Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more

by ZeljkoS • 11 years ago

148 176 11 years ago

jamra• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

fs1113• 11 years ago

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.

lukasm• 11 years ago

Keep in mind this is only in European and US culture. In Japan is normal to talk about it.

brobinson5• 11 years ago

In Norway, you can find out how much anyone makes by looking up their public tax returns!

http://www.joshuakennon.com/tax-returns-in-norway-are-public...

jotux2• 11 years ago

Have you ever considered why you feel that how much you earn should be a secret?

dominotw5• 11 years ago

Why not?

timdorr• 11 years ago

Honest question: Why?

fs1113• 11 years ago

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.

roel_v• 11 years ago

Why do you get to ask why? Why can't people decide for themselves what information they want to have public? Would you want a public website with everybody's health stats, or the report from every GP visit? If not, why not? It's only our bodies, everybody has physical issues sometimes, what's the big deal?

zzalpha• 11 years ago

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.

Don't forget your co-workers.

Capitalism only works with information transparency. The minute there's an information asymmetry, things break down.

In this case, without information about the salary of your co-workers, you cannot effectively negotiate for your own value, which puts you and all of your colleagues at a disadvantage to the employer.

Of course, that's really the American way these days, but that doesn't make it a good thing.

brobinson5• 11 years ago

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.

cdubzzz3• 11 years ago

I think this level of openness and such a specific salary formula speaks volumes about the work culture and that should partially answer your question.

If my employer made this level of information available to everyone, I would have a great deal more trust and confidence in the senior management and probably wouldn't be job hunting on the side.

k-mcgrady4• 11 years ago

> "If my employer made this level of information available to everyone"

...I would stay well away. I guess it's different for everyone but I don't want this kind of information available to my colleagues never mind the general public.

tdees40• 11 years ago

In Norway everyone's income is public. I'd be curious to hear from any Norwegians how this works out in practice.

danfarrelly4• 11 years ago

My personal top reasons are the culture, the people and what we value as a company. I believe it's a phenomenal place to work as an engineer and the remote working setup has been one of the most fun, interesting and liberating ways to work in my career.

Dan, Engineer w/ Buffer for 1 1/2 years

dominotw5• 11 years ago

culture, the people and what we value as a company.

Curious if you have specific examples.

fragmede2• 11 years ago

So Dan, how does the $118k/yr and 0.24 equity factor into making Buffer a "phenomenal place to work" and "fun, interesting and liberating"?

sunils34• 11 years ago

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 :)

Domenic_S2• 11 years ago

Could you talk more about how it took "great feedback" to realize how under-market you were? I would imagine a tech company -- especially one that took so much time and effort coming up with compensation formulas -- would have their finger on the pulse of salary levels.

discardorama2• 11 years ago

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.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that you have to pay more in markets like SF and NYC. The costs of living are much higher, and employees can switch jobs almost effortlessly.

brobinson5• 11 years ago

Thanks for the reply, Sunil! Wasn't expecting a response from the CTO. :) Glad to hear you are constantly making changes and improvements. I almost applied a while ago, but the salaries were off-putting.

fragmede2• 11 years ago

How's the $177k/yr and 0.96 equity treating you?

What choices have you made in the past year that make you feel you're worth $63k/yr more than Colin? I mean, is Colin just not quite as smart and good at technology as you? Have you two talked about how much better you are than him?

That rhetorical line of questioning is a low blow, but as CTO you might be able to answer: what positive open and honest discussion has the open equity/salary table actually encouraged?

Idle gossip around the virtual water cooler is one thing, but for open salaries to be appreciated, there have to be positives that outweigh the obvious negatives.

Another thing not mentioned, does Buffer give bonuses for good work or is the spreadsheet an employee's total compensation?

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

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?

JDiculous• 11 years ago

Most likely because they allow you to work remotely from anywhere in the world.

Cherian• 11 years ago

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.

cookiecaper3• 11 years ago

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.

matthewowen• 11 years ago

Kinda frustrating though, because Buffer's salaries are very low (esp in SF and NYC). So to whatever extent they're anchoring standards or w/e, they're anchoring them to a very low level.

chollida1• 11 years ago

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?

