[HN Gopher] Workers are often told not to talk about pay. That's...
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Workers are often told not to talk about pay. That's not legal
Author : hhs
Score : 308 points
Date : 2021-09-22 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usatoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usatoday.com)
| legerdemain wrote:
| At my previous company, we didn't stop anyone from discussing
| pay. That's obviously illegal. What we did instead is make sure
| that everyone, including new college hires, understood that
| talking about pay almost always leads to interpersonal friction,
| resentment, conflict, lower work productivity, and slower
| progress of our company toward an IPO. In short, talking about
| pay would actively damage their bottom line, which is in not
| something in anyone's best interest. It's not a threat if you
| just explain how the real world works and that actions have
| consequences.
| gooseus wrote:
| This approach works for all kinds of destructive conversations
| in the workplace.
|
| You don't need to explicitly stop people from complaining about
| a manager's behavior or other toxic workplace features, you
| just need to explain to people how discussions around how they
| feel about a particular management style almost always leads to
| interpersonal friction, resentment, conflict, lower work
| productivity, and slower progress of our company toward an IPO.
|
| You see, it's not a threat if you just explain how the real
| world works and that actions have consequences. /s
| handrous wrote:
| Telling--being very generous--a lie couched in exaggerated
| hypotheticals (the lie: if sharing comp harms the company, it's
| the fault of the person who shared it, not management;
| exaggeration: this will have some huge and harmful effect on
| the company such that employees are significantly harmed) to
| your employees to keep them from acting in their own best
| interest is--still being very generous--kinda shitty.
| triceratops wrote:
| Pro athletes' contracts are fairly public knowledge. Does that
| affect how professional sports teams perform?
| legerdemain wrote:
| Yes? Teams lose valuable players all the time, often to
| everyone's detriment, over failed contract negotiations. Pay
| in professional sports is an extremely sore topic. See US
| women's soccer last year.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Teams lose valuable players all the time
|
| If they were that valuable, they should've paid them
| accordingly. Compensation is the most direct marker of
| "value". If you're valued more, you get paid more.
|
| > often to everyone's detriment
|
| Presumably not the acquiring team's.
|
| > See US women's soccer last year
|
| They played 1 game in 2020, which they won. This year,
| their W-D-L record reads 15-3-2, which is pretty damn
| good.[1] Their contract negotiations might have been
| fractious, but they still performed on the field.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_women%27s_na
| tion...
| dmead wrote:
| I make it a point to talk about pay on the regular. I want to
| know if I'm getting fucked or not.
| yupper32 wrote:
| Is this satire?
|
| Talking about salaries have always resulted in better or equal
| pay for everyone involved (except the higher ups, like you) in
| my experience, and the experience of everyone I know.
|
| Your post sounds like companies claiming that unions would
| actually hurt you.
|
| If you're underpaying people in order to get to an IPO, people
| deserve to be aware of that and know the risks involved.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think the person you're responding to is referring to the
| social (not economic) outcomes that result when people
| realize they're paid differently than their peers. Depending
| on how diverse a team is (in terms of ability, experience,
| performance) this can open up discussions about what "equal
| pay" really means.
|
| If ability, experience, and performance are part of how you
| pay your employees, then a discussion about comparative pay
| of employees inherently means you are opening up a discussion
| about the comparative ability, experience, and performance of
| employees.
|
| I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- but -- some feelings
| might get hurt in the process.
| b3morales wrote:
| Mostly agree, but I think there's a companion reason for
| the triggering of discomfort. The idea that pay is
| completely merit-based -- as you say "in terms of ability,
| experience, performance" -- is a comforting lie that we
| tell ourselves, in my experience. No company has truly
| objective decisions for salary. There is always a large
| handful of historical accident and personal relationships
| stirred in. (If nothing else, in tech a person's salary is
| partly determined by their previous salary _at other
| companies_!)
|
| Discussing the raw numbers of pay exposes that fact as
| well.
| kube-system wrote:
| For sure, pay is much more driven by immediate staffing
| needs for retention or hiring. This has more to do with
| the labor markets and work pipeline than anything about
| an individual employee.
|
| But people _say_ they _should_ be paid based on ability,
| performance, and experience. So this is what the
| conversation will be centered around, whether it is the
| complete reality for the considerations made by the
| employer or not.
|
| Alice won't care that Bob was hired for $10K more because
| there was a labor shortage and the company was going to
| lose a contract if they couldn't hire another person. She
| just wants her $10K. So, the marginal cost of hiring an
| additional employee is not only the cost of that
| employee, but the additional wage demand that would
| result from the rest of your workforce. This is likely
| why we see many companies giving bonuses in this labor
| crunch rather than higher base wages.
| usui wrote:
| I'm not sure why you are interpreting the parent's comment as
| similar to "claiming that unions would actually hurt you".
| It's just a post talking about how management in companies
| works around the illegality of telling employees not to talk
| to about pay. It's in the first sentence.
|
| It's not like the parent comment is defending the practice,
| just how it's done in practice to discourage employees. Yes,
| groups of employees that don't band together believe that it
| will hurt their own bottom line if they talk about pay.
| yupper32 wrote:
| Are you saying that the poster is saying that they lie to
| their employees?
|
| I'm honestly not sure what you're saying.
| mfogikds wrote:
| "Talking about salaries have always resulted in better or
| equal pay for everyone involved"
|
| What is the exact source on this? I highly doubt every
| company in existence has the budget to pay everyone "better
| or equal"
| yupper32 wrote:
| I address that in the second half of the sentence: "in my
| experience, and the experience of everyone I know."
|
| I'm not claiming a universal truth. I do think that the
| original post is much farther away from the truth than my
| claim, though.
| mfogikds wrote:
| Have you done an actual survey? I doubt you know the
| inner workings of every workplace of everyone you know.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You'll need pretty solid justifications to lower salaries.
| In a case where a bunch of employees realize they're
| underpaid, there's only three natural outcomes:
|
| - lower paid employees don't get anything, and start
| looking for a better paying job
|
| - lower paid employees get compensatory raises
|
| - lower paid employees get nothing and the higher paid
| members are expected to get lower pays. They proceed to
| leave for greener pastures (and they only need to find at
| least equal paying jobs to make it worth it)
|
| The scenario where salaries go down and employees don't do
| anything is unrealistic.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I don't think I ever talked about pay with my coworkers, but
| the first thing I'd do if someone gave me that speech would be
| talk about pay. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > What we did instead is make sure that everyone, including new
| college hires, understood that talking about pay almost always
| leads to interpersonal friction, resentment, conflict, lower
| work productivity, and slower progress of our company toward an
| IPO.
|
| I hope you've provided some very concrete examples how talking
| about pay delayed an IPO by a certain period of time, and
| quantified how much exactly hires were losing because of it, in
| exact dollar values.
|
| Because otherwise, it's just a gaslighting scare tactic.
|
| > It's not a threat if you just explain how the real world
| works and that actions have consequences.
|
| One of the consequences of bullshitting new hires with vague
| examples of _how the real world works_ is that you end up with
| people willing to drink the kool-aid, regardless of their
| skills and ability. Now maybe that was your primary goal in the
| first place, but somehow I doubt it.
| jahewson wrote:
| Ah so you gaslighted them, nice.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| > talking about pay almost always leads to interpersonal
| friction, resentment, conflict
|
| You could take this as an indication that your pay scale is
| screwed up.
|
| But I guess it's easier to just bully your employees.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| This is hilarious!
| farmerstan wrote:
| Sorry but this is complete bullshit. Everyone should be on an
| even playing field. Keeping secrets only helps the execs
| control the peons. The best places I've worked at was very open
| and transparent. I mentioned below that sharing salary helps
| everyone. It doesn't hurt the company at all unless the owners
| want to save every penny they have for themselves.
| nexuist wrote:
| > talking about pay almost always leads to interpersonal
| friction, resentment, conflict, lower work productivity, and
| slower progress of our company toward an IPO
|
| Try this one with your SO:
|
| "Talking about chores almost always leads to interpersonal
| friction, resentment, conflict, lower work productivity, and
| slower progress of our relationship towards marriage"
| rpmisms wrote:
| Even if you want to maintain an old-style decorum about keeping
| salaries private, reaching out to people leaving the company is a
| great way to get an idea of your coworkers' pay.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I really like how this was handled at Boeing.
|
| Every year, the local SPEEA rep would post an anonymous graph
| showing compensation compared to experience. The org was large
| enough that you couldn't pinpoint everyone, but you could easily
| see where you stood WRT your peers.
| jofer wrote:
| Yeah, that's actually a key thing I miss from my previous
| bigcorp job many years ago.
|
| Pay was tied to numerical career grades. Everyone's numerical
| career grade was public information. Salary ranges (fairly
| broad and overlapping for each grade) for each were published
| each cycle. While there was a ton of griping along the lines
| "seriously, X got promoted to 23!? They just suck up!", it was
| at least consistent across disciplines and clearly tied listed
| job responsibilities to a pay range to make justifications for
| a promotion easier.
