> One thing that I found out in my exit interview at Capital One is that the mistake I made while posting this was to call something a "counter offer" from Capital One. It was noted that this wasn't a counter offer, it was a "your salary is being updated anyway for competitiveness", but I'd misinterpreted the exact wording, as it sounded like a counter at the time.
Sounds like a counter offer to me. I'd be very surprised if this "update for competitiveness" would have happened had it not been for a different offer.
It is absolutely a counter offer and they also don't want to give their employees the idea that they sometimes do counter offers. Counter offers are discretionary and usually you only get one chance at it - it burns a chunk of trust if you've demonstrated will to walk away. A counter offer is something a manager asked for, and if you do it again, they usually won't be as willing to go bat for you a second time.
If there's been turnover in managers or you've switched teams in a large corp, then you may have more luck. On the other hand, larger corps treat engineers more fungibly, and if they're looking to trim headcount via a directive from on high, they'll just let you walk out.
In terms of this being a loss of trust, it's not uncommon for managers to say "we're already paying you as much as we can afford" or "your compensation is already the highest that our rules allow for". If they are willing to go beyond that in a counteroffer, it pretty much reveals that they were previously being dishonest with you in order to get away with paying less.
This is either a loss of trust, or else trust never existed in the first place.
Or the counteroffer is to retain the person until the completion of an immediate project. It could be that the short-term loss of an individual exceeds the extra cost of a raise, but the long-term cost exceeds the benefits.
More likely, it's a case of non-generalizability. Profitable companies can normally afford to counter-offer in specific cases, but if the resulting raise became a rule in like-for-like employee relationships, the collective increase in payroll would not be affordable.
Kinda reminds me of Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series.
I believe there is a culture in that world, traders of which will do their best to make sure the person they're negotiating with gets the best deal possible.
The people of this fictional culture don't do business with you if you try to get the best deal possible for yourself.
What you say is fair, but do you believe that trust is reciprocal when talking about corporations?
How often are companies the ones trying to get the best deal for themselves? How often would the people of that fictional culture do business with such a corporate entity?
A corporation by its very nature can not have the same values as a human.
> it burns a chunk of trust if you've demonstrated will to walk away.
I still don't understand this advice. As someone who has done this a few times at the same company, I have not witnessed it. Usually the whole point of an outside offer is to convince someone outside your management chain what you're worth (HR). At that point, the question isn't about loyalty, it's about the value of the work to the company on the whole (does your org even need an expensive engineer).
This is because management would like the company - employee relationship to not be a purely business one. There is some kind of fictitious betrayal involved in what you described.
From the pov of the employee, they are just updating the price for their services.
What if society would treat companies raising prices as betrayal?
> What if society would treat companies raising prices as betrayal?
They often do just that. Usually through government actions that limit or cap price increases in goods, or policies that discriminate against companies based on previous behavior. Last time the US had a real run at it was the Nixon price/wage caps in the 70s, but it's definitely getting traction again when we're seeing corporate taxes at historic lows, profits at historic highs, and inflation popping up again as a real risk.
This whole "trust" thing is a big fucking deal, regardless of what folks might like to think, and it absolutely does extend to the relationship corporations have with the public.
I personally don't think the controls usually work the way they're intended (it's mostly bad news), but I don't mind the punishment aspect of them in regards to betrayed trust.
Thing is, companies aren't just a web of contracted individuals.
Companies gain efficiencies from reduced transaction costs; this is the basic theory of the firm, the reason we have firms at all.
One of the big ways transaction costs are reduced is by increased trust, trust at the human level. Interactions don't need lots of checks and guards and ass-covering because there's mutual trust, at a human level, that people are working together on a profit-making enterprise.
Breaking trust affects efficiency. If someone threatens to leave, you can't make future plans that assume they're in place. People aren't cogs that can be trivially replaced; on-the-job knowledge makes people more productive and takes time to acquire. So if someone's future presence is uncertain, timelines stretch, more people need to be allocated to it to account for risk of people leaving, and so on.
And this affects other trust relationships further out. A manager of a team or a product area may not be able to deliver on commitments that serve a strategic purpose of the company directed at a higher level.
It's not "purely business". Businesses run on trust; companies are collections of individuals with a higher degree of mutual trust, and the more trust they have, the more they can eliminate inefficiencies caused by lacking trust. That's why companies work at all.
