I worked for a very old fashioned company in Germany that used a similar system to pay employees. After about a year I became the lead of my team. But since some of my colleagues had been in the company about 10 years, they were getting paid more than me. Frustrated, I left for a better (and better paying) job.
I believe these systems produce a "dead sea effect". High performer will leave, being able to get better deals elsewhere. Low performers will stay, since they can' find a better deal elsewhere.
I've yet to see anything better than years-of-experience (or years-in-company). I've worked in both FAANG and startups plenty, and personally I've seen worse outcomes from "impact-driven" OKRs, nepotism, team-surfing, than from coasting.
Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs (which I consider a healthy lifecycle for any company).
"Coasters" at least know that what they do today they might have to support for N years following, so design accordingly. (Although I've also heard horror stories when they make it intentionally hard to understand for job security reasons, fortunately never seen myself).
As someone with 20+ yoe this is true, I'm probably as good as a guy with 5 yoe and honestly I want to apply for jobs like that. Honestly tech has changed so much I'm skeptical anyone really has 20 years experience now.
Its hard though when people see my work history they only let me interview for very senior roles which I usually aren't good enough to do.
On the other hand, significant merit raises (over 3%) are mostly a thing of the past. Workers that gradually improve at their job are paid less and less each year.
If you increase pay regularly on a semi-fixed schedule, you at least solve this problem and improve your employee retention.
They address this in the article by saying it is "relevant" experience. They've given themselves some wiggle room there and I'm assuming they will trust their hiring practices to make sure they don't hire someone with 10 1 year experiences.
Coasting can be compensated for by a "we're expecting you to be productive or we'll help you move on with our thanks & good will" policy. Make it easy for managers to fire and replace at market levels.
For "individual contributors" that breaks in a way that seems obvious, but managers deal in unmeasurable fuzziness almost by definition (since humans are complicated and they're in the business of humans), and there's significant pressure to become a manager after a few years.
The OP did not say that they were basing salary on years of experience, but that they were using "years of relevant experience". That is a big difference, and relevant experience is a pretty arbitrary measure.
Experience is relative here. While I agree, there should be an adjustment that captures something like "years of performance", but its harder to quantify.
> Not being able to pay enough for great candidates is a common problem for startups, and we’ve already had to accept that some very strong potential teammates won’t even consider us, given enormous salaries at established tech companies. But by doing the legwork to make sure we’re competitive within our cohort, we believe we’ll have enough great candidates who want to work at a company of our stage and size.
Recruiters and managers out there: I read "competitive" compensation as somewhere around median compensation. That will be attractive to undercompensated employees and employees in their early careers. It's hard to get good candidates to leave current roles without some sort of pay bump (20%, say?) unless there's some sort of serious dysfunction or mismatch with their current employers.
Daily's plan is to shoot for median-ish compensation and get "enough great candidates" to reach the next phase of growth. I'm glad they're planning on revisiting in a year or so, though it's easy to kid yourself. Especially when you're taking what current employees are willing to tell you as proof positive. For one, selection bias is certainly happening. Also, in my experience, people tell you what you want to hear. Daily employees that are significantly unhappy with compensation are a bad fit for Daily now given the blanket compensation policy. The best way to address that is to discretely look for other offers.
My career path was 10 years in journalism, during which I was also programming as part of my responsibilities, and now 11 years in full-time software development.
Under Daily's levels system, I'd have 11 years of "direct" experience and 5 years of "indirect" experience, for a total of 16 years of experience, putting me in their highest band (Level 7) with a salary of $270K.
But as I've told every employer who's hired me since leaving journalism, and particularly as I've transitioned from an IC to a manager, those years of experience in journalism were invaluable. I learned how to ask the right questions; how to handle the stress of always being on deadline; how to be a generalist, quickly learning enough about a subject that you can clearly explain it to others; how to communicate effectively in general; and many other skills that are absolutely relevant today.
Obviously, it wouldn't matter for this banding whether those years are treated as "indirect" or "direct" experience -- I'd be in Level 7 either way -- but I could see it matter for others.
Full disclosure: I applied to Daily last year but they ended up filling the position with an internal candidate.
There’s a huge loyalty tax being paid here. Although the transparency is nice to have, it’s simply not a sustainable model.