|
| I know it's a very common system, but my current company
| doesn't have that, and I quite miss it.
|
| We somewhat do via titles. E.g. I know the 25 year old
| engineers who have the title "principle staff engineer" despite
| not being trusted to do anything directly are absurdly
| overpaid, but it's really murky and not consistent. E.g. If
| your title says "software engineer" you're on a completely
| different scale than someone who's title says "data engineer".
| And if you have actual experience in the field, you'll be
| considered a "scientist" or a "technician" instead of an
| "engineer" depending on the exact role you're hired into.
|
| At any rate, it's really, really, really unclear how anything
| relates, and going from a "staff X" position to a "junior Y"
| position is often a pay raise.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Boeing is also large enough to pay people reasonable salaries
| seeing as they're the largest contractor of the DoD.
| chrisBob wrote:
| At my last job, all salaries were public record, and some dude
| even put together a website (https://umsalary.info) to make
| searching easier.
|
| Want to know what some internal career change might look like?
| Just take a look. Want to see what career path got someone else
| to where they are? Take a look. Want to know if you are being
| underpaid/discriminated against? Click on the job title next to
| your name and see where you stand compared to all employees with
| the same role.
|
| At a place where Diversity Equity and Inclusion is a stated goal
| I think this works well. I also know that people don't always get
| paid the same amount, and (as I often explain to my six-year-old)
| fair doesn't mean the everything has to be equal, but it is very
| useful to know where you stand.
|
| At my new job, the information on Levels seemed accurate based on
| my offer, and I was very happy with it.
| vibien wrote:
| One thing that surprised me is that the highest salaried
| employees seem to be in Athletics (
| https://umsalary.info/numbers.php ). Is it something specific
| to that particular university or a normal thing in the US
| universities?
| mmoche wrote:
| Extremely typical. There are cases where the highest paid
| employee in an entire _state_ is an athletics coach at a
| state university.
| oneweekwonder wrote:
| I was flabbergasted to learn Nick Saban from University of
| Alabama makes $9.3 million annually(2019)[0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Saban
| listenallyall wrote:
| too much or too little?
| munk-a wrote:
| Too much - universities obviously benefit a lot from the
| revenue that sports bring in but it'd be nice to see that
| benefit spread a bit more evenly across professors.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _universities obviously benefit a lot from the revenue
| that sports bring in but it 'd be nice to see that
| benefit spread a bit more evenly across professors_
|
| Professors can't do what he does: bring in big-ticket
| spending, sponsorships and donations.
| munk-a wrote:
| This is true - but professors provide the real value that
| students retain over time - so admissions fees should
| pretty much all be funneled to them. This is a problem
| with how hard to market the value professors provide is -
| a lot of admissions care more about a good sports team
| than a good set of professors even though the later
| factor will be much more important to them two years in.
|
| Basically, people don't act rationally so the market is
| irrational.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _professors provide the real value that students retain
| over time - so admissions fees should pretty much all be
| funneled to them_
|
| I wouldn't so quickly ignore the additional tuition
| revenue athletics departments bring in at non-Tier 1
| schools.
|
| University athletics are a weird thing. But if the pay
| bothers you, think of it as a commission. Going cheap on
| that will likely cost more than it saves.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think the broader point for the HN crowd is this is a
| great example of why you want to be part of a _profit
| center_ instead of a _cost center_ in a business. If it
| 's easy for management to try a direct line from incoming
| revenue to the work you do (like a sales person or, in
| this case, a football coach), you are in a great
| negotiating position. If you are in a cost center,
| management will do everything possible to reduce your
| salary, even if it the grand scheme of things that cost
| center is critical to running the business.
| cycomanic wrote:
| The irony is that the people who do the central work for
| the business, academics at the University, engineers
| designing the next products, even factory workers often
| are often cost centres. This leads to the somewhat
| perverse insentive to remove more and more of your
| central workers to hire managers and administrators.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| One can also try to work for companies that properly
| appreciate the value of all necessary components of the
| business, even if one can't directly tally their
| contribution. Most important factors to success are not
| easily measurable.
| j_walter wrote:
| ...or the Athletic Director. Unfortunately that can usually
| cost the state long after they are gone as the retirement
| system is usually setup based on final salaries. In the
| case of the State of Oregon the 3rd highest paid PERS
| recipient is Mike Belotti who was the head football coach
| for 13 years and then AD for 2 years. He gets almost
| $50K/month in retirement. The only two higher recipients
| are doctors that worked for the state more than twice as
| long as Belotti.
|
| https://gov.oregonlive.com/pers/
| vultour wrote:
| I found a similar website for a different university a few
| weeks ago and have been shocked by the same thing. Some of
| the people had total compensation listed at over $3 million
| which is a completely insane number if you're not from the
| US.
| solarhoma wrote:
| Athletics typically brings in the most revenue and exposure
| for a university. I do not agree with these programs being so
| handsomely rewarded. But it seems most of America disagrees
| based on college football viewership.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Technically only men's football and men's basketball are
| usually profitable for universities. Most other sports
| programs are run at a loss, and funded by football and
| basketball.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| At many schools, the football and/or basketball programs
| literally fund all other athletics programs...including the
| _scholarships_ for those other athletes.
|
| Some schools, like LSU, have reported a 100x return _or
| greater_ on their investment in their football coaches
| salaries, with respect to increased alumni donations,
| memorabilia sales, etc.
| dstaley wrote:
| LSU alum here, and I can confirm that our athletic
| performance is a rising tide. It's my understanding
| though that LSU athletics pays employees from its own
| revenue. So it's not like LSU is diverting funds meant
| for academics to athletics (in the macro sense). As an
| alum I frequently get asked to donate to the LSU
| Foundation which is an entity separate from the Tiger
| Athletic Foundation, which is where you can donate
| specifically to the athletic department.
| pessimizer wrote:
| College athletics are an entertainment industry grafted onto
| an educational institution. They bring in an enormous amount
| of revenue, and must employ star power to compete. Star power
| costs money.
|
| It's best to not think of athletics as part of the university
| at all, except when they start to lose money and become
| parasitic.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Collegiate athletics, especially at the highest division
| (which University of Michigan is in), can be lucrative
| revenue streams, particularly in football/basketball; top
| positions within are compensated nicely.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The basketball or (American) football coach will be the most
| highly compensated individual at most tier 1 athletics
| schools
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| m-watson wrote:
| Yea it is pretty common in US universities, coaches are also
| often the highest paid in the state.
|
| https://moneywise.com/managing-
| money/employment/the-10-highe...
| slownews45 wrote:
| Normal - a reminder that US Football probably brings in a LOT
| more money than a soccer club at an german university.
|
| ESPN is doing something like $5B (billion) at maybe $450M per
| year going forward for the SEC conference? Some parts of that
| deal are going up 3x+.
|
| https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2020/sec-
| esp...
|
| So it's been going up like crazy. The key thing is to get the
| athletes paid in my view.
|
| These sports are not your average rec league type pickup
| games.
|
| That ties into massive fundraising by university that rides
| the back of these games.
| mturmon wrote:
| In universities with teaching hospitals, it's common for
| doctors or medical directors within the hospital to be very
| well-compensated (>$1M/year, say).
| nightski wrote:
| Frankly, I'll never work for a company with public pay. I don't
| want equality, I want to be able to negotiate my value to the
| company whether that is more or less than others. This is why I
| became a freelancer years ago and have vastly increased my
| income. I'm paid for the value I provided the company's bottom
| line, not some arbitrary "equal" amount based on an arbitrary
| title as a cog in the machine.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I worked for a trading firm that had public pay & it
| certainly wasn't about equality. It was simply recognition
| that people will talk about pay and it was easier to get in
| front of any ill will & miscommunication.
|
| There were extremely wide pay bands there for the same
| function and it worked fine because the company was perfectly
| happy to tell people "that other person is paid more because
| they are worth more to us". I find that a whole lot more
| palatable to the nonsense pay bands I see at the regular tech
| company.
|
| Don't lie to people about why your pay is secret (it's always
| for information asymmetry in negotiations) and be honest to
| your employees about their value to the company and
| everything seems to sort itself out.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" it's always for information asymmetry in
| negotiations"_
|
| There are other reasons; depending on how varied the roles
| and responsibilities are in an organization, and the people
| working there (partly 'culture'), this kind of information
| can make some people get embarrassed or envious. This is
| obviously most true for company with wider ranges of
| operations (highly paid engineers vs. lower paid
| manufacturing workers and/or customer service personnel,)
| in areas where 'value to company' is not a widely-shared
| outlook.
