
Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more - ZeljkoS
https://buffer.com/transparency
======
JoshMilo
After spending eight years in the military (where everyone's salary is public,
even Generals) I was kind of shocked when I got out and everyone was so
secretive about how much money they made. When I got my first office job a few
friends had to coach me to not talk about salary. To me it seems the only one
really benefiting from not talking about money is the company paying you.

~~~
brightball
Well, there's a couple of reasons for it.

The main reason is that there is this idea of equal pay for equal work which
only works if your work is producing widgets per hour. That's fine on a
manufacturing line, an hourly job, or a job where the variance in performance
of a job isn't measurably valuable to a business.

I've got a lot of experience as a programmer/devops guy, but if somebody hired
me to setup Wordpress with a template for them I'm not really adding much more
value than anybody else who could do the job. From the business perspective,
they just want the site to be setup and look nice.

If a company is looking to hire a developer who can both develop the
application, help manage the infrastructure and identify programming decisions
that are going to cause a negative impact down the line...I'm going to add a
lot more value for that business.

But...if my salary at that business was public and you could clearly see on
paper that I made more money that another programmer on the team who really
felt like he was contributing just as much it's going to cause resentment. The
only way to clear up that resentment is for somebody to sit down with said guy
and say, "Look, this guy does X, Y and Z and has experience and a track record
of identifying problems and preventing us from making expensive mistakes. His
salary is based on the value proposition. You are focussed on an area of
programming for the app and you do a great job with it."

There's no way to explain it without causing resentment, having another person
constantly having to justify themselves, or backhandedly belittling the
contributions of another person.

This is essentially why people don't talk about it. Because nobody thinks
their work isn't as valuable or their contributions are as valuable as the
most valuable people at the company...and they have no way of understanding
that without actually doing those people's jobs.

There's not a PC way to say "there's no such thing as equal work" unless your
job is so specific, so thoroughly defined and so repetitive that anybody can
be plugged in to perform the tasks...and at that point your job doesn't have
much value anyway.

~~~
polymatter
But keeping salaries secret leads to rumour and speculation. How is that
better? Especially when you make it so taboo to talk about, it just makes it
more exciting. Especially so since you can't hide the externalities.

I'll give you an example. When we learnt a girl from finance owned her own
horse, the gossip around the office was not how did she skrimp and save, but
what she needed to do to whom to receive such an obviously large salary. I
have no doubt she did just save her money well but thanks to keeping
everyone's salary secret, we have vicious rumours instead of fact.

If you are really hiring people who honestly believe that everyone apart from
them contribute little to the company, then you are hiring incredibly arrogant
people. If you are really hiring people who honestly would be surprised that
some people earn more than others, then you are hiring incredibly naive
people.

fwiw, I earn £27,000 as a C#/Java developer in central London and I know I am
extremely poor at salary negotiation so I expect I am grossly underpaid. This
causes me resentment. Salary negotiations involve me having to justify myself
or backhandedly belittling the contributions of my colleagues. ie. exactly the
sorts of problems you believe that keeping salaries secret solves.

There is only one reason for keeping salaries secret, and that is to keep
wages down. That benefits employers, and it benefits those who are great at
negotiating.

~~~
e40
_When we learnt a girl from finance owned her own horse, the gossip around the
office was not how did she skrimp and save, but what she needed to do to whom
to receive such an obviously large salary. I have no doubt she did just save
her money well but thanks to keeping everyone 's salary secret, we have
vicious rumours instead of fact._

I'm sorry, but that's just plain stupidity. There are many, many reasons how
the woman (I assume, not an actual "girl") would have a horse. The combined
income of her and her spouse might have allowed it. It might have been a gift
from someone.

If your coworkers are using stuff like this as the basis for gossip... you
work with some horrible people.

~~~
polymatter
You are right I shouldn't refer to a woman in her early 20's as a girl. Its a
habit when I thought "girl" meant, woman younger than me. Sorry.

Horses are expensive to maintain, even if they are gifted to you for free. But
people use all sorts of basis for gossip.

~~~
Flenser
Horses also take up a lot of time (or rather if you have one, you will spend a
lot of time with it to get the most out of what you are paying for it), which
means you aren't spending money on other things.

People often make the mistake of thinking "how can _they_ afford <expensive
thing> when I can't (because of all the <expensive things> I have to pay for)"
without thinking that maybe the other person has a different
lifestyle/priories to them.

------
brobinson
Can any engineers who work at Buffer chime in as to why you work there? It's
been noted before on HN that the salaries are on the low end for the SF area.
Obviously salary is not everything, so I'm curious as to specifically what
made you join and what keeps you there.

