I've always felt the culture of hiding salaries was doing a significant disservice to employees. It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. In turn, this makes the entire labor market less efficient for the employee.<p>This also makes the employer less accountable to the employees. The employer can easily pay somebody significantly more or less than they contribute, and the rest of the team cannot really say anything about this.<p>Now, there are some cultural reasons to do this--preventing jealousy, hiding inequality. But it really feels like a social band-aid, a temporary solution hiding the symptoms but not the underlying problem. Besides, everyone ends up having a reasonable guess as to who makes more and who makes less anyhow! The same dynamics develop, just with more uncertainty.<p>On the other hand, making salaries public takes these problems head-on. Inequality isn't bad in and of itself; some is basically necessary. But hiding that fact doesn't really help anyone. Instead, forcing people to see it head-on, deal with it and talk about it is probably a better solution.<p>I really applaud Buffer and the general movement towards transparency. I think it's a very healthy cultural progression and hope it catches on more widely, so that people stop having knee-jerk reactions to salary information.<p>EDIT: As an interesting additional note, all salaries (beyond a token minimum) at Berkeley (and the whole UC system) are publicly available at <a href="http://ucpay.globl.org/" rel="nofollow">http://ucpay.globl.org/</a>.<p>I've looked up various professors at the ParLab (where I did some undergraduate research). The fact that their salaries range from ~120k to ~350k did not change my perspective of anyone and did not seem to affect the lab's culture at all.<p>Essentially, I'd be perfectly happy to see this outside of public universities.
Let's say I'm a competitor, and I find that Niel (randomly picked) is someone I want to hire. All else being equal, I offer him $100k (website says he's making $88k). He comes to his boss to say "I like it here, can you match it?"<p>What does his boss do? Especially, if he's valuable to the company...<p>What if I have a very specialized skill that doesn't fit nicely into your matrix? Let's say market pay for my skill is $200k. Do you create a new category for me? Do I get dirty looks from all of my co-workers because I have a valuable skillset that most people don't?<p>I'd hate it, as an employee, as a boss or as an investor. But that could just be me.
Excellent concept - but one major Caveat.
Why in the world would you publish it for all the world to see?<p>Keep it internal to the company - you have an expectation of privacy from your employer and this post just ruined it completely.<p>I hope they got written signed releases from every one of those folks whose private info they broadcast to the world.
Seems unwise to have a CEO co-founder be the highest salaried employee at a startup.<p>That person's equity position is probably at least an order of magnitude higher than the other employees. As an investor or employee, I'd find this alarming.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/peter-thiel-best-predictor-of-startup-success-is-low-ceo-pay/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/peter-thiel-best-predictor-...</a><p>Call me old fashioned, but I think co-founders should be paid living expenses + 25%, even in a series-A funded startup.
Wow...the engineering salaries are significantly lower than I would've expected for a well known startup in the Bay Area...at least compared to the perceived range for such things.<p>Note: a less cynical take is this: GodDAMN buffer employees must be happy working there if they tolerated transparency to this level...which, really, is the best win-win for all kinds of transparency scenarios.
I like this idea, but with a few modifications:<p>* Names should be anonymous. Everyone knows where they are within the group and can determine if its fair without knowing exactly who makes what.<p>* It should include options and bonuses. In some companies non-salary compensation dwarfs salaries, and it's dishonest to point to a CEO salary and say "Look, he only makes 1.something X what regular people do."<p>* Keep it internal to the company. No point in giving the competition an exact target or requiring whole company buy in before you do it.<p>* Allow people to redact their own information, but display it as having been redacted. If enough people do that, or just management does it, everyone will sense that things are unfair.
Things I learned today:<p>* Buffer is not somebody's weekend project<p>* It needs 16 (yes, SIXTEEN) people to run that thing<p>* They actually have revenue. In millions. $2.3 Millions!<p>* Their company values are based on How to win friends and influence people.<p>Aside from that, open salaries are pretty naive idea, if not completely dumb and dangerous. The lives you live everyday is in effect a game (as in "game theory" game). When you are talking to person, selling goods or buying one you are in the game. Like in any game, information is your advantage and your opponents weakness. This is exactly why privacy matters. If insurance company knows you eat too much pizza, they would want to get a higher premium from you. Similarly if a car dealer can look you up and figure out your salary, he can adjust his negotiation tactics. A plumber making half the money you do would want to charge you more than others. And so on. When all these people would look for their next jobs, their next employer would know how much salary to offer them.
