stressed in your current jobs? Maybe you'd take less salary for a less stressful job. Are you interested in the particular opportunity as it's a stepping stone? Perhaps you'd take less salary to that opportunity for the doors it opens. Moving to another job isn't just about getting a bigger salary and those are factors you need to evaluate in terms of coming to what you think you're worth in the new job.
But what if you could have less stress and make more money? (don't scoff, I've done it). Or learn something new and make more money (I've done that too). Or whatever other axes you want to maximize vs more money. If you're happy with the job, more money is always better than less money.
You're worth as much as your employer can/will pay for your skills. Why would you ever take any less, assuming you like everything else about the job? How much you value the non-money aspects of the job is irrelevant to the discussion of how much you should be paid. If you like the non-money aspects treat it as a bonus meant just for you, because it is.
You should be happy in your job, no question about it. But happiness vs money is usually a false dichotomy.
I don't know what you do but when you earn enough to move from your needs to your wants phase, you find happiness is more important. A nasty job paying lots will make you miserable and impact your health. Money is secondary in the wants phase. Maybe you're different, I don't know.
This will only hurt employee salaries. If all salaries were public, there would be no negotiating and they it would make them based on position rather than individual (IE: the lowest it can possibly be).
Companies will just show you the public chart if you try to negotiate.
Want to fix the problem? Learn how to negotiate your value to a company. This skill comes in handy in pretty much all aspects of life.
> This will only hurt employee salaries. If all salaries were public, there would be no negotiating and they it would make them based on position rather than individual (IE: the lowest it can possibly be).
Companies don't just give great negotiators whatever number they want. They know how much they're willing to pay for a certain role. I've failed to hire people because they wouldn't take what HR would let me pay. Sucks, but those are existing company problems.
How is making salary numbers public going to change that? They'll still need to find someone to do that job, and if they publish too low a number they won't be able to hire the people capable of doing the job.
When you say in a later post that you made 40% more in your first-out-of-college job compared to a colleague due to your "experience and negotiating skills," I'm skeptical of the "experience" aspect since it was your first job. So I'm all for things that in that case would have put you two both making exactly the same amount. And then if your on-the-job skills are better, yours will go up faster; if they aren't, you aren't getting overpaid just for being better at an unrelated skill set.
Your points are anecdotal as well, without you realizing it, in the sense that they're based on your lack of anecdotes.
To further the anecdotal train I can tell you I have a few first hand examples that prove you wrong:
- Due to me negotiating well during the offer stage I received a title bump (to meet mandatory max salary range reqs) and had budget pulled from other open positions to pay for mine as I was now 40% (I'm guessing) above max pay for the position I interviewed for.
- Before my latest job I've had one way candid conversations with coworkers (i.e., I know what they make) and I've always been significantly above them (25-40%) for the same level of experience or less.
I'm completely against making salary numbers public for obvious reasons.
Yes, I had one anecdote, and in it, I failed to hire the candidate I was looking at because I couldn't pull off that re-leveling. (It was discussed, but we didn't need that level of skill enough to justify shifting our other budget.)
They walked away from the offer we gave them instead, as was their right.
In the non-anecdotal part - yes, someone like you would be hurt with this. I consider that a net benefit. Your negotiation skills are not helping you write better software than me or anyone else, but they're redirecting money towards you instead of me.
I distrust organization because I want to be able to make more than people based on skill and output, but I am all in favor of problems at all with measures to tie salary more strictly to output, or to make that more transparent.
Heck, I've even managed people who made considerably more than people at their same title band, despite less experience - it was based on on the job performance, not years of experience or negotiation before being hired. The salary band for the range was wide so that it could accommodate both strong performers and poor ones.
"Wrong. The way to fix the problem is to organize. Collective action works."
Why would I want to do that? I already make many multiple times more than my peers due to my specialized skill set.
I remember my first job out of college. Somehow, salaries got leaked and I was making 40% more than my colleague, in the same position (he sat right next to me).
The difference was my experience and negotiating skills.
'Collective action' as you say just adds a middleman that won't do much for me..except prevent me from getting a raise on my own terms.
