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I don't want you to make more money because you're a pretty good negotiator; I want that money distributed to employees based on engineering results rather than negotiating skills. I don't want engineers who are focused on looking for and creating BATNA's and getting good at story telling rather than working as engineers.

> I want that money distributed to employees based on engineering results rather than negotiating skills

Why should money be distributed based on engineering results? Business results are what matter and a startling number of engineers are bad at assessing business results.

> I don't want engineers who are focused on looking for and creating BATNA's and getting good at story telling rather than working as engineers.

That's fine, but keep in mind that the easiest way I've found to influence my BATNA is to actually get great at my job.

> Why should money be distributed based on engineering results? Business results are what matter and a startling number of engineers are bad at assessing business results.

Well, for engineering staff, it makes sense that compensation is based on engineering results to the extent that that is what those employees have control over.

(If your staff are given broader responsibility, the results that figure into their compensation should be broader.)

I do believe in giving employees pretty broad responsibility, but even in area with narrower responsibility you should be able to connect your engineering work to the business metrics it's meeting.

Even if engineers aren't deciding what projects to pursue, they should be able to quantify their work in terms of how well they're implementing those business projects.

You know, I appreciate being rewarded on my ability to do the job, not my ability to negotiate. I'm glad you're getting rewarded for something other than your work, but the rest of us are unhappy about that.

I do appreciate your candor, though, and I hope you won't be offended at mine.

> I do appreciate your candor, though, and I hope you won't be offended at mine.

Not offended at all.

I would argue, however, that the best way to get good at negotiation is to actually gain a strong understanding of what it means to do your job well.

The real risk I see with open salaries is that most engineers tend to overvalue engineering knowledge and undervalue business understanding. So they'll see the solid engineer with great business savvy as overpaid when he makes more than the other intermediate engineers. Companies, unfortunately, will be pressured to underpay their top performers.

If you actually understand what it means to be good at your job and you are good at your job, and you feel you've negotiated a salary that reflects your actual worth...

What are you worried about?

It seems to me that you'd only need to be worried if you believed your compensation came at the expense of others. If it doesn't, then you should be fine.

Said better than I could. Alternatively, this is a form of negotiation, just a moderately collective one (not to be confused with collective bargaining): you now need to defend your salary to your peers, not just your boss. Meanwhile, when your peers push on open salaries, that is how they are negotiating, because they don't find the present approach optimal for them. So, like all good business books encourage, they're doing something creative/unexpected but completely above-board to improve their bargaining position.

> Companies, unfortunately, will be pressured to underpay their top performers.

Or to educate their engineers as to what it means to perform so that they understand why their top performers are really top performers (and simultaneously understand the skills they should be developing to be top performers.)

Which, if you think about it, the companies should be doing anyway, independent of open salaries. But open salaries would increase the obvious incentive...

What is the social value of having negotiation skills be a large determinant of one's salary? Why not diminish this cause of variance (perhaps relatively disadvantaging those who currently have anomalously good negotiation skills, but perhaps benefiting those who have not bothered specifically developing negotiation skills (or who have erroneously convinced themselves that they have))?

> What is the social value of having negotiation skills be a large determinant of one's salary?

Nothing in my comment said there was actually social value in having negotiation skills.

I'm talking about my personal experience and the drawbacks I see.

Do you think Buffer pays its employees fairly?

Your argument is circular.

You're saying that we shouldn't talk about pay, because when we talk about pay we get paid like Buffer devs do, which you think is obviously low compared to other salaries, which we can't actually prove because we don't talk about pay.

It's a bit like telling someone that you're giving them $100 in a box, but not to open the box, because if you open it, it'll turn into $20. "You can only have a high salary if you have no way to verify that it's high." Even if true, where does that leave us?

> which we can't actually prove because we don't talk about pay.

Just because salaries aren't public doesn't mean you can't get any salary information. Just go on a few interviews, set up an auction, and see what you can get.

> It's a bit like telling someone that you're giving them $100 in a box, but not to open the box, because if you open it, it'll turn into $20.

It's a cute analogy, but the more complete version would include a box market, where other people with insight into the box market are interested in buying the box I've been given. In such a scenario, I could shop around my box to see what it's actually worth without having to open it up.

I dunno, let's try the more complete version:

"There's $100 in this box. You can't open it, or look inside it, but trust me, it's there. Now you need to go over to my mate George, and give him the box, and he'll give you $100 for it. But only if you haven't opened it!"

Now it just sounds like you're being recruited as a drug mule. :)

Okay, granted, in your scenario their are multiple box dealers who are willing to bid on your unopened-but-totally-contains-$100 box. If you work at it, it's quite possible that you might even get some semblance of a fair offer. But should you need to work at it? And this still feels like a system which lends itself to collusion, uncertainty, and unfairness. Nor is that even hypothetical; we KNOW that our industry suffered from a serious wage-fixing cartel which was only recently busted open.

I feel like any argument against transparency has a high bar to clear.

So discount the value of negotiating as a skill, simply because others aren't good at it?

Seems just as biased as rewarding those with negotiating abilities.