I'd originally written it on my salary page as a "counter offer", but the competitive increase was given to me regardless of the fact I was in my notice period :)
I currently work for a smaller private company. It doesn't pay me as much as a large corporation in the industry. Were my compensation public, I would forfeit the option to increase it significantly again.
I work here because I live next door, like the people and the work environment. It is worth it to me. Public registers would not reflect these choices. Otherwise I would need to keep up appearances and optimise my compensation. I like to keep these options.
Not relevant in Norway because everyone earns a lot. Sweden seems to be a country with significant social pressure, not really a role model for me.
That said, under no circumstances should it be illegal to talk about your compensation. Any company that forbids you to do so probably has some dark secrets here.
> "Were my compensation public, I would forfeit the option to increase it significantly again."
Not at all; you might feel that way, companies will certainly try to make you feel that way, but it's up to you to negotiate and ask for whatever salary you want and companies will generally pay it if it's within their budget. Specially if the company trying to hire you also had public salaries, why do you think it'd limit your growth?
Yes and no. Of course I can argue my way out of it just like I have done here, but it will summon a number in the head of others on valuable your productivity is. There is no way around that and this then also extends beyond the company you work for. It won't feel right for them to increase my salary by 100% just because I now work in a large corporation. They might still hire me for more, but the relation will be influenced by this, like a productivity debt that I have to compensate for. Especially also if my relation to my employer is in good standing.
There are some benefits with openness of compensation, but I would like to keep it private for me. I believe the lower end of salaries might profit from more transparency. As I have said, it should be possible to reveal it. Making it public by default wouldn't be my preference and I would feel the need to demand more from my current employer.
I am aware the secrecy is most often a vehicle for companies to supress wages. But I think selective and voluntary transparency can alleviate this.
100% agreed and I've witnessed this, it may be more common here in Europe. Some companies are very focused on your last salary (if you're desperate or careless enough to tell it to them) and will outright laugh you out the door if they think you demand a jump that's too high.
To the person you were replying to: Please remember this is not the valley, sometimes an increase of 10k per year is noticeable.
I am actually from Spain and I agree; my point though is that you normally would want to negotiate and work for companies based on value, not on your cost. That has many implications and it's not for everyone ofc, but it's generally true IMHO [article pending...].
Put it the other way; if you know a company is paying 60k/employee (at your level/role ofc), and they offer you 40k "based on your previous salary", wouldn't you also laugh on their face?
Is your argument that if you get paid too little and this is public, then your next gig won't pay you more because they know this? If so, can you expand a little on why that would be the case?
Because companies want to get you for as little as they can, and if they know your previous compensation, instead of potentially offering you 30, 40, 50% higher than what you're currently making, they will think they can get away with offering you {your previous salary} + 5% or 10%.
That's why a bunch of companies ask what your previous salary was in interviews and why you need to absolutely not give that number in pretty much all circumstances.
Like I got a 60% bump from my previous salary my last job search, in part because I hadn't gotten raises for several years at my previous company as they had wage freezes, and in part because I had been behind on compensation for a while due to having to take whatever halfway decent jobs I could get while unemployed, but if the prospective employer knew I was getting paid so little, they probably would have significantly lowered the salary they offered to me, and I'd still be behind the market rate for my skills, and the next time I went looking for a job I still wouldn't be offered enough to catch up to what I'm making now. It's a vicious cycle when they know your current salary.
Not if that's all the offers you get, because they keep using your previous job's salary as a baseline. Or you have to churn through a 2-3 dozen job offers to find something closer to the going market rate, which is exhausting and time consuming.
Even for that 60% bump, that was after talking to 20 recruiters over the phone, 8 online code exams, 5 multi-stage interviews, and getting 2 offers, over an exhausting three week period, and juggling all those with a day job was super difficult, and I had to schedule enough of those during the work day that it got to the point where my former boss probably started to notice.
I'd hate to have to double, triple, or quadruple that effort just to get maybe a 30% bump if my previous salary was public knowledge.
Maybe they know your previous salary, but they don't know how many offers you have. You just have to put your foot down and say you won't move if they offer less than X and state that you current salary is irrelevant as they up against other companies not your current one.
I managed to get a significant salary bump even without having a job, because I made sure they understand from the beginning I'm happy to walk away.
I've personally experienced this. Salary is taken as a proxy for ability.
After the dot com crash, I took lower paid work in the public sector, working on some interesting things.