People grow at all sorts of rates professionally. Some people can grow from a formal level to another in a year as they get a hang for their responsibilities/job. Some people have extremely hard years due to external factors too. This type of system incentivizes nobody. Why work hard? Why do challenging stuff? Why take on the jobs with most responsibilities? Etc
> In the coming months, we aim to develop written guidance on what career growth looks like for different roles, and we'll start experimenting with rewards and recognition other than salary for particularly noteworthy achievements.
How do you reward or give recognition if your system isn’t fully thought through or based on the traditional methods of perceived impact and notable accomplishment? Isn’t that exactly what this would be anyway?
Honestly this sounds like a startup who just landed recent funding thinks they are “disrupting” the market with new unconventional TC methods. Not everyone is the same. One person with ten years of experience is another persons four years.
What fairness is to me is understanding where you sit relative to your peers and market. It is checks and balances of your worth and not political players reaping the rewards constantly. It’s the whole idea that there’s three types of workers: experts, operators, and politicians. The former two actually do the work, the latter just takes the credit more visibly.
This is sort of well-articulated and someone thought about it a lot. The salaries seem fine, as long as there’s 1MM in liquid equity to go with the L7 one like Google does.
But it doesn’t seem to address the real issue (to which I also don’t have a final answer): the jock/nerd thing is still playing out.
If, as I believe is mostly true, A16 is pretty on the money with the software eats the world thing: hackers “should” today and inevitably will be the highest paid people possibly excepting the best salesperson.
If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day, anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring.
COVID/WFH only turbocharges this: tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom.
It’s going to be a painful, but ultimately necessary transition where everyone whose math stopped at calc has their TC stop at 150-200k, and that money/seniority/prestige goes to the only truly irreplaceable people, again with the notable exception of the sales guy.
I work in finance. I have the seen the same situation play out with salespeople. As risk taking at large investment banks has fallen dramatically since 2008 regulatory reforms, the value of sales people has only risen. The "alpha" sales person seems to have no ceiling. Ideally, this sales person is working in a product area that does not increase balance sheet risk... holy moly... they are worth more than weight in gold. They bring big new accounts that trade like crazy, but balance sheet (and risk) does not balloon.
And now to offer a small criticism of your post: I prefer to say "conventionally attractive" over "tall white guys", because that would be more inclusive. Yes, really, I have seen very successful women who present just shy of pornstars-in-real-life and absolutely clean-up by selling to drooling old (dumb) white, male, portfolio managers. The sooner all of this is replaced by passive investment, the better for all customers -- but not big banks(!). After all, as the saying goes: "Where are the customers yachts?"
If you truly believe this, then please reconsider. The tech industry doesn't reward people for technically challenging work. Consider how many large companies were/are built on what you'd consider to be terrible technology choices.
Don't expect an "ultimately necessary transition" because it'll likely go in the opposite direction.
> COVID/WFH only turbocharges this: tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom.
Being tall probably matters less, sure.
I do find that ability to communicate in writing with English-speaking audiences is much more important than it used to be. Technical communication and persuasion that used to happen in hallways and on whiteboards is now happening in discussion threads, written code reviews, design papers, etc. In some cases, I expect people that some people that used to struggle now benefit from the ability to communicate more deliberately or without a verbal accent.
I don't know that white versus non-white maps to excellent writing skills as such. Partly because I'm never sure what folks mean by "white" in these contexts.
It's not just sales, it's figuring what to sell, and when to pivot. It's all well to have a solid tech stack but the market changes and companies need to see changes coming and adapt. Having the most optimized compiler isn't going to help if you're trying to sell something nobody wants.
Even tech companies don't just depend on elite programmers plus an exceptional sales guy. You need good design, good customer service, good marketing, and so on. Yes, there's a lot of bullshit in those fields (not that programming is free of it), but there's real value there too when executed correctly.
> If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day, anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring.
Optimizing compiler is a great example of a niche that a few guys should be in that really shouldn't be paid well. The big bucks earned at Google/FB aren't earned because they have better compilers or low level libraries, its because of the business strategies they have.
> We start counting years after formal schooling (high school or college). Grad school often counts as indirect experience.
As someone who worked in software development during High School, and took time off before University to work in software, this somewhat frustrates me.
Alyssa Rosenzweig has 0 years of experience under this model.
> Direct experience in our rubric means substantially the same kind of work (coding, design, product management, etc.)
This is a recipe for finding people without "n" years of experience, but instead finding people with one year of experience repeated "n" times. Great if you need a specialist in something, tragic if you need generalists - which most startups do.
