A similar article over Amazon’s 350k base salary was already debunked — Amazon’s 350k base salary is probably smoke & mirrors
So past few days, there is lot of hype and viral sharing of articles about Microsoft announcing it will make salary/wage range information public and people sharing/re-sharing the similar articles all over internet and social media (Forbes, Daily Mail , WSJ and so many more). Here are few reasons why this is nothing more than another marketing/advertising gimmick without truly sharing anything really. As a data and analytics team, we at Symmetrics care a lot about unbiased and true information and our product reflects the same sentiment. Devil (or actionable truth in most cases) is always in the details !
FYI: You could explore all Microsoft salaries on our platform/product too :)
(Actual) Interpretation of Microsoft official post — all vs. each
An excerpt from Microsoft official blog post. As you can see below , lets explore the sentence “all racial and ethnic minority employees in the US combined earn $1.006 for every $1.000 earned by their white counterparts”
Layman (and hence viral news): The lay man interpretation would be instantly like — wow ! So Microsoft is paying every ethnic and minority person more white counterpart, definitely seems improvement over status quo (aka. white race folks unfairly make more).
The Keyword is “all” ! (NOT each)
True interpretation in details: Microsoft like companies (most high-tech companies) hire high-skilled talent from across the world, getting the best of best brains (I don’t think anyone needs introduction on H1B Visas and how they are really the unsaid backbone and secret weapon of US, for being the tech super power of the world). So isn’t it obvious, that when you take the best-of-best cohort across the world and compare with any other cohort — of course wages will be higher ! Whether they were not higher BEFORE (which they did not confirm in the post) would be a surprise because that might invite audit (By definition H1b guys are supposed to get paid higher than local talent — True or not is for another article)
Apples to Apples (How we segment matters !)
Microsoft is a top employer of H1b — every year
2022 Q2 State of High-skilled Jobs national report shows that Microsoft already hired about 8.1k and in the top 5 employer list
Below is the yearly trend that shows Microsoft hires quite a bit every year
- The report for US — West Region (instead of national numbers) arrives at the same conclusions, as that of national report above.
- Microsoft hires many job titles
Comparing a Software Engineer salary with that of an Electrical engineer (and more so adding up the salaries and comparing across races is misleading)
- Microsoft hires across many states (and cities)
Comparing a California salary with that of Idaho (and more so adding up the salaries and comparing across races is misleading) . Cost of living varies a lot based on location
Apples to Apples adage exists for a reason !
Too Wide Salary Range is more misleading
Your salary range is between 0 to infinity
We will update this post with more analysis once Microsoft publishes specifics (assuming Microsoft will post them across all jobs, locations, industries, job categories etc., otherwise analysing on national and “all” data is pretty useless i.e. if they publish national averages etc.)
It doesn’t help with any actionable information, if the salary range is too wide. What is too wide then ? Well, as stated above first we need salary ranges split by location, job title, industry, skill etc. (you can find all that information on symmetrics platform btw). We believe the posted salary range should include (and not limited to) all of the below criteria to lend some credence
- Range should specify min. wage adjusted for inflation and cost-of-living
- Range should specify how many with the same job title (or job category) got paid within that range (for e.g. among 1000 , 900 of them got paid within that range). Without knowing “how many”, it is again misleading, because a few getting paid very little will bring down the range of salary and set lower expectations
- Range should be different for states and cities as tax codes are different (so is cost-of-living)
- Range should specify how many data points from the entire population data is taken for analysis (Without knowing this we can take any sample data to arrive at whatever conclusion we want to arrive at)
- Range should be a clear statistical data driven range to begin with (excluding skewed data points) and not sample data points. This can be relatively and easily verified on Symmetrics platform
Conclusion
Unless a company publishes all data points, that is statistically verified by a third party — we believe that such articles merely create a viral effect and sharing and re-sharing action and multiplying over internet makes it difficult to question the verity.
At Symmetrics, we built a platform that is FREE for end consumers and contains honest labor analytics, that are not only trustworthy but actionable. (Our data is authoritative and employer submitted and verified by government, unlike user submitted data on Google, Payscale, Indeed an so many more portals out there)
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