~~~
sunils34
Hi there! Sunil here (CTO at Buffer). Really great question! We've had a long
and hard look at our salaries and have been in the midst of overhauling how
exactly we determine salaries. One of the great things with being transparent
about our salaries is that we learn so much about how we've originally set up
our salaries and how we'd need to further adjust things. We received some
great feedback and through that, we've realized how under-market our rates
have been for areas like SF and NYC, while being quite above market rates in
many other regions. We've been in the middle of overhauling how salaries get
set, and have adjusted developer salaries based on some solid feedback. I
believe we'll update the public numbers and be transparent about the process
we took and our overall learnings quite soon!

Generally our approach with salaries (and much of the company) has been to
iterate with continuous feedback loops. The feedback we receive in HN may
further influence how we think about things. Would love any more
thoughts/advice you have :)

~~~
s73v3r
How do you deal with someone who's doing just as much work as a person in
SF/NYC, but living somewhere else feeling resentful that they're not making as
much?

~~~
shanemhansen
You send me their email because my team compensates people based on talent,
not zip code.

I don't think you should pay some one more because they want to live somewhere
expensive, just like you shouldn't pay them more if they decide they want to
drive a tesla.

~~~
baby
> I don't think you should pay some one more because they want to live
> somewhere expensive

I don't think that's the problem. The problem is, if you have someone you want
in your team, and if that someone is living in SF for example, then you can't
offer him the same kind of salary otherwise he will never accept.

~~~
shanemhansen
I don't think I was very clear because this example is backwards. Maybe I
should say we don't pay people less because they live in a flyover state.
Engineers in sf do produce value that justifies a high salary. In many cases
engineers outside sf can produce as much value.

------
nilkn
The only thing I dislike about this is that the salaries are literally public
-- not just known to each other in the company, but your friends and family
could also look up your salary. I'm not sure I understand the purpose of this.
Is it really necessary to have names in the public listing?

~~~
jlukasavige
I'm just starting with Buffer as a Product Creator. I gave this a bit of
thought at first and it did indeed make me nervous.

Now, however, it's completely freeing to have it out there and have one less
thing bottled up that I can't talk about.

Finances are a funny thing in the US; money is completely taboo to talk about,
but why? Does it really matter that your friends/family know how much you
make? Maybe it does and that might keep you from working with a company like
Buffer, which is just fine. In that case it might not be a culture fit and you
should probably pursue working with a company with a little less transparency.

The openness and transparency is what most drew me to work at Buffer. They
don't compartmentalize and that's a great thing. Transparency extends to all
corners of the company. Some places say they stand for something but then you
find out there are boundaries. Not the case here. :-)

Justin, new Product Creator with Buffer

~~~
swozey
I don't want anyone but my closest of friends to have any idea as to what I
make for a living. How do I benefit from that? Now when we go out to dinner,
or to buy drinks, is this acquaintance that I see a few times a month going to
pressure or guilt me into paying for things? Are they going to be upset that I
spent $20 on a birthday present when I make 2-5x their pay? It shouldn't even
be a consideration unless I want it to be. Are they going to talk behind my
back about how I only tip $1 on drinks but make XYZ amount of money?

When people know you're making money they come out of the woodwork and do
things they wouldn't do if they had no idea. I'd rather it not even be a
consideration in our relationship as friends/family/whatever.

~~~
baby
Honestly how many friends/family member/whatever actually made the effort to
look at your company website? How many how them looked further that the
frontpage?

------
jedberg
aka A recruiter's dream. Now you know exactly how much you need to offer each
employee to poach them!

I'm a big fan of internal transparency of these things, but external not so
much.

However, I did make it a point at reddit to show our AWS bill to anyone who
asked, but that was actually selfish in nature. I was hoping that if enough
people knew it would drive the price down.

~~~
impostervt
Did it drive the price down?

~~~
jedberg
Hard to say. They were driving the price down anyway and they don't give
special pricing to anyone (they just do usage tiers that get cheaper)

------
Cherian
Every time Buffer did something like this, I was skeptical. I thought this was
just a marketing angle and they’ll have to abandon this at some point when
they scale.

But I was wrong. Shame on me.

Props to the Buffer team. You’ve set new standards. An engineering candidate
referred to Buffer’s salary during the interview and I realized how much they
mean to all of us now.

~~~
cookiecaper
They're still small. While they could probably keep their formulae public, I
seriously doubt that the personal data exposure will be able to continue
if/when Buffer matures into a company with more than a handful of employees.
There are many good reasons to have some opacity around personal income, and
at scale, people will expect that from their employer. It's one thing to find
a couple dozen people in SF who don't mind, but it's another thing to hire
hundreds or thousands of employees this way.