Having founded and worked at quite a few start-ups, start-ups should aim for one specialist for every half-dozen generalists, preferably even lower than that. It's not a hard and fast rule, and pretty flexible, but if you have a single generalist and lots of specialists in a start-up, you are in trouble.
I’ve worked with plenty of people with “bad experience”. People who don’t learn from their mistakes, and consistently repeat the same errors, even things as basic as not testing their code before creating PRs.
I guess this model works if you identify and fire those people early, but in general, this seems like a great way to retain proven career underperformers.
On one hand, this is pretty nice. I've always hated the career management aspect of working in the software industry, and so to have it so transparent and approachable makes a ton of sense so you can focus on doing work.
However, my big question is how expectations and performance management scale with level? If someone's not there yet, but hits the years of experience for the next level, are they fired? Likewise, whose responsibility is it for people to get those skills by the time they age into the next promotion?
Quick edit: Also wanted to call out how well written this post is. It lays out the facts, peoples objections, unknowns, and anticipates questions (salespeople remain on variable comp, equity isn't being addressed yet). So kudos to the author for the great writing on this thoughtful piece.
I like the transparency and fairness. I dislike that it rewards time rather than merit and will likely discourage people from developing expertise away from their core skillset as there could be an argument that their experience in that area isn't relevant, or that their relevant experience in this area is so small.
Salary based on your "experience" as measured by the number of years you survived sitting by the computer.
This is absolutely, fucking dumbest idea I ever heard.
Say you have two engineers that both have 10 years of experience, one is barely scraping by and one is working his ass off and significant contributor to the team.
They earn the same money and, more importantly, they both know it. And the team knows it. And the manager knows it.
Can you guess which one will feel treated unfairly and will start looking for a new job?
Imagine a good employee comes to you and says she is going to leave because she has been offered better salary somewhere else.
You have now only two choices:
1) break the commitment you made to entire company,
2) let her go.
You can also decide to promote her, but management is really a different job and you lost your team member anyway.
Over time your business will accumulate people who just barely passed your recruitment process and are just barely competent to avoid being let go.
If you think you will keep the better one just because you say some nice words and give them recognition token, guess again.
Let me explain what this means: it promotes people who sit idly by the computer (because they gain regardless of their involvement) and punishes people who actually give a shit and who try hard being better every day.
It punishes your business HARD. In most businesses, most progress is being done by small minority of employees. And now you are leaving gates open and saying you are not going to even try to keep them doing good job.
While I like this promotion system, I think it lacks something like what the military calls "billets". If I'm a principal engineer and I lead two teams of engineers to deliver projects then I should be compensated for my knowledge as a principal engineer, then I should be compensated for the magnitude of responsibility of being a team lead. They are, in fact, two separate things.
"If everyone can get promoted simply by sticking around, managers have to be active in communicating with people who aren’t meeting expectations and helping them improve. Managers also have to be willing to let people go if they don’t show progress."
I appreciate the intent here of making levels more transparent & evenly applied, but in practice this seems to be tying levels/comp to a demographic attribute people have no control over: their age. This makes me feel uncomfortable.
It’s interesting to see these salary levels. A senior developer (10+ years of experience) here in Sweden is paid less than their entry level salary.
The difference in pay between Europe and the US seems huge. I wonder why.
I am disappointed this comment does not receive more comments! I feel the same. From far away, it seems like Berlin is bursting with great technical talent, as well as Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki, yet the salaries are terribly low. (I see you Oslo, but not the same reputation!) Oh hey, please include France. They have such great, underrated technical universities... do amazing comp-sci research... but their commercial software industry is so small!
Some theories:
* High taxes actually means lower gross pay? (I am someone who strongly supports the "social safety net" -- do not read that question as some kind of weirdo libertarian / low-tax promoter.) As a counterpoint, usually high taxes means higher quality of life.
* Or: Labour mobility is higher in US than many high-tax, strong-labour countries in Europe/Japan/Korea/Taiwan. In short: It's easier to hire and and fire in US. As a result, I see massive income inequality in US, but much less in wealthy European countries -- and Japan/Korean/Taiwan.
Another way to think about it: If software engineers are paid 50% of Silicon Valley in Helsinki, then Starbucks baristas are paid 100% higher in Helsinki. (I have no hard references to offer... but my point: Lower skill jobs pay living wages in Northern Europe/Japan/Korea/Taiwan, but less in US.)
