
Leak of Microsoft Salaries Shows Fight for Higher Compensation - milligan
https://onezero.medium.com/leak-of-microsoft-salaries-shows-fight-for-higher-compensation-3010c589b41e
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lbriner
It seems like a strange premise to share salaries on the basis that if we both
have the same experience and work at the same paygrade, we are worth the same
amount of money - or even for me to know the range so I know whether to ask
for a raise.

The underlying problem is still that it is very hard to accurately measure
someone's worth as a developer (or manager for that matter) and that there are
many who are "experienced" who have not improved in any meaningful way over
time and that's why they might not get a rise or a promotion. Pay grades are
quite arbitrary and personally, I don't think that a lot of these "super
coders" are worth as much as they think unless they also do management (except
perhaps for really niche skillsets).

~~~
lacker
At the engineering departments of most large tech companies including
Microsoft, people at the same pay grade are _supposed_ to be making about the
same amount of money. The idea is that if you deserve a raise, you deserve a
promotion too. So your job title and your salary aren’t like two different
things.

Differences arise for many reasons. The most common in my experience is people
who negotiate a higher starting salary. You don’t want to just give them more
money forever so every year they get their salary tweaked back a bit toward
the average for their level. There are also some bonuses that operate outside
the normal system.

~~~
DP0o4Dy4jWe2
> At the engineering departments of most large tech companies including
> Microsoft, people at the same pay grade are supposed to be making about the
> same amount of money. The idea is that if you deserve a raise, you deserve a
> promotion too. So your job title and your salary aren’t like two different
> things.

This is not true. At FAANG companies and Microsoft, the total compensation
bands for levels at or above "Senior SWE", "Senior SDE" are really wide. This
is by design, and its widely communicated that this is the case. Most of the
variation is in equity grants and bonus, rather than salary - if your
management chain recognizes that you made a huge impact last year, you'll
probably get huge equity refreshes and a giant bonus, although your salary
might not rise by much.

Promotions are a separate thing, because promotion beyond "Senior" implies a
change to your role and expectations (more leadership, more "people
coordination" even if you're not a people manager, etc.) It's totally possible
that you're making an amazing impact in your current role in a way that merits
additional compensation, but you're not meeting all the criteria for the next
step on the ladder. That's fine - you're still going to get paid a huge amount
more than the average for your level.

~~~
joshuamorton
> This is not true. At FAANG companies and Microsoft, the total compensation
> bands for levels at or above "Senior SWE", "Senior SDE" are really wide.

Ehh, not really. Up to the director level (well above senior), if you give me
someone's level and last two performance evals, I can probably tell you their
TC to within 5%. There's certainly a wide variance within senior and above
levels, but it's not as bonus based as you suggest, and sustained high
performance will often (although not always) lead to promotions.

It's not like there are two senior SWEs with one making 2x what the other
does. At least not at Amazon, M, or G. Since netflix doesn't have levels,
that's possible, and my understanding is facebook has huge bonuses on
occasion, but I'm also pretty sure you'll just end up getting promoted if you
get too many of those.

~~~
fierro
helllll no this is 100% not true. I worked at Google, and there is an internal
spreadsheet with compensation that is contributed to on a voluntary basis, and
has n=1000+ for many levels. The variance is far greater than 5%.

*for Googlers, you can find this at go/salarycomp or something like that, I can't remember

~~~
joshuamorton
I'm well aware of it. It doesn't include performance ratings. Which I
mentioned ;)

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DP0o4Dy4jWe2
If you're at a big company and want a significant compensation increase
outside of what you'd get from the normal performance review process, the
_only_ way to do it is to interview elsewhere and get a better offer.

If you succeed in getting a better offer, you can take it to your management
chain and ask them to match it. In my colleagues' experience, they frequently
will match it, but not always. In particular, if there are certain firms that
have a reputation for "overpaying" for engineers (e.g. Uber in 2016-2017),
there might be a blanket policy of "we don't match offers from firm X".

If your offer gets matched, all is well - enjoy the money, but don't expect
big raises through the normal review process for a while, since you're
probably at or above the expected pay band for your level.

If it doesn't get matched, you're in a tough spot, because your manager may
view you as a "lame duck" who is interviewing elsewhere and liable to leave.
If you choose to decline the offer and stay and your company, then handling
this perception will be very important.

A side benefit to interviewing around and receiving offers - you may realize
that your aren't as underpaid as you may have thought. I've had a few
colleagues who were unhappy about their pay and chose to interview around, but
were surprised to find that the only higher offers they could get were at
firms with a much more difficult work/life balance. They realized that their
current arrangement was actually pretty good!

Anyway, all this is to say that exercises like this don't have any effect
unless people are actually willing to walk. Microsoft already pays for
compensation survey data from across the industry - they know how much people
are paid, and have set salary bands where they think they're competitive.
Unless you're willing to take another offer somewhere else, complaining about
comp just hurts morale on your team and makes people less happy.

