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How We Replaced Salary Negotiations with a Sinatra App

Konstantin Hasse • June 24, 2016 • Singapore • Talk

In his talk at the Red Dot Ruby Conference 2016, Konstantin Hasse, Co-Founder and CTO of Travis CI, discusses the implementation of a new salary system that replaces traditional salary negotiations with a Sinatra application. This initiative aims to create a fairer, more transparent salary framework at Travis CI, which includes several key components:

  • Rationale for Change: Hasse shares the motivation behind eliminating salary negotiations, citing concerns that negotiation skills do not accurately reflect a person's value to the company. He highlights that salary negotiations can disproportionately affect underrepresented groups, leading to systemic pay gaps.

  • Salary Framework Development: The development of the salary framework involved a year of discussions within the company to evaluate fair compensation. The goal was to develop guidelines that could be standardized across all employees, avoiding unequal pay due to negotiation prowess.

  • Initial Inspiration: Hasse references other companies such as Buffer, which have successfully implemented similar strategies, providing transparency in their salary structure and ensuring fair pay through a formula-based approach.

  • Sinatra Application: The heart of the new system is a Sinatra app that automates salary determination based on various inputs, such as role, experience, and location. This app utilizes data from multiple sources to set competitive salaries reflective of market rates and living costs in different regions worldwide.

  • Measuring Value: Hasse explains that instead of using vague terms like 'senior developer,' the company has established clear levels with specific expectations. This allows for a more structured approach to salary increases based on employee development rather than arbitrary negotiations.

  • Incorporating Needs: The framework also considers the financial needs of employees based on their geographical location, employing a needs model to ensure all pay is fair and reasonable. Hasse discusses their use of databases to evaluate living costs and income taxes across various countries.

  • Future Plans: The rollout of this framework has already begun for new hires while existing employees will gradually transition to this new pay structure. Hasse stresses that this approach isn't just about fairness but also aligns with Travis CI's values of inclusivity and diversity.

Through this innovative approach, Hasse aims to redefine the conversation around salary discussions in the tech industry, encouraging a more equitable workplace for all employees.

How We Replaced Salary Negotiations with a Sinatra App
Konstantin Hasse • June 24, 2016 • Singapore • Talk

Speaker: Konstantin Hasse, Co-Founder and CTO, Travis CI

Let's talk about salaries, diversity, career development, getting compensated in gold and silver, paying taxes in livestock and Ruby code. For the last year, we at Travis CI have been working on a new salary system to determine how much we pay whom, when employees get raises and a whole range of other things. After lots of back and forth, we ended up with a Sinatra application to solve salary questions. Expect to explore the topic from many different angles and levels. We'll look at decisions, realisations and implications, as well as interesting parts of the implementation.

Speaker's Bio
Co-Founder and CTO at Travis CI, former opera star

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/rkh/how-we-replaced-salary-negotiations-with-a-sinatra-app

Event Page: http://www.reddotrubyconf.com

Produced by Engineers.SG

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Red Dot Ruby Conference 2016