Personal question: Would you prefer to live in Sweden with your current wages, or a place with "up 100% wages for you", but much higher income inequality? When you answer, please assume much higher personal crime rates and visible poverty (or working poor).
I live in a place with simply appalling incoming inequality. The visible poverty and working poor are so depressing. I would easily take a 25% pay cut to build more social housing and help the elderly who collect cardboard to retire immediately and play with their grandchildren all day long!
Yes that is something that comes up on hackernews a lot, and I personally still struggle to accept it.
According to the Daily level system I should be in their band 5, so $210K, but in England I am paid less than half their entry level salary (at current exchange rates).
Americans don't have IQ scores, or any other metric to suggest being approximately 4-8 times the quality of other developed countries workers, so it's hard to just take it and accept that their compensation isn't due to their ability (on average), and that life isn't fair.
The company I’m with now makes promotions without salary increases. The salary increase comes in the next review cycle when you’ve proven that you can do the job. It seems very unusual to me, has anyone else seen this?
I suspect that, for most locales, they're beating the market. There's a good chance I'd count for 15+ years of experience, and thus they'd pay me much more than my local market normally pays me.
On the other hand, I had a company with a similar salary structure approach me. They were based in a distant country with a much lower cost of living. I pointed out that their salary was about half of what I normally earn.
They didn't "get" it that they were out of their game trying to recruit me.
This seems broadly sensible. Only counting experience after schooling ends won't work for everyone though. I was employed full time as a software developer before I went to university. And I had 5 years of non-commercial experience before that while I was still in high school that most people won't have. Presumably there's some wiggle room for managers to use their judgement on what counts as experience, so it probably works out.
[+] [-] angarg12|4 years ago|reply
I believe these systems produce a "dead sea effect". High performer will leave, being able to get better deals elsewhere. Low performers will stay, since they can' find a better deal elsewhere.
[+] [-] parkingrift|4 years ago|reply
I actually consider this an anti-pattern that actively encourages coasting.
[+] [-] deepsun|4 years ago|reply
Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs (which I consider a healthy lifecycle for any company).
"Coasters" at least know that what they do today they might have to support for N years following, so design accordingly. (Although I've also heard horror stories when they make it intentionally hard to understand for job security reasons, fortunately never seen myself).
[+] [-] rr808|4 years ago|reply
Its hard though when people see my work history they only let me interview for very senior roles which I usually aren't good enough to do.
[+] [-] sokoloff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vehemenz|4 years ago|reply
If you increase pay regularly on a semi-fixed schedule, you at least solve this problem and improve your employee retention.
[+] [-] lkxijlewlf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallerfish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbg721|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|4 years ago|reply
I find it funny that people in tech get squirrely over annual raises, but don’t have a problem with multi-year vesting schedules with massive payouts.
[+] [-] rowls66|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ct0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanrebar|4 years ago|reply
Recruiters and managers out there: I read "competitive" compensation as somewhere around median compensation. That will be attractive to undercompensated employees and employees in their early careers. It's hard to get good candidates to leave current roles without some sort of pay bump (20%, say?) unless there's some sort of serious dysfunction or mismatch with their current employers.
Daily's plan is to shoot for median-ish compensation and get "enough great candidates" to reach the next phase of growth. I'm glad they're planning on revisiting in a year or so, though it's easy to kid yourself. Especially when you're taking what current employees are willing to tell you as proof positive. For one, selection bias is certainly happening. Also, in my experience, people tell you what you want to hear. Daily employees that are significantly unhappy with compensation are a bad fit for Daily now given the blanket compensation policy. The best way to address that is to discretely look for other offers.
[+] [-] sockpuppet69|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jawns|4 years ago|reply
Under Daily's levels system, I'd have 11 years of "direct" experience and 5 years of "indirect" experience, for a total of 16 years of experience, putting me in their highest band (Level 7) with a salary of $270K.
But as I've told every employer who's hired me since leaving journalism, and particularly as I've transitioned from an IC to a manager, those years of experience in journalism were invaluable. I learned how to ask the right questions; how to handle the stress of always being on deadline; how to be a generalist, quickly learning enough about a subject that you can clearly explain it to others; how to communicate effectively in general; and many other skills that are absolutely relevant today.
Obviously, it wouldn't matter for this banding whether those years are treated as "indirect" or "direct" experience -- I'd be in Level 7 either way -- but I could see it matter for others.
