Buffer Open Blog

Buffer's recently switched to self-management as well. Their early reflections[1] on switching is a good read. [1] https://open.bufferapp.com/early-reflections-buffers-switch-working-wi…

I haven't heard of enough companies that are open about their open compensation, but Buffer seems to have it handled pretty well: https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includi… The difficulty lies in quantifying experience - there loads of ways to pull that off (and none of them quite wrong). Years of experience, type of hackery, FOSS contributions, etc. I'd say the best option would be to pick one and stick with it. If you're properly open about it, those who take issue with your system won't apply.

I really hope this "open salary" trend doesn't continue. It has the effect of systematically decreasing the standard deviation in developer salaries. Poor negotiators (and some poor performers), of course, love having access to this salary information as pointing to a public average is any easy way to ask for more money without having to put much effort into actually negotiating. Great negotiators, on the other hand, are getting salaries far above the median for their positions and the additional information wouldn't help them at all. I strongly suspect that if salaries were public companies would be far less willing to give in to great negotiators as a single isolated case could easily cause cascading demands from other employees. (Note that salary ranges/averages are irrelevant if you're a great negotiator except as a story-telling tool. All you should be playing with is your BATNA and the company's BATNA.) If you don't think open salaries have a negative effect on top engineer salaries, look at how little Buffer is paying.[0] In the status quo, open salaries are a tax on poor negotiators which companies and good negotiators split. As a pretty good negotiator, I hope we don't go public. [0] https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includi…

I have incredibly mixed feelings about this. Zero-negotiation policies are great tools for eliminating unfairness if executed well, the problem is that you still force the employee to end "trusting someone at their word", and every company claims they're going to make a fair, standard offer. Here's the thing: 1) Yes, being strict and almost formulaic will reduce inequality and increase probability that folks are compensated according to actual value. 2) But you need meaningful transparency around this. I guarantee you, 100% that if I had a live offer at Reddit, I could find some way to negotiate some additional crap that amounted to a meaningful compensation bump in the end. 3) Every company that does this ends up making exceptions for people the higher-up you go. Wealthfront, Stack Exchange, and now Reddit, will join the club of companies that negotiate with execs they hire, VCs, and bizdev partners, suppliers - basically, everybody except their employees. And even then only "most of the time"- there are always exceptions - just hold out for a higher comp band. Get a stronger inside referral. It's always possible. Something very close to the Buffer model is the only real way to do things. You can tweak the variables, but you need strictness and transparency. https://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-open-equity-formula/ Ellen, Alexis - If you're reading this, I'd love a chance to understand your challenges in crafting these policies, and see if I could offer any input from my…

That's a really good example of impostor syndrome on a grand scale. Also see http://alistapart.com/column/seeing-past-the-highlight-reel : "we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel". People also tend to sound far better in writing, precisely because they have the opportunity to compose and edit; you don't necessarily see the volume of composition and editing that goes into the average post. Anecdotally, I'd suggest that it takes far longer to write a quality post than you'd guess. Short content can take all the longer to write, precisely because of its brevity. ("I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short." -- Blaise Pascal) (I also like this image: http://open.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/0-VtB9_W6sRf4z6O0… ) And that's just on an individual level, comparing yourself to one specific other person. When you compare yourself to an entire community of people and their highlights, you run into exactly the issue mixmax noted: the most knowledgeable and confident people will post, and a subset of those will get upvoted. Comparing yourself individually to the best of what a large community can offer is like asking why you're not an Olympic athlete. If you want to build up your skills in writing specifically, consider focusing your writing on areas you already have expertise in, or on areas that you're actively learning about to provide an "experiences" type of writeup. And compare…

Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) - REMOTE (We're a small distributed team of 17 people (5 engineers) across the US, UK, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sweden and Australia) I'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We have over 1.1 million users and our annual run rate is over $2m. There are some super interesting challenges ahead, as we focus on Buffer for Business. We're looking to expand our engineering team with the following open positions. * Reliability Hacker (Devops engineer).  * Happiness (Support) Engineer * Backend Hacker Here are some key stats about our technology and scale. - we have over 150k monthly active users. - 8500+ API clients. Most popular: Feedly, IFTTT, Pocket, Instapaper - we release changes several times a day - we have an entirely data-driven process, with Einstein and Buffer-Metrics, our custom built a/b testing and metrics tracking framework. - Some of the tech we work with: PHP, Python, MongoDB, AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, Elasticache, SQS), Backbone.js, Grunt.js, Android, iOS.) More stats and stack details here: http://overflow.bufferapp.com/2013/08/01/scaling-buffer-in-2013/ We're a small team of driven hackers and happiness heroes (our support people). Just like you, we're excited and passionate about engineering challenges and have some interesting architecture and scaling problems we work on. If you're interested in coming on board, you’ll: - work closely myself on technical architecture and Joel on product. -…

Hi everyone. Joel here from Buffer. Some of you might have heard about our security breach on Saturday. I just wanted to leave a quick note and clarify that this MongoHQ security breach was the method used to obtain our users' access tokens, which led to the wave of spam on Saturday. This is a key final piece of our investigation which brings it back full circle. I'm very happy that we have been able to gain the full understanding and can be confident there is no backdoor. I want to be clear that this is still our fault. If access tokens were encrypted (which they are now) then this would have been avoided. In addition, MongoHQ have provided great insights and have much more logging in place than we have ourselves. We’re also increasing logging significantly as a result. I've updated our security breach blog post with this information. If you want to see the full set of events, take a read here: http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-has-been-hacked-here-is-whats-going-o… Let me know if you have any questions about this. I'll keep an eye on this thread.