00:00:14.519 next up we have uh Constantine he is a co-founder of uh Travis C and he's going
00:00:21.720 to talk about how he replace salary negotiations with the Sinatra app personally I like apps that that
00:00:30.119 this so we don't have to exercise our developer skills uh our social
00:00:38.719 skills hello hello can you hear
00:00:45.960 me yes this is exactly the motivation behind replacing salary negotiations with the Sinatra app it's like this I
00:00:52.920 also really hate calling people and if there's a um anyway I'm con Constantine
00:01:01.719 ha on Twitter or RK popcorn these are two of my many Twitter accounts uh just
00:01:07.320 RK on GitHub if you want to I don't know tweet at me
00:01:14.280 anyway uh let me be the first to welcome you all to Singapore um I'm happy to be
00:01:20.640 back and I'm giving a talk this is the first time I'm giving a
00:01:27.439 really a top a talk about this topic and um an important thing about this topic
00:01:34.240 is I have actually no clue like I'm probably one of the least qualified
00:01:40.439 people I have no real experience like as an employee
00:01:46.040 from the Cel discussion standpoint and so on um and this is
00:01:54.399 actually I don't want to say this is a non-technical talk because I actually think it's just this is a very technical
00:02:00.439 talk um I there will even be code I promise there will be code in these
00:02:05.560 slides um obviously when talking about saler who was here yesterday for Joe's
00:02:12.120 talk the lightning talk yes so that actually said that salary isn't that important so this talk
00:02:19.160 doesn't no it did not say that salary isn't that important it said it's not the reason that people leave
00:02:25.879 um I also think that this talk that I'm giving is not so much about salary but
00:02:31.599 more about development in leadership or rather how we do things at Travis um and
00:02:39.040 I think it's an important aspect of that is that I'm trying to break a taboo here
00:02:46.920 um a taboo that people have been breaking previously uh very famously with the
00:02:54.720 talk pay hashtag and uh some news articles and blog posts lately
00:03:00.440 uh it is a great taboo to talk about salaries I don't know how it is in in Singapore uh I know in Europe and in the
00:03:07.400 US it's not something people generally talk about with their friends with their
00:03:12.440 colleagues um but it's not just that it's also not companies companies I found um don't
00:03:21.120 really talk about salaries either I mentioned that was the the talk
00:03:26.720 pay uh hashtag where people were tweeting their salaries their job some
00:03:33.480 details and um that gave a lot of momentum to having a
00:03:40.319 conversation about salaries um there's also Bots that do that anonymously so
00:03:49.120 you don't need to reveal your salary and there are some companies a very small
00:03:55.200 number that are aggressively open about the their salary structure um most
00:04:02.599 well-known probably buffer who have published their salary formula and not
00:04:08.439 just their formula they've actually published a complete list with names and everything of all
00:04:14.760 their employees and the salaries they're paying um but buffer also is trying to
00:04:20.239 be a very very open uh company about this which is quite impressive uh so
00:04:26.840 recently they saw themselves forced to let let people go because they
00:04:35.759 couldn't afford from their budget anymore to pay that um many salaries um
00:04:42.360 which also brings us to to the to one important aspect of this presentation
00:04:48.800 which is looking at salaries from the employer side like as well as just what
00:04:56.320 people are making which actually is a site that as a co-founder Trav I've had to deal with more often than the other
00:05:03.639 side but we're actually is in a salary and I think that's that's where one of
00:05:09.759 the the major conflict between employees and employers comes from or the major
00:05:16.160 fiction points or interpretation differences is the different View and
00:05:23.840 interpretation of what the meaning of a salary is
00:05:30.840 who knows these people yes yes is that a big thing here
00:05:36.919 The Big Bang Theory so that's interesting let's talk about their
00:05:44.800 salaries does anyone know what they make and how they're
00:05:50.160 paid a lot uh yes correct no not correct
00:05:58.000 depends on who you talk about of the these five um so they all renegotiated
00:06:03.720 their salaries last year um initially the three main actors renegotiate their
00:06:11.680 salaries um to 1 million per episode uh
00:06:19.520 so uh how you pronounce it GIC GIC Parsons and cucko uh playing lonard
00:06:27.039 Hoffer Sheldon Cooper and Penny last name unknown or at least I don't
00:06:32.880 know um got a deal of 1 million per episode
00:06:39.039 in August 2015 at a time where um hellberg playing Howard wtz and Kunal
00:06:48.680 Nar playing rajish uh we're getting paid 100,000 per episode um which caused the
00:06:56.879 two to try to renegotiate their salaries um and they were aiming for
00:07:03.960 getting salary parity with the other three um which was denied to them they
00:07:10.720 got erased which is undisclosed at the at this point which is supposed to be in the mid six digits um but essentially