Full disclosure: I applied to Daily last year but they ended up filling the position with an internal candidate.
[+] [-] thenerdhead|4 years ago|reply
People grow at all sorts of rates professionally. Some people can grow from a formal level to another in a year as they get a hang for their responsibilities/job. Some people have extremely hard years due to external factors too. This type of system incentivizes nobody. Why work hard? Why do challenging stuff? Why take on the jobs with most responsibilities? Etc
> In the coming months, we aim to develop written guidance on what career growth looks like for different roles, and we'll start experimenting with rewards and recognition other than salary for particularly noteworthy achievements.
How do you reward or give recognition if your system isn’t fully thought through or based on the traditional methods of perceived impact and notable accomplishment? Isn’t that exactly what this would be anyway?
Honestly this sounds like a startup who just landed recent funding thinks they are “disrupting” the market with new unconventional TC methods. Not everyone is the same. One person with ten years of experience is another persons four years.
What fairness is to me is understanding where you sit relative to your peers and market. It is checks and balances of your worth and not political players reaping the rewards constantly. It’s the whole idea that there’s three types of workers: experts, operators, and politicians. The former two actually do the work, the latter just takes the credit more visibly.
[+] [-] benreesman|4 years ago|reply
But it doesn’t seem to address the real issue (to which I also don’t have a final answer): the jock/nerd thing is still playing out.
If, as I believe is mostly true, A16 is pretty on the money with the software eats the world thing: hackers “should” today and inevitably will be the highest paid people possibly excepting the best salesperson.
If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day, anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring.
COVID/WFH only turbocharges this: tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom.
It’s going to be a painful, but ultimately necessary transition where everyone whose math stopped at calc has their TC stop at 150-200k, and that money/seniority/prestige goes to the only truly irreplaceable people, again with the notable exception of the sales guy.
[+] [-] heurisko|4 years ago|reply
Why do you leave out class analysis? This has far more relevance than arguably either height or race.
White working class boys, at least in the UK, are the demographic least likely to go to university.
The story is likely to be the same in other countries. If you're working class, you're not going to be the intake for an MBA.
[+] [-] throwaway2037|4 years ago|reply
And now to offer a small criticism of your post: I prefer to say "conventionally attractive" over "tall white guys", because that would be more inclusive. Yes, really, I have seen very successful women who present just shy of pornstars-in-real-life and absolutely clean-up by selling to drooling old (dumb) white, male, portfolio managers. The sooner all of this is replaced by passive investment, the better for all customers -- but not big banks(!). After all, as the saying goes: "Where are the customers yachts?"
[+] [-] aphexairlines|4 years ago|reply
Don't expect an "ultimately necessary transition" because it'll likely go in the opposite direction.
[+] [-] humanrebar|4 years ago|reply
Being tall probably matters less, sure.
I do find that ability to communicate in writing with English-speaking audiences is much more important than it used to be. Technical communication and persuasion that used to happen in hallways and on whiteboards is now happening in discussion threads, written code reviews, design papers, etc. In some cases, I expect people that some people that used to struggle now benefit from the ability to communicate more deliberately or without a verbal accent.
I don't know that white versus non-white maps to excellent writing skills as such. Partly because I'm never sure what folks mean by "white" in these contexts.
[+] [-] loudmax|4 years ago|reply
Even tech companies don't just depend on elite programmers plus an exceptional sales guy. You need good design, good customer service, good marketing, and so on. Yes, there's a lot of bullshit in those fields (not that programming is free of it), but there's real value there too when executed correctly.
[+] [-] rr808|4 years ago|reply
Optimizing compiler is a great example of a niche that a few guys should be in that really shouldn't be paid well. The big bucks earned at Google/FB aren't earned because they have better compilers or low level libraries, its because of the business strategies they have.
[+] [-] cindarin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw1234651234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codechad|4 years ago|reply
I think you have some unresolved emotions regarding the "nerd/jock thing".
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] david_allison|4 years ago|reply
As someone who worked in software development during High School, and took time off before University to work in software, this somewhat frustrates me.
Alyssa Rosenzweig has 0 years of experience under this model.
[+] [-] jen20|4 years ago|reply
> Direct experience in our rubric means substantially the same kind of work (coding, design, product management, etc.)
This is a recipe for finding people without "n" years of experience, but instead finding people with one year of experience repeated "n" times. Great if you need a specialist in something, tragic if you need generalists - which most startups do.