| golemiprague wrote:
| In trading firm you can measure value by how much money a
| trader makes for the company, people can almost guess your
| salary, or at least your bonuses based on this data, so
| exposing it is not such a big deal. But how do you measure
| software developers? it is not that simple and exposing
| salaries can create a lot of jealousy between people
| because there is no clear criteria.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > I'm paid for the value I provided the company's bottom line
|
| Completely untrue. Imagine you spend three years building an
| app. You'll produce zero revenue during those years, and even
| after it ships, it'll take years more to pay off the money
| invested.
|
| In reality, like any other good, your pay is determined by
| what someone is willing to pay for you.
| lovich wrote:
| Public pay information doesn't require equality.
|
| If you actually are better then you'll negotiate better pay.
|
| You're saying the equivalent of "I don't want a free market.
| If other people have the same information I do then I won't
| be able to benefit off the information disparity and have to
| compete on merit"
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Public pay information doesn't require equality.
|
| That's absolutely NOT how it works in practice. It is
| widely studied that there are HUGE differences in
| programmer productivity. While the theoretical "10x"
| programmer may not be that common, I see "2x" programmers
| _all the time_.
|
| But you hardly _ever_ see 2x differences in salaries, _even
| though this would be the fair thing if you were looking at
| output_. Once pay becomes public, management is basically
| constrained to keep people in relatively tight bands
| because it 's trivial for anyone on the lower end of a pay
| scale to complain that Programmer X gets paid more money,
| even if Programmer X gets shit out the door 2x faster.
| [deleted]
| cycomanic wrote:
| Let's assume that is true, what has that to do with
| public pay information. You say yourself you hardly see
| 2x differences in salary, and I assume you are not only
| talking about public pay companies (I certainly have not
| seen it much either even in non public pay companies).
| lovich wrote:
| It is trivial to complain in general.
|
| If a trivial complaint from a colleague who, in your
| theoretical here, is less productive than you can make
| your employer not pay you more then that means you are
| only trivially more productive or negotiating pay based
| on something other than productivity.
|
| Labor is told repeatedly that wages are based on market
| forces and companies have to act at a sociopathic level
| of responding to economics.
|
| Why does the narrative always flip to employers having to
| act emotionally whenever labor would get an up like
| decreasing the information asymmetry between employers
| and employees?
| indrax wrote:
| If 2x programmers are paid ~2x then the company is using
| some performance metric to influence pay, but then for
| pay to remain secret the performance metric also has to
| be secret.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| You don't see differences in salaries perfectly
| correspond to differences in outputs for the same reasons
| that companies want to pay less for remote work. Pay in
| general doesn't correspond that great to value provided.
| Potential complaints about pay comparisons are way down
| the list of reasons.
| suriyaG wrote:
| The problem, I believe is in objectively measuring said
| "productivity". Yes, you say person A is 2X productive
| than person B. But that's just arbitrary from your POV.
| Someone in the same team may mark them as 1.5X
| productive. Heck, the same person you saw working 2X one
| week might not work the same amount the next. If you have
| any suggestion on ways of measuring productivity. That'll
| be cool to hear.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I agree, measuring productivity is very difficult. And as
| you said, it can be a moving target as well.
|
| But I don't think you are claiming there are not
| significant differences in productivity? Given that, it's
| not unreasonable for the more productive people to ask
| for more compensation, even if it is difficult to
| identify who they are.
|
| It's definitely a hard problem. There is probably a lot
| of room for improvement in general for how we approach
| this.
| varjag wrote:
| Some people consistently outperform most others in their
| clique. Fair compensation is a problem without a great
| solution there, but denial is not the answer.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing that is a problem, and the reason
| this is a thorny issue is that there is no reliable way
| to measure programming productivity: https://martinfowler
| .com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.htm...
|
| That said, while it can't be measured, I also don't think
| anyone would disagree that it _does_ exist, in that I 've
| easily see engineers that can produce reams of quality
| code in a fraction of the time other engineers can
| produce buggy code.
|
| But yes, I do think there is an amount of judgment at the
| end of the day, which is why this is a tricky subject.
| ravitation wrote:
| If one can't make a compelling case to be in a higher
| "band," and therefore get paid more, then I'm failing to
| see how they could possibly make the case that they are
| actually 2x productive.
| serial_dev wrote:
| At most companies I worked for, I'm sure there is 2x-3x
| difference in "raw" dev productivity, or even 10x once we
| keep in mind the affects of the correct prioritization
| and technical solution, but the salary difference is
| almost always within 50% band. The most productive people
| could never negotiate 5x salaries.
| ravitation wrote:
| I'm not saying there would be a 5x, or even 2x, salary.
| Only that if one cannot even negotiate for oneself, on
| the basis of some self-perceived productivity disparity,
| a higher salary (of literally any meaningful magnitude),
| then it seems quite dubious that such a productivity
| disparity even exists (especially at the perceived
| magnitude), given how flawed comparing "raw" productivity
| often is.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't think public pay means you can't negotiate your
| salary to get paid what you believe you deserve.
|
| Did you ever wonder if maybe your negotiation skills aren't
| as good as you think? Public pay could be a way of finding
| out if you are selling yourself short.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's easy to contact salary services to know what the
| market rate is for your position. If anything, people with
| better "negotiation skills" do this proactively, while
| other people wander and complain without realizing much of
| this information is already publicly available.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > It's easy to contact salary services to know what the
| market rate is for your position.
|
| This would be easier and more accessible if the data was
| just available.
| ravitation wrote:
| I'm interested to know how having access to information,
| which the opposing party in said negotiation has access to,
| would hurt you?
|
| It seems unlikely that it hurts you directly in your own
| negotiation, and more likely is a benefit. It might hurt you
| indirectly - in that it helps other employees, who are making
| less than you, potentially make more, and thereby reduce your
| own theoretical maximum pay (this doesn't seem very
| compelling though)... But, it seems naively egocentric to
| believe that, over the course of one's career, that indirect
| harm would be greater than the potential direct benefit...
|
| What am I missing here?
| Frost1x wrote:
| There tends to be an assumption that more information is
| always better but it ultimately depends on how one
| interprets and uses that information (time and absorptive
| capacity is important). Most models that push for more
| information assume perfect decision making (utilizing all
| the information effectively and optimally). That is not
| always the case (I might even argue often).
|
| Information overload can lead to analysis paralysis, adding
| complexity to properly weighing information, and ultimately
| land into poor decision making processes. In the case of
| salary information, perhaps I perceive that I'm a below
| average worker. When handed the average, I might be willing
| to low ball myself because my thought process may think pay
| is directly correlated to skill or value given to a company
| and if I perceive my ability to produce as lower than
| others, I may be willing, during a negotiation process, to
| accept low balled values.
|
| In the era of the data deluge, we're learning it's not
| always the case that more information is better. More and
| even high quality information needs high quality decision
| making. If you think of human decision making as flawed
| (hint: we all make flawed decisions so it is), then our
| processes will not always make good use of new information,
| even with high quality concise information. It's very
| possible for more information to result in undesired or
| negative effects.
|
| We like to pretend we have all sorts of oracle systems out
| there but we really don't. In the case of knowing salaries
| I tend to agree with you: knowing what your competition
| make is better, most of the time.
| ravitation wrote:
| Your example, while potentially leading to a lower
| salary, is not actually an argument against public salary
| information, unless you assume the goal is universally
| higher salaries... Which, in your example, you explicitly
| state is not the goal of the worker... The prior is, in
| my opinion, generally the safer assumed goal.
|
| Regardless, yes, more information yields the possibility
| of incorrect analysis, but I don't think that it's
| obvious that the information in this instance, the
| salaries of one's peers, would be of such complexity that
| knowing it would result in frequent misinterpretation to
| the detriment of the worker. In fact, given the stated
| goals of the worker in your example, even they use such
| information to their own (personal) moral, if not their
| financial, benefit.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| You're conflating openness with equality. Public salaries
| don't mean they have to be the same salary for all, because
| people are not the same.
|
| It's frequent that the salary of a freelancer working for a
| company becomes public among its employees. That doesn't mean
| similar employees will ask the same salary, because they know
| the freelancer can do something they can't, or they can't do
| it as well.
| ljm wrote:
| Or more literally, you can't take a freelancer on a 3 month
| contract at 700 a day and say, "well based on what they're
| being paid, my salary should be 170k!"
| [deleted]
| moron4hire wrote:
| Shouldn't your performance influence the title you end up
| having? Just because your pay is based on your title doesn't
| mean your relative performance level can't be rewarded.
| Perform better = increase grade in career track.
| ljm wrote:
| Arguably, freelancing or starting your own business will
| continue to be the best way to achieve this (and it comes
| with considerable risk), as your negotiation skills and
| business acumen will contribute to your income, as well every
| other skill not directly connected to the job description for
| a specific role.
|
| At a full-time, salaried job, though? Do you get a higher
| salary because of your demonstrable value, or just because
| you've become a great salesman? The latter being why tech
| companies throw up barrier after barrier in their hiring
| process to try and differentiate between smooth talking and
| genuine skill (or value).