------
fs111
I like openness as much as the next guy, but it is really nobodies business to
know, how much I earn, except for my employer, the tax office and myself.

~~~
timdorr
Honest question: Why?

~~~
fs111
I consider that private information. Why do my friends/neighbours whatnot have
to know, that I make more money than they do? It creates all sorts of awkward
situations, at least in the culture, that I live in.

~~~
adrianpike
How do you know they're not the ones making more money than you?

~~~
fs111
because I am a very well paid software engineer and they are not..

------
vosper
Here's a direct link to the Google doc with all the info:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81a2wzcHYxV1pacWE1UjM3V0w0MUE&toomany=true)

Edit: I find this hugely inspiring. I love that they're sticking to their
transparency promise.

~~~
iolothebard
Hope their equity pays off because those salaries are shit for SF. For that
matter, they're shit for Dallas.

~~~
baby
things are most of their devs are not living in the US.

------
chollida1
Pretty cool of these guys to do this.

There now appears to be 3 ways of allocating salary

1) The typical negotiate and keep secrete way most companies work

2) The finance model where everything is public and you get bonus-ed out based
on your performance with some discretion.

3) The buffer way where everything is public and you get paid based on a pre
existing formula

Case 1 is how most firms work and it kind of sucks for people who don't job
hop and don't negotiate well.

Case 2 works well when you:

    
    
        - make a profit
    
        - can directly relate profit back to an individual or group
    

Case 3 Not sure if this works well or not, at the very least everyone knows
where they stand and that counts for something.

Is there a better way to do this?

------
drewpc
I love it. The explanations for equity, salary, etc are great. If the
individuals within the company are on board with having this information
public, then it's proof that they hold the same values as the company with
regard to transparency--almost like a test, right up front. All of the
comments below about people wanting to keep that information private is
perfectly fine, but that means you don't share the same values as the company.

I agree with the previous comments about government/military salaries being
pre-defined. It completely removes the negativity usually associated with
secret salaries. That's now a non-issue.

Well done.

~~~
asift
I'm curious what, if any, effect this has on the type of people who are
attracted to a company. I'm personally not a fan of arbitrary pay metrics. I
want my compensation to be tied to my performance. I don't want to be pigeon
holed based on some formula. I suppose having equity helps with this, as it
presents some more upside for everyone to accomplish exceptional things, but I
would personally stay away from a company like this. It's not so much driven
by the transparency aspect, but I want to be compensated based on my
performance.

~~~
drewpc
I certainly can't speak for Buffer, but most companies use bonuses to account
for this (for salaried employees). Having a tiered salary structure lets both
the company and the employee plan for a base salary from year to year and
provides opportunities to "move people up" as the progress through a career.
Beware what you ask for: if you produce less value for the company in a given
pay period, they should be able to pay you less!

I think tying a base salary to performance creates a really unstable financial
situation for the company and the employee.

~~~
asift
I agree on the bonuses, but if I understand Buffer's compensation properly,
this is not how they operate. They take out any possibility for comp that's
not determined by their formula, which was my general complaint against the
rigidity of their compensation.

------
pyb
I am surprised that this equity distribution isn't raising more eyebrows. Is
this considered normal by anyone ?

~~~
kwang88
I might be ignorant, but if they hit profitability relatively early in their
hiring (and meaningfully de-risked themselves as a result), I could see them
having the leverage to parcel out lower equity amounts.

Were you expecting a shallower decline in equity grants over time? Definitely
curious to hear what others view as an expected employee equity structure.

~~~
pyb
Well yes. Joel has been at Buffer for 6 years and Andy for 4 years. Joel has
42 times more equity than Andy. How's that make sense ?

Anyway, I want to stop picking on this particular startup because, from
looking at Angellist ballpark offers and various HN comments, this is seen as
the normal.

I find this reassuring in a way. That Silicon Valley is cocking up on this
vital issue so vastly and consistently shows that it's still being run by
fallible humans...

~~~
pyb
Also, kudos to Buffer for opening themselves up to criticism from randos such
as myself

------
netfire
I find the location modifier interesting. Obviously, the living costs in major
cities are being factored in here, but if two employees provide the same
amount of value to the company, it seems odd to pay someone more just because
they choose to live in a big city. It seems like that might also cause some
resentment between the two employees.

Does the company get some additional value from having their employees live in
a big city? Is there some other factor I'm missing?

