My Thoughts on #KnowYourWorth After an 80% Pay Cut
Friday evening I opened up Twitter to a feed full of tweets about strangers’ 🏫 degrees, ⏳ years of experience, 🏷️ positions, 🌍 locations and 💸 salaries, all in tech, with some tagged #KnowYourWorth. As I kept scrolling, I found out that this had started from a software engineer’s desire to highlight pay inequality, specifically for underrepresented groups. As someone who recently took an 80% pay cut in order to join an early stage startup, I’ve had some conflicting feelings regarding these tweets. Although I am grateful for the transparency, I’m wary of the messaging, and am mostly writing this piece to mull over my thoughts and translate them into something somewhat coherent.
I’ll start with my background. I’m 24, I’m from Romania, I started coding in high school, I have a Computer Science degree from a liberal arts university, I spent my summers throughout university interning as a software engineer at Google offices in both Europe and the US, the year after graduation working as a technology analyst (essentially as a software engineer) at Goldman Sachs’ Hong Kong office, and I’m currently a co-founder and the Lead Developer of a Stockholm-based startup called imagiLabs.
On one hand, I’m glad that these tweets are promoting pay transparency. During my time at Google, I’d had access to an internal spreadsheet created by a former employee, that shared other employees’ anonymously reported salaries. As someone who had seen this spreadsheet, the numbers I saw being tweeted were not shocking. I wasn’t surprised by the crazy high figures software engineers were reporting in the Bay Area, and I wasn’t surprised by the relatively low figures software engineers were reporting in Europe, even if they worked for the same companies. I knew how much more I’d made at Google New York than at Google Munich, and how much less my full-time offer at Google London was than my friends’ full-time offers at Google’s HQ, despite the fact that we were essentially working on the same global products. I also knew I couldn’t work at Google’s US offices post-graduation because of their hiring policies for non-US citizens, but passport privilege is another story.
I also know that one of my main factors for deciding to work at Goldman Sachs after graduating was the salary figure printed in tiny letters on the final page of my offer letter. The investment bank had just significantly boosted their tech analyst salaries in an effort to compete with FAANG, and well, it worked, at least in my case. But I also know that I’d never questioned my worth more than I did when I was making six figures from my 65th floor desk in Hong Kong. That is why, on the other hand, these tweets, or at least the phrasing of #KnowYourWorth, make me uncomfortable.
Earlier this week, us co-founders decided that we would not be taking salaries, at least for a couple of months, to extend our startup’s runway until our next funding round. Long story short, if my worth were to be determined by my salary, I would basically be worthless right now, despite having found, for the first time, fulfilment in my work. I work on something I am passionate about, with people who share this passion. I see our startup grow from an idea to something that we hope will have a positive impact on our users’ lives, as we’re working on a product that teaches young girls how to code. And I wholeheartedly believe that knowing how to code will give them the ability to change the world, for the better.
I know that, typing from my MacBook Pro, I speak from a position of privilege. I have also had the privilege of being supported throughout my journey as a woman in tech by the various networks and companies I’ve been part of that understand the need for diversity in the industry. I know that part of the reason I can take this pay cut at a startup is because I lack major financial or familial responsibilities at this point in my life. I don’t have student loans to repay. I know that for many, money is crucial to their own and their family’s well-being and safety.
But I also know that during my exit interview at GS, I was asked “how much more” my future salary was than my current one, and that I heard nervous laughter when I said that it was actually only 20% of my current salary. I know that how much you make is seen as a status symbol, and I, until recently, prided myself with the amount deposited into my bank account each month. I know that in some locations it is just absolutely impossible to make as much money as in others, despite similar costs of living. I saw someone suggest that Dan Abramov, a Facebook employee working on the revolutionary React library and also the creator of Redux, start a Patreon after he revealed his £100k base salary in the UK. Most of all, I saw shock over the salary reveals. Shock from people in Eastern Europe at how much others were making. Shock from people in San Francisco at how little others were making. Shock from people not in tech who didn’t realize how much their friends and relatives in tech were making. Shock over realizing that there’s not always a correlation between impact, effort and skill set and salary.
I’m grateful for the conversations that are stemming from this hashtag. I’m grateful that people are revealing their compensation, something so taboo in many cultures, to give others a better understanding of the industry. I just hope they understand that making a glass ceiling more transparent isn’t very helpful if you don’t have the tools to break it. And I’m grateful that more people are realizing that the value you bring to the world is not necessarily reflected in how much you make. I hope that they know and believe that their own worth, as well as others’, goes beyond direct deposits and stock options. And although I might be young and idealistic, I hope that I keep believing that too.
Thank you to Melinda Szekeres for her wonderful editing skills that have helped polish my writing endeavours since our freshman year.