|
| The point being, would you even work for a company at all
| knowing where you stand as a freelancer, or a consultant?
| From where I'm standing, publishing the payroll wouldn't make
| a jot of a difference.
| Veen wrote:
| I completely agree. My pay is based on a private agreement
| between me and my employer. It has nothing to do with other
| employees, just as their pay has nothing to do with me.
| vkou wrote:
| > Frankly, I'll never work for a company with public pay. I
| don't want equality,
|
| Public pay does not mean equality. Most public institutions
| have public pay, but the janitor does not make as much as the
| CEO.
|
| > I want to be able to negotiate my value to the company
| whether that is more or less than others.
|
| In which case, public pay is an incredibly important bit of
| information for you to frame your negotiation around.
|
| Being unhappy with public pay is like going to a car
| dealership and being unhappy that there are prices written on
| the windows of the car its selling. You can still negotiate
| from those prices. In fact, you're expected to.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can more accurately ascertain the true market value of
| your work by knowing the salaries of your peers. It has
| nothing to do with equality.
|
| Also, even in companies that don't post their salaries have
| pay grades and bands.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I wouldn't want my to work at such a company either, but not
| because of negotiation power. I'd avoid it because I think it
| would lead to a sense of competition with coworkers over pay,
| complete with resentments, and that would be irritating.
| Afforess wrote:
| You are making the argument that public pay reduces the upper
| window on merit-based compensation. This may even be true!
|
| However, consider the other group of people this helps.
| Minorities, H1B holders, other commonly discriminated
| classes, who discover they are doing the same work as a
| colleague and being payed 1/3 the rate. Should these folks
| get screwed over so you can get your negotiated high pay? Has
| the trade off even been considered?
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong. I just want to make clear what
| the other side is arguing for - and it's not some evil plot
| to screw you in particular. It's to help a different group.
| zepto wrote:
| > it's not some evil plot to screw you in particular
|
| It might not be an 'evil plot', but corporations routinely
| support wage suppressing measures.
| Veen wrote:
| > Should these folks get screwed over so you can get your
| negotiated high pay?
|
| They're not getting screwed over. They're getting paid what
| they agreed to when they took the job, just like everyone
| else is.
| fnimick wrote:
| And it's an unethical system where people who have
| leverage end up able to negotiate more pay for the same
| output than people who do not. I suspect that if you
| weren't in a privileged position, you'd be upset about
| the disparity too.
| nightski wrote:
| Leverage is skill and results. Skill and results do not
| come from "privilege", it is earned through years of hard
| work, practice and dedication.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Ah come on, we know that this is not true. For example we
| know that many CEOs come from very select few
| universities, have typically unique connections through
| families etc.. So not really hard work practice and
| dedication
| Veen wrote:
| They don't last long if they can't do the job though,
| even if they had an advantage in their climb to the top.
| ravitation wrote:
| I generally agree with what you're saying, but it's often
| more simple than that. The greatest leverage in a salary
| negotiation comes from the freedom to actually quit, a
| freedom, especially in the United States, that many do
| not have (and never "earn"). While, on the other hand,
| the privileged are born with this freedom.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| This is why equality often ends up being a race to the
| bottom. If you disallow rewarding exceptional behavior and
| people, or only let everyone have the same thing, then
| there's just no way around the reality of limited resources
| and the inherent inequality of genetics and interest/effort.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't see calls for equality as meaning that you can't
| make more money by performing better. I see calls for
| equality meaning that the basis on which pay rates are
| decided are applied to all equally.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Maybe we see different things. Many people, including on
| HN, argue for things like lottery systems for
| universities, i.e. "you can't get into a better
| university by performing better in grade school".
| tayo42 wrote:
| Are you actually able to do that in any typical company.
| Usually your stuck in a pay band ime
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I'm paid for the value I provided the company's bottom line
|
| Nope. You're paid for your ability to negotiate. Big
| difference. It's very obvious in some companies where it's
| easy to find higher paid people who are mediocre compared to
| their colleagues. They get paid more not because they bring
| in more value, but because they negotiated better.
|
| And, seriously: Except for a few cases (2 person business or
| something) no one has an accurate amount of how much you add
| to the bottom line. It's a safe bet you don't. So the notion
| that either party knows your value is just flawed.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > no one has an accurate amount of how much you add to the
| bottom line. It's a safe bet you don't.
|
| +1. This is extra impossible at tech companies that "give
| away" products. How much do you add to the bottom line for
| improving google search algo? Its directly 0 because a
| better algo doesnt mean more money (it would at a hedge
| fund!) and indirectly it could be billions if it means more
| people use the product (or it could be zero if one thinks
| that google's 98% market share means the algo is
| irrelevant)
|
| How much does an employee on Alexa add to amazon's bottom
| line? Its a huge project that is important to the company,
| but it makes almost $0 and is obviously not free to run...
| so should you lose money to be an alexa employee?
|
| How do you measure this at any real company?
| salawat wrote:
| Hate to break it to you, but any accountant with any data
| savvy can you give a more or less accurate ballpark
| figure with the right details. (This is also why you
| should be chummy with Tim in Accounting; you'll be amazed
| the things you can pick up shooting the shit with the
| finance department).
|
| BI, in fact, is almost entirely the artform of
| synthesizing the answer to that very question for the
| purposes of executive decisionmaking.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| It is most definitely not impossible. How do you think
| companies decide on budgets? They're not just guessing;
| they're predicting how different projects will impact
| revenue. Alexa isn't important to Amazon because it's
| "cool" -- it's important because they've put an actual
| dollar amount to its return on investment.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I have never seen these things come from anything other
| than guesswork. It's educated guesses, but guesses
| nonetheless. It's why products get killed too early or
| too late. Measuring these things properly and causally is
| hard and sometimes infeasible.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > it's important because they've put an actual dollar
| amount to its return on investment.
|
| The issue isn't whether you can put a dollar amount, but
| on the confidence in accuracy. I've seen how this is done
| in my company: Construct a narrative, assign numbers to
| that narrative (with some justification that doesn't
| always involve real world data), and come up with a
| total. They are incentivized to inflate the numbers as
| their goal is to increase their budget - not be accurate.
| If all departments did this, and you add the numbers they
| come up with, we'd easily end up with a number 10x our
| annual revenue, which is ridiculous.
|
| Some folks who are not vested in this will aim for
| accuracy. And even then, they will have a large
| confidence interval - easily off by 2x.
|
| How are you going to go from there and estimate an
| employee's value? Even if the project's value was 100%
| accurate, you still need to break that down to each
| employee. And since most employees don't work
| independently, you need to model the interaction effects
| (my work depends on your work - if you perform poorly, my
| contribution to the bottom line is reduced).
|
| If the estimate of the value of the project is off by 2x,
| then you've already got a pathetic lower bound on the
| interval length of your confidence interval.
|
| Alexa is actually an easier case to model. My job is to
| improve the internal communications infrastructure so
| that important messages get delivered (IT announcements,
| CEO communications, etc). How will you model my
| contribution to the bottom line?
|
| I can assure everyone: At any decent sized company, _no
| one_ is trying to come up with your value to the company.
| solveit wrote:
| > How do you think companies decide on budgets?
|
| With great effort and generally mediocre results.
| Figuring out the contribution of an individual project is
| _hard_. An individual person even more so. And this isn
| 't because we're not smart enough, it's because the idea
| of an individual contribution when the whole is greater
| than the sum of its parts is not coherent.
|
| So how do you split the returns? Well, the entire field
| of cooperative game theory has something to say about
| that, and the answer is complicated but the gist is that
| it depends less on contribution and more on negotiating
| power.
|
| Are you willing and able to just leave if you don't get
| what you want? Are you hard to replace? Can you do your
| stuff with a different company if you leave? All that is
| much more important than how much your presence benefits
| the common enterprise compared to the counterfactual
| where nobody did your job.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Also, it doesn't take into account skilled/hard-to-hire
| roles that are effectively cost centers, like security.
| How much revenue am I responsible for as a security
| engineer? Probably none, especially since the
| consequences for a breach are usually negligible.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Do you really think the average marketer at a company is
| poorer at negotiating than the average SWE, and what do you
| think their comparative salaries are?
| dopamean wrote:
| You're 100% right and they seem to know that but not
| realize that they know that. This quote before saying "I'm
| paid for the value I provide" spills the beans...
|
| > I want to be able to negotiate my value to the company
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| This is pretty much the long and short of it entirely. And
| it's why there shouldn't be secrecy in salary. The idea
| that you're paid your value to the company on-balance gets
| even more absurd the larger it is. You aren't an exact
| quantified line item on revenue vs expense. That isn't even
| the criteria except in the abstract or in a very, very
| small business.
|
| I absolutely agree that people doing ostensibly the same
| role or with the same job title (but not necessarily
| responsibilities or time investment) can be deserving of a
| pretty wide gap in pay based on the particulars but that
| isn't the purpose or the reality of trying to keep pay a
| secret.
