On pay philosophy

Robbie Clutton draws on conversations with clients scaling their pay structures to lay out the mechanics behind a compensation philosophy. He starts from role hierarchy (function, family, track and level), moves through where companies get benchmarking data, then into the compa ratio math that turns that data into actual pay bands, and closes on how companies handle regional pay differences in a remote-first world.

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• Role hierarchy has three layers: Job Function (engineering, product, marketing), Job Family (software engineering, SRE, QA within engineering), and Career Track. Tracks split into Professional (Associate → Engineer → Senior → Staff → Principal), Managerial (Associate → Manager → Senior Manager → Director → Senior Director), and Executive (VP → SVP → President → C-suite).
• Level alignment across tracks: a Principal on the Professional track tends to sit at the same level as a Director on the Managerial track, and a Senior at the same level as a Manager.
• Benchmarking sources: survey-based industry data (Rashford, Mercer, Willis Towers Watson) tailored by sector and location; user-reported data (Glassdoor, Reed) plus informal reports of competitor offers; and newer entrants like Ravio.
• The compa ratio sets a midpoint per level with lower and upper bounds as a percentage of it (an 80%-120% band is the example given). Deliberate overlap between adjacent levels’ bands gives room to pay more without a title change, or promote without a big jump in pay.
• Two regional pay models: benchmarking and compa ratios computed separately per region (more rigorous, more expensive in survey data), or a ratio system that scales a primary location’s pay range up or down (0.7x for a lower-cost country, 1.15x for a higher-cost one is the example given).
• Clutton frames the “same role, different location, different pay” question as unresolved and leaves it to the reader, noting only that the debate is shifting as remote work grows.