[+] [-] justinlloyd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mepiethree|4 years ago|reply
I guess this model works if you identify and fire those people early, but in general, this seems like a great way to retain proven career underperformers.
[+] [-] mindvirus|4 years ago|reply
However, my big question is how expectations and performance management scale with level? If someone's not there yet, but hits the years of experience for the next level, are they fired? Likewise, whose responsibility is it for people to get those skills by the time they age into the next promotion?
Quick edit: Also wanted to call out how well written this post is. It lays out the facts, peoples objections, unknowns, and anticipates questions (salespeople remain on variable comp, equity isn't being addressed yet). So kudos to the author for the great writing on this thoughtful piece.
[+] [-] kybernetikos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmilcin|4 years ago|reply
This is absolutely, fucking dumbest idea I ever heard.
Say you have two engineers that both have 10 years of experience, one is barely scraping by and one is working his ass off and significant contributor to the team.
They earn the same money and, more importantly, they both know it. And the team knows it. And the manager knows it.
Can you guess which one will feel treated unfairly and will start looking for a new job?
Imagine a good employee comes to you and says she is going to leave because she has been offered better salary somewhere else.
You have now only two choices:
1) break the commitment you made to entire company,
2) let her go.
You can also decide to promote her, but management is really a different job and you lost your team member anyway.
Over time your business will accumulate people who just barely passed your recruitment process and are just barely competent to avoid being let go.
If you think you will keep the better one just because you say some nice words and give them recognition token, guess again.
Let me explain what this means: it promotes people who sit idly by the computer (because they gain regardless of their involvement) and punishes people who actually give a shit and who try hard being better every day.
It punishes your business HARD. In most businesses, most progress is being done by small minority of employees. And now you are leaving gates open and saying you are not going to even try to keep them doing good job.
[+] [-] kodah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KevinEldon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btucker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebackup|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2037|4 years ago|reply
Some theories:
* High taxes actually means lower gross pay? (I am someone who strongly supports the "social safety net" -- do not read that question as some kind of weirdo libertarian / low-tax promoter.) As a counterpoint, usually high taxes means higher quality of life.
* Or: Labour mobility is higher in US than many high-tax, strong-labour countries in Europe/Japan/Korea/Taiwan. In short: It's easier to hire and and fire in US. As a result, I see massive income inequality in US, but much less in wealthy European countries -- and Japan/Korean/Taiwan.
Another way to think about it: If software engineers are paid 50% of Silicon Valley in Helsinki, then Starbucks baristas are paid 100% higher in Helsinki. (I have no hard references to offer... but my point: Lower skill jobs pay living wages in Northern Europe/Japan/Korea/Taiwan, but less in US.)
Personal question: Would you prefer to live in Sweden with your current wages, or a place with "up 100% wages for you", but much higher income inequality? When you answer, please assume much higher personal crime rates and visible poverty (or working poor).
I live in a place with simply appalling incoming inequality. The visible poverty and working poor are so depressing. I would easily take a 25% pay cut to build more social housing and help the elderly who collect cardboard to retire immediately and play with their grandchildren all day long!
[+] [-] flibblercorn|4 years ago|reply
According to the Daily level system I should be in their band 5, so $210K, but in England I am paid less than half their entry level salary (at current exchange rates).
Americans don't have IQ scores, or any other metric to suggest being approximately 4-8 times the quality of other developed countries workers, so it's hard to just take it and accept that their compensation isn't due to their ability (on average), and that life isn't fair.
[+] [-] twobitshifter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|4 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I had a company with a similar salary structure approach me. They were based in a distant country with a much lower cost of living. I pointed out that their salary was about half of what I normally earn.
They didn't "get" it that they were out of their game trying to recruit me.
[+] [-] nicoburns|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KevinEldon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flashgordon|4 years ago|reply
* Constant pay hikes per level (~30k every 2-3 years)
* Any equity guidelines for level (especially since it is a startup) - I assume this is not a 9-5 job given it is a series B startup?
* No mention of what leadership team makes (VP of Eng is ultimately a managerial role - is it equal to L7? L8? YoE a consideration in this role?)
* Company is fully remote - Remote within the US? Any where in the world?
* How will (if at all) cost-of-living be adjusted (for remote)?
* What is the interview process like (Is leetcode grinding still required - effectively pushing for a "fresher" workforce?).
* If comp affects the "quality" of hire - what is the perf management (and appraisal) culture looking like in there?