I have a feeling you will regret this soon. There are certain benefits in having a firm salary structure sponsored by a transparent system, but the loss of flexibility will hurt in ways you haven't experienced. Also, letting everyone know what their peers make can cause disgruntled employees.
It’s one thing to have a transparent salary policy, it’s a whole another world to publicly blog about people’s salary with a link to their Twitter account.<p>I hope all employees agreed to have their salary published on the buffer blog.<p>Kudos to them for trying something different.
Back when I was a really dumb undergrad, I did some work for a company & they asked me where to mail the cheque. I gave them the University address. So I was chatting with my professor & we walk by the mailboxes, and by pure reflex, I reach out into my mailbox & grab my mail & he does the same & we say our goodbyes & go home.<p>Now, I open the mail at home & am staring at my professor's salary! You see, the secretary had switched our mails by mistake because our last names began with the same letter. I was quite stunned by the number - it was a measly sum, and I did the math & worked out that the Professor's salary was about 60K. Now, I knew my Professor was an important CS scholar & had tons of papers to his name, but that low number irked me. After the PhD and all these papers, just 60K...why..?<p>At the same time, my Professor had also gone home & opened his mail & was staring at my salary! So much money for some dumb undergrad who was basically an average student & had no major publications or research! He was quite bothered.<p>The next day, we had a very awkward exchange of mails. But from then on, the student-teacher dynamic completely changed. I suddenly began getting B's instead of C's & even occasional A-. He probably felt, hey if this guy can get so much money in the market, he probably knows his shit. otoh, I began to respect him & the CS program less & less. So I still have to spend 3 more years & take 45 more credits & do the qualifiers to get the PhD & then write all these papers & for what..60K ? That was my attitude at the time.<p>Needless to say, I dropped out of the PhD pgm with a Masters & went to work full-time. That was the stupidest thing I ever did, but I just didn't know it then. Now, I look back & think...hey if I hadn't known about his salary, I'd have slogged it through & actually gotten my PhD instead of half-assing it out here :(
Can't say a lot of good things about a company that pays a "Chief Happiness Officer" more than most of its engineers. I know plenty of startups that seem to be doing alright in the customer service department without an overpaid exec heading it.<p>Does she really contribute more to the bottom line than any of the other 4 underpaid engineers?
Very humbling that no one at Buffer would call themselves a "Master", indeed many would probably but Joel at that level but he sits there on a 1.2x multiplier.<p>I once had a conversation with an old hat who said "If you call yourself a python master you better be fucking Guido."
One result from behavioral economics is that people care more about their relative standing to others than the absolute value of the salary. This is why transparency can be a double edged sword. If I think I deserve to be paid more than Joe, as long as I don't actually know how much he's paid I can believe that I'm being paid more. However, once you have transparency and I can see Joe is getting paid more than myself this will probably have a negative impact on my morale and performance.<p>One example I've heard discussed (I think by Dan Arieli) is how transparency in CEO pay has failed to bring CEO salaries down. One problem is now CEOs can see what other CEOs are getting paid and naturally every CEO will want to be paid higher than his peers.<p>I used to think open salaries would be a good thing but lately I'm not so sure. You definitely want to tread very carefully there as there are many implications and unexpected consequences.
I found one thing interesting is that only 4 out of 17 people choose equity over $10k salary. Even CTO chooses salary.<p>I am curious if this is common in startup companies, since I have never worked in startups.
Wow, these salaries seem to be pretty low. I mean a senior IOS engineer making $107K in SF? Id expect them to easily increase their salary by 30% by jumping ship.