|
| Also even if you think you deserve whatever you negotiate,
| having more information instead of less is probably a good
| idea during your negotiations.
|
| The only motivation for keeping them a secret at that point
| is so that your coworkers don't realize you're being
| grossly overpaid for what you do compared to the rest of
| them and honestly I'm okay with that. Additionally once you
| get high enough in a company the salary isn't even what
| matters or where the money is really made.
| analyst74 wrote:
| As an employee, if you consistently deliver measurable and
| outsized impact, you get high ratings and promotions that
| will increase your pay dramatically.
|
| And as freelance developer, how do you know you're not
| underpaid? For example, a client offered you $x to build a
| system, how do you know that's a fair amount without market
| data?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| A simple rule for negotiations is that whoever has more
| information has an advantage. That means if workers don't know
| the exact pay scales they are almost by definition at a
| disadvantage while the company has the full info.
|
| To the people who think they negotiated really well and want this
| to be kept from their coworkers I say that a lot of you have been
| lied to and you are making what everybody else makes or even
| less. I still remember a guy proudly telling me about his great
| contract and his face when I told him that I made almost twice as
| him.
| stagger87 wrote:
| > A simple rule for negotiations is that whoever has more
| information has an advantage
|
| Outside of some progressive companies, what jobs exist where
| everyone's salary is public at the time of negotiation (when
| hired?) and people can negotiate salaries 2x or more for the
| same position?
|
| Do you think you deserve to make 2x what your colleague does?
|
| Did you tell your colleague why you think you deserve 2x their
| salary?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| It's not my job to justify my salary to colleagues or reduce.
| Once they have the info they can ask for more money and
| management has to justify why one person is higher paid than
| the other or raise pay. In this particular case I was
| actually charging less than the contracting companies that
| often kept 70% of that money for themselves.
|
| But the main point is that knowledge is power. Ignorance may
| protect your fragile ego from inconvenient truths but it's
| not bliss.
| stagger87 wrote:
| > and management has to justify why one person is higher
| paid than the other
|
| And when they can't, do you think they will raise your
| coworkers salary to match yours, or bring yours down? (I
| know what I'd bet on) Persons who benefit from that
| asymmetry of information may not even know it. I'm not
| saying you are one of those people, but if your first
| reaction wasn't "Yes I deserve to get paid 2x my coworker",
| then I suspect you won't continue to be in a transparent
| system.
|
| You also skipped over my first question in my previous
| reply. I am interested in your feedback on that. You claim
| that "knowledge is power". Can you point to an industry or
| large segment of jobs where this sort of salary negotiation
| (such as yours) takes place in a transparent system.
| Alternatively, can you point to any study/research that
| backs up your claim?
| tathisit wrote:
| Are you by any chance ex Google, ex Facebook, multi millionaire
| tech lead?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| You wish! Just a lowly contractor at the time.
| milesvp wrote:
| This sort of illustrates why I dislike talking about salary.
| This person went from super happy with his life to unhappy, and
| nothing is any different in his life. I understand that this
| unhappiness is part of what drives income equality, so I'm glad
| more people are having these conversations, but I was once in a
| job for a number of years, where for several reasons I just
| needed to weather the storm, and I certainly didn't need to
| know what my coworkers were making at the time.
| munk-a wrote:
| The more information you have the better a position you'll be
| in - always. If you have an extremely stressful event in your
| life then making sure that finances isn't also a stressor is
| important for your mental health and, by extension, your
| physical health. A perfectly valid way to react to being
| underpaid is to say "the job security is worth this
| difference in salary while I sort out this other problem in
| my life" - but in that case it's you that's making the choice
| that the difference is acceptable. Everyone staying mum on
| salary only causes companies to be able to get away with
| exploiting introverts and people with low self-confidence.
|
| If salaries are public it isn't a super rare case where
| friendly coworkers will help to build you up to asking for
| that promotion.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| > The more information you have the better a position
| you'll be in - always.
|
| I agree with this 90%. More information is very useful most
| of the time, as long as it is high quality.
|
| However, given that we humans do not have infinite
| processing power or infinite emotional capacity, there are
| obviously limits to the amount of information we want to
| have at any point in time. And these limits will change
| depending on the situation and our own internal state.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| So basically -- if you're getting exploited, ignorance is
| bliss?
| lrem wrote:
| If you're happy with what you're getting, are you being
| exploited?
|
| Personally: I've reached the point where I don't want to
| know what my colleagues make. I know many of them make
| significantly more, but that's fine. In some cases I'm
| outright happy for them.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "If you're happy with what you're getting, are you being
| exploited?"
|
| Yes you are exploited if you don't know what would be
| possible.
| beebmam wrote:
| Exploitation is a tax that your boss (and their boss) is
| hiding from you. Literally just taking right out of your
| pocket before you ever even see it, just like a gangster
| would do.
| wccrawford wrote:
| This is why I don't discuss pay with anyone. I don't want
| them to feel bad, and I certainly don't want to feel bad
| myself.
| danaris wrote:
| And this is how companies keep you in the dark, and
| maintain the information asymmetry that gives them the
| upper hand in negotiations.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Don't tie your self-worth to your income.
| inafewwords wrote:
| I've found a few years ago some people were making more than me
| at generally lower skill and abilities. So I started giving my
| other colleagues my past pay history and raise %s and it turns
| out they were getting significantly less pay. I'm glad for them
| to be brought up so that my party doesn't seem drastically
| higher as well when I all for mine.
|
| I've changed job positions and let them know my previous pay
| since they are in that role now. Sadly I think their pay is
| generally smaller since I negotiate until I embarrass myself
| and my friends are women and I understand that the negotiations
| are less aggressive from that population in general.
|
| I made 12% more than them at the same job role.
|
| And at my current I'm also about that much higher than the
| bottom paid (a guy internal promotion).
|
| I asked for 12% raise citing my usefulness to the team as a
| whole. Still waiting on the results of that. It seems I
| negotiate in a very clumsy manner but still getting better
| results than those I know about.
|
| Possibly those that get paid less share their pay, but those
| that get paid more do not?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| One neat little tip. If you work for a large employer that has
| h1bs, you can see their starting salary:
| https://h1bdata.info/index.php
|
| This assumes of course, that they pay those employees fairly. At
| my company, we do, so it's a useful source of salary info when
| negotiating salary.
| ttmb wrote:
| These numbers do not seem to correspond to actual salaries. If
| I look up my company I can see multiple entries for job titles
| that I have specific knowledge of, and the quoted salary is
| much much lower than anyone's base salary has ever been.
| standardUser wrote:
| Millennials certainly seem more willing to openly discuss
| salaries, which is a promising trend. I've also noticed that
| people in NY are much more eager to discuss specific salary
| numbers than people in SF.
| analog31 wrote:
| On the east coast you're nobody if you're not rich. On the west
| coast you're nobody if you're not trying to get rich.
| tathisit wrote:
| How many of those millenials were earning minimum wage?
| dml2135 wrote:
| As a New Yorker, that's interesting. Just curious -- do you
| find people in NY are also more willing to discuss what they
| pay in rent?
| standardUser wrote:
| Rent was a hot topic in SF in recent years because costs
| skyrocketed, so it was actually talked about a lot. I live in
| NY now and I haven't noticed people talking about rent as
| much. But I can give you a ballpark figure (if not an exact
| figure) of how much most of my friends here earn, even though
| I have never once asked!
| jackconsidine wrote:
| In freelance networks I've worked in this is par for the course.
| I understand the rationale- they'd like their network to be more
| valuable by being the gatekeeper on everything- but it's
| extremely off-putting to hear you're never allowed to mention
| rates. In general, I mistrust services and systems that derive
| value from opacity.
| pope_meat wrote:
| A friend of mine worked as an editor for a news paper. He was a
| new hire, and a woman who has been working as an editor at the
| same news paper for 9 years asked him what his salary offer was.
| It turned out she after 9 years was getting paid $3k less than
| what he was offered as a new hire.
| lliamander wrote:
| Even as a man this has happened to me. In my case at least (and
| I think in many cases) is that the market price of labor
| changes, which requires employers to pay more for new hires,
| but they don't go back and adjust the salaries of existing
| employees.
| soco wrote:
| Which basically means they don't value experience in their
| own company. What better reason to say sayonara?
| ericmcer wrote:
| There is a sort of stagnancy that can surround people who have
| been there for years though.
|
| For many devs, the first 3ish months you lack context to be
| super useful, then that first 2-4 years of hard work and
| enthusiasm are probably your peak productivity. It gets harder
| to maintain enthusiasm as the years go by, so some devs who are
| cruising with 5+ years might actually provide less long term
| value than a new hire.
