If you can't stay in business without underpaying a lot of people, your business is in trouble.

If there really is a difference in negotiating ability between women and men, it would seem far more beneficial to teach women how to negotiate for a fair wage rather than abolish the entire thing altogether. In fact, teach all employees to quantify their abilities and how much value they will provide to their employer. Demonstrate that if companies are unwilling to pay them a fair wage, that they should not devalue their employment.

But the most recent steps toward banning negotiation will ultimately hurt all employees. When companies like Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley companies agree not to hire employees from each other, and threaten to replace tech workers in the US with less-expensive H1B visas, we should question their true motives. This newest idea of "banning negotiation" is nothing more than another tactic used by a profit-maximizing entity to reduce costs.

Let the market drive the compensation level. If "the compensation for the position - take it or leave it" is too low, then the company won't be able to hire anyone, and they will have to alter it over time.

If it's "take it or leave it" from the employee, you wind up underpaying people with humility, and overpay people who are overconfident.

Note: I'm not at one of the large companies that have been in these lawsuits, and lost an internal fight to move to the "one price" policy that I'm advocating for. I'm doing my best to implement it in my part of the organization, and even there it doesn't always work.

Rather, there are many ways to approach this:

1. Salary negotiation could be included within curriculum at CS schools. (Schools would love if alumni made more money!)

2. Techniques could be included in books (like "Soft Skills"), podcasts, etc.

3. The culture in Silicon Valley could emphasize the importance of negotiating a fair wage.

Left to their own devices, companies WILL exploit those who believe that negotiation is "bad". Companies might not even do so intentionally, but might do so merely by hiring the cheapest employees who have the highest skills.

A side effect is that even if only 75% of employees negotiate to higher wages, the "market rate salary" for employees will increase. If, instead, 75% of employees did NOT negotiate, you'd see a depression in wages.

This is such a good idea. The modern school system oscillates between industrial training and academic pursuit, and very practical skills like this one (or householding finances) which could directly benefit the actual person, are terribly neglected.

What is it that stops teachers from talking about everyday matters related to money? Is it their own sense of inadequacy on the subject? Fear of letting out how much they (don't) make? Is it "political pressure"? Or simply that they love their academic subjects so much, they'd rather not talk about more prosaic stuff?

Student feedback always suggested these were incredibly valuable lessons.

There is also the issue that the same behaviour is seen differently when coming from men and women. What is assertive in a man can be aggressive and offputting in a woman. Which means you'd have to have different kinds of courses for different genders, and it only starts there (more minority groups with less studies of what happens when they act the same as a white male). So, there is even more of a hurdle for potential training classes to overcome.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/men-see-powerful-women-a...

https://hbr.org/2013/04/for-women-leaders-likability-a/

I think for very senior roles, individual negotiations still might make sense, as the value prop of those hires is highly variable and can have big impacts on the organization. But for roles like Software Eng I, and Software Eng II, etc... in the long run it is better for morale, attrition, and equality to use defined salary ranges. And you can still use bonuses to adjust compensation based on performance.

And just because a company has defined salary ranges doesn't mean employees have no voice in the matter. If they feel those salaries are not keeping up with market rates, they can make that known to management, or they can go find greener pastures.

It is a very worthwhile path, but it certainly is not easy for the founders (and is probably impossible in a large traditional, top down, public company where "the owners" are a faceless group of shareholders who definitely want to believe they are in control - even though they definitely are not).

At this point, we (my cofounder and I) have pretty much zero control over how much people are paid in the company. We provide advice to people making those decisions but we are not the decision-makers. And the conclusion of that experiment is that people actually seem to care far more about getting the arbitrary salary formula right than we do, so I believe it was very much the right choice to let go of this lever and let the company design its own salary structure.

Thanks to this situation (however difficult it was to get there), the problem you outline is not there because there is no "employer" entity separate from the employees that could collude or have incentives different from the employees.

A friend recently had an offer, ready to sign, but the salary was lower than she wanted. She wrote back asking if there was room to move upward. She had the offer withdrawn.