I was approached by a recruiter to work for a company that was basically the best possible fit. They were working on a product category that I had helped to define at a previous start up, where I was the chief technical architect.
Once I told the recruiter my current salary, he was no longer interested. He even sounded aghast. Couldn't possibly put me forward for the role.
I've done work in the public sector before. Here's what I told recruiters who asked for my salary history after that:
"In my previous job, I deliberately took a below-market rate to work in the public sector, as a form of service to my community. I don't consider that salary relevant for this discussion."
End of story. I'm fortunate to be in a place where broader salary statistics are available, so from there I simply redirected the conversation to "here's what I'm seeing as the range of market rates here, and why I think I deserve to be on the high end of that", and that was fine.
Remember: in this industry, your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is...just walk away, and answer the next recruiter who's begging for your time. If they can't consider putting you forward because of an arbitrary number from a non-comparable position, well, that's their problem and their loss.
That works. As you say, it was their loss, but the reaction surprised me at the time. I didn't have any problems negotiating a better salary when I finally left.
This is pretty consistent with communication most people get from recruiters: tell me your salary so we can know what you are worth. Back home I have a few screenshots of LinkedIn messages that opened conversations asking for screenshots of pay slips so they could verify. Not suggesting I agree with the practice of course.
You don't have to comply with their request. If it's for a company you're interested in, you can say no while also being polite, i.e. "Let's not worry about compensation until we're sure it's a good fit."
To be fair, the salary is relevant to recruiters for their compensation. For lower wages it often isn't worth it for them to recruit people. It isn't necessarily a judgement of you, although yes, overall your income is.
Yes, only that salary is relevant, but they too see the previous salary as a baseline for any future compensation.
They know that the typical case is that salary maybe increases by 10% (number pulled from thin air here) and calculate if the effort is worth it for themselves.
In India, this is almost always the norm. Most companies are willing to offer only 30% on top of what you’re currently making. Anything above that is considered “asking too much”.
"Were my compensation public, I would forfeit the option to increase it significantly again."
No, it doesn't, and it would matter less if employers had to print legally binding starting salary ranges for jobs (they can't pay you less than the range, and the top must not be less than their top earner in the job).
I can’t speak for the country you work in but here in the U.K. not every company has salary ranges and even those that do, a great many will try to negotiate salaries down rather than up (salaries are a businesses largest expense after all). Thus having a lower published salary gives you less bargaining power to negotiate a higher starting salary.
This isn’t a universal problem even in the U.K. but just an illustration of how the GPs point isn’t as inaccurate as you claim.
Oh yeah, I treat that question as "what salary would you like?". My current salary is entirely irrelevant, as this question just serves to begin the negotiation, and I sometimes say "it entirely depends on your needs, do you have a range in mind?".
Never be the first to give a number. Then you have lost the negotiation.
An option is to go with something along the lines "I have a number in mind that would satisfy, but as I'm sure you have looked at the market rates I trust you'll make a great offer if in the end you are interested"
i think it is in the other way: many companies will try to hire you for less-> big competition for you-> some will try to pay more, or you can say that you got an offer for much more. As result you filter out the greedy ones
It isn’t illegal. The right to discuss your pay publicly, with anyone, is enshrined in British law.
Any contract terms to the contrary are invalid, and actions taken against you for sharing are illegal, and UK employment tribunals take a very dim view of employer misbehaviour.
He does say that it "could have been", but it turns out it's fine.
It depends on where you're based, but I doubt that it's actually illegal in most countries. I know that I'm legally allow to tell people how much I make. It is kinda interesting when your open about your own salary, but your coworkers aren't. Apparently I made less that other in the same position at my previous job, I was just never told by how much.
I'd be astonished if it was criminal-law illegal in any country. But in eg. India, it's pretty common to sign an NDA covering your own salary, meaning that sharing it externally could get you sued.
Likely not what's being discussed in the article here, but I used to be active on a developer mailing list where discussion of pricing/hourly rates/etc. was forbidden because there were a lot of contractors/freelancers working in relatively narrow spaces and some jurisdictions could consider it a form of price fixing. Essentially, imagine if all the experts on some particular niche technology sat down and said "we all are going to charge at least $X/hour". Doing that explicitly is illegal. And in a forum related to some profession, having conversations about "how much should I charge for X?" or "how much do you all charge for X?" can quickly run into legal grey areas. Discussing salary probably is safe (but IANAL) but you do have to be careful if it's a conversation about rates happening between competitors in a market.