Historically this just isn’t correct - for example in accounts of labour agitation and union formation in the 19th century it’s noted time and again that the organisers and ringleaders were often the cream of the workers in each industry despite the attempts of capital to put forward the impression you have. The very best of humanity can see further than their own little bubble.
When the metric is income, pretty much everybody who works for wages or salary is below median. People who are above it are those who derive most of their income from investments.
So, in that sense, OP is still correct - it's beneficial for workers to organize for collective action, so long as you draw the proper boundaries within which that collective action will operate.
It's also often supported by those at the most extreme top end for whom it has very little positive or negative impact beyond signaling. See philanthropic billionaires and top-level athletes for examples.
I don't know why people always jump to "collective action" as the answer to anything related to compensation. Software engineers and program managers are not powerless, uniform skilled, replaceable cogs. You have unique & distinctive value. That we've just gone through the most ridiculous compensation inflation period of my entire career yet people still act like they're forced to put in 70+ hours a week in a coal mine boggles the mind.
> Software engineers and program managers are not powerless, uniform skilled, replaceable cogs. You have unique & distinctive value.
I beg to differ. Most companies treat their IT employees as exchangeable cogs. Hell, there's an entire offshoring and h1b industry built around that fact, not to mention local dumpsterfires like Accidenture.
> yet people still act like they're forced to put in 70+ hours a week in a coal mine boggles the mind.
Well, many of us work 80+ hours a week and are happy because they're allowed the honor to work for SpaceX/Facebook/Google/... so yeah.
The best part of the article is in the first paragraph, "...Microsoft employees shared their salaries, bonuses, and stock awards in a Google spreadsheet..."
I see a lot of people saying a lot of things about how salary transparency is bad for relatively high performers. I haven't found that to be the case. It's useful because it let's you understand the rules that the other side has in negotiation. For example, where I work, if I wanted to negotiate, I wouldn't have any luck increasing my base salary (without getting releveled), but I could negotiate on stock or bonus.
Also like, personally I don't think a skill like negotiation should be a part of the "meritocracy" of Computer Science.
You are participating in a labor market, and a market is not a meritocracy. The only guaranteed way to find a market price is to find a buyer that is willing to actually buy at a given price.
Thus, you don't need negotiation "skills". You need to interview at other companies, get offers, let all of them know what offers you got that you are ready to take. Nothing much more necessary. There are small negotiation tactics that may make small changes but those are not big - the largest gain is from interviewing at all. If you are not willing to interview, then that's your choice.
This is why I strongly recommend all folks to interview at other comparable companies once in a while. It's about the only way to keep your employer pay at least a fair market price. And this also helps everyone else. It helps others get better salary, and it ultimately makes the society more efficient by having people where they can create the most value.
I'm aware of what the reality is. I'm mostly poking fun at people who claim that this industry is anything resembling a meritocracy (whatever that even means).
But the broader point is, and I say this as someone who, broadly, is okay with the status quo of tech interviewing, the idea that to be compensated fairly, one needs to focus on all of these things that aren't actually improving my skills or value to the company I work for is counterintuitive.
I would like to be in a situation where the company says "this is how we structure compensation, here's how your performance plays into that, and so here are the levers you can pull to change your compensation". Even better if I can see where other companies in the market sit. Then, I can focus on increasing my value to $employer, which will hopefully reward me with more money. Only at the point that I feel that there are other, better offers that $company can't compete with (whether for $$ or ethical or interesting work reasons) do I have any need to interview elsewhere.
But the incentives aren't aligned that way, and it's annoying.
> But the incentives aren't aligned that way, and it's annoying.
Not only they are not aligned, they are fundamentally adversarial.
- Companies want to pay as little as possible as long as they can get away with it.
- You want to get as much as possible.
- There's no "objective" criteria possible that can judge someone's salary/pay.
So it is fundamentally impossible to get what you're asking for. Fundamentally. Like, no amount of your wish or arguing or effort can make it so. Meritocracy (for a pay) is a lie. It's never been true. Merit does have significant effect - as capable people will tend to get advanced, etc - but it does not and can not guarantee better pay, as merit is only an indirect factor that determines your pay.
That said, https://levels.fyi seems decent enough to give you reasonable ranges, if the company you work for and their competitors are there.