MicroBerto• 11 years ago

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.

jedberg2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

Did it drive the price down?

jedberg2• 11 years ago

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)

ryanSrich• 11 years ago

Eh. Not really. If you're a company and you've hit an employee's baseline salary for what they need to make (YMMV) there are other things you need to do differently in order to attract and retain great people.

For me there are just some jobs out there that I would never do. Unless you're paying me seven figures there's no way I'd ever work for Facebook, or Google, or pretty much any Silicon Valley company. Those places would have to drastically change how they operate in order for me to consider working there.

A place like Buffer seems nice and I'm sure it's a great place for people to work but the product is just boring to me. They're not working on anything that I personally feel strongly about.

In short: It's way more than salary.

ryandrake• 11 years ago

If this were truly a recruiter's dream, we'd see this company's employees getting "poached" left and right. Is this happening?

I HATE the term "poach" in this context. It implies that an employee is merely the property of a company, like a deer or fish, being "taken" by another company, rather than employees freely choosing among mutually beneficial business relationships with employers.

chubot• 11 years ago

That is indeed a downside, but I imagine there's a less obvious benefit to Buffer. If Buffer has an employee that is working there despite the ability to get a higher offer somewhere else, I imagine that that employee is pretty engaged.

Multiply that by the whole company, and I bet you have a pretty great team. In other words, the there is likely a positive self-selection effect going on.

It's not perfect, but no other system is either. Right now I am seeing a lot of people at my job thinking a lot about comp, which makes me think about comp, etc. It's contagious.

icelancer4• 11 years ago

Oh yeah, because salary is the only thing that people optimize for. A salary range is easy enough to ascertain if you are a good recruiter anyway. If you think this dashboard really helps you poach employees, you are a terrible recruiter.

demarq• 11 years ago

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_junk5• 11 years ago

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

vosper• 11 years ago

Here's a direct link to the Google doc with all the info: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81...

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

iolothebard• 11 years ago

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

baby6• 11 years ago

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

ndm00• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

nilkn2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

Dwolb• 11 years ago

I'm undecided on if public transparency of salaries is a net positive or net negative for society and for Buffer.

However, I do applaud you as an employee and the organization itself for trying something different. You can tell by the polarization of responses here on HN that you guys are truly on to something (not sure what though!).

swozey• 11 years ago

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.

antoniuschan99• 11 years ago

The discrepancy in equity is huge

icelancer4• 11 years ago

Like it is in every other company?

andyidsinga• 11 years ago

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

JoshMilo• 11 years ago

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.

kenko3• 11 years ago

Yep!

Some companies try to prohibit their employees from discussing compensation, precisely because they see the benefit of keeping people in the dark about each others' salaries, benefits, etc.

This practice is actually illegal, but it's also mostly unnecessary, because so many people have internalized the idea that such things are Not To Be Spoken Of anyway.

ryanmarsh11• 11 years ago

What about the reverse where I can negotiate an outsized salary to feed my family with so long as our dealings are private.

dominotw5• 11 years ago

Do people get performance bonuses in the military?

MatthewMcDonald• 11 years ago

It's not really the same as in civilian jobs, but there are several pay bonuses for people in hazardous areas, imminent danger, at sea, etc.

netcan• 11 years ago

I agree

The other side of the coin is totally taboo free. IE, people on the employer side freely talk about salaries with people at other companies & recruiters in order to d exactly what the employee-side taboo prevents, get information to help them negotiate.

brightball4• 11 years ago

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.

debacle4• 11 years ago

This is completely untrue. People talk about salary in other places of the world very regularly, because it is often public.

People don't talk about salary in the US because companies will fire you for it.

Edit: See kasey_junk's response and my follow-up.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

I honestly don't see any of that as reason other than, "Talking with people is HARD!"

fleitz2• 11 years ago

"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."