Dad took a photography consulting class and they instructed the whole class to charge market rates and to not cheapen the industry as a whole by starting a bidding war to the bottom. Felt wrong but my dad finally started charging competitively so I didn’t blink twice
When they say illegal, they probably mean breach of contract, not illegal in terms of criminal law. Also just because something is in a contract, doesnt make it lawful or even actionable.
We are already in such a society. Secrecy is an option in your employment negotiation. If you want to talk about your salary - go ahead and make it a part of your employment agreement. If others don't want to talk about their salary and instead negotiate for something else like a higher salary or more time off it's their prerogative too.
I find it funny that in software engineering you become a senior with just 6 years of work experience. Doesn’t anyone else find that funny? So, at age 29, you’re basically a master of your craft?
I was made "senior" developer six months after graduation. Mind you, that was back in the 2000 dotcom era.
I'm reminded of Lincoln's "I can make a new general in three minutes": if you need to staff a hierarchy, and you have a bunch of young men to do it with (+), you take the ones that look like they have initiative and stick titles on them and let the results shake out.
>the industry has always been pretty terrible at hiring and promoting women, and the way we handle recognition is part of that
By highschool, you have as large of a gap in boys and girls enrolling in computer science AP classes and extracurriculars as it's going to get by adulthood. Additionally, in wealthier countries, with more gender equality, less women choose computer science degrees.
So no, it's not the fault of the industry. Man and women just have different interests for complicated reasons. You can verify it with your own two eyes - in any big corporation, (and in many smaller companies), there is a big drive to hire women, there are events exclusively for women, career groups, opportunities exclusively for women.
> (+) the industry has always been pretty terrible at hiring and promoting women, and the way we handle recognition is part of that
I wonder if, in a parallel universe, HR departments of schools are beating themselves up for not hiring enough men, college admissions departments are asking themselves if they're failing the boys of the current generation, or hospitals thinking if they should have a more inclusive culture in nursing.
Architect is becoming more adjacent akin to the manager path at some places. Lead is also more adjacent, given a junior can be a lead by proxy of leading others.
Haven't heard much of 'staff' and principle seems reserved for Fortune N types.
I graduated with a PhD 10 years ago from the same university (Nottingham) as he did, in mechanical engineering, and have been working in academia ever since, working my way up to senior lecturer (UK equivalent to associate professor), and I'm still earning much less than him. I do a lot of coding in research projects in my job and have some experience in web development from side-projects, as well as contributions to open-source libraries (mainly statistics and simulation based in Python) etc. Been thinking of making the career switch into a software development role for a while but wondered if it's too late. This makes me think it may still be worthwhile, even if getting that first role might prove difficult given my academic background and I'd have to start at the bottom again.
If you go the data science / machine learning route, your academic knowledge (applied maths, formulating and running experiments, etc.) will be a lot more valuable than if you go for standard software developer roles. Also, no reason you'd start at the bottom.
You won’t have to start at the bottom again, given your experience. Sounds like you could get a decent job in data science, and I guess you know of engineering businesses where you could apply your knowledge.
If you have 10 years of weak coding experience and have managed to finish a PhD, you'd probably start at least at a mid level, not junior, and quickly get up from that.
"Senior" doesn't mean "master". It just means you're capable of leading projects on your own of reasonable size. The terms we use for people who have truly mastered their field are things like "technical fellow" or "distinguished engineer". (And, FWIW, people can reach "senior" far earlier than 6 years of work experience.)
> It just means you're capable of leading projects on your own of reasonable size.
That's a "team lead" which is a particular skill of its own - I'm definitely a senior (age, experience, skills, breadth of knowledge, etc.) but absolutely not a "team lead" (or any kind of management) because that is a skill that eludes my brain.
A team lead is not a project manager which is not a technical lead. These are mostly disjoint sets of skills, which may or may not have disjoint roles in a particular org.
Not necessarily master, but you may well be better at it than the majority of your colleagues by that stage and should probably be compensated/treated accordingly.
The majority of software engineers don't dedicate themselves solely to practice and improvement of their skills so can't compete with somebody that does
Outside of domain specific knowledge some people have Senior traits right away; ownership, tenacity, attention to detail, empathy to risk. They will ask for help more readily but also become blocked less than other "seniors" with years of experience(by both asking for help and trying to help themselves more).
Others will have a few years of experience and a "senior" title but may never obtain those traits.