I remember one of my first colleagues as a professional in this industry had to fight and fight to eke out a lousy 3% raise, despite being s superstar employee.

Later I found out that she was making 30% less than me, and They had just threw a ton of equity at me to try and keep me from leaving.

When did these Silicon Valley companies threaten to hire less-expensive H1B visas? Do you have any citation on this? Are the H1Bs working for these companies paid less than non-H1Bs? Looking at the publicly available salary data for these companies - AmaGoogFaceSoft kind - seem to pay their H1Bs very well.

Consequently, since they've eliminated the possibility for negotiation, I will never approach them for prospective employment.

A "master" engineer taking low equity living/working in SF only makes ~$155k: no thanks.

https://buffer.com/salary?r=1&l=10&e=3&q=1

In my humble opinion: this kind of hiring strategy rewards low performers who get lucky and dissuades and marginalizes A-players who know what they are worth.

You may believe that sets you apart as an "A player" and means we only hire B players. I believe the concept of A players and B players is false, and have discussed this here: http://danieltenner.com/2014/09/11/there-are-no-b-players/ . That said it is your right to believe this dichotomy exists and that you are on the right side of it. I put it to you that if you insist on having an A/B player dichotomy your desire for an environment which makes you feel worthy through paying you more makes you inherently a B player in the environment at Buffer or GrantTree, where this kind of mindset will have all sorts of side-effects that will make it difficult to work with you.

Almost all the people who we interview are very keen to work in this kind of environment. The last job we had opened (admittedly a relatively low skilled job) we had 200 applicants, interviewed about 20, and almost all those 20 were really, really keen to work in this open environment (and none found it a turnoff, though some didn't really understand what it meant). I like to think we hired someone who will be able to do the role very well and be happy doing it in our company. What I love about your comment is that you are far from alone to have this reaction, but because we are very upfront about our culture, people with your reaction never seem to apply. That's a win on both sides: you don't waste your time interviewing with us, and we don't waste our time interviewing you.

I find it difficult to work with people who are compensated less than me. I want my coworkers to be better than me.

I do not want to work with people assessed as "masters" making $155,000/year in San Francisco, CA. I am accustomed to working with people being paid more.

Full disclosure: Over four years ago, I was receiving offers $10,000+/year more for like roles (SF, FTE, backend development). I would certainly not proclaim myself a "master," either. Especially not 4 years ago.

> I love about your comment is that you are far from alone to have this reaction, but because we are very upfront about our culture, people with your reaction never seem to apply.

Please do not turn this into a matter of "culture."

I find nothing wrong with a culture of transparency. I find Buffer's actual compensation packages problematic.

The lack of negotiation ability makes what might otherwise be a fruitful business relationship impossible. I do not believe that transparency and negotiations are mutually exclusive.

Sincere counter-question: how can you retain talent with fixed salary ceilings? Why would someone stick around when they're leaving a ton of money on the table?

Entirely my opinion: this is potentially the A/B dichotomy.

If someone is developing their skills, is extremely productive, is increasing their worth, at one of these companies they can choose to leave money on the table (altruistically donating their higher value to a for-profit company) or leave. Are they a "bad culture fit" because they wanted to make what they are worth?

> I find it difficult to work with people who are compensated less than me. I want my coworkers to be better than me.

I much prefer that attitude to the opposite :-) Though surely even better is to work with great people whom you're learning from in a variety of ways, whether or not they are paid more or less or the same. A lot of the value that someone can bring to your life is not correlated with their value to the market.

> The lack of negotiation ability makes what might otherwise be a fruitful business relationship impossible. I do not believe that transparency and negotiations are mutually exclusive.

I can't speak for Buffer, but in GrantTree it is not that you cannot negotiate, but that you cannot negotiate in secret - so it's more a discussion than a negotiation (I hope... sample size is limited at the moment!). As I mentioned in my original post, we start the ball rolling by saying where we think you fit on the pay scale and why, and if that's not where you think you should fit you are welcome to engage in a discussion to help us get it right!

