Why Buffer Has Transparent Salaries and How The Open Salary Formula Works - Founder Chat Friday

Key Takeaways

hey guys when we published the transparent salaries on the open blog there was a lot of interesting conversation a lot of discussion kind of why I haven't done that and you know a lot of a lot of questions so we thought it might be interesting to address some of them and maybe most fundamentally to begin with what what when you say is that the key reason we even ended up with open salaries yeah I think we we did a number of different things transparently we published our user numbers we would always share revenue openly with anyone that asked and I guess then you know we sat down transparency as a core value for the company and then once we've done that we just wanted to go through one by one to everything right and and salaries was one of those key things that we found that you know question ourselves why are we not transparent about this so I think you know on a on a higher level why transparent why transparency at all I guess we just believe that that's the kind of the right thing to do and there's no reason to hide anything and it it keeps us very honest and it helps us to reflect on things that we need to change sooner than maybe we would otherwise yeah makes us live up to a higher standard in general because we feel like well anyone could see it you want to be you know be able to have it you know have a sound reasoning behind it yeah anyway maybe you want to share a little bit about you know what does transparent salaries even mean like oh yeah how do we do that what you know how does it work and stuff that's a good one yeah so the way it works is that we we've come up with a formula we tried to be as mathematical as possible when we created that so that every every person that joins buffer you know no matter which position can be engineer can be happiness hero can be content crafter they you know we have like buckets that they fall into based on you know partially it's you know the initial you know base salaries and then being include location in there like if someone lives you know somewhere where rent is really expensive they get a bit more someone live somewhere where not so much get away and and so that's kind of like the how the formula works in the in a broad sense and everyone who joins or even anyone who's watching this could probably you know Google buff open salaries and find out their own salary that they would that they would get right afterward join us so that that's the end of like oh we've yeah I guess one of the ones anything else's when we started to make this implement open transparent salaries it's like kind of decide so almost side effects that happened that yeah we didn't anticipate we didn't do it because of that we didn't realize that to begin with but was most interesting to see against that to me personally that the negotiation maybe I don't know how you've I think has been very very pleasant surprise isn't that we don't have any negotiation right and I guess that partly comes with the combine fact that we hire very selectively based on culture fit as well so it's not I think if it was only transferring salaries and we didn't you know have such a high bar on culture fit then maybe people would come and they wouldn't necessarily and negotiate but how it works where those as I guess that we get people that know by the time they've approaching us the people that have a really good fit they know everything about the culture and they know that transparencies and Transplant salaries is a core part of the culture so they don't kind of question that they know that that's so core and that that's something that you know it can't really change so although we change the formula right yeah we change the formula we always try you change it recently always try to you know if the salary goes down for any existing person according to the formula we try to keep it to be grandfathered and I think the term that yeah I think that's used for like product development yeah and we have to change the formula from time to time because you know but that's probably one of the reasons why it's transparent is that we learn a lot about that about the formula whether it's not good whether it works and so by putting out there we learn some of the things that aren't working about it way and then we can you know make those adjustments so we've done that recently and made it a change yeah mainly for the people going forward yeah it affects affect only those obviously I think another thing that's really interesting is that you know if you keep salaries you know acquired or at least that's what we heard you know I've never actually you know this might the first time I've actually really been in a company and which is also yeah a bit lucky but we've heard is that you know often times you know if this is quiet then you know over lunch you discuss it like you know it's like oh how much do you make and then you find out that a person makes twice as much as you and it's in the same position so a lot of these like discussions are like office politics I think we we kind of avoid as well through that yes I think you think we're doing yeah yeah that's also but yeah I think that's kind of thing somebody gets awesome let let us know if you have any questions just post a question in the comment and we'll we'll get back to you on that