The links in this article go to some very good case studies on getting the correct tone for downtime status updates. However, I found the most interesting link the one about open salaries [1] - are there any other businesses doing similar things? I'd be inclined to consider it a very strong mark in their favour as a workplace. [1] https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includi…

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-salaries.…

He may have been referencing the choice of Buffer to disclose the salaries of all employees: https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includi… In that situation, he does not get to choose wether or not his salary is disclosed

Stories like this put me more in favor of going with a Buffer-style transparent salary policy [1] with my startup. Whether to open it up to the public or not is a separate issue, but having it be transparent internally just seems to make so much sense. [1] https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includi…

I know that Buffer offers equity for their Happiness Hero, just like any other of their employees. Happiness Hero is their term for customer service representative. Buffer isn't big compared to likes of Google but they are growing pretty fast. Here's a blog post on their equity distribution (a little old though) https://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-open-equity-formula/ My view is that customer service people are as valuable as other employees so they deserve stock options too :)

Fortunately, there are companies who are aware of how it would make some people feel excluded. For example, Buffer recently removed the word "hacker" from their job postings: https://open.bufferapp.com/job-descriptions-diversity

This reminded me of the transparency thing they had going at Buffer (https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includi… but it looks like they're moving away from it now (to "self-managed salaries" https://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-in-march-5-9m-annual-revenue-self-ma…

Buffer's app is one example, but I'd like to see others. https://open.bufferapp.com/buffers-y-combinator-application/

Take a look at buffer: https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includi… all salaries are public in a spreadsheet. _YOU_ can see what everyone is getting paid. I think it's pretty interesting.

Buffer's entire team is remote, and they write a lot about their approach https://open.bufferapp.com/distributed-team-benefits/

Have a read of http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includin… Buffer have a base rate and then an additional sum based on location. Locations are split into 4 categories depending on how expensive they are to live in. Seems like a fair way of doing it, but obviously depends on the employer.

It's relatively common for their to be a gap between local and remote developers. Buffer have been incredibly transparent about their approach to this: http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includin…

Blog post for some more info about this http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-public-revenue-dashboard/

You can see their staff costs as of Dec 2013 here: http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includin…

See footnote at this: http://open.bufferapp.com/two-more-happiness-heroes-join-the-buffer-te…

1. http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includin… 2. glassdoor.com 3. my network of people who work at various companies and will tell me what they make. I'm assuming that you are a small company that doesn't actually show up in either of 2 or 3.

Buffer is doing a really good job on this. I believe complete transparency is the only way to minimize politics in your company. [1] - http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includin… [2] - http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/radical-transparency-and-how-buffer-i…

This is really interesting, I can see how this must cause a lot of negativity at work. It's one of the reasons we've made salaries completely transparent within Buffer to avoid situations like this: http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includin… Do you guys think open salaries can help with this?

Interesting. There's much more to building a business than simply how difficult it is to build the product, so using just that as a reason to reject people seems a bit off. For example, Buffer [1] seems to be doing pretty well and that must have been a comparatively simple app to get off the ground (in terms of MVP). I expect the hard work there is in growing fast enough that you capture most of the market/mindshare (as well as how big that market is). [1] http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-december-update-2819000-run-rate-1249… EDIT: IIRC Buffer didn't make it to the interview stage for YC. They carried on anyway.

Here's data for Customer.io for comparison: * Currently based in NYC * Raised ~$700k. * Both of us founders are each @ $80k and have been the same with the exception of a couple of months at minimum wage. The goal with these salaries, was to be able to not think about money while working on the company. It kind of worked. 80k in NYC doesn't get you very far unless you're making huge lifestyle changes and not eating out with friends, or traveling for fun etc... I moved out of Manhattan to Brooklyn to save a bit on rent. I'm planning to raise our salaries later in 2014 (don't tell John, it'll be a surprise). For other examples, check out what Joel @ Buffer has shared about their salaries: http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includin…

http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-includin… (wait for it to load and take you to the specifically linked comment)

Close: http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-november-update-2347000-run-rate-1189…

Just trying to develop a timeline here. Buffer security breach - October 26, 2013 [1] MongoHQ security breach - October 28, 2013 [2] But the Buffer security breach was via MongoHQ, so MongoHQ has likely had the issue since at least the 26th, and probably earlier, since the attackers had to have enough situational awareness to target Buffer. I guess my point is, MongoHQ likely had the issue for a while and it went undetected. [1] http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-has-been-hacked-here-is-whats-going-o… [2] http://security.mongohq.com/notice