> Sincere counter-question: how can you retain talent with fixed salary ceilings? Why would someone stick around when they're leaving a ton of money on the table?

> If someone is developing their skills, is extremely productive, is increasing their worth, at one of these companies they can choose to leave money on the table (altruistically donating their higher value to a for-profit company) or leave. Are they a "bad culture fit" because they wanted to make what they are worth?

There's a really good question here and I don't have a great answer to it. If you or anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them. To an extent, part of my answer would be: surely that's true of any small company. People might grow faster than the company. When that happens, I guess they leave and move on to something else. I guess that's ok. It's not like everyone has to keep working for GrantTree for the rest of their life! People might leave for this reason or for another reason. I hope they then look back at GrantTree as a place where they grew and learned a lot, had a great time, made some great friends and did some worthwhile work. In that time, they contributed to GrantTree's growth as well as their own, so it's not like the company is left high and dry here.

And no, I don't think that makes them a "bad culture fit" in that sort of insulting way. It might mean they are no longer a good fit for working here. That's ok. People change. Companies change. Someone that was a good fit to work in a small 3-people startup is not necessarily a good fit to work in that company 20 years later, obviously. That doesn't have to be an insult or a put-down.

Problem with this approach is that inevitably part of the formula is also "level" -- so you just converted one problem (negotiating $) to another (negotiating level.) That is when the real tricky people come in -- those who want a high level and just manage others, often adding no value (good managers add a lot of value, but if you tell people that the only way they can make more money is by being manager or senior managing level, then you force people who should not be managing into managing roles.)

This is actually a separate issue. A healthy engineering organization needs to have parallel technical and management tracks, with similar growth opportunities (both compensation and responsibility) at every level. On the tech track, think about a path that leads to CTO.

Of course, you'll still get people (in either track) arguing they want a higher level than they merit.

His trick was to write a minimum of 0 as in if you're not satisfied with his job he won't take your money, supposedly he got much better offers doing the negociation this way, probably because he gets the other party to give a number much higher than what they would otherwise have said. Also it may have been for contracting work and not an employee position. (Can't remember where I read this, probably on hn though).

I've seen too many people with low salaries get "exceptional" raises of 5% when everyone in the company gets 3%. So you have an employee who works his way out of tech support into dev admin but he's the bottom of a very large band. There is no hope for that person to get to salary parity when mountains have to be moved to go from 3% to 5%.

This assumption is wrong. Read about the anchoring effect. Your process still seems fine though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

I'm not sure that there is an individual solution to this problem. EVERY company (or most companies) would have to be ultra-transparent about their salaries before people can trust something like this, which works against how a lot of high-profile companies currently compensate (i.e. fixed salary ranges, highly variable bonuses)

On the employee side, best to get out of the question as quick as possible. One thing to say is, I have offers higher than that already. They can find out your current salary, but the other offers, doesn't have to be disclosed.

If anything, a person would know even better how much they are "worth". E.g. they know the necessarily short interview wasn't accurate.

None of those factors are why someone is worth $X salary.

You say I'm worth $X. I go get a job offer for $Y. If $Y > $X, you were mistaken.

It's both as easy and as hard as that, for candidates. If you want to get anywhere close to your earning potential, you'll have to have more than one option when job seeking.

It doesn't matter what you're paying other employees or whether that information is known to employees.

EDIT: To clarify, this is about market value, not intrinsic value.

Any salary formula is entirely arbitrary. We have a pay scale simply because it is a useful tool for conversation, not because it represents any sort of intrinsic property of the person being placed on the pay scale.

If your main concern is getting paid as much as possible then we're probably not the right place for you to work anyway. We try to pay well but we certainly can't afford to pay as much as, for example, banking, or Facebook. Importantly, we have no interest in trying to sucker someone into working with us if money is their primary motivation. They won't like it here.

To answer a likely reflex-response to this: that doesn't mean we think people should be working for free, or that we judge people who want to earn more money. It's totally fine to want to make more money. Different people have different expectations and requirements at different stages of their life though.