00:07:19.599 the salary uh negotiation ended with the studios
00:07:27.000 threatening to write them out of the series and this makes you wonder what does this
00:07:35.599 mean does this mean that one's a 10 times actor 10x
00:07:43.800 actor this is this is a phrase from that's very popular especially in the
00:07:49.759 Bay Area this concept of the the 10x developer and this comes from from a
00:07:57.319 strong belief in an actual misused word in that context I think the belief in
00:08:04.360 meritocracy um that uh Merit defines your standing in
00:08:10.560 an organization um this rock actually has been changed
00:08:16.000 for one that believes in collaboration so I didn't want to do like GitHub
00:08:21.479 shaming or anything but in the Bay Area there there is as I said this strong
00:08:27.159 belief in the 10x developer qu is a great resource in General on such topics
00:08:33.640 um if you want to learn the difference between a full stack 10x generalist and unicorn programmer uh there there other
00:08:40.719 like if on this topic 10x Engineers there other really great questions like
00:08:46.519 what do mediocre people do in Silicon
00:08:52.680 valy you got to wonder uh some of the questions are why are the best programmers 10 times more productive
00:08:58.760 than mediocre programmers but paid only three times as much another interesting
00:09:04.640 question um very interesting to me as well is how do bootstrap companies hire
00:09:11.680 Talent I've actually once was asked by someone in a in a bar like you didn't
00:09:16.760 take VC how do you pay salaries um anyway nothing against VC
00:09:24.720 just saying there are bootstrap companies and they do uh pay salaries
00:09:30.160 I actually work for one of these I actually founded I'm a co-founder one of these bootstrap companies uh who here
00:09:43.279 CI we bootstrapped uh found it in 2012 we have 38 employees at the moment that
00:09:50.160 was my last count from slack uh this morning um I think we have some top talent we're based in Berlin Germany but
00:09:57.800 we're actually a or try to be a remote first company so we have employees in
00:10:05.279 eight countries of 16 different nationalities also again I tried to count it this morning there might be
00:10:16.440 a feel we we have uh 54% women uh in our
00:10:22.040 company uh in our engineering team it's 50% it's a one toone split um with uh
00:10:37.880 and we were actually planning to keep hiring in the
00:10:43.240 future and salaries is an important topic for
00:10:48.320 us from the company perspective salaries currently account for 46% of our
00:10:54.160 spendings I think in most companies it's actually higher at least most software companies but our infrastructure costs
00:11:01.200 are also very uh massive um but that on
00:11:06.839 its own makes it the biggest cost center if you just look at it from a budgeting standpoint so any conversation that we
00:11:13.240 have there even if it's just changing it by a small percentage has a big impact
00:11:19.240 on our company finances um salaries have actually for a
00:11:25.160 long time been quite a mess at Travis to be honest we started bootstrapped we
00:11:31.160 started with not essentially having any money and we started hiring in Europe
00:11:36.680 and specifically mostly in Berlin which by Western standards is a really cheap
00:11:42.600 City and salary was based on so what do you
00:11:49.519 need and that has actually led to once we started hiring overseas for instance
00:11:55.480 a very uneven un not well thought out uh distribution and
00:12:04.320 uh you essentially got erased when you said oo money is really tight I need more money uh but no one ever went like
00:12:10.880 oh you've been here so long great work um so we've been having a discussion for
00:12:16.480 quite a while in the company on how to change that and we came to the conclusion and the
00:12:22.320 result is that we got rid of salary negotiations at travisci if you want to
00:12:27.959 work at travisci if you're going through a job interview we do not negotiate salaries with
00:12:33.079 you instead we have a Sinatra app that will tell us how much we'll pay
00:12:44.480 you why do we believe before I tell you more about this
00:12:49.519 app why do we why are we trying to to get rid of why have we removed
00:12:55.760 negotiations from this process
00:13:00.800 well we think that negotiation skills don't reflect your value to the company
00:13:06.320 which is the employer approach to to how
00:13:11.639 you decide on salaries if you remember um that uh the
00:13:18.320 three main characters were one point at a salary that was 10 times the salary of
00:13:23.480 the other main characters in The Big Bang Theory that was not based on them being
00:13:29.279 uh 10 times better actors this was based on them being 10 times more valuable to
00:13:35.399 the production of the show so your negotiation skills are not the main
00:13:40.920 value you provide to the company unless of course you're hired as a negotiator then that's that's a different
00:13:49.079 discussion the EMP employees view on salary is different it's not it can be
00:13:55.120 the value argument can be used in a negotiation or in figuring out if it's
00:14:01.120 appropriate but the employees view is usually financial needs based and your negotiation skills also don't reflect
00:14:09.639 your financial needs but most