The problem is those areas are often conflated under a single "senior" title at companies. But you definitely know who's going and who's staying when the layoffs come.
It's as funny as CTOs I know are just below average developers. Senior for me is scoped by company, since it will only cover range of knowledge the business requires. Some seniors are just the ones who stay long enough in a company. I only respect developers from what they created or does. Cool title is often false alarm.
Well Silicon Valley on Twitter expect you to be CTO at at 3x and retire by 40. And this has been going on for quite sometime.
I mean they aren't wrong, after all a Fresh Grad gets $200K Total Comp from FANNG. That is nearly double ( adjusting for exchange rate ) the "Senior" software engineering roles in the blog post.
I'd find it strange that you can only become senior after X amount of years. Some people are just more skilled than others. One person can do a job for 20 years and still only be medicore, whereas others could do a job for 1 year and be a master at it.
I would assume the title is based on merit and ability, not X number of years regardless of how good or not they are.
If this shows anything is how low salaries are in the UK compared to the cost of living. 90K in London make you a working poor by Western and Southern European standards (I mean, try to send 2 children to nursery and rent a 3 bed flat on that salary)
Property prices in London are distorted by how much is owned by the top 1% or 0.1%, such as the Duke of Westminster who owns 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia.
This is coming time and time again. It's not "richest" top - income has little to do with wealth. If you come from a working class, have no assets and just got the £90k job, you have not suddenly become rich. Far from it.
These statistics are used to pit workers against each other and enforce crabs in the bucket mentality that works in favour of big corporation who then can keep wages low.
Even if you are in 1% you are still far from being "rich".
The workers are really screwed in the UK and then you have tax thresholds not adjusted for inflation for over a decade, so it's getting worse.
Whatever, you make 90K and you can’t afford to rent a 3 bedroom flat and to pay nursery fees for 3 kids. You can call this “rich”, but you’d have a better lifestyle as a janitor in Germany.
No, you won't have a better lifestyle as a janitor in Germany. But I agree with the sentiment, 90K is a top salary (judging by the numbers), but it's just not enough anymore in these days.
The OFSTED maximum children per childminder ratio is six, so looking after three kids necessarily takes half a person's salary before overheads. This is often forgotten in the childcare costs discussion by all political sides.
Sending 3 kids to nursery cost in excess of 5K per month, that is not half a person’s salary. It is the entire after tax income of somebody earning 100K a year.
It's about what the money gets you, not about what percentile you're in. Who cares how much above average you are if everyone else's salary is also crap.
"Richest" implies wealth, which is not salary. Someone who makes 90k and owns their own home free and clear, say by inheriting it, is different from someone who has to pay rent on the same salary.
You can't if everyone is using the same tactic, and if everyone is using it more successfully than you then you'll be a lot worse off. A different approach would be preferable.
There is no problem though that the big corporations record insane profits, no? It's a myth that prices will go up. More like the CEO won't buy that second yacht.
You don't think house prices go up without wages going up?
House prices have near enough doubled in the UK over the last 10 years. Average house price at the start of 2020 was 240k, now it's bordering 300k. Do you honestly think that wages have seen growth even close to that?
Much of the recent rises are due to investment money entering the system and the calculation used to determine mortgage lending limits changing (from 3x your income to 5x or more). The rises in the early 00s were due to buy-to-let money entering the system. In the 80s it was due to significant wage increases. Before that the last significant rise was in the 50s when households shifted to having two incomes as more women started earning, much of which went on buying a bigger house, which dragged prices up.
Every time there's a major price increase you can point to a congruent increase in the amount of money available to buy houses. I don't think it's a coincidence.
IMO this is an issue of taxes being very high. I'm against progressive taxation; people like to call it fair because "rich people should pay more", but you'd already pay more by just making more under a proportional taxation system.
I don't think it's fair paying a larger proportion of your income just cause you make more.
But what's worse are brackets such as the ones in the UK. Up to ~50k you pay 20%, but anything above that will be taxed at a 40% rate, which is, plain and simple, theft.
Do any UK people here know what the typical employer taxes are on payroll? US companies pay around 10% of the employee's salary in taxes (~8% for social security and some change for workers compensation, unemployment and whatever else the state demands). So if your salary is 100k, your actual value to the company is closer to 111k (plus whatever benefits they are paying like health insurance).
90k seems low compared to American salaries, but if the employer has to pay 50k in UK taxes to hire you, well, that (partially) explains it.