Are you a charity doing good work with orphans? Or are you a business trying to make as much money for the investors as possible? If the latter is true, why wouldn't someone work for you with "money as the primary motivator" ?

(This is not Rhetorical, I actually know nothing about your business. But I do see this argument a lot from companies that are 100% for profit and do nothing to better the world)

Our view of business is that, much like humans, it can achieve and balance multiple objectives. You want to make money: does that mean you want only that to the exclusion of or above other objectives like finding love, raising children, being a good person, etc? I assume not. We want to make money: does that mean we want only that to the exclusion of or above other objectives like having fulfilling work, working in an open organisation, being respectful of others, etc? No.

[1] Though opening up the shares to employees within the next couple of months... it's taken a while to put the right system in place. Options wouldn't work because we have no intention of ever selling the business.

Edit: Given your clarified question, I will also add that what we do is to help other tech businesses to raise government funding so they can develop cool tech. Many of them have raised money from investors - I don't think that necessarily means that their only purpose is money (though it's certainly true of some). See argument above.

- You're not broke

- You think the work would be more interesting/fulfilling than places that pay more.

Of course, I'm sure there's a tipping point where you don't care how interesting the work is. But in my mind you'd use the above criteria if someone is offering you $95k/yr when you're currently pulling $110k/yr.

And money is rarely the actual motivator. Often times, money is the mediator to the things that really motivate people, such as purchasing daycare and enrichment activities, splurging on medical care plans, financial security, etc.

There's definitely no necessary causal link here. We aim to pay enough that they won't leave because it's too little but not so much that they will stay just because of the salary is too high. It's a pretty hard balance to achieve... not sure if we have. We used to phrase it as "pay people fairly" but then "fairness" is so relative as a concept that it is essentially useless.

Having transparent pay does have a clear link with creating a good working environment, in our experience, however - and transparent pay doesn't mix well with having salaries basically based on people's negotiation skills (rather than a more open system like I've described), in backroom deals.

> And money is rarely the actual motivator. Often times, money is the mediator to the things that really motivate people, such as purchasing daycare and enrichment activities, splurging on medical care plans, financial security, etc.

I wish that were always true... my observation is that some people are in fact motivated by the money, and the status that comes with being paid more than others, more than by the things they can actually do with the money. I find it puzzling, but so it is...

Here's the disconnect. In this scenario, I'm not saying, "you're worth X". I'm saying, "I'm willing to pay someone $x to do this job." If someone else is willing to pay you more for the same job (all else being equal), I'd advise you to take the other job.

If I can't find anyone qualified to take the job for $x within a reasonable period of time, then I'm below market and should adjust.

The beauty of that analysis is that it ties to current employee compensation as well. If my offers are below-market, then I have a much larger people problem: either my current team members are below market skills (bad) or are at risk of being poached (also bad).

As a candidate, I might look at that and value the culture it represents: transparency, fairness, likely diversity, people-centric...

The "we like people who care about more than money" (the passion gambit) can be a a giant warning sign. And is at the root of the "why would I accept less money from you than my market rate, so that you, the founder, can make more money" concern.

But it assumes that the owner, is in fact, making more profit "off your back". This might be false. The owner might instead care about investing back into people and the working environment: an indirect "perk", if you will.

Everything's a trade-off. No one is forcing you, as a candidate, to act against your best interests. There are just different kinds of interests.

It's far from perfect, and it's often difficult and demanding of people (particularly those who are on the various pay task forces that assemble and disband to make changes or evaluate people), but it's working alright so far for us. It's also a huge learning opportunity for everyone involved.

> But it assumes that the owner, is in fact, making more profit "off your back". This might be false. The owner might instead care about investing back into people and the working environment: an indirect "perk", if you will.

There is no good idea humanity has ever had that cannot be twisted into a trap to fool people... unfortunately every good thought ends up being used by someone somewhere to screw someone else over. I like to think we (my cofounder and I) are on the good side of that assumption, but it's important for us to remember that if we shift to the wrong side of it then the whole system becomes polluted by this desire - or rather, this fear of not having enough.