00:14:15.519 importantly as one of our core values at Travis we care about creating a diverse
00:14:21.040 and welcoming working space and we believe that salary negotiations harm
00:14:27.399 under represented groups um there is lots of evidence for this
00:14:33.600 for instance women people of color generally under represented groups uh often are impacted from things like
00:14:41.279 imposter syndrome um there has been a study for when uh women and men look at
00:14:47.880 a job ad and there are five requirements listed and um for women one of the most
00:14:55.240 common approaches is like I'm not so sure about this one requirement I'm really bad at this I probably am not a
00:15:02.000 good fit for this job and most men approach it with oh yeah I check off three of the five I can totally do this
00:15:09.560 um this is not any individual person this is just a general thing that is more dominant in
00:15:16.920 under represented groups and there is also statistical data to prove the whole thing um so
00:15:24.279 salary negotiations are very likely to cause pay gaps Within your
00:15:31.399 company so these are some of the things we wanted to
00:15:37.120 tackle and we've been working on this for over a year and we call it the
00:15:43.040 travisci salary framework we finally rolled it out released it this March
00:15:48.959 company internally and this year is is the very first time we're
00:15:56.279 actually talking about this publicly so all the things I'm telling you are
00:16:03.800 not really known outside of Travis let's first look at how again how
00:16:10.920 other companies have solved this uh buffer also has an app I don't actually
00:16:17.240 know if that's Sinatra or not um their approach is very very formula based we
00:16:22.639 also have a formula but I get to that in a second you can actually access their app publicly can go to buffer.com
00:16:30.560 salary and then you can select your role experience location and it will tell you
00:16:37.480 exactly what you would make when you were to join a
00:16:43.600 buffer but let's get back to our our framework so buffer was a big source of
00:16:49.600 inspiration and figuring these out because they also have public explanations of all the
00:16:56.240 things so we developed this framework for full year and U very importantly to
00:17:02.480 how we Trevis approach these things this is a conversation that everyone in the
00:17:07.919 company could take part in so a lot of this was actually discussing aspects of
00:17:15.679 what is a fair salary for instance or what should be in a
00:17:22.160 salary so we decided that we want to pay by value and
00:17:28.919 we want to pay by needs by needs so we want to take both these aspects into account and we also want
00:17:37.600 to come up with generalized rules that apply to everyone and that also everyone
00:17:44.039 could question so in a way you can negotiate salaries but you cannot negotiate your salary you can as an
00:17:51.720 employee at Travi say I think this pay difference is too big or
00:17:58.840 or we should in general pay higher salaries um and then you can give a
00:18:04.080 proper reasoning or we should our increase our salaries because the euro is taking a nose dive because the UK is
00:18:10.640 leaving the EU or something like that but you can't say uh I'd like to make
00:18:16.320 like 500 bucks more a month that's not an an argument you can
00:18:23.039 use that's a screenshot of our app this is confidential
00:18:38.360 um let's talk about what goes into this are people taking f is this being
00:18:49.640 recorded so let's talk about value how do you
00:18:56.600 measure value or how do you quantify what someone provides to the
00:19:04.200 company um buffer does that with the factor so they say you have an
00:19:09.559 experience factor of 1.6 or something um that is something we we started off with
00:19:17.559 with playing with that but we found really hard to what does that actually mean and then everyone talks about uh
00:19:25.960 senior developers but senior is such an over overloaded term in the industry
00:19:31.000 where there again is a massive mismatch between
00:19:36.559 um employer employers and employees uh similar to what does a 10x
00:19:44.880 developer actually mean so we instead decided to take an
00:19:50.840 approach where we have levels and then on these levels we have certain
00:19:56.000 expectations that are quite uh mattera that when we have an employee at
00:20:03.840 a certain level we expect them to fulfill these expectations one way or
00:20:09.880 another so if you had the discussion how do you define a 10x developer if they
00:20:16.760 even exist um I don't really know how You' place them on our levels but let's
00:20:22.840 just pick a level let's pick uh the the level 10 of our software engineering
00:20:30.159 career path and that has expectation like shows an intuitive grasp of
00:20:36.440 situations analytic uh approach only used in novel situations which is basically you see a problem you already
00:20:44.640 know how to fix it without having to analyze all these things
00:20:50.840 um is self motivated to the point that they create new work for themselves and sometimes others and understands
00:20:58.000 business require requirements does not just understand but also shape the big picture uh so these are very vague and