I wonder in five years looking back whether Buffer getting hacked or their 'transparency' will have hurt them more. I am betting the latter.<p>Do they really think they can ban private emails between engineers? it would have been much easier to simply load eavesdropping software on their computer if management doesn't trust them.<p>I really like Buffer but I'm a little worried about them.
Seeing these pathetic salaries (and in the Bay Area!), I don't feel so bad about my boring enterprise development position at no-name established corporation anymore.
Many people here are picking on the senior developers salaries, hovering right around $100K. Maybe this isn't a particularly competitive startup salary, but note that salaries are tied to revenue.<p>If the company's revenue grows significantly, their salaries could become much more attractive. If, for example, revenues grow from $2M revenue to $20M revenue, senior developers would see their salaries increase by $54k or ~50% over this time.<p>It could be argued that 10X growth or an $18M increase in revenue is unrealistic for a tweet scheduler, but that's for the employees to determine.
I have a question: Why would the founders take such high salaries?<p>Seems to go against everything I would think was important for a company that is venture-backed.
Serious question: Why aren't equity positions posted too?<p>To me, that's part of the trade-off that the startup founder / leaderships takes (for good or ill), and seeing salary in the absence of actual equity positions is only half the picture.<p>Hopefully they all know each other's equity positions internally and just chose not to share publicly... otherwise it would seem like a betrayal of the open culture if the <i>actual ownership structure</i> of the company wasn't openly known and discussed.
Imagine if you went to the store to buy bread, but you didn't know how much all the other people in line were paying for their bread. When you get to the counter, the baker charges you some arbitrary amount. Today you have enough money to buy bread, but the baker warns you that he may charge more tomorrow. Since you don't know what anyone else is paying for their bread, you can't have any idea if what the baker charged you is fair or not. All you know is that you need to work as hard as you can so that you can be sure you will be able to afford tomorrow's bread.<p>Of course, this doesn't work. Nobody is preventing you from asking your neighbors what they paid for their bread. Once you know what a "fair" price for bread is, then you know exactly how hard you need to work to afford bread, and you have little incentive to work any harder than that.<p>If you own a company, ideally you don't want your employees competing with each other. You want each of them to compete with themselves, pushing their abilities, growing, learning, improving. You don't want them to know exactly how much they need to do to earn that next promotion, because then they will have little motivation to do more than the bare minimum.<p>If you own a company, unlike the baker, you can have some amount of control over the flow of information. This control allows you to manipulate your employees motivations. Like any amount of control over anything, this control can be abused...but in capable hands it can also be wielded to great effect.<p>An open salary policy gives away that control entirely...
I've read dozens of the comments on this page so far. The thing that jumps out to me is the interplay between these factors: (1) internal transparency (2) external transparency (3) internal privacy (4) external privacy (5) human motivation and (6) company culture. There are many combinations here, and I can't help but think Buffer didn't do an effective "search" across the possible "parameter space", even according to their own goals and interests.<p>For example, Buffer could have easily added a policy saying that each employee's compensation may be adjusted by, say, +/- 20% based on individual factors. That would give some uncertainty, and thus a bit of individual privacy. Peers would still have some confidence that they were, more or less, in a similar range as others with their public performance characteristics.<p>Let's put ideology aside (i.e. do we <i></i>want<i></i> this to work, according to our theories of human nature) and focus on the actual effects. How do you know if you've succeeded? How do you measure this? How do you design the experiment?<p>Call me skeptical, but I can't help but think that Buffer is doing this, largely, to say "look at us!" and "this makes an interesting blog post!".
Well, Sunil and Colin, seeing that you are criminally underpaid, are you interested in opportunities elsewhere?<p>I will figuratively eat my underwear if you don't come to regret this strategy (public, non-anonymous open vs. internally open) at some point.
This post reminds me of Miley Cyrus at the MTV VMA earlier in the year. Pop singers are incentivized to be the first to break cultural norms for no practical reason in order to ride the wave of subsequent teen followers.<p>In the same way, posts like these are created to be the first to break a specific norm (i.e. do not post employee salaries publicly) in order to ride the wave of traffic (and hopefully a few additional users).