I try to be very suspicious when my views about how the world works line up with some way that I'm benefited monetarily. For instance it's very hard for me to have a clear and accurate opinion of oursourcing and h1-b's.

For me this translates to happily walking the extra mile. It also means my wife is ok with me working a bit extra here and there because I love my job. And it means a whole less paperwork and talk about overtime or not.

But it sure helps when telling my wife I should work a couple of extra hours.

I can imagine a case in which a sufficiently high salary could lead to someone staying in a position for which they have no passion.

Still, like you say, it's a delicate balance, and on either side you of not getting good work out of your people. On the low end, you just wouldn't be able to secure high-value candidates. On the high end, you might keep people who have no interest in their roles.

I do think the latter case is less likely, though.

I think the sentiment you are seeing here (not necessarily taking a side, just playing devils advocate) is that it might seem a little hypocritical to portray a culture where compensation caps (and ones that seem a little below market rate judging by other comments) are expected when there is no limit to the upside you as the founder might see down the line or from a potential exit down the road. Startups are inherently risky for employees, and while Founders certainly shouldered more of the risk, employees are typically rewarded with equity worth the risk, market rate salaries, or some combination. To not compensate employees in such a way seems like it might be taking advantage of a mindset when you the Founder might not be held to the same standards.

Again, if addressing this very issue is part of the opening up of the shares to employees you reference, awesome. This is a very hard problem to tackle and one where it must be damn near impossible to get everyone on board, so I commend you for making the attempt. I'm making lots of assumptions that I hope are simply not the case. Just wanted to clarify and push a bit more on why there seems to be a consistent theme to these comments.

Now, is the inverse also true? If I take a job with you- can I work 4 day work weeks and stick strictly to the 8 hour workday?

Money is not your only motivator so I don't see why this would be a problem for your employees.

I'm in 100% agreement with you. So you do pay less to those who work 4 days a week. That's fine and it makes sense. Just confirming.

Then I don't even need to ask: you're also saying that for every hour over 8 hours staff is paid overtime? That would be consistent with paying 4-day a week folks less. And would be the nail in the coffin that profiteering isn't your main motivator.

If I'm understanding your argument right, I think you're saying that because we try to evaluate how much people should be paid in a rational way that includes some assumptions around time being correlated to amount of work, that means we are "profiteering". I'm not sure that's worth dignifying with an answer, but here goes:

GrantTree is a business. We need to make a profit in order to continue to exist, to grow, to be an exciting place to work, to have the resources to invest in our people, to be able to develop new products, and so on. We also need to compete against other businesses in the same market, some of whom are quite aggressive. If we get the balance between people's contributions and their compensations wrong, we'll be uncompetitive and won't survive. It's that simple and has nothing to do with profiteering.

Ultimately from your description it sounds like the increased non-profiteering wages would not come out of company profits. Thus in the end it's just like all the other businesses then. No need for all the flowery language about how there's other priorities than making money. If you had to ditch everyone and go to Malaysia to "be competitive" then you'd do it.

> a business trying to make as much money for the investors

> as possible? If the latter is true, why

> wouldn't someone work for you with "money as the primary motivator" ?

It is possible to offer a fair return on investment without having to take every possible step (ethical or otherwise) to maximize profitability.

Cases in point: Tesla and SpaceX. They aren't charities. They are very purposeful.

You are not Tesla or SpaceX.

Those are just two companies, ran by the same guy. I think finding even a couple dozen more examples would be very difficult.

That said, nothing about being motivated by money means you can't have a purpose as well. That's why I was careful to draw a distinction between "solely" and "primarily". Making money while also improving the world is just enlightened self-interest.

For the overwhelming majority of people, the decisions about work are a balance of competing interests.

I could go out and get a part time job working on weekends, and make more (overall) money, but I don't because the money I make in 5 days is enough, and I place some value on my free time.

But the reverse it true, I could probably convince my employer to let me work 4 days a week for a 20% pay cut (or 0 days a week for a 100% pay cut), but that would drop my pay below the level I want/need in order to support my family and be able to do things on the weekends.