| twistedpair wrote:
| A friend screened a female candidate years ago. She was highly
| qualified, with serious experience. When asked what her salary
| expectations were, she said what she made, but confessed she
| doubted the prospective employer could possibly pay that.
|
| The reality was she was quite under paid. It's quite saddening
| that her prior employer seemed to have convinced her that such
| low pay was top of the industry mark.
| conductr wrote:
| This is business as usual in all industries. Companies don't
| value tenure and you're often better off changing companies for
| promotion, salary increases, etc.
|
| To be honest, $3k sounds like a tiny variance. I frequently see
| 20-30k differences on middle management roles. Often 10%-30%
| differences. Getting several years of 3% increases can put you
| well behind the market.
|
| This is one of the reasons salary bands are so wide. Employers
| don't want to bring current staff up to market but want the
| ability to hire top talent. Also, there's a fair bit of budget
| exceptions that get made when a great candidate comes along
| (whether they're great or not, TBD)
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Experience is valuable. Experience with what specifically
| your current employer does is not.
| [deleted]
| Supermancho wrote:
| This is why switching jobs to a new employer is the single
| best way to get a salary increase. The chances that you will
| get an increase from an employer's pay schedule (or by active
| request) is far lower than simply applying somewhere else for
| the going rate, in the US.
| mfer wrote:
| > Companies don't value tenure
|
| This is very true. They value your ability to do a job. If
| you've been around a long time and aren't being valuable in
| your current job they often won't value you. But, if you are
| being useful in your current job they will value you.
|
| Tenure is not valued. Usefulness to the company is. Whether
| you're 20 or 60 this same thing applies.
|
| > you're often better off changing companies for promotion,
| salary increases, etc.
|
| This depends.
|
| Companies often view their people as expenses. They often
| want to get the maximum they can out of someone at the least
| expense. There are exceptions to this but it's the rule.
|
| So, you need to learn to maximize the thing you value if you
| want that. Things like position and compensation.
|
| When being courted by a new company they will use these to
| pull you in. But, if you learn the system at your current
| employer you can use that system to your benefit as well.
| Your current company doesn't often see benefit from paying
| people more and promotions. In some cases, they're looking
| for the people motivated enough to seek them and not wait for
| them to be given. Especially at the higher levels.
|
| Of course, using your current companies system to your
| benefit means you want to stay there.
|
| > 10%-30% differences
|
| Hiring companies are looking for that number which will pull
| people away. Even from a job they like. What they initially
| offer is almost always lower than they are able to go.
|
| Just my 2 cents after many years in the systems.
| munk-a wrote:
| > This is very true. They value your ability to do a job.
| If you've been around a long time and aren't being valuable
| in your current job they often won't value you. But, if you
| are being useful in your current job they will value you.
|
| I think this point is correct - but I think a more
| important point is that companies forget how much value an
| employee that prevents fires creates. If you work in a
| position where you reduce risk to the company you'll need
| to work hard to constantly remind the company of how much
| risk you're helping them evade.
|
| > Hiring companies are looking for that number which will
| pull people away. Even from a job they like. What they
| initially offer is almost always lower than they are able
| to go.
|
| That's absolutely a core truth - nobody wants to pay more
| than they have to and salary negotiation is one of the only
| fields where (in western cultures) we actually haggle over
| prices. Employees almost never have significant experience
| advocating for themselves since haggling is a very rare
| activity.
| twistedpair wrote:
| Given the ongoing inflation in the US is 5.4% so far this year,
| everyone has gotten their 5.4% cost of living increase for
| 2021, right?
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Similar situations arise constantly in the tech sector. If you
| stay with a company for a few years, you'll probably get
| surpassed in salary by new college grads depending on the
| market at the time.
|
| If you let it go too long before you bring it up, when you
| finally do, you'll get some BS about how they "can't" bump you
| up because they "can't" authorize that large of a salary bump.
| A purely BS, arbitrary, rule.
| munk-a wrote:
| If you find yourself in a situation like that and want to
| remedy it then get a competing offer. If you're making 80k
| and sit down with your manager to talk about the possibility
| of leaving for a 120k position that you're clearly qualified
| for then a lot of companies will respond with a counter
| offer. It sucks but you often need to turn your employment
| rate into a bidding war.
|
| Oh - just FYI - be prepared to jump ship if you do this. Some
| people are manipulative assholes that react strongly and
| quickly to any employees standing up for themselves - and
| other companies are legitimately failing and can't afford the
| pay bump. In either case you're better off at the new shop.
| Having an actual job offer to another shop should give you
| the confidence to risk your current position.
| glouwbug wrote:
| It's best to just go. Once you've accepted the counter
| offer you've already indicated to your superiors that
| you're ready to leave
| munk-a wrote:
| It really depends - sometimes the team I'm working for is
| worth the hairiness of negotiating the pay raise - other
| times it's nothing to write home about and jumping ship
| is easier.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Then I guess you "can't" be bothered to keep working at that
| company. Pity.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| As someone who has spent a most of my life working and was never
| told what to say or not say about his pay by his employer, my
| bullshit detector went into the redzone after reading the story
| that says 50% of employers tell workers not to discuss pay. Was I
| such an odd exception?
|
| So I dug deeper, and discovered this was an activism piece, not a
| scientific study, by the Institute for Women's Policy Research -
| not a group well known for objectivity.
|
| They commissioned a poll but did not disclose the details of the
| poll such as the exact questions asked and the responses for each
| question, which is the basic minimum required to take a poll
| seriously.
|
| Instead, they published a glossy "brief" - https://iwpr.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/01/Pay-Secrecy-Poli... - which claims 12% of
| employers prohibit discussing pay -- that's much more plausible
| than 50%. So how do you get to the headline 50%? Because that is
| how many people reported being "discouraged" -- but were they
| discouraged by their employer, by their peers, or by their own
| conscience? Here is where knowing the actual questions to the
| poll would be useful.
|
| Please do not listen to _any_ reports of a poll when only the
| summary results are provided but the specific questions and
| breakdowns of the answers are not provided. Particularly when the
| poll is commissioned by a pressure group not known for
| objectivity.
|
| If you can afford to put together a big glossy "brief" then you
| have the bandwidth to host result text files that disclose what
| the questions were and the poll methodology. This is the minimum
| bar for credibility, an outfit like USA today used to be aware of
| this, and so is any think tank worth their salt.
|
| Thus my spidey senses detected there is a good chance this is an
| activism piece that is intentionally misleading to promote some
| "greater cause".
|
| A good approach is to look at what other stories the same author
| wrote, to see if there is a track record of spreading propaganda
| in the name of some moral cause or whether it's just shoddy work.
|
| And indeed the author is a crusading reporter, that is, one who
| focuses on moral _causes_ and _issues_ rather than _news_. Real
| news is messy. Sometimes it supports your beliefs and other times
| it doesn 't. But a look at his articles (as well as their social
| media presence) reveals an activist who cannot be objective or
| professional. E.g. the "news" story about racism causing food
| deserts and creating food "injustice". I get that this is an
| issue that many on the left are passionate about. But it's not
| _news_. it 's a cause. And when you start reporting your causes
| as news stories, then you lose credibility and also hurt your
| cause.
|
| Here the problem is the general compression: There is a process
| of learning the truth about a situation, coming to some
| conclusion about it, and then figuring out the appropriate course
| of action.
|
| These can be separated into information gathering, issue debate,
| and then solution advocacy, and are best done by different people
| with different skillsets. Everyone must do their part well, which
| means everyone must have integrity. The reporter must seek the
| truth of the facts, not whatever servers their agenda, and the
| think tank must have integrity and a commitment to look deeply
| into issues.
|
| Reporters are supposed to be uncovering hidden information. Not
| advocating well known issues like food deserts or that many
| people don't like to reveal their exact pay to their coworkers.
|
| Think tanks who employ PhDs are supposed to be thinking through
| solutions and advocating solutions. Not pretending to uncover
| "news".
|
| So when the reporter with a bachelors degree skips over the news
| gathering part and dives into synthesis or solution advocacy, you
| can be sure it is a poorly thought out synthesis or solution.
|
| Just as when the think tank tries to create "news", you can be
| sure the think tank's press release is _not_ newsworthy and
| sacrifices were made to try to make it "news". It's not like we
| get a steady stream of new _issues_ to put on a newspaper.
|
| Thus they both do a shoddy job because they lack professionalism
| and discipline, which unfortunately is the current state of both
| modern news as well as think tanks. Everyone wants a podium to
| stand on and shout about the injustice of the world, rather than,
| you know, being good at a job so that progress can be made.
|
| For example, with this type of misinformation we don't even know
| what the problem is. If the study had been done right and the
| actual questions posted, we could have had useful breakdowns of
| how big of a problem this really is, what industries it's
| concentrated in, and the methods used by employers. This could
| then provide real actionable intelligence. But it wouldn't grab
| headlines. So this is an interesting area that a think tank can
| do a real study in. But we don't know the results -- all that
| useful information was sacrificed in order to inflate the problem
| to make it "news worthy".