Just trying to compare here with my European salary.. How much of this do you get to take home, ie. what part of it can you spend on food, clothing, housing etc. after takes? What about health insurance, is it provided for?
I actually love the radical transparency here, even after reading all the warnings in the HN comments.<p>What I like less is the salary formula. What's going to happen is that all of the negotiation is going to get packed into the experience and seniority multipliers. It creates the illusion of rigor and possibly does more harm than good.
Does anyone have an opinion on how these numbers square with market rates?<p>I make $113k/year as a juniorish engineer at a VC backed startup in SV. Am I hilariously overcompensated?
I always thought the best system would be to tell people what their boss makes, including options and other non-salary compensation.<p>This eliminates the problem of people comparing themselves to their nominal peers on incomplete information. It really tells you everything you need to know about compensation.<p>But the most valuable part of the buffer system is the formula. You have a framework for calculating what is fair.<p>One of the dangers at small busy startups with well-intentioned leaders is that you basically forget to give people raises and your employees don't get you to correct it until they are pissed enough to quit. That's part of why I left my original company and it cost me a good employee recently.
Interesting in many ways.
In particular, only the executives make what would be considered a competitive senior engineer/architect salary in NYC or SF. Perhaps they 'compensate' with equity?
The CEO of Buffer was asked by someone if he worried about this making it easier for his employees to be poached. His response: "if they do, they would be saving me time. Good to speed up that process. I don’t believe salary is the reason people would leave."[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/joelgascoigne/status/413713018455740416" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/joelgascoigne/status/413713018455740416</a>
I'm still baffled by salaries. In Toronto and surrounding areas (cost of living is not as high as San Francisco) I'm a programmer for web apps (php, js, and a bit of this-and-that). I see sallary ranges all over the map. Some make 40k, I've seen a 55k who wanted 60k, I've an 80k, and a few 90-120k.<p>One job I asked for 2x what I made at my old job.<p>I'm convinced you're paid what you ask for, so long as you can get shit done.
when I clicked on "try buffer" it takes me to the url: bufferapp.com, kaspersky blocked it saying "phishing URL".<p>You might wanna talk with Kaspersky?
As someone who uses Buffer (free version) on a regular basis, I have to say that I'm fairly amused that it appears as though none of the commenters here have actually read much, if anything, about Buffer. They have quite a lot of information about corporate culture that would have answered some of the questions and concerns posted here. Further, they're a distributed workforce (which I don't think anyone picked up on -- this explains emails vs. face to face conversations).<p>Some extra reading for you folks:<p><a href="http://bufferapp.com/about/#our-philosophy" rel="nofollow">http://bufferapp.com/about/#our-philosophy</a> (scroll down to the 9 Buffer Values)<p><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/joelg2/buffer-culture-01-16707113" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/joelg2/buffer-culture-01-16707113</a>
I am the CEO, and my salary is lesser than all the key staff in my company. Reason, self-funded. And everyone in the office knows it. I am just astonished how a CEO of company like Buffer, can afford such an expensive package for himself. Are you making enough or just billing it to your investors?
This is only halfway to true transparency. And also halfway to the bureaucracy of most large companies.<p>The other half to get to full transparency is having clear, measurable definitions of experience, and clear milestones of how to advance in seniority.<p>And that relates to how this starts to resemble corporate salary structures -- the key difference being that these guys have a defined number instead of a "salary grade". but the idea of plugging positions and experience levels and seniority into a salary structure is key to almost every large company. And as a result, most of the corporate angst over salaries starts to boil down to questions like: "Why is he a programmer IV, while she is a programmer III.", "How do I advance from being a Staff Software Engineer to an Advisory Software Engineer?"<p>This structure doesn't necessarily remove questions (and sometimes conflict) over career advancement, it just moves the discussion away from money, and towards labels and definitions.<p>And as some comments mentioned, there are cases where you really want to hire someone whose salary requirements do not match your structure. You may get into sticky situations like having a great coder, but you would have to make him a Lead, or a VP to actually make him fit your structure. And maybe you don't want them to have that level of leadership, because that is not their skill set. So you end up having to decide -- Is this salary structure more important than making those hires, or are you willing to let potentially great hires get away because this structure is more important to the company than those people?<p>That decision is not one that I will second-guess - I would think that these types of issues and scenarios, as well as other issues raised in the comments, have probably already been debated internally before this decision was reached.<p>But that would be an interesting follow-up post -- to hear about what discussions and debates went on before making this decision, what the expected impacts will be, why decisions were made, and what levels of growth are expected to invoke changes in this structure.
