Introducing the New Buffer Salary Formula, Calculate-Your-Salary App and The Whole Team’s New Salaries

Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Learn more about the latest formula and see all the team’s current salaries here.

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It’s been incredible to see how many companies have adopted our formula or a similar open formula, and it’s a privilege to be a small part of the larger conversation around pay transparency and equality.

It also kicked off a long list of other things that we wanted to make public. Here’s a roundup of things we’ve made transparent since then:

• Our company-wide equity breakdown
• Buffer’s pricing – where your money goes when you pay for Buffer
• Our real-time revenue
• Our values (and every change we make to them!)
• Our fundraising process, valuation and term-sheet
• Our team makeup and diversity
• And so much more!

You can get an overview of everything here.

Since we first launched our formula, a lot of things have evolved and changed at Buffer. We thought it was time for our salary formula to evolve, too.

This was a really fun process for us—we worked on this with the whole Buffer team for about 2-3 months (more on our detailed process on this further below!) and this is the result.

Today we’re excited to share a new (and, we believe, improved) version of our salary formula, along with a brand-new web app that anyone can use to find out what you would make if you were part of the team at Buffer.

Buffer’s new salary formula

Our new formula looks like this:

[画像:Buffer Salary Formula]

Here’s a quick breakdown of each component:

Role: (overall base + location base + cost of living)* role value

The first, and biggest component for anyone’s salary is the role component. On the whole it consists of the following 4 factors:

• Overall base: For 35% of the base, we use standard U.S. data from both Payscale and Glassdoor to determine overall base.
• Location base: For the other 65% of the base, we factor in each location’s cost of living using Numbeo together with data from Payscale and Glassdoor, which we then use to have a base salary for that particular location (say New York or Cape Town).
• Cost of living correction: A 0ドル-8,000ドル addition to some salaries based on cost of living. We explain all about this one below in "The Good Life Curve" section – it’s an additional fixed value that can range from 0ドル-8,000ドル/year.
• Role value: A multiplier to adjust the overall salary. We don’t agree with the market salary data all the time (for customer service roles, for example) and so we create our own "role value adjustment" based off what we feel is fair. This can be an overall multiplier of 1.1x for example, or it can decrease for roles that aren’t exactly as described by Payscale and Glassdoor.

Experience: After we have your role base (above), we then apply the experience multiplier. There are 4 tiers as follows, which we determine through discussions with each team member:

• Beginner: 1x
• Intermediate: 1.1x
• Advanced: 1.2x
• Master: 1.3x

Dependents: For every person that depends on your income (kids, husbands, wives, significant others, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc.) we add an extra 3,000ドル per year in salary.

Update January 2016: We now have a different method for supporting dependents that is not part of the salary formula; you can learn all about it here.

Loyalty: For every year a teammate is with us at Buffer, they’ll receive a general pay raise of 5%. This is applied on top of all of the above.

Choice: This is an option we give Buffer team members to either get extra salary or extra stock options in their compensation package. Right now, you can either add an extra 10,000ドル to your salary or skip the extra salary and get roughly 30% more stock options.

Here’s an example, putting all this together:

For an advanced engineer, living in Cape Town, who chooses more equity and has 2 kids and a husband depending on her income, this would be the result:

• 60,662ドル x 1.20 + 9,000ドル + 0ドル = 81,794ドル

A full list of all our salaries

Calculated with the new formula, here are the salaries of every team member at Buffer right now:

Team Member	Role	Start Date	Location	Salary
Joel	CEO	2010年08月01日	New York, NY, USA	218,000ドル
Leo	COO	2011年01月03日	New York, NY, USA	185,000ドル
Andy	iOS Developer	2012年06月01日	San Francisco, CA, USA	168,550ドル
Carolyn	CHO	2012年09月01日	New York, NY, USA	140,932ドル
Sunil	CTO	2012年09月18日	Boston, MA, USA	182,089ドル
Åsa	Customer Success Lead	2013年02月18日	New York, NY, USA	121,090ドル
Colin	Backend/Frontend Developer	2013年02月22日	Cambridge, UK	122,670ドル
Niel	Backend/Frontend Developer	2013年08月15日	Cape Town, SA	101,141ドル
Mary	Happiness Hero	2013年11月11日	San Francisco, CA, USA	92,108ドル
Adam	Happiness Hero	2013年11月13日	Detroit, MI, USA	91,389ドル
Daniel	Happiness Hero	2014年01月28日	San Francisco, CA, USA	80,974ドル
Courtney	Content Crafter	2014年02月03日	Nashville, TN, USA	89,582ドル
Steven	Systems Engineer	2014年02月03日	Taipei, Taiwan	98,175ドル
Dan	Backend/Frontend Developer	2014年02月24日	New York, NY, USA	139,463ドル
Kevan	Content Crafter	2014年03月06日	Boise, ID, USA	95,631ドル
Patrik	Customer Researcher	2014年03月12日	Knoxville, TN, USA	98,112ドル
Dave	Happiness Hero	2014年03月20日	London, UK	77,913ドル
Rodolphe	Operations Champion	2014年04月07日	Paris, France	118,331ドル
Nicole	Community Champion	2014年04月14日	Portland, OR, USA	88,861ドル
Octa	Happiness Hero	2014年04月28日	Miami, FL, USA	70,621ドル
Michael	Backend/Frontend Developer	2014年05月04日	Santa Cruz, CA, USA	151,078ドル
Tom	Android Developer	2014年06月03日	Toronto, Canada	102,842ドル
Mike	Backend/Frontend Developer	2014年07月14日	Barcelona, Spain	96,926ドル
José	Backend/Frontend Developer	2014年12月01日	Madrid, Spain	86,549ドル
Tom D	Customer Researcher	2014年12月15日	Cambridge, UK	81,415ドル
Eric	Systems Engineer	2015年01月06日	Beijing, China	76,692ドル
Phil	Backend/Frontend Developer	2015年02月09日	New York, NY, USA	128,740ドル
Maxime	Data Analyst	2015年02月09日	Montpellier, France	94,291ドル
Dave O	Product Designer	2015年03月03日	Southowram, UK	103,833ドル
Julian	Data Analyst	2015年03月16日	New York, NY, USA	95,135ドル
Jim	Product Creator	2015年04月16日	Nashville, TN, USA	134,215ドル
Danny	Happiness Hero	2015年05月05日	London, UK	78,269ドル
Kat	Backend/Frontend Developer	2015年05月11日	Bristol, UK	89,549ドル
Pioul	Backend/Frontend Developer	2015年07月09日	Grenoble, France	95,215ドル
Marc Anthony	Product Creator	2015年07月13日	Houston, TX, USA	119,548ドル
Steve	Product Designer	2015年07月27日	Timperley, UK	94,177ドル
Ivana	Backend/Frontend Developer	2015年08月10日	Zadar, Croatia	92,116ドル
Sandrine	Content Crafter	2015年08月10日	Paris, France	81,780ドル
Kelly	Happiness Hero	2015年08月17日	Philadelphia, PA, USA	75,934ドル
Ross	Happiness Hero	2015年08月31日	Louisville, KY, USA	77,397ドル
Alex	Backend/Frontend Developer	2015年09月01日	Los Angeles, CA, USA	111,696ドル
Marcus W	iOS Developer	2015年09月02日	Padova, Italy	95,924ドル
Lorenz	Product Designer	2015年09月08日	Rotterdam, Netherlands	90,324ドル
Roy	Customer Researcher	2015年09月10日	Saint Catharines, Canada	103,133ドル
Alfred	Community Champion	2015年09月14日	Singapore	59,112ドル
Jordan	iOS Developer	2015年09月23日	Ozark, MO, USA	110,636ドル
Kyle	Product Creator	2015年09月28日	Portland, OR, USA	116,243ドル
Amy	Happiness Hero	2015年10月01日	San Francisco, CA, USA	77,118ドル
James	Product Designer	2015年10月05日	Berlin, Germany	95,538ドル
Ash	Content Crafter	2015年10月05日	Bury St Edmunds, UK	80,518ドル
Matt	Data Analyst	2015年10月12日	Boulder, CO, USA	95,185ドル
Mike E	Customer Researcher	2015年10月14日	Sydney, Australia	82,992ドル
Humberto	iOS Developer	2015年10月14日	Asuncion, Paraguay	76,160ドル
Arielle	Community Champion	2015年10月26日	Philadelphia, PA, USA	67,418ドル
Deb	Culture Scout	2015年10月27日	London, UK	86,423ドル
Karim	Finance Planner	2015年11月01日	Växjo, Sweden	106,628ドル
Marcus S	Marketing Specialist	2015年11月03日	Nashville, TN, USA	72,124ドル
Todd	Happiness Hero	2015年11月05日	Louisville, KY, USA	64,397ドル
Bob	Happiness Hero	2015年11月05日	Medford, OR, USA	67,099ドル
Boris	Backend/Frontend Developer	2015年11月09日	Montpellier, France	91,186ドル
Juliet	Happiness Hero	2015年11月09日	London, UK	71,203ドル
Federico	Backend/Frontend Developer	2015年11月09日	Milan, Italy	89,308ドル
Kieran	Backend/Frontend Developer	2015年11月16日	Sydney, Australia	95,287ドル
Hannah	Happiness Hero	2016年01月04日	Brighton, UK	66,002ドル
Darcy	Twitter Hero	2015年11月17日	Fort Collins, CO	70,193ドル

Check out our working salaries spreadsheet to get more information about how each salary is derived.

Introducing "The Good Life Curve"

This is one of the things we’re the most excited about for this salary iteration, and it has created some of the biggest changes of this formula.

Here was the problem: Our previous formula took into account the cost of living in a city, but not the market rate. For example, San Francisco and London were both considered at the same level previously since they have a similar cost of living, but have very different job markets.