~~~
mnm1
If you get another offer, bring it to your employer and they don't match it or
at the very least come up with a counter you both agree to, then you need to
quit and take the other offer. That's the risk of this move. As you say, you
will be viewed as a lame duck at the very least and possibly even get fired.
Even if your company agrees to match, they may see you that way and have plans
for you to leave as soon as you transfer all your knowledge. This is a power
play and it can backfire so it's only advisable to do this if you're ready to
accept the other offer and move.

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jillesvangurp
I lived in Finland of a while. Tax declarations are public information there
and you can find out the salary of anyone pretty easily. IMHO that kind of
transparency is actually a good thing to have and helps prevent unfair
practices where e.g. men get more than women or nepotism gets you access to
better salaries.

~~~
auslander
> Tax declarations are public information

What was historical reason for this? I see it as a privacy invasion. Is it a
case for GDPR?

~~~
yxhuvud
The underlying reason is that we have a default that says that all documents
produced by the different levels of government is public by default. This
allows journalists and other investigators to expose bad stuff that is going
on. Also note that just because something nominally is public, it doesn't
automatically mean it is easily accessible. It can mean you have to go
somewhere, submit forms and pay for the induced work load to produce the
documents.

Things can still be made secret if there are actual reasons to do that, like
privacy reasons or security reasons etc. Taxes have traditionally not been
counted into the things that require privacy here in Sweden.

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Pfhreak
"And there’s really no upside for individuals to upload and share their own
private salary information, other than contributing to a grander vision of pay
equality."

What a weird way for the author to end the article. Does there need to be a
reason beyond pay equality? I benefit by having an understanding of the bands
at a company. That only works if many people see value in this data and share
theirs.

~~~
Clubber
Yes, leverage is one of the most important parts of salary negotiation. If you
know what a target is (i.e. what other people make), you are in a much
stronger position.

For example, let's say you are just starting out, or are a couple of years in.
You don't really understand how the business and hiring side works, you just
want a programming job at a well known company. You might settle for 80%, 75%,
50% of what the market truly values you, because you don't really know what
you can get. That's the important piece. It's hard to know your market value
when you are a single data point while the hiring companies have entire teams
analyzing the market for them.

This also compounds. All your raises over your entire tenure at a company are
based on your existing salary. They typically won't think, "wow, we're only
paying him $50k, we'd better bring it up to market rates." Managers don't get
bonuses for thinking that way; they'll just give you a set percentage based on
your current salary. You can start to see how important initial salary
negotiation is; it affects your compensation for your entire tenure at that
company. When hiring companies ask how much you make at your current company,
they're trying to extend that discount to their company. All based on what you
agreed to because you didn't have the pertinent data.

That visibility is so important, it's enshrined into US labor law (back when
politicians gave a hoot about labor):

>Under the National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935, private-sector
employees have the right to engage in "concerted activities for the purpose of
collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."

[https://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/301989789/pay-secrecy-
policie...](https://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/301989789/pay-secrecy-policies-at-
work-often-illegal-and-misunderstood)

~~~
Pfhreak
I think you and I are in agreement. Sharing this data gives others power in
their negotiations, and you benefit from others sharing. That seems like
enough of a reason to me...