I don't mean anything but these salaries are pretty weak. Honestly, they are sort of really weak for this kind of company it seems to me. Hardly gives the impression of high paid software developers, particularly in the Bay Area, wow. I dunno.
I think if you don't like the idea of closed salary (I don't), you should just go ahead and publish yours publicly (on FB or something), if you have the guts to do it and face potential conflict with your employer (I don't have the guts, I wish I had).<p>Because, quite frankly, it's your money. No one should tell you what to do with it, much less to count these, publicly. And if, as the result of this, you get smaller salary, it will be there for the others in the company to see. How motivational.<p>I think even with this unilateral action, you will get most of the benefits - good people around you are likely to respond back and tell you if you're underpaid or overpaid.
Also introducing open revenues and semi open profits.<p>Implied Revenue: $2.0M [1]<p>Total Salary: $1.7M<p>[1] ((158.8 - 22)/1.2 - 75×1.2)/12
Not the smartest thing in the world to do, publish people's salaries and twitter accounts, especially in this day and age where privacy is virtually non-existent. I hope everyone agreed to publicly disclose the salary information.
If I were in HR then I would be reaching out to any employee that I see is under paid. Likewise I would not reach out to any employee that I think is over paid. Perhaps consider keeping this data internal.
It's great to see other companies experimenting with openness in salaries. We've taken a different approach and pay all employees (including founders) the same salary which increases as the company grows. Our team is now 8-people strong and it's working great so far. As long as you contribute to the bottom line everyone's salary goes up automatically. It's totally transparent, no negotiations required, reviews, etc.
One area where open salaries are not such a big deal - education. Many teachers are paid on an open scale of years of service X education level. It does create a culture of possibly too much higher education beyond what is useful or necessary for certain levels of teaching. That also creates teachers who don't want to switch jobs because they'll lose the years of experience pay.<p>Lesson - all people game the system for their own benefit.
I'm very much on the fence with this. If you follow a simple formula, it can work. If you need to use judgment (how to pay a superstar?) then it becomes very tricky. My general observation is that any time two people compare salaries, one is disappointed. And here you shared your salaries with the whole world. Bravo for doing this, and engaging the discussion.
As a "boss" I'd love this.<p>The only downside I see is that some people will be disappointed because the salary reflects their skills and the value the company puts in them. For some this is hard to take if they are in the bottom 20% of people in their peer group.<p>Said that, it's probably a good idea to start with this compared to introducing this later.
There are a lot of people bringing up edge cases and contingencies on this thread. The success of Buffer's culture is what happens when you stop being afraid of the edge cases and start deciding what kind of people you want to be. People will follow you if you stay true to that, as corny as that sounds.
I'm really happy to see companies offer equity vs higher salary. As someone is almost 30 (read: less willing to take the chance that equity will result in future money), I feel that's a great choice to offer employees.
This sounds like absolute hell<p>><i>Every internal email sent between any 2 people on the team has a certain list cc’ed that is accessible for everyone: For example if 2 engineers email with each other, they cc the engineers list, if it’s people on our customer support team they have a support email list cc’ed. Stripe was a great inspiration for this. (More about this)</i><p>Openness and transparency and honesty are great. But this seems like it's removing privacy, which sounds very tiring.
It's honestly stuff like this that makes me feel like the only sane person around. Why would you do this? If the CEO is pushing for it, the employees will all smile and nod and go along with the crowd, but all this does is breed resentment. The idea of open salaries sounds good on paper, but it's simply idealistic.<p>You can sing the happiness song and do all the lets-be-friends dances but at the end of the day we're people competing for resources. This will have lasting effects to all current employees for sure.