One hopes that you're being paid for value to the company, and it's not obvious that being good at negotiating your own salary is well-correlated with providing value / having valuable skills. Though I see that morgante disagrees, so maybe we should explicitly discuss this!

I actually think it's not only rational but also good for the industry and society (long-term) for employees to push hard on improving themselves at the expense of their current employer. But many employers will act in what seems to be rational self-interest, and prefer candidates who won't prioritize themselves over their employer when it's close to zero-sum. (For instance, many employers require tracking and approval of expenses, instead of saying "We hired you to act in the company's interest" and dealing with abuse of expensing after the fact, as they would with e.g. abuse of root credentials.)

I'm also not particularly convinced that being good at negotiating your own salary is well-correlated with things you might do on behalf of the company, especially for many non-management-track software engineering careers.

> Though I see that morgante disagrees, so maybe we should explicitly discuss this!

I'd actually love to have a discussion about that, as I think it's an implicit assumption behind a lot of these anti-negotiation threads.

For my part, I do think that negotiation skills correlate with ability to deliver business value. Ability to command high salaries tends to follow from: (a) understanding what businesses actually value, (b) understanding market dynamics, (c) strong storytelling and communication skills, and (d) confidence/risk tolerance. All of these are, to me, valuable skills for software engineers as they help to translate business strategy and market dynamics into functioning software.

(Then again, I come from a place of believing engineers should have broad latitude and that software-driven companies should be more like law firms.)

So I think that's true for some roles but not all. I personally end up arguing about what markets we should and shouldn't enter, presenting at industry conferences, etc., because I find that interesting. But, for instance, a junior ops employee on a pager schedule primarily provides business value by getting good at the technologies that other people have chosen, not by paying attention to the market, by being able to present convincing arguments to others, etc. Yet that's a crucial role to business values.

I think this may be true of junior roles in general, and I think it's junior roles where I'm most worried, as a social-responsibility thing, about the fairness of salaries. I care less about earning $150K when I should be earning $200K than I do about earning $50K when I should be earning $100K, since it makes far more difference in my quality of life. (Even though they're the same delta value for the company!)

I could buy that there is a more generalize skillset of communication and persuasion: ops getting dev to clean up messes before putting them in prod, developers convincing open source maintainers into fixing their bugs for free, employees convincing prospective new hires to join, etc. And I do think it's valuable to measure that in addition to raw technical skill, both in hiring and in performance reviews. But I suspect there's enough reason to doubt that that correlates strongly with personal salary negotiation. Some people just don't do well pushing back on their direct superiors, but none of these other cases involve direct superiors. Somewhat more rationally, if you're worried about your job for office-politics reasons, or if it's riskier than usual to lose your income (maybe you're starting a family or have health issues), the right decision might be to take a safe, lower salary instead of trying for a higher salary with a small percentage chance of losing the negotiation badly. People without those concerns -- like me, who lives alone with no medical expenses and can bother my parents if worst comes to worse -- have a much higher risk tolerance, and I don't think personal risk tolerance particularly proxies for business value.

I also think that skill is learnable, and there are obvious poor incentives for a company to teach employees how to ask for more personal salary, but probably great incentives to teach employees how to negotiate better in the general case.

(As I understand it, big law firms rely on a sizable work force of associate lawyers and especially paralegals and other staff, who at least start out with very little say in the direction of the firm, what cases are taken, etc., right? And the partners are owners, not simply employees? I can definitely imagine open salaries and probably even unionization for the staff, which wouldn't compromise the ability of the partners to keep running the firm and making plenty of money.)

> look at how little Buffer is paying.[0]

Uh...it looks like they are paying a lot of engineers >$90,000. In what world is that how little ???

As of a few years ago, starting salaries for fresh-out-of-college software engineers in the Bay Area at decently-funded pre-IPO companies were consistently around $100K. I don't have a good sense of what it is today, nor what it is for early-stage startups, large companies, non-profits, etc.

(This is what happens when you don't talk about numbers!)

> Uh...it looks like they are paying a lot of engineers >$90,000.

Market rate for junior engineers is >$100k and for senior engineers it's easily >$150k.

Says who? Where are you getting that information, if you think nobody should talk about their salaries?

> Says who? Where are you getting that information, if you think nobody should talk about their salaries?

From friends, offers I've received, and offers I've given.

It's not that I don't think anybody should talk about their salaries. It's that we shouldn't have "open" salaries—nobody should be compelled to reveal their salary, particularly in an "anonymous" way.

I suppose I'm a poor negotiator since I'd be well pleased with Buffer's salary for my position. Not sure how me being a good negotiator would add more value to my company though, so calling it a tax seems mean spirited and self serving.

In SF the rate for an "Advanced" engineer would be:

$60k (base) + $12k (1.2 multiplier) + $22k (location) + $10k (salary instead of equity) = $104k.

Also your sample size is 1. Looking at salaries across their entire company they're a bit shit[0].

[0]: https://open.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/buffer...

How much do negotiations really count? if they amount to huge differences, why are there not professional negotiators?

> if they amount to huge differences, why are there not professional negotiators?

There are...