I’m not sure if I would qualify ‘needing to pay more than 600k/year’ as low-balling.

It absolutely could be! If the employee is capable of generating 60MM a year in savings or additional revenue, that's a pittance.

If a non-founder employee can do that the company is already at Google or FB scale and they're going to be paying accordingly.

And the SDE isn't the only person making the money come in, it's just (usually) very easy to draw a line between new products and revenue, or code changes and lower infra costs. There are a lot of other people - hundreds - contributing to that $60MM but everyone here likes to pretend if the SDE isn't getting 98% of it they're getting screwed by The Suits.

> If a non-founder employee can do that

I never understood why people thought there was a giant leap in value between employee #1 and a founder, in terms of value-add.

Meanwhile, sometimes it is dependent on lots of people. Sometimes it isn't. A programmer is the only person who has the possibility to rewrite some code and make a process take 1% the same amount of time.

At this point I'm primarily evaluating jobs based on their altruistic impact, but if I went back to trying to optimize for compensation I think I would be able to get a few companies bidding against each other at which point my history isn't really relevant. That's what I did when I rejoined Google in 2017.

I'm very lucky to be in this position, though!

> At this point I'm primarily evaluating jobs based on their altruistic impact...

I don't know how you rose above the greed, but you remain a constant source of inspiration in the hope that someday I might.

The only thing that allows a buyer to lowball a seller is the seller not having a second buyer willing to pay more.

Except that the big corpos have proven their willingness to collude.

In that case, the buyer already knows your pay due to the collusion, so the claim that pay transparency can allow a buyer to lowball a seller is moot.

You mean that one case with Jobs and Schmidt in 2005?

> Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

True.

Still, one single case 15 years ago doesn't prove the whole industry is permanently tainted.

Employers should be forced to be transparent as well. you know, things like a legally binding wage range on a job advertisement: Telling folks first thing in an interview what the pay range is as well as putting it in the advert (to cover anyone that was simply referred). The range should include all salaries at that position, if there are other people working it. If the 'starting pay' is less than current employees make, this should be justified (current employees have had raises, for example) This should be updated yearly and made public to your employees.

It is a lot harder to lowball folks if they have to be upfront about what they are paying.

Not sure the guy earning $800k/yr from Google just a year ago needs to worry about getting lowballed.