It is. But you do get unlimited health-care for you and your dependents. Also note until recently it was worth $115k-ish USD and now it's worth $99k-ish.
Finally note that his £90k is actually £110k with stock, which is a strong London developer salary outside of banking.
> But you do get unlimited health-care for you and your dependents
Healthcare in the UK is not a solved problem at all - long waiting times and lots of stuff that should be covered in theory but in practice can't be accessed by many people (mental health, dental treatments). I'm paying a lot in taxes and NI, I have private health insurance through my employer and in many cases I still need to pay out of pocket for treatments.
It took my mother 3 months to get into see a cardiologist for a moderately serious issue. My sister has MS and is currently seeing the only neurologist in the area who specializes in MS, but they are retiring soon. She also spent a year being jerked around by insurance when they rejected the medication her neurologist prescribed, her disease progressing the whole time (there's no "getting better with MS, just slowing progress).
People in the US often criticize the wait times in the UK or Canada like it's better here, but it's often really, really not.
As an American living in the UK, I will point out that you're not wrong, but the NHS is still vastly better than what was available in the US. And that most of the problems with long waits, etc. are largely the result of deliberate defunding and meddling by conservatives.
American here, when we or our kids need to see a specialist we usually have to go to an urgent care clinic to get a referral because scheduling with our primary care can be 3-6 months out. Then it's about a 4-8 month wait to see the specialist and a whole bunch of unknowns on treatment and the cost.
Some of my conservative friends have voiced that we need to radically change our healthcare but some still insist on their "freedoms".
Edit: Also we brits /know/ our salaries are low compared to the US. Also the majority of us get very confused when someone claims that they’re on £200k plus bonuses as a devops in London and we’re left utterly confused as those salaries are like from another planet for us
You are talking as if your salary is related to the revenue/value you bring to the business? That may be the theoretical upper limit, but the more important factor is the minimum you would accept, ie the labor market. Or the cost of replacing you (again the labor market).
> US companies pay around 10% of the employee's salary in taxes
I'm in the US and glancing at my pay slip, it looks like these taxes come out of my gross salary. It really looks like I'm paying them and not my employer
Currencies worldwide have lost ground against the dollar, and the pound was doing poorly to begin with. A pound is only 1.12 dollar atm.
What's going on is a combination of social services using taxes and the US being one of few places putting a huge value on software devs. The US is an outlier, not the other way around.
UK salaries have always been low. US salaries have always been very high.
Though we do get unlimited free healthcare and a statutory minimum of 28 days paid leave, and up to 28 weeks paid sick leave. Not quite swings and roundabouts - I'd like a higher salary, but there are some benefits to not living in the US.
Salary transparency is especially helpful for knowing if you got a bad or good deal in comparison to your peers.
I had a peer who was doing the same work as me early in my career and I found out they were paid 2x less, so I helped coach them to ask for a market adjustment and they easily got it. Not only was it demoralizing for them hearing how much I was paid when we shared, but seeing how happy they were after they got what they asked for is something I’ll never forget.
What ruins it for everyone is when people go to LinkedIn to be “radically transparent”(aka brag online) about their 500k USD total comp package in SV. Not only is it fairly rare, you also have to gamify your career to get there.
These companies are increasingly hiring in non-SV offices, but I take (particular) umbrage with “gamify your career to get there”; that’s not remotely true.
It was noted that this wasn't a counter offer, it was a "your salary is being updated anyway for competitiveness", but I'd misinterpreted the exact wording, as it sounded like a counter at the time.
For this to be true the author's salary would need to have increased regardless of whether they left. That would mean, if they chose to go, they'd earn a bit more during their notice period[1]. If the author's salary didn't increase during their notice period, or if the role didn't have the subsequent higher salary when it was advertised to find a replacement, then it was an offer designed to counter the author leaving, and I think it's very dubious to call that anything other than a counter-offer.
[1] In the UK we to have 1, 3 or 6 month notice periods depending on seniority. None of this "2 weeks and I'm gone!" efficiency like the USA. Very high level (eg c-suite) roles sometimes have even more.
I'd originally written it on my salary page as a "counter offer", but the competitive increase was given to me regardless of the fact I was in my notice period :)
Regarding your point about notice periods in the UK, that's not really a given. More senior people typically work as consultants and it is not uncommon to have a zero day notice period. Which works great for both sides - senior people don't have issues with finding jobs and if the job turns out to be a chore they can do 'kthxbye' and be at a new one the next day.