Here's the thing you might have experience doing that, I have experience driving revenue and increased sales with websites. I suggest you stop programming, and start driving revenue.

Also, I'm highly skilled at increasing employee productivity through automation performance enhancements, such as reducing build time which saves 15 minutes per programmer per day, over 10 programmers, or 912 person hours per year. I'll collect my cheque for $25K for that thank you very much :)

polymatter3• 11 years ago

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.

pavlov• 11 years ago

Discussing one's salary seems to be a particularly American taboo. Yet it's curiously dissonant with the overall American enthusiasm for all things money.

I wonder when it started? Somehow I can't imagine 19th century Americans being so secretive about how much they're making.

kedean2• 11 years ago

It probably comes down to pride. Americans are a prideful people, we don't like to admit to being wrong or inferior. If you go around telling all of your coworkers how much you make, chances are good that at least one of them is making quite a bit more for what you see as the same job. Most people would rather not find out that they get inferior pay to their coworkers, even if they could potentially do something about it, because it tells them that the employer sees them as the one worth less (whether justified or not).

It's kind of like how most people aren't going to just ask their spouse if they're cheating, they'll wait until the evidence is clear. Nobody wants to confront the potentially ugly truth.

rwallace• 11 years ago

I'd say it is consonant with it. Making salaries public has a strong flattening effect - it makes it much more difficult for people of the same rank to have different pay. Someone else said in Norway all salaries are public, which fits the Scandinavian idea that one person shouldn't be much wealthier than another. In America, there has traditionally been the idea that you as an individual might be able to get rich.

I'm not taking a position on which side is better or worse, just noting that whether you aim to get richer than your neighbour is probably going to be the main thing determining whether you think salaries should be public or private.

ryanmarsh11• 11 years ago

In the Army we were all broke so it didn't matter. Now there is no fucking way I want my peers knowing how much I make. I've been very successful in negotiating 25%+ higher salaries than them on balance. I commonly make more than my boss.

Additionally, there is a privacy aspect to publishing this information on a public website. People I don't know or trust don't need to know how much I make. The reasons for this should be totes obvi to HN.

I'm actually horrified that I'm able to see the salaries and so forth for complete strangers.

serve_yay• 11 years ago

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.

And the people who make more than you :). Sorry but I see this point thrown around often in this context, and there is truth to it, but also a little more to the situation than that.

therealmarv• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

eric_h• 11 years ago

They don't appear to be sharing full names, only first names.

baby6• 11 years ago

They are wrong

I stopped reading there

netfire• 11 years ago

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?

timvp• 11 years ago

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.

drewpc3• 11 years ago

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.

asift2• 11 years ago

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.

FragenAntworten3• 11 years ago

I want to be compensated based on my performance.

I imagine they'd increase your experience and seniority multipliers based on your performance, so you could advance (up to "lead master developer").

drewpc3• 11 years ago

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.

pyb3• 11 years ago

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

kwang88• 11 years ago

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.

pyb3• 11 years ago

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...

ryanmarsh11• 11 years ago

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.

nilkn2• 11 years ago

I upvoted this because I think your concerns are actually legitimate. I hope others will engage with your post rather than being turned off by the slightly inflammatory tone.

ryanmarsh11• 11 years ago

I'm honestly curious what was inflammatory about my tone?

drewpc3• 11 years ago

Apparently, you don't negotiate a big raise at Buffer. You prove that you've increased your experience level. The only thing I would add to the equation would be a multiple for "years employed at Buffer". Then they would be automatically handling raises for people as the stayed longer.

ryanmarsh11• 11 years ago

You could think you're in a meritocracy, that no one is getting an outsized deal over anyone else. The reality is that reviews and promotions will be subjective, gamed, or both. This is human nature. It might work with fewer than 100 employees. The military is proof it doesn't work in large organizations. The point and promotion system was endlessly gamed.

gfody• 11 years ago

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...

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.

ryanmarsh11• 11 years ago

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

that hasn't been my experience

djb_hackernews• 11 years ago

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

tomredman• 11 years ago

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

Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more

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