> Not only they are not aligned, they are fundamentally adversarial.
I disagree. I'm aware that that's the general opinion, but no, this isn't strictly true. A company can be interested in treating its employees well, and being upfront with them about pay is, to many, a comparative advantage (especially if the pay is also competitive).
> There's no "objective" criteria possible that can judge someone's salary/pay.
Generally correct, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. As long as you and the company agree on the method of evaluation in advance, it's fine. That is, given:
1. A predetermined (if fuzzy) algorithm for determining pay
2. Transparency on what other people are being paid
You have approximately full information. You know the game you're playing, you know the rules, and you can verify that the company is being honest.
To some extent this is pushing things down the stack a bit, since the company can lie about performance to favor certain people, but this still limits the effectiveness compared to no transparency.
I de-facto have this where I work now (enough people share their salaries that one can reverse the formulas used to calculate compensation). Empowering people to be able to ask why they were only paid $X, when their performance suggests they should have been paid $>X is valuable, and any manager worth their salt should be able to give an answer if there's a legitimate reason.
> I disagree. I'm aware that that's the general opinion, but no, this isn't strictly true. A company can be interested in treating its employees well, and being upfront with them about pay is, to many, a comparative advantage (especially if the pay is also competitive).
We'll have to agree to disagree here. And I'm afraid it's not an "opinion" but a fundamental fact due to the structure. I'm not saying companies are not or can not treat their employees well - they absolutely can and do. But a company is interested in treating its employees well as a strategy to be competitive against other competitors when acquiring and retaining talent is more important, and they can only do so while they are competitive. Once that changes for whatever reason, they will have no choice but to stop treating their employees as well. That's just the economic reality. This economic expansion in Silicon Valley lasted so long, and the demand for software engineers have been high enough for long enough, that I've seen young folks like you who have no idea what a true downturn can do, and I'm afraid you are one of those youngsters with a rose-tinted fantasy view of the economic system.
> Once that changes for whatever reason, they will have no choice but to stop treating their employees as well.
Yes, but there is more than one way to do this. For example. Instead of secretly lowering pay for some people, you can do so transparently and explain why it's necessary to furlough or fire or reduce raises or bonuses. It is possible to be transparent even in tough times. And there are companies that have done that. "Economic realities" don't force companies to lie to their employees. That's on leadership and values.
I think, as long as this is anonymous, that these are interesting questions. Especially with the talk about how H-1B1 visas are supposedly being abused.
Although it does not seem that the data here, according to the article, is representative of Microsoft. It is difficult to draw hard conclusions from it, although the data is far from useless.
has just over 2000 entries for Software Engineers. Admittedly, it’s time since launching in 2017, but that’s still a simple average of more than 600 samples a year.
More information is always good. In any case, this information is out there since it's common in Asian and South Asian communities to be pretty open about pay - though usually not with people outside the community to respect the local culture.
Usually, the value of the information is high when everyone knows everyone is equivalent.
The aim is to create the effects of Dodd-Frank on CEO pay.
How do people measure a year's stock comp? Cash value of vesting RSUs and (value-strikeprice) of options that vest in that year? Or just present value of grants issued in that year?
Whether that's the right way to do it is a matter of perspective but at least it's a number that doesn't constantly change. And with tech stock prices doing what they do, it's been very conservative over the past 4 years...
This is a good question. With a public company it's easy to treat vested stock comp as cash. I would not expect newly issued grants to be included if they depend on continued employment.
> Over the course of August 2020, more than 300 Microsoft employees shared their salaries, bonuses, and stock awards in a Google spreadsheet to continue their push for fairer compensation.
I find this interesting that they are using Google Sheets instead of Excel.
The one big area where Google Docs is superior to Microsoft, is having a bunch of people be able to edit a single document.
At Google, sharing salaries is officially supported and the spreadsheet is linked to by HR. So Google employees actually fought for and started this trend, they were way ahead of everyone else.
What's interesting is that you have information about whether the respondent identifies as a person of color and questions about gender identity and whether they feel marginalized. And yet you decide to just report information that's already available on levels.fyi. Why not dig into questions like whether people who identify as people of color or are feeling marginalized are getting paid less or the same as their peers?