00:21:06.120 then you supposed to work with your team lead at travisci on a regular basis
00:21:13.360 mostly through 101s setting specific goals for yourself um to fulfill and
00:21:20.039 reach the point where these are expectations the company can have towards you we currently have our engineering
00:21:27.320 career path defined up to level 17 we do not have anyone at level
00:21:34.679 17 the main intention is to show people that there is room to
00:21:40.480 grow while at the same time staying a software engineer and staying at travisci because this is actually one
00:21:47.080 thing we see happening in the industry so much it's like people reach this point where they're senior developer and
00:21:53.960 then what like it's not just about salary this is actually about uh your
00:21:59.600 professional growth Career Development and so on and not just about your bank account statement and then you often see
00:22:06.919 one of two things happen either people go to a different company to do something new and
00:22:14.240 fun or people become managers and in both cases you lose your
00:22:22.279 best developers in one case you might swap them out for potentially a bad manager
00:22:30.799 um if if someone wants to be a manager like I'm not I don't want a badmouth
00:22:36.039 developers becoming managers like if someone is really passionate about that sure but becoming a manager because it's
00:22:42.799 the next logical step in your career path is a really really bad
00:22:49.240 reason and these levels we've constructed or try to phrase them in a
00:22:54.480 way that employees should level up about once a year so that it's also clear how
00:23:02.320 often people can expect salary raises and most importantly we don't
00:23:08.240 view this as a performance review that you get once a year that we can use to
00:23:15.279 justify to not give people a raise but instead as a program for us to grow
00:23:22.880 people internally if someone does not meet the expectations for the next
00:23:29.039 level that needs an investigation of what's going on is this some
00:23:36.200 productivity issue do we have other problems here that we need to address or
00:23:42.159 are our expectations wrong you do not fix productivity issues
00:23:51.039 by paying people less the other aspect we take into
00:23:56.640 account is needs we use a generalized needs model based
00:24:02.039 on location this was actually a discussion initially where we assumed
00:24:07.480 the bigger discussion would be should you pay by location or should you not pay by
00:24:14.080 location actually the opinion at Travis was pretty unanimously that you should pay
00:24:21.080 by location uh the bigger question was how do you determine that those
00:24:28.960 differences um but essentially even if we wanted to
00:24:37.039 not pay by location just pay everyone on level 10 no matter where they are the same
00:24:42.440 salary we could either not afford that or we couldn't hire in California
00:24:50.159 essentially but then we have the goal had the goal that if we pay by location
00:24:56.279 differences we want to be scientific about this we want to be reasonable about this and we don't want to have
00:25:03.559 someone basically get a worse deal because they're in a cheap or an expensive location we don't just want to
00:25:09.159 pay people in San Francisco more than everyone else essentially so how do you do that there's one interesting
00:25:14.840 statistic that's a Big Mac index has anyone heard about the Big Mac index so Big Mac is a great thing because it's in
00:25:21.480 so many countries and it's essentially the same supply chain but it's different
00:25:27.600 cost so you can compare countries based on
00:25:32.919 what the big me costs we do not use this for salary determination by the way um
00:25:39.159 it's also it's a bit unfair to have India in there actually because it's chicken meat in
00:25:45.960 India which has different costs associated um there is different conclusions you
00:25:53.640 can draw from this like uh Big Macs are the most expensive
00:25:58.720 in Switzerland but that doesn't tell you actually much about Switzerland because if you then compare that to or Norway
00:26:06.279 for instance is the second most expensive um it's the cheapest in South Africa but if you compare it to how long
00:26:13.799 it actually takes an average worker to work to get the money for a Big Mac you
00:26:18.880 see that Switzerland is still pretty good and actually Hong Kong is the best where it takes on average 8.7 minutes of
00:26:25.960 work to get a Big Mac whereas in Ukraine in KF Ukraine you have to work for
00:26:31.480 almost an hour there are actually way better statistics to reason about cost of
00:26:38.360 living one of my favorite is uh numo which is actually something that we used
00:26:43.480 uh so we used n numo we use the international labor organization we use the Bureau of Labor Statistics and we
00:26:49.919 use Shadow stats which is basically going like oh those Bureau of Labor
00:26:55.720 Statistics statistics aren't actually that great to look at um this uh n is
00:27:01.360 actually a crowdsourced um database that gives you
00:27:06.600 very detailed insight into into living costs for instance for Singapore it uses
00:27:12.559 6,300 something entries uh you can see what a McDonald's meal costs as well but