This is the same for workers doing work through an agency which gets increasingly more popular.
Notice periods can also by asymmetrical - the employer can let go of the worker without notice period, but worker if they want to quit need to give 2-8+ weeks.
Wut? In Denmark we have a law specifically stating that not only are employees free to talk about their salary, it is also particularly illegal to fire them for doing so. A contractual clause disallowing this would in itself be illegal.
Isn't this salary really low? For comparison, a new grad straight out of undergrad makes like $150k at Amazon (which is the low end of comparative companies).
From the perspective of a french dude, 90k£ is something like 101k€, which is an INSANELY good salary.
For comparison, i'm actually paid 25k€ with 2 year of experience (Junior software developper), and a really good salary in this field in France is something around 48k€
Last point, the minimum salary in France is 1.5k€ per month, around 18k€
I believe it widely change depending on the country.
It's pretty easy. US has scarcity via VISA scarcity.
US companies have a smaller hiring pool and more competiveness.
US companies in Europe exploit workers from all around the world at the lowest price they can and call it "market salary" and "that's how things are".
Then they'll rave about fighting inequality and "the wage gap" but no one will address that in the US you have double the salaries for usually less taxes.
And no, what is done with those taxes is generally not good enough nor "way better than in the US" to justify the travesty in terms of high taxes.
Housing crisis' abound and landlord classes and politicians are one, protecting their own interests.
As always, the desires of the shareholders come first and foremost, with the people spending their lives doing the actual work merely considered a resource to exploit the labor of.
Amazon pays fairly well when you take the entire market into consideration, but somewhat poorly when you're looking at the top end (FAANG…but even then, they are all over the place). But the anchoring you've brought up is really what they'll pay US-based developers, rather than someone in the UK.
I understand the ideas behind publicly talking about salary, but I don't think I could ever mention my salary publicly. I know my friends earn a lot more than me and I'm ashamed of my salary. I'd much rather have them thinking that maybe we were possibly on level footing.
When talking about money, it's not just money that matters. Social rules and emotions are in there too.
Does anyone know what this damage was? I didn't read the original post, but I thought it'd at least be alluded to somewhere on this page. All I could see was that someone suggested checking the legality of disclosing their salary, but that turned out OK in the end.
On a related note, in the US all state government employee salaries are public. As a state university professor, my salary has been pubic for years. I like it this way because our salary negotiations with the college dean can be more informed.
90K GBP salary, 9K GBP bonus and 21K Stock for an L5 at Deliveroo in London? If you are in that position, I am 99% certain that Silicon Valley is a better[1] choice. Any L5 at a Fintech or a Social media or a Gig-economy based company will earn 350K-400K, if not more, even in this economy[2]. That's a 3x difference, or 2.5X if GBP recovers.
Comparing London vs SV on other aspects: you get great health insurance at these companies, better than NHS; housing prices are the same level of crazy; SV tech co's will give you at least 3 weeks of vacation + 10 holidays; SV has far worse dating scene but SF is not bad; taxes should be comparable;
[1] strictly in a monetary sense. Please stay in London if you have an awesome social network there or love English culture or prefer English weather or have trouble getting a US visa.
[2] Source: I am hiring L5s and I have comp data for the US.
Indeed - I'll be polite:
I just cannot falsify the "showing off" thesis.
What value to the community does it add posting this single data point under his own name?
Aggregates like Glassdoor are much more valuable.
Is Glassdoor skewed/misleading? Then make that the post (and quantify).
PS: And always be very careful with individual anecdotes! There were whistles blown - from multiple sources - about extreme abuse at a famous science institute in Germany [1], and the single review on Glassdoor about it at the time was one guy singing it praises.
> What value to the community does it add posting this single data point under his own name?
People get an idea of what's possible. If you're making £50k and you see an anecdotal report of a £90k salary in the same market, that tells you something about the progress that you can make. Comparing yourself to an average isn't always helpful.
> Is Glassdoor skewed/misleading?
For a well known company that I worked for the Glassdoor average was lower than the company's actual graduate salaries.
He might be but it doesn't mean that everyone doing it would be - I'm contemplating publishing mine (assuming I can remember that far back) and trust me, there's no bragging rights there at all.
Sounds like a counter offer to me. I'd be very surprised if this "update for competitiveness" would have happened had it not been for a different offer.