I could quit my current job and go back to working in finance for more money than I make now. I don't want to. I've done that, and I prefer the work I'm doing now, even if I'm paid 20% less.

I could quit my current job and go work for a charity and make 50% less than I do now. I don't want to take that sort of pay cut.

It's because of these balances that we have some well educated, highly employable people making a (relative) pittance as school teachers. And why some people spend their evenings doing open source "work" instead of taking on a second job.

Very few professionals in western countries have money as the single primary motivation to work. Once you can afford to pay your bills and maintain a comfortable lifestyle, you become quite willing to trade off the extra money to increase your overall enjoyment of life, whether that means more leisure time, or more interesting work, etc.

It is quite reasonable for for-profit companies to aim to provide a compelling work environment through factors other than pure financial reward.

It's also quite reasonable for workers to select job opportunities based entirely on the financial reward (though I think that's actually relatively rare).

That company and that worker are probably not a good fit for each other.

No belittling intended.

If money is not your primary motivator, why can't you pay more?

Money is like rocket fuel. If you're accumulating it for its own sake, rather than to get somewhere, I'd say you're doing it wrong - but that's just my opinion...

1. You don't believe top developers are intrinsically 'worth' the amount that FB/Goog/Amzn/ and many other SV companies pay, that it's not a net win for the company to have top talent.

2. You think that you don't need top developers, that really you're just going to be fine recruiting a bunch of B players, and it's some other 'thing' (business? Sales? Marketing? an 'idea'?) that will make you better than competition.

3. You are incapable of harnessing top development talent to produce adequate ROI that would justify top salaries.

Money is not my primary motivator, I love my job. I wouldn't leave just for more money. However, salaries in a certain ballpark are a strong signaler to how much a company values software engineers.

I think it's insulting to see developers significantly underpaid and have you attempt to justify it the way you do. If money is not your primary motivator, wouldn't you be OK taking a bit less salary and having that distributed out to other team members?

> 1. You don't believe top developers are intrinsically 'worth' the amount that FB/Goog/Amzn/ and many other SV companies pay, that it's not a net win for the company to have top talent.

You're conflating two things here.

I don't think that "top developers are intrinsically 'worth' the amount that [[..]] SV companies pay" (emphasis mine).

There is nothing intrinsic about a developer's value. A developer's value to their company is some proportion (<100%) of the value they add to the company.

Their value to FB is unrelated to their value to XYZ Corp.

> it's not a net win for the company to have top talent

That does not follow from a view on the intrinsic value of developers. I know that it is a net win to have top talent, but:

a) They might not be "worth" (to me) what FB etc will pay them.

b)I might not think that I have to compete on salary to get top talent. I may have a method of convincing talent to work here based on non-financial incentives.

Great point and I sort of side stepped that. It's not one not talked about enough. I didn't get a sense of that from the poster I replied to, but perhaps there is a compelling story there.

Re: your second point, I don't believe in the concept of "B players". See http://danieltenner.com/2014/09/11/there-are-no-b-players/

I am sad that you see this as insulting. I'm not justifying anything. These developers (like others in the company) have largely chosen their own salaries. One of them is in the top pay bracket in the company. They also chose my salary, btw.

I'm in a highly competitive housing market, and my children are in a highly competitive educational market. A number of interesting projects that won't pay off immediately.

Since when is an individual expected to just defer to a greater good in an employment arrangement? Which is most likely "at-will"?

I'm certain the shareholders and executives aren't making such self-defeating sacrifices.

1) You should never "defer to the greater good". I would not advise it. If this environment doesn't offer something of value to you definitely do not apply or join such an environment.

2) I completely agree that this approach is incompatible with the ultra-violent approaches to "at will employment" of the US and much of Europe. I find the process by which most people are fired in american companies abhorrent. I don't want to go into too much detail about what our current process is to deal with situations where there is a performance problem, but basically it involves engaging with the person and providing them with a lot of support to help them figure out what the problem is, and how they can fix it, and offering them a number of decision points about what they can do to fix it. Obviously, from a distrustful viewpoint this might seem even worse than a clean firing - and rightly so. This kind of stuff absolutely doesn't work in a distrustful, fear-driven environment.