When we first started doing this, we noticed that relying purely on market data would create a huge salary disparity. For example, there would be a 90,000ドル wage gap from Cape Town to San Francisco. We didn’t want that big of a gap for a number of reasons.

To mitigate this, we created a formula that ‘corrects’ this. We call this the "Good Life Curve."

The new formula now includes an elastic part that adjusts to the cost of living and market influence of salaries for different roles.

[画像:good life curve]

These are some of the key reasons that triggered us to come up with The Good Life Curve:

• Buffer is not a San Francisco company, neither is it a Cape Town company—instead, it is a distributed company that operates in both places and many, many others as well. So we don’t want to blindly adjust to market rates and instead create our own rates that include this "remote" aspect in some way.
• We believe that everyone should be able to live a good life—and we don’t want to exploit people living in places where wages are generally lower. We’re not an outsourcing company. Therefore, we decided to create a significant lift in salaries for those that live in places that are generally much lower paid compared to the average.
• We don’t want to have such a stark wage gap between team members in general. Even though a certain gap is inevitable and good, if someone in the same role, with similar experience, is making 100ドルk less, that feels unfair in the grand scheme of things.
• The value that someone in San Francisco creates for Buffer is not different compared to the value a teammate in Cape Town creates. The only difference is that someone in Cape Town might have higher purchasing power, which should be the only driver of salary difference between the two.

We hope that the Good Life Curve offers a happy life to every teammate!

The Transparent Buffer Salary Calculator: Try it for yourself!

[画像:calculator launch]

With weighting, multipliers and now The Good Life Curve, all of the various elements of the salary formula can get a bit tricky to explain as we grow the team quickly.

[画像:try the calculator]

So we created The Transparent Buffer Salary Calculator. This means that now anyone can see what they might make at Buffer by plugging in their own data for location, experience and so forth.

For instance, an advanced-level developer living in San Francisco might enter this into the salary calculator:

[画像:Screenshot 2015年11月20日 15.42.22]

We break out for you each individual component so it’s simpler to understand how every element of the formula works together to create the overall salary.

Even though our formula has become more comprehensive, we hope that the calculator will make getting results easy. We were so blown away by how many startups have adopted our salary formula, and we want to keep making it simple for anyone to make use of our latest data.

On top of that, we’re of course excited to make great use of the calculator internally as we bring new people on board and give them fair and accurate salaries they can easily understand.

What isn’t in this iteration of our formula (and what’s next)

As we grow and evolve, our salary formula naturally needs to become a lot more comprehensive; and we feel it has turned into something that’s pretty solid now.

However, there are quite a few elements that are not included in this formula:

• Experience: We’re using a very primitive approach to the experience component right now. It scales only across four bands: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Master. And it’s not a very accurate process in how we arrive there. More or less, we make a call and ask people how they feel about it. That’s not great, and we’re keen to improve this. It feels really important to measure people’s experience more accurately, and indicate how people can progress and be compensated for that progress. This is #1 on our list.
• Taxes: We’re a distributed team, and taxes vary greatly by country. Even though the top-line salary might be easy to compare, the take-home pay might be quite different. We know, for example, that Buffer team members in France pay a lot of extra taxes that others don’t. This would be another great one to improve on.
• Nomading: Another element of being a distributed team is that people are free to move around as much as they want. That’s usually a heavier burden in terms of costs, and we’re generally keen to support people in finding the place where they feel happiest and want to live. It’s something that isn’t accounted for either in the current formula and something we’re keen to dive in deeper on.
• Exchange rate changes: Especially with the recent Euro/USD change, a lot of teammates’ salaries in Europe have gone up a lot. However if the opposite was the case, this might be more of a challenge.
• Salary vs equity choice: When you join Buffer full-time, you decide whether you want more salary or more equity in your compensation package. Right now, you can get either 10,000ドル in extra salary or you can get 30% more stock options. That’s an option that has become a bit outdated as Buffer’s overall valuation has gone up and it’s no longer that attractive to get extra equity. This is another key iteration we’ve already started to work on.

Thanks for the amazing input, and let us know more thoughts!

It’s amazing to come across so many people who have been inspired by the original formula and implemented it for their own company.

For anyone looking to take a job at a startup, or anyone working on salaries at a startup, we hope this new formula and calculator might cut down the time you spend on thinking about salaries by many hours.

And even though we’ve thought about this formula for many months, it’s far from perfect. It’s going to have a ton of flaws and mistakes, and it’s exciting to share it with you to get feedback and insights we can use for the next version.

For a deeper dive into some of the philosophy and tactics involved in this version of our salary formula, we sat down for a chat with Courtney about the thoughts and process involved in creating it. You can watch the whole chat here:

[フレーム]

There are many reasons why we believe salary transparency is such a powerful force, and we’re humbled and excited to keep iterating in this area, and keep starting conversations that can have an impact on the industry.

Hit us up in the comments below, we’d love to hear your thoughts and discuss.

Read more posts by Joel and Leo, Buffer Co-founders