| tdeck wrote:
| I upvoted this because, while there's a lot to unpack in this
| comment, I think it's valuable to have some criticism of the
| methodology here. People could easily have interpreted this
| question differently and that really skews the results.
|
| I also don't know how representative my own experience is. I've
| only worked a few kinds of jobs, so whether or not I've been
| told explicitly not to discuss pay isn't relevant to most of
| the population.
| lovich wrote:
| I have been told at every job but my current one to not discuss
| pay.
|
| I have been told this formally only once. Every other time was
| an informal meeting over dinner or at a bar, or being told some
| nebulous statement like "that's not really part of our culture
| here" when a manager discovered that I would freely discuss pay
| with coworkers.
|
| It is explicitly illegal to require employees to not discuss
| pay. Of course you're going to find that most people who were
| instructed to not discuss it felt "discouraged" and can't point
| to some paperwork where it was official
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Well now we have two anecdotes. Don't you wish there was an
| unbiased, trustworthy study we could look at it to resolve
| this?
| comeonseriously wrote:
| No, but good luck proving that's why[0] you were fired.
|
| [0] Discussing your salary.
| pessimizer wrote:
| In the US, it's entirely legal to fire someone because of the
| side they part their hair on, or because you're _too attracted
| to them_ [*]. As the asshole, I mean person who was fired, your
| obligation is to eliminate every possible cause other than
| belonging to a protected class or some specific labor law
| corner case. If they didn't write about you in an email, you're
| in trouble.
|
| [*] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/opinion/fired-for-
| being-b...
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Worker protections have _no_ teeth in the US. It 's to the
| point where factory management can literally be caught on
| camera saying they fired a worker for trying to organize a
| union (see American Factory) and the company gets nothing more
| than a slap on the wrist. Nothing is 'illegal' if it's not
| enforced.
| tptacek wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience. In two different companies I
| worked at (none of them companies I ran myself), the company
| settled quickly over claims, at least one of which was
| candidly pretty frivolous. It's annoying to have to find and
| retain an attorney to get this done, but my expectation is
| that if you had an attorney bring a credible claim, you'd
| likely get some degree of satisfaction.
| lovich wrote:
| Does the situation in the United States seem to back up
| this anecdote? Do we see companies fail or suffer extreme
| setbacks from workers exercising their rights across the
| land? Or do we see companies growing at massive rates while
| employee compensation has stagnated?
| pessimizer wrote:
| No. They suffer no setbacks, admit to nothing, and there
| isn't even a record left that can establish a precedent
| for the next person to get screwed. You can tell through
| the pathetic press releases of the various agencies
| responsible, esp. the EEOC: these are the _best_
| settlements they 're getting.
|
| Your best option is to find the sleaziest, most
| experienced lawyer possible. A lawyer who is adept at
| delay, distraction, and costly legal requests. The
| company will settle for a moderate amount (maybe a couple
| years salary in exchange for your silence.) You'll give
| half to the lawyer.
|
| I'm pretty sure that in a lot of cases it's the same
| lawyers threatening to sue the same companies over the
| same behavior, and getting the same settlements in return
| for the same NDA. It can become a relationship between
| lawyer and company functioning like an external severance
| pay arbitration department.
| effingwewt wrote:
| That's nice, but for another point of anecdata I've seen
| more companies flagrantly break laws, than ones who follow
| them, especially when it's in the best interest of the
| company.
|
| Most workers cannot afford to take their employers to
| court, and the businesses know this and take advantage of
| it every single day.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I actually recently did a blog post in which i talked pretty
| openly about my pay, earnings, savings and how purchasing power
| parity fits into all of that (or doesn't):
| https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
|
| That said, it always feels a bit shameful to talk about how much
| you earn, in part due to social conditioning, because of which
| you correlate how much you earn with your worth. No one wants to
| be told that their work is worth 10-20x times less than that of
| someone else (even if knowing that is also useful), which is a
| revelation that stares me in the face after comparing my salary
| with that of people abroad.
|
| Oh well, i don't see why openness would be a bad thing, apart
| from me deciding to be open about this stuff, potential employers
| deciding that they can underpay me because of these figures,
| which would put me at a disadvantage compared to the other people
| who wouldn't talk about that stuff - a problem, that's there in
| the first place because everyone's salaries aren't public to
| begin with. It feels like some sort of a catch 22.
| farmerstan wrote:
| I'm in my 50s. When I was younger, no one talked about pay ever.
| It was never ever broached.
|
| These days, all my younger coworkers openly discuss pay. I really
| like the openness today. It's shared in a way that you're trying
| to help your coworker, like "dude you're totally underpaid I made
| $20k more than that! Go ask for a raise or find a new job!"
|
| It's a different sense of camaraderie that people share these
| days instead of the zero-sum game from when I was younger.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'm also in my 50s and recall when it was completely taboo.
| Except I worked at a startup a few years back where I was told
| going in that we were all making the exact same pay from
| engineers to CTO. We all knew it was below-market pay, but it
| was supposedly so the company could bootstrap. One day I was
| having a conversation with a Russian co-worker (on an H1-B, I
| think) and I said something along the lines of "we're all
| making $XK/month which is about 25% below market, but hopefully
| we'll get some funding and that will change soon...". The look
| on his face told me that something was wrong. "You're making
| $Xk/month?!" he said. "Yeah, you are too, right... right?" "No,
| he replied, $2K/month less." I was really surprised because
| this guy was doing pretty much all of our hardware development
| and he was pretty brilliant. Shortly after he went to the CEO
| and (rightly) demanded parity.
| zerr wrote:
| He should've also demanded the compensation for the past
| time.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| At my first US startup the CTO told me that all engineers are
| making the same slightly below market salaries and receiving
| same options. A few months later I found that most actually
| made almost twice and had way more options. I fix this
| quickly but i still don't understand how people seem to think
| that it's ok to blatantly to somebody
| mikestew wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be a hand-to-mouth startup to
| blatantly lie to folks, it can be a multi-billion-dollar
| multi-national corporation. For instance, when I was a
| manager at Microsoft I had more than one newly-hired report
| tell me that their onboard training said there was no stack
| ranking, which we all now know wasn't even remotely true in
| the early 2000s.
|
| (New hires would mention this, because one of the first
| things I'd tell new hires on my team was how stack ranking
| worked, amongst other parts of the performance review
| process.)
| cma wrote:
| All companies are required by law to post all H1-B employee
| salaries, so you don't even have to ask:
|
| https://h1bdata.info/
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| That's why it's discouraged from the company perspective.
| Everyone would realize they're underpaid. :)
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| First thing a union does when they enter a workplace is talk
| about what everyone is paid.
|
| My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much you
| got paid. There's only 1 reason, they are underpaying someone.
| They propose that it's to my benefit because they can then pay me
| more.
|
| Then a coworker got a better job and told everyone how much he
| was being paid. This angered lots of people because they were
| being paid much less and did much more.
|
| What blows my mind. Minimum wage is $15/hr and they were getting
| $24/hr as senior sysadmins with tons of experience. Soon as they
| decided to get a new job, they got a nice raise near instantly
| and they were gone. Yet their time was billed out above $100/hr.
| It was literally the greed of our employer who kept their wages
| low begging for someone to offer more money and steal them. Such
| a high risk for minimal benefit in greed.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much
| you got paid.
|
| If you're in the US, I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| >If you're in the US, I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
|
| Not in the US, but you know whats funny. The timeline of this
| job was outgoing government who passed the law making it
| illegal. Then a very short period of time, the incoming
| government deleted all the previous government's labour laws.
| So in fact during that time, it was in fact illegal.
|
| Though in context, nobody was punished. We were 2 senior
| staff down already. They had no opportunity to punish anyone.
|
| It's back to legal today. Your employer can have such a rule.
| bityard wrote:
| Cost/benefit analysis says there is nothing for me to gain by
| discussing my salary with my co-workers and only potential
| downsides.
|
| Everyone wants to be paid more than they are of course and I'm no
| exception, but overall I feel like I am being paid pretty close
| to what I am worth. After accounting for the fact that I work for
| company with a decent culture, don't take part in an on-call
| rotation and pretty much get to pick my hours outside of
| scheduled meetings. I know what the market rate is in my area for
| my skills and experience, and I negotiate my pay (and raises)
| with my employer according to that data.
|
| What _would_ hurt me (or at least my image) is if someone who
| does similar work to me went to their manager and said, "hey
| manager, bityard says he makes $x more than me, please give me a
| raise." Now maybe the manager is a completely reasonable guy and
| agrees completely. But it's a small company and maybe that
| particular manager isn't so reasonable. Now I'm the bad guy in
| that manager's eyes for "bragging" about my take-home pay and
| making him do the work to convince _his_ managers to approve the
| raise and justify the increased operating costs, passing along my
| name discreetly to them as well. Or maybe the raise is denied,
| and the guy quits. Then I'm the bad guy. Or the raise is denied
| and the guy is fired for something unrelated. It all gets murky
| and resentful real quick.
