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Comment by marme | Hacker News Reader

no two employees with the exact same job title should have more than 10% difference in pay. If someone is making 40% more than others with same title then they should be promoted to higher title and if they dont deserve that title then why is the company paying them so much. It is one thing to want to minimize salary costs but another to disrespect employees with absurdly low salary.

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"no two employees with the exact same job title should have more than 10% difference in pay"

Meh, job titles are just buckets. Comp is also a bunch of buckets.

Why should these buckets be necessarily tied in size?

Lots of flatter organizations have a smaller number of titles but larger comp buckets.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this.

This is true even for bigger companies. As an example, let's say we classify engineers as SDE I,II and III and then have at least three sublevels within these which are not reflected in the titles. Engineers can negotiate on what level they think they should be based on their performance - as opposed to how much you should be making. Everybody at a sublevel makes the exact dollar amount +/- a performance bonus. I worked at a company that did that and I found it much less awkward to negotiate during performance reviews (aka pay-hike talks).

Doesn't the Peter Principle come into play here? What if we do the same job but I do it twice as fast? That doesn't mean I'd be a good fit for the next level up, it might just mean I'm really good at doing this specific job very quickly.

In my mind this is one of the cases where "Jr" and "Sr" titles can be useful.

Or a 20 hour work-week with full salary.

I suppose it's ambiguous but generally I feel like "senior" means "responsible for more pieces or higher level pieces" not just "faster at the simple stuff".

Where I work, there are 4 levels of my job, none of which are management. That is to say that someone can work an entire career as a research associate and take on more responsibility, but not be forced up the org chart. This is very important because I look to the people in the higher levels for a lot of help (both organizational and technical), but we can do much of the same lab work.

No. An employee should make the salary he or she is willing to accept and an employer is willing to pay.

What if they do different jobs? Is the title so important?

Agreed. Title doesn't really mean much, unless you force a ton of different titles.

That only works if you come up with lots of different job titles, which is probably a good idea. It's just pretty hard to implement for many companies: most non-tech companies don't have 10 different levels of software engineers.

I've had plenty of experiences where people in equivalent job titles had vastly different productivity (and, justifiably, vastly different titles).

A job title is not an accurate reflection of an individual employee's value to the company. It would be insane to require that a 10x developer gets paid the same as colleagues just because they shared a job title.

He is arguing that this 10x developer should get promoted to "senior principal engineer" or something like that.

But titles are just arbitrary anyway. If you're saying that two people with the same role shouldn't have more than 10% difference in pay, that makes a bit more sense, although it's still quite difficult to define "role."

Are titles really that meaningful? I've never worked at a place that cared much about them.

Also, on a practical note, that would require 17 different titles for the same type of job if you have a 5x variation in compensation. That seems kinda crazy.

Employees care about them because getting a new title is an official recognition of their accomplishments to themselves and their coworkers, it looks good on a resume, and can definitely be meaningful for optics with clients.

I really don't care that much about them myself. I do use a few different titles depending on the client however.

LOL, genuinely laughed. A developer with a title a level below mine makes more than me - I was recently promoted but the raise I got with the promotion didn't match his salary without the promotion!

OK, next thing there's 9000 job titles. Where's a win in this? If it just salary levels, then why bother with titles? Call it just "salary level N+1" and that's it.

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