Monitoring the competitiveness in the market
TABU is a platform that openly shows salaries in the tech market, and its main goal is to make it easier for employees to negotiate salaries, and enable employers to monitor their competitiveness in the market.
TABU compares salaries in all positions in the IT industry — from developers and designers to product managers and marketers, and allows each employee and employer to find out how much people are paid to do the same or similar work within a criterion (city, industry, type of company, level of seniority, experience, the form of employment, job, people management, etc.) The main goal for TABU is to become a salary benchmark platform for employees in the tech industry which will enable them to evaluate their current market worth.
Taking the taboo out of salaries
The idea behind this platform is to remove the taboo on the topic of wages and motivate both employers and employees to change their perspective — employers to see the advantage of being transparent because they can be fairer in the market, and employees to not feel uncomfortable whenever the salary topic is mentioned.
Behind this platform is our CEO Tomislav Grubišić, who has already personally conducted a survey of developer salaries in 2018 and 2019. He has previously used Google Forms for his research, but he realized that it’s time to step up the game.
My goal is to raise this whole research to a higher level so that the story behind the salary finally stops being a taboo topic. I can see on Bornfight’s example how much happier our employees are, how much faster they develop, and ultimately how much their output has gotten better since we made it public.
Tomislav Grubišić
Bornfight CEO
Presenting TABU general stats at one of the largest developers’ conferences in Croatia
Based on 13 000+ entries on the platform, we did a general analysis of the developers’ roles, and Tomislav presented those stats at this year’s edition of Debug — one of the largest developers’ conferences in Croatia.
This was the most visited presentation at the entire conference — over 1 200 developers attended this keynote in person. This presentation is now available on YouTube and everyone can watch it for free.
Transparent salaries benefit everyone
TABU was created as a result of our transparent salary policy, and we can confirm from our own experience that transparent salaries are profitable in the long run, as we publicly announced salaries back in February 2020.
Transparent payroll motivates employees, and companies have insight into the state of the market so they can adjust their billing models. Instead of the traditional view of wages as a balance of power, we see transparent salaries as a practical and advanced way of thinking that benefits everyone.
Make the wages fair again
As most people do not have direct access to current wages on the market, many employees are underpaid — not because they do not work well, but because they are not aware of the true value of their work and they are not good negotiators. It is hard for them to define a ballpark for their pay range — they don’t have any guides or access to research about the worth of their skills and experience on the market. Salary should be defined on the basis of knowledge, skills and experience, not on the negotiation skills of the individual, and it is for this reason that TABU was created.
TABU helps equalize the salaries and expectations by providing statistics and pay averages based on gathered data. This helps both employees and companies to structure fair pay for their job positions and ranks.
Protecting the privacy and anonymity of every employee
In order to avoid situations in which the employees do not know how to assess the value of their work, and the employers do not have an overview of the current state of the market to know what salary to offer to their future employees, TABU collects wages on the Croatian tech market.
This means that people don’t have to worry if their entry is unique for a particular position, seniority level and combination of other parameters — the salary is not displayed until enough results are collected to guarantee anonymity.
TABU will not show specific data or the exact salary, but salary ranges, and will not display or share information with third parties — collected data is only used to aggregate with other responses. The data for a particular division will be presented only when there are enough results to preserve anonymity.
Vatroslav Mileusnić
Bornfight Product Lead
16 000 salaries gathered, and counting
We built this platform completely in-house — from the idea, branding and design, all the way to development and marketing. TABU launch was accompanied by a provocative campaign, and the idea behind this was to raise attention on the market and collect as many salaries as possible.
As we attracted over 35 000 visitors at the same time, we completely filled the server’s RAM, CPU and I/O allowed usage which made the site inaccessible for many users, displaying only an error message. We had to immediately increase the allowed usage of all three until the problem didn’t occur anymore.
Until now, over 40% of the entire Croatian tech and more than 60% of Croatian developers participated in this survey, which means that TABU already counts over 16 000 salaries.
Explore www.tabu.hr!