------
ndm00
The company I work for does something similar. Everyone at the same level gets
the same salary, with percentage variations based on geography. It completely
removes the competitive and secretive nature I've seen elsewhere. And it also
pushes each individual to live up to their title due to the extra
transparency.

~~~
heywire
I work for a large (30K employees) company that does something similar. For
each job title, there is a salary and bonus range. So from someone's title in
Outlook, you can pretty much guess their salary within 10% or so. This
information is all readily available to all employees, though I don't think it
is shared externally.

~~~
madcaptenor
I work for a large company that does this - except it's pretty much useless
for guessing someone's salary, because the salary range for each job title are
something like $X to $2.25X.

------
timvp
I think it is a very great movement of companies being transparent. I've
learned a lot of the companies that share their ups and downs and how they
distribute their salaries, equity and how much and on what conditions they
raise funding.

------
demarq
This is brilliant, and I love that they aren't holding back.

I think if society govts/corps/ngo's operated like this the world would be a
much better place. Or perhaps I've just gone hippie.

Buffer keep it up!

~~~
kasey_junk
Governments usually do operate this way. As does the military, many ngos and
oddly enough lots of trading/finance firms.

------
ryanmarsh
This is so fucked up for employees. I'm a little surprised at how mad this is
making me given I don't work there.

Want to negotiate a big raise? Sorry everyone will see and might not agree you
deserve it.

Want a big salary bump at your next job? Sorry, the recruiter now holds all
the cards in salary discussions.

Want to get robbed? Yes! We can facilitate this by publishing you are a top
paid individual at company XYZ.

~~~
gfody
OTOH the other visible salaries make nice "comps" for appraising yourself to
justify your raise. If you think about it, the usual reason you would want to
negotiate a big raise is because you are significantly underpaid in the first
place, and that shouldn't happen under this scheme as long as you're as
transparent as the company is with your expectations and only accept what you
believe is fair. Furthermore, if someone disagrees with you getting a big bump
then maybe they have a point. You might have something to say if somebody two
levels below you started posturing for a leadership role and more pay? This
way you can't just ignore it and say it's none of your business - that's the
kind of behavior this level of transparency discourages. Everyone's an owner.

You really should be honest with recruiters about your previous salary. Lying
about that is more likely to hurt your chances or get you fired down the road
- [http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/is-it-illegal-
to-l...](http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/is-it-illegal-to-lie-about-
your-pay-in-a-job-interview)

You have a good point about it being risky. If any of these people end up
making a great deal of money I hope they do more to obfuscate their identities
in the public versions. From the looks of it right now they are all massively
under market for their roles.. it's clear they're doing a startup and are
taking startup sacrifices. I wouldn't worry about any of them being targeted
as a filthy rich mark.

~~~
ryanmarsh
> Lying about that is more likely to hurt your chances or get you fired down
> the road

that hasn't been my experience

------
antoniuschan99
The discrepancy in equity is huge

~~~
icelancer
Like it is in every other company?

------
jamra
Nice of you to publish this. It takes a lot of courage to break the mold. I
would like to hear how publishing this info has affected you later down the
road.

~~~
sharkweek
As someone who has followed Buffer's business for a while, this has been
public for quite some time.

I'm under the impression from reading a lot of the founders' writings that it
has certainly had small challenges but overall has been a huge net positive.

~~~
nraynaud
yeah, I read that kickstarted projects have a huge problem when dealing with
providers, everybody wants the biggest share of the loot, they know that the
backers reacted well the last time they were late, etc.

------
djb_hackernews
All of the Engineers took the salary over the equity. Anyone else find that
interesting?

~~~
tomredman
Not me :) I opted for the equity option. -Tom, Mobile Engineer @ Buffer

------
andyidsinga
question I have is how can one use all of this to evaluate company performance
in terms of productivity and morale?

I'm curious about: 1) employee turnover 2) offers made to candidates vs
declines 3) promotions and job changes

------
MicroBerto
At some point, all of these transparency posts/pages start to reek too highly
a self aggrandizing marketing ploy. A successful one, no doubt (especially
since the readership is also a main target demographic)... but it's getting a
bit tired.

Good luck to Buffer, try not to throw your shoulders out while patting
yourselves on the back.

------
therealmarv
They thing they make a good thing to make it open. They are wrong. It may be
ok to share their calculations, it may be ok if the CEO tells how much he
makes. It is not ok to share full names of employees. And if they do they
should make it internally. This absolutely helps nobody outside the company.
Really Buffer, you're making me angry. Privacy is something I decide and not
my company in this case.

~~~
kyriee
Actually, employees had deliberated on this and voted. It wasn't a top down
decision.