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sumanthvepa
This is one of the reasons I hypothesise that you don’t get to hire good
programmers in India. It’s not that there is a lack of talent. I’ve seen many
enormously talented developers. However, the very best won’t work for Indian
salary levels, since they know they can command better salaries abroad or
become entrepreneurs. As a consequence there is an adverse selection effect in
play in India. The very best won’t offer their services and the quality of the
talent pool declines over time in a viscous cycle, as companies lower salaries
even further to compensate for a poorer talent pool. Obviously this is not the
only dynamic at play in the enormously complex Indian IT labor market, but it
is a factor that I think that might be worth pondering.

~~~
blocked_again
Wait what? If you are a senior software engineer at a good company in Banglore
you can easily make 40k - 60k USD an year. After taxes and expenses it becames
equalent or better than salaries in most places except for San Francisco(USA),
London and Singapore. USA is super hard for an Indian software engineer to
immigrate. London is doable but for most of them it's not worth all the travel
and staying away from family. People immigrate only if they makes way too much
salary abroad compared to India which is hardly the case. Nobody is going to
immigrate if they will save a few hundred dollars more a month. So good
software engineers mostly immigrate for reasons other than salary (Like living
in Europe etc).

Edit: Looks like even London don't offer good enough salary for a good
software engineer when compared to cost of living.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
London is fairly notorious for low SE salaries outside of high end consulting,
I’m not sure why it would be listed with those other two cities.

The biggest problem with India is that talent migration doesn’t really work
the other way (same with China), so you have to build companies solely with
local talent. That works for lower end software services, but for higher end
R&D generally requires some amount of draw from a world-wide labor pool.

~~~
blocked_again
I mentioned London because it had one of the highest salaries in Europe. I
don't have personal experience myself apart from what I saw in Glassdoor.

~~~
gniv
In Europe, Switzerland is most similar to the Bay area: high salaries, high
cost of living and low taxes.

~~~
blocked_again
Low taxes? California has high tax right?

~~~
schrodinger
Not compared to Europe I suppose?

~~~
crispyporkbites
Last time I checked take home pay was lower in NY than London for someone
earning around 150k before tax. Not sure if that holds true in California...

~~~
pedrosorio
According to this calculator:
[https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php](https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php)

120k £ (equivalent of $150k at current exchange rate) becomes net 71135 £
which is 61.8%

In the state of New York: [https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-paycheck-
calculator](https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-paycheck-calculator)

$150k gets you a take home that is 68% of gross. NYC imposes an additional
local tax between 3 and 3.8% so in the worst case you’re still taking home
more than 64% of gross.

Maybe the last time you checked $150k was a lot less in £ and therefore taxed
at lower rates in the UK?

~~~
crispyporkbites
Potentially- I think I added in property taxes (about 1-2k/year in the uk) and
healthcare (free on the nhs or if you’re earning 150k you’re likely getting
heavily subsidised private care from your employer).

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Zaheer
Co-Founder of Levels.fyi here (mentioned in article). We aim to share salaries
for all companies. You can see the salary bands for example of google as well
here:
[https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/](https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/)

Would love feedback and suggestions to help make this a better resource. Our
next feature is regionalization. Look out for it in next few weeks!

~~~
mkhpalm
Its interesting how completely different the numbers are on your site vs
everything else I've ever seen.

Why do you think that is?

Example:
[https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Google/salaries](https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Google/salaries)
vs
[https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/](https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/)

~~~
jvm
Not sure where indeed is getting their numbers, but I can assure you
levels.fyi are well calibrated. Glassdoor also has weirdly low estimated
salaries.

~~~
sgt101
Has anyone done the sums of the numbers of people on l1->l9 vs the mean
salaries estimated?

What does the estimated salary bill for each of these companies come out as
and how does that stack up vs. their public declarations?

~~~
Zaheer
I haven't done that specific analysis but stock based compensation is given
out in public quarterly financial statements. See here for example that Google
spent ~9.35 Billion (!) in stock compensation last year:
[https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/stoc...](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/stock-
based-compensation)

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highmastdon
I find these type of sharing salaries interesting since you never know if the
people having a significant higher salary, want to share it. It might be a
skewed way here high salary earners don’t want to put their salary in harms
way and therefore don’t submit theirs to the system.

Therefore no real conclusive arguments can be drawn from this

~~~
Zaheer
Don't think it's fair to say that nothing can be drawn from it. Sure there's
less statistical significance but I wouldn't discard it completely. There's a
large altruism component involved. Nearly every other week folks email us
(levels.fyi) willing to help us out with site development for free because we
helped them negotiate a higher offer. If there's anything I learned from this
project it's how willing people are to help others. Open-source is proof of
this.

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salawat
One thing that has always struck me about compensation is that it is
incredibly infrequent where I can actually implement the type of fundamental
changes a company most needs due to most opportunities for major throughput
gains being hidden in the mires of interdepartmental communication breakdown.

I've actually gotten grudgingly bored of technical implementation/testing as
at this point, I can look at a set of specifications, and generally have the
code that underlies it it be almost immediately apparent. Migrations are a bit
more interesting, however, at the end of the day, I get the most out of
untangling or unobstructing human communication pipelines.

The work is irregular, generally novel, completely underappreciated, and nigh
impossible to get anyone to agree to let you do regardless of the throughput
increase you can enable. Especially if politics/an imagined threat to
someone's budget becomes a sticking point somewhere in the chain.

So often times a job degenerates to the work an office will allow you to do.

It is one of the things I miss about startup culture sometimes. It's amazing
how much a couple of people can get done with a process based on the right
abstractions and a tailored vernacular/set of efficient protocols.