00:27:18.679 also um disposable income rent and so
00:27:25.600 on when when I when we started investigating I built a little web app
00:27:30.640 um where you can basically enter which city you live in where you want to move how much you make um and then you can
00:27:37.200 calculate which salary you should aim for when you move there it doesn't work well for Singapore
00:27:43.799 because that data on there is outdated and some models in there are outdated but works quite well if you want to move
00:27:48.880 from San Francisco to Berlin or the other way um so say you make 130k in San
00:27:55.559 Francisco means you should aim for uh somewhere below 60k EUR in Berlin if
00:28:02.360 you want to keep the same standard of living that's living cost but also
00:28:08.880 market rate are a big factor as well um there there are some websites like a
00:28:14.760 glass door uh where people can can enter their salaries and then it can give you
00:28:21.880 an overview of a location uh pay scale is similar uh also really nice to know
00:28:28.159 not they have like Fifth and 95th per or I actually think think this is 10th and
00:28:33.200 90th percentile and um K scale has that as well for the US thanks to the open
00:28:41.080 government campaign under the Obama Administration you can actually just access the data from all the Visa
00:28:48.200 applications so you know what people are getting paid when they get a visa for the US or a green
00:28:54.840 card important here is that you only compare data points from the same Source because the Visa data points for
00:29:00.919 instance tend to be on the high end of the salary Spectrum so you shouldn't use that data P point on its own but you can
00:29:07.559 use it quite well to compare to cities and the same is true for glass door and pay scale where salaries at least in the
00:29:14.799 US where I can compare it to other sources um are more on the lower end so
00:29:21.399 I used that I did a factor that's a comparison between Berlin and that City and um created a Splat graph of the
00:29:31.080 biggest cities in the world to see your correlation between Market rates this is Market rates compared to Berlin and this
00:29:38.559 is living cost compared to Berlin and you actually see that almost all the cities are on a very nice line you also
00:29:44.600 see that Singapore is quite the outlier so um living costs are significantly higher
00:29:50.880 here than in Berlin but salaries are not proportionally higher as well um
00:29:58.279 and then besides that what we took into account is I think I'm running bad on time you're fine it's okay okay um
00:30:06.679 so what we also said or what what was more like the
00:30:11.880 conversation went like this um so if we take living costs into account and rent and all these things shouldn't we take
00:30:18.399 income tax into account and the conclusion was yes we should but you
00:30:23.600 can't really calculate the income tax for everywhere in the world um
00:30:29.039 and then yeah okay that's right and then I spend a weekend playing with some Ruby code and turns out you can calculate the
00:30:36.960 living C the income tax for everywhere in the world I created a ruby Library you can gem install income
00:30:49.960 tax you can tell it which country you're in it doesn't do text deductions or anything even though someone emailed me
00:30:56.159 and they want to do like a text filing program for you I don't know I think they I
00:31:01.720 actually never got back to them anyway um so you can tell it how much you make or a salary a country and will'll tell
00:31:09.000 you gross income net income taxes and important for us you can also tell it a
00:31:14.159 net income uh like the income after taxes and it will give you a gross income uh interesting things I learned
00:31:21.600 there in Mali you can choose your tax rate basically you go to negotiate your taxes and they go like so we want to pay
00:31:27.600 3 % you want to pay 30% you can also bring a goat and use that as your tax
00:31:34.600 payment um and from that we calculate the the the salary levels we
00:31:40.880 have a baseline per country that's based on Market rates and then a city adjustment for expensive cities that's
00:31:47.720 based on living cost so we do take Market rates into account for the us but
00:31:52.799 we don't take Market Market rates into account for uh San Francisco but we do take take into account that the rent is
00:31:59.320 really high in San Francisco here's actually the code I promise code there is the oh there's
00:32:05.399 it's bit cut off the result is basically the rounded we have our own rounding
00:32:10.720 method to be more favorable to our employees so it's uh taxes applied on
00:32:18.279 top of the before taxes we apply if someone's working parttime uh before
00:32:24.120 Texas is the monthly value times 12 monthly is the the base
00:32:30.200 value um plus the increase for the level you're added times the level plus the
00:32:37.519 city adjustment exchange to the local currency yep that's essentially it if we
00:32:44.000 would pay less than zero we just pay zero we don't make people
00:32:50.799 pay and with that we've actually calculated the rates for 3536 cities in 209 countries for four of
00:32:58.600 these countries we also have 92 regions you might wonder 209 countries there aren't that