> I'm certain the shareholders and executives aren't making such self-defeating sacrifices.

On what basis are you certain of this? Do you know something that I (cofounder) don't? I suspect that in the long term this approach will result in a more successful, longer lasting company that I feel even more proud of being a part of, so I don't think it's self-defeating in the long term - I disagree with doing anything self-defeating, I think no one appreciates it and it rarely results in anything good. But I don't know for sure that it will actually result in a better company. In the meantime, my cofounder and I could certainly have taken far more money out of the business and have not done so, so your assertion is incorrect in the short term (5 years) at least.

Considering that founders are making themselves fabulously wealthy on the backs of their employees, I think we'd all appreciate a little bit more respect than you're showing when you poo-poo employees who want something more closely approximating 1/4 of the share they actually deserve.

The team has themselves set a target for wages to 40% of revenues, in line with your suggestion. I would have set it higher (and in fact right now our wage bill is closer to 60%) but that was not my decision to make. The 40-60% is of course not evenly distributed, though I would also quite like the thought of that, but the team themselves decide how to allocate it, so I guess they're doing the best they can.

I find the reality you perceive distasteful too - and I agree that it is widespread and it is sad that that is so.

That kind of phrasing is generally code for, "We pay crap wages and expect you to live at work."

"I was 20 minutes late because I had to take my newborn to the hospital and they only gave me a written warning!"

>And we have remote work

"On the fifth wednesday of every month I can work from home!"

>flexible working hours

"I worked from 9am to 10pm yesterday so I get to come in at 10am to 10pm today!"

GrantTree might be one of the few outliers here and if so I congratulate you, but this is typically what employers mean when they say those sort of things.

Or: since my child was born I've been able to be home by 5pm every day without any problems.

> "On the fifth wednesday of every month I can work from home!"

Or: one of our people is currently taking part in Remote Year. He's just spent the last few months in South America. http://remoteyear.com

> "I worked from 9am to 10pm yesterday so I get to come in at 10am to 10pm today!"

Or: we don't track working hours at all, and people often choose to work from home or do whatever makes sense given their circumstances. They work because they want to get their work done, not because someone's hovering over them with a finger ready to point at them.

> GrantTree might be one of the few outliers here and if so I congratulate you, but this is typically what employers mean when they say those sort of things.

Yes, it is quite sad that every good thought gets copied and corrupted. I can't do much about that.

There are many, many people starting from far worse conditions, though, I'm not complaining. I had a stable childhood, a good education and I have great friends and parents and an amazing wife and cofounder. That's worth way more than any trust fund or inflated property.

Not necessarily. The first employer says I'm worth $X to them. The fact that I may be worth more than $X to another employer is not a contradiction.

In general, there is nothing "wrong" with a particular employer and applicant being unable to agree on a mutually satisfying salary. It doesn't necessarily mean either party made a mistake in the salary negotiation.

The only data point that matters is the one where you got hired and started receiving paychecks, all others are not factors at all.

I don't understand that. If an employer offers $X, I'd say that means the applicant was worth at least that much to the employer, assuming the job offer was legitimate. I suspect it's fairly rare to get an offer for $X, only to find out that the employer was lying and won't actually pay that much.

The $Y amount may be higher than $X because you are actually worth $Z to a median company, and $Y > $Z because that particular company is in the 90th percentile at turning developer work into revenues, and $Z > $X because that company is in the 20th percentile.

So, generalizing, the company that is capable of offering the most to you is going to be better at managing development teams, which is usually a symptom of being a better employer overall.

When I say you're worth $X, I mean: "you're worth $X to me".

If you get a job offer elsewhere for $Y, you're still worth $X to me.

Not at all. Company A may value you at $X, and company B may value you at $Y, and they may both be right.

You can offer $x and explain your reasoning, but if $x < $y, you might not get any candidates. Don't then complain about the "shortage of qualified tech workers".

What's my house worth? Who knows until I go try to sell it?