"Our compensation is not based on how well you negotiate or how often you ask for raises... We don’t have a range of possible salaries for every level, we have a single salary, so everything about the system is algorithmic."<p>Bullshit. Politically savvy employees will just move their lobbying from blatantly asking for raises to arguing that they are on a new "level."<p>Consider that this document lists 10 different criteria for just the "public artifacts" portion of the ranking, including writing blog posts, public speaking, participating in hackathons, being on panels, and "participating in Stack Exchange." Queue the guy who says his upvotes and tweets bump him to the next level.<p>And "public artifacts" is just one of FIFTEEN (!) vague areas on which you are graded, including "Outreach," which lists some of the exact same criteria as "public artifacts," like public speaking and hackathons; "Getting Things Done;" "Ships" (how is that different from Getting Things Done?); "Ideas" (sounds objective!); "Extracurricular programming learning;" and "Other engineering type skills."<p>This sounds like a compensation system that pretends to be far more objective than it really is, which is actually more dangerous than one that acknowledges (and thus treats carefully) its own subjectivity.<p>(Which happens to be a broader issue I have with StackOverflow itself; much as I love it, the site is plagued by know-it-alls wielding pseudo precise rules "your question is overlocalized" and "not really a question" to delete reasonably compliant content. But that's a whole other comment.)
The PDF is part of a larger blog post: <a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/how-much-should-you-pay-developers/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/how-much-should-you-pa...</a>
I believe if people shared their salaries with their co-workers only good things will come for the individuals.<p>A) Either you will feel valued and continue happily along your way.<p>B) You will realize you are not being fully appreciated, find a new job opportunity, and know now how much to negotiate for.<p>FYI: I just created a poll "How much do you make as a programmer?" (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763932" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763932</a>)
There is a previous discussion about this from last night here <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2761427" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2761427</a>
If they have objective measures and are compensating based on them, there's no reason not to tell people what the formula is. You can still hide what you measure people at (Bob's only A+ at LINQ, vs. A+++). Without specifying how measurements translate into yearly compensation they're just waving their hands around and saying how scientific they are without actually being so.