~~~
UncleMeat
> One thing that has always struck me about compensation is that it is
> incredibly infrequent where I can actually implement the type of fundamental
> changes a company most needs due to most opportunities for major throughput
> gains being hidden in the mires of interdepartmental communication
> breakdown.

Then solve those problems. At higher levels, solving organizational problems
is a job expectation for engineers. "Process is preventing me from having
impact" is not an excuse.

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someguy101010
Seems like the higher levels are a bit undercompensated compared to other
FAANG companies but otherwise pretty average for a company like them

~~~
pacaro
Yeah, it's an interesting trend, back in the day (day 10 years ago) it was
conventional wisdom that moving to Amazon was a good move (financially) for
more junior levels, but that more senior levels (64+) did better at MS.

From personal experience, the principal/staff band now pays significantly
better at FAANG than it does at MS (considering total comp, because above a
certain level salary isn't a useful comparison)

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sorum
No one's going to comment on the fact that when Microsoft employees want to
collaborate, they turn to Google Sheets?

~~~
purplezooey
nice catch

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91pavan
Comparing US salaries to Indian salaries or anywhere else for that matter is
like comparing apples to oranges. $50k equates to 35 lakh rupee per annum
which is considered a great salary in Indian standards.

I know of many good developers in India who earn less than this figure but are
generally very content in their life. Stop trying to look at everything
through the lens of silicon valley.

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fallingfrog
I’m not sure “leak” is the right word for this, it looks like employees are
voluntarily anonymously sharing their salaries.

~~~
bradleyjg
It sounds like they agreed to share it with each other but not necessarily
with the general public. So leak is appropriate for sharing it with the
journalist.

------
purplezooey
Damn all these salaries in the 200-250k range. I worked as an engineer in the
bay area for 12 years and never made over 150k or so. Guess I wasn't that good
or didn't know how to play the game right.

~~~
chillacy
I think the game is just leetcode and interviewing regularly at large
companies.

------
Irishsteve
Can someone copy paste. Medium pay wall blocking me

~~~
siwyd
Just open the article in a private tab.

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throwaway13000
Can someone here explain why companies pay only 40% of US salaries in India?
One person from my team is leaving for India soon. He is paid $200k/yr
currently in Bay area. But he is being offered INR50 lakhs which is roughtly
$80k USD. What stops MS from paying something like $120k USD (converted to
INR) because fully loaded costs in US (with FICA taxes) is abot $250K?

Especially, if the quality is the same in both places?

~~~
paulstovell
Assuming $80k is market rate in the new location, if this person was paid
$120k it creates another kind of risk: the person might be disgruntled and
hate the job, but never leave, because they aren’t going to get $120k anywhere
else.

As an employer the ideal is to pay at or slightly above the market. Enough to
make money a non-issue, but not so much that people who secretly hate you
still work for you.

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goatinaboat
This just seems like a really complicated, roundabout way to do something a
union would do automatically.

~~~
username90
A union seems like a really complicated, roundabout way to do this.

~~~
Apocryphon
What would be an easier way?

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yegor256a
Discussion on Reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3znww/leak_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3znww/leak_of_microsoft_salaries_shows_fight_for_higher/)

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nickpp
Shouldn’t these kind of sites also include a productivity indicator next to
each individual salary? Considering how much individual productivity varies
for IT workers knowing just the salary is like knowing the price of a bag of,
say, flour in a supermarket, without knowing the volume.

Also, to push the analogy forward, how about the flour quality? One employee
could be more valuable for the business due to stuff like his willingness to
help in tough, boring but critical moments. Or learning more outside of work
to be able to apply that knowledge in new and innovative ways inside the
company.

And so on... Are all those factors sufficiently captured by a single number
like "level"?!

~~~
Zaheer
How would you collect productivity? I think that's quite subjective. As you
mentioned, 'Level' is a signal of an individuals' performance to some degree.
If you're performing well, you will move up quickly (broad statement but holds
true probably in >80% of cases).

~~~
chillacy
Perhaps performance reviews ratings? That should already get factored into the
bonus at least.