00:33:04.639 many countries I recommend to you this YouTube channel I also found myself in that
00:33:10.799 income tax gem to for the first time specify what this gem sees as a country
00:33:17.559 and stating that this is not a political opinion but just trying to model income Tex best uh currencies are very tricky
00:33:26.240 uh employees that are uh not in the US or Germany can pick their own currency
00:33:33.200 we have uh conference allowance converted to the currencies I imported a
00:33:39.120 set a list of currencies with exchange values uh which I didn't know when importing this currency list included
00:33:45.760 gold so if you work at travisci and we pay you in Gold you get 4.45 ounces of
00:33:53.399 conference allowance per year I assume this is how you go
00:34:02.080 home and we've wrote this out we've used that for all our new hires for to replace salary negotiations we're very
00:34:09.200 happy with it it reflects what we set out to solve we think the rates that come out are competitive based uh so
00:34:18.119 there are some relation to Market rates they're comfortable we think people can live of them they're fair this is has to
00:34:24.639 do with the uh uh rules applying to everyone for for instance they're feasible they're within the capabilities
00:34:30.440 of our company and they're prospective so people know there is a path to take
00:34:36.919 and most importantly I think it's a model that everyone participated in and
00:34:42.480 can participate in shaping how that develops in the future thanks
00:34:52.320 if if you have questions I don't know if there's time now otherwise hit me up later or
00:34:58.320 tweeted me email me uh I also brought
00:35:03.400 stickers yeah um thank you Constantine I have no CLS about my salary but I
00:35:09.240 absolutely love what you guys are doing at Travis so uh round of uh Round of Applause and maybe you can accept one
00:35:22.960 yep how what's your plan for bringing existing employees across to this have you done it or is it going to be a
00:35:29.240 gradual thing um so we actually started doing that um so we've brought on EX so
00:35:36.800 all of our engineering team I think is now on the framework so we have this concept of people being on the framework
00:35:42.960 and people being off the framework um we started rolling that out we don't have all the career paths done
00:35:49.760 so we have the career paths done for uh software Engineers designers uh
00:35:56.200 support we're working on our Administration career paths right now um
00:36:01.680 so that's why not everyone is on this now but the majority of Travis is paid
00:36:06.800 in accordance to the celebr framework um just two questions one is
00:36:16.119 you guys have this yes so we've actually discussed
00:36:21.599 this uh releasing this public uh first of all we want to actually uh talk more
00:36:27.079 about this blog about this not just to like show off what we did but also to get a conversation started that goes
00:36:33.680 further than just Travis um we still need to figure out what work
00:36:40.440 needs to be done so that we can actually release our app um which would probably also be quite interesting for people out
00:36:47.560 there and second question
00:36:53.880 is to an exch to a specific exchange rate right
00:37:00.079 wouldn't that bring a bit of end balance on
00:37:06.960 the yes so this is uh where do I have to slide a
00:37:13.560 currencies are tricky uh so what we actually have is we have a travisci exchange rate which means we picked
00:37:22.079 exchange rate at certain points in time and decided that that's the exchange R
00:37:27.880 we use for the calculation these exchange rates are usually picked at times that are favorable to the person
00:37:34.119 paid in this uh currency uh we also
00:37:42.000 um update this but this is a semi manual process so we need to decide um do we up
00:37:49.760 the change rate um and the reasons there might be extreme changes or we actually
00:37:56.160 plan to review this on approximately a yearly basis
00:38:01.599 um if someone thinks the exchange rate is not in their Pap they can go to the
00:38:08.240 currency page in our salary app C the this C link which will automatically even go to the existing issue about the
00:38:15.800 currency or create a new one and then mention that it's not in laor what we've also did is that why I briefly mentioned
00:38:23.839 people might be able to choose their currency um so so we have employees that
00:38:30.200 are not getting paid in what their local currency is and the main reason for choosing that is we have an employee in
00:38:37.000 Mexico the Mexican p is really unstable so she chose to um get PID in durs
00:38:44.119 instead um so that's one approach we also take
00:38:49.760 there uh one last shot question um hello okay uh I have question is it actually
00:38:57.960 buiness model because I also some sense for we have project mostly
00:39:07.359 similar that the tax R of different country different something like that
00:39:12.400 and each CH conly during the road the governments and I got I got the
00:39:18.400 application that it change from every treatment for Europe country just Europe
00:39:24.079 you know that also be a CH so
00:39:33.240 uh um perhaps I can uh you can talk to him after during match so
00:39:40.200 sorry uh so a round of applause
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