|
| Further, if you ask someone at work what their pay is, how do you
| know they are telling the truth? I can think of several reasons
| people might lie about what they make by shifting the number in
| either direction.
|
| At the end of the day, going to your boss and saying you and the
| other employees compared salaries is frankly a pretty lazy (and
| likely ineffective) way to ask for a raise. The _right_ way to
| ask for a raise is to do your own research on market rates, and
| then _prove_ to your employer why you deserve the going rate (or
| higher) based on your work performance and other relevant
| factors. As it always has been.
| Leszek wrote:
| I appreciate your pragmatism, but it falls apart in the
| statement "do your own research on market rates". How do you
| discover those without openness about salaries? You could
| interview at other companies, but then you'd only find other
| employers' opinions on what they could pay specifically you,
| not what they could pay someone else like you.
| bityard wrote:
| There are lots of ways to do this. Interviews with other
| companies are certainly a high-effort but valid strategy.
|
| The easier route:
|
| * Lots of web sites report aggregate salary information by
| profession and location. Often these are not to be trusted
| because {algorithms and marketing} but can still be a useful
| data point.
|
| * Look for job listings with compensation information in
| them.
|
| * In-person networking with your peers in other companies.
| Every decent-size city has meetups for developers and other
| tech professionals. Not everyone is going to be willing to
| share what they make with a near-complete stranger
| (especially if friends are nearby) but some might. This is
| pretty much the only time I would voluntarily share my
| earnings with another person besides my wife. There's no
| reason for me to fib, and unless I'm being profiled for
| identity theft or something, there are no downsides.
|
| * Virtual networking, a.k.a. join a Slack, Discord, or other
| kind of forum with people like you and just ask what someone
| with your experience and skills should make. Since you
| (probably) don't know any of these people, there is little
| consequence.
|
| These are all data points to gather and consider in
| combination in order to arrive at some kind of ballpark
| figure. You don't have to show any of your research to your
| employer, but trust me when I say that it's a crucial step
| because your employer absolutely does already have a very
| good idea of what you are worth to them. This is data for you
| to make sure your number is accurate.
| legulere wrote:
| > The _right_ way to ask for a raise is to do your own research
| on market rates,
|
| This only works until some point. I showed my employer that
| they pay me around 15% less than median for software engineers
| in general (there's public data here on this from taxes). The
| result was that they told me that 15% is too much offered me
| "even" an inflation-adjustment and in the end didn't give me
| anything. All while also telling me they want to keep me and
| how I'm one of their best developers.
|
| Often getting a proper raise only works through jumping the
| ship.
| tyingq wrote:
| > nothing for me to gain by discussing my salary with my co-
| workers and only potential downsides
|
| That sort of makes sense from a social consequences standpoint.
| But, if the data is open, the only real solution for employers
| is to correct upwards. They aren't going to lower the salary of
| high salary outliers. It seems like it would raise the water
| level for everyone.
|
| It's also useful as a way to know you should ask for a raise.
| You don't have to necessarily mention it when asking.
| bityard wrote:
| > They aren't going to lower the salary of high salary
| outliers.
|
| True, probably not. But I have worked for companies that
| would simply stop giving meaningful annual raises if forced
| to for some reason, which would be the same net result.
|
| > You don't have to necessarily mention it when asking.
|
| Also true, but if person A tells person B what they are being
| paid, person A has no guarantees that person B will keep
| their identity a secret. I like my co-workers but I don't
| trust them as much as I trust my family and friends so it's
| just not worth the risk.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| That's why we created https://levels.fyi to collectively help
| people understand compensation and leveling across companies.
| While individually sharing data points is great, our goal is to
| help bring all this information completely into the public sphere
| so even people that don't have a network or are starting their
| first tech job have a resource to ensure they're not getting
| lowballed.
|
| I do believe anonymous pay transparency is very different from
| full individual pay transparency too. Anonymously contributing
| even partially can mitigate a lot of the social stigma around
| attaching your real identity to compensation figures. That said,
| it's still always a good idea to discuss these things with
| friends!
| mabbo wrote:
| Hey just wanted to say thanks. Levels.fyi really helped me out
| when I was negotiating and considering offers recently.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| Glad to hear it!
| Gortal278 wrote:
| I was able to really negotiate a meaningful increase in
| compensation the last time I interviewed around based on the
| insight from levels.fyi. Thanks!
| JohnFen wrote:
| My company was purchased a few years ago and everyone had to sign
| new contracts. The contracts included language prohibiting people
| from discussing their compensation with others.
|
| Someone pointed out that this was just straight-up prohibited, so
| the contracts were rewritten to remove the clause. The funny
| thing is that nobody that I know of has shared, or wants to
| share, information about their compensation. They just wanted the
| option to do so should they choose.
| malwrar wrote:
| I want to talk about pay, and make choices based on what I know
| about other people's pay. I've attempted to do this several times
| with friends, but for a lot of people pay is just too intimate a
| number to discuss objectively.
|
| In one case, we discovered that one friend was getting paid $30k
| less per year than I was, which seemed mostly to be related to
| the fact his parents convinced him that no one was actually
| getting the insane tech salaries people talk about here and thus
| he didn't negotiate. Maybe he took that information with him to
| his employer and successfully negotiated up, maybe he didn't. I
| don't know because he started treating me differently and
| eventually stopped talking to me altogether.
|
| It's not like job title maps to the actual work anyways. Some
| companies only expect SWEs to work various parts of a huge
| monolith that magically gets deployed somewhere. Some companies
| only expect SWEs to own every single part of the process for
| getting an application from a whiteboard to prod. Some companies
| have different expectations depending on your org. Some companies
| vary these expectations based on what they sense they can get
| individuals to do. That's not even discussing the idea that
| people can be better (and thus take less time) than others even
| if they are doing the "same" task. How is pay a useful number in
| that context?
|
| I'm just soured on the whole idea, I don't see how a system based
| on this kind of radical transparency doesn't result in either
| completely leveled salaries or pay reflecting (and enforcing)
| social hierarchies. I just see people using different social
| tools based on group perceptions more than the modicum of
| individual agency I have when I'm able to advocate for my
| specific contribution's value during negotiations.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The problem is that you don't know the value of your
| contribution - unless you're in accounting or the CFO. At least
| with knowledge of what other people make, you can know the
| ratio of relative contributions to compensation.
|
| Without that, you know nothing. You'll be making the case that
| your performance deserves a 20% raise, and they'll negotiate
| you down to a 10% raise. Meanwhile everyone else is making
| twice as much as you. Your estimate of 20% was not based on
| your _value_ it was an estimate that you made of what _sounded_
| reasonable, and what you thought you might be able to get away
| with. That 's easily nullified by the boss always playing
| hardball, and always giving the impression that they're paying
| you as much as you possibly can.
|
| How can you possibly know how much you should be paid if you
| both don't know how much other people are paid, and you don't
| have access to the books?
| malwrar wrote:
| > How can you possibly know how much you should be paid if
| you both don't know how much other people are paid, and you
| don't have access to the books?
|
| Surveys & data on job sites, staying plugged into places like
| this where people discuss salaries semi-anonymously, getting
| to the offer stage at other companies and seeing what they
| propose. It's not a perfect strategy, but I'd rather have
| individual agency over giving companies an excuse to level
| salaries.
| blululu wrote:
| One thing that is frequently overlooked in discussions of
| publicizing salaries is that there is also a strong social stigma
| to flaunting wealth or talking about affluence. Personally I
| think that this is a good thing since it encourages humility and
| a sense of equality. I realize that there is a clear market case
| for publishing salary information, but I also think that we
| should be considerate of why people generally frown upon such
| conversations in interpersonal contexts (anonymous listings like
| levels.fyi are different).
| mprovost wrote:
| You're not encouraged to talk about salaries but instead try
| and guess how much people make from social clues like what kind
| of car they drive, what brand clothes they wear, where they go
| on holiday, how new their phone is...
| JohnFen wrote:
| Interesting. I find that very few people care enough about
| what other people make to put any effort into deciphering
| such clues.
|
| And wealthy people around here don't tend to offer many.
| Being flashy is considered a bit trashy.
| delaynomore wrote:
| >guess how much people make from social clues like what kind
| of car they drive, what brand clothes they wear, where they
| go on holiday, how new their phone is...
|
| All poor indicators IMHO.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This makes it worse, of course, as people go into debt in
| order to appear wealthier than they are.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I like appearing poor. I tend to have conversations with much
| nicer people as opposed to when I dress well.
| munk-a wrote:
| I like appearing poor because appearing rich is a
| completely unnecessary expense with almost no value to me.
| That said, I'm not particularly wealthy.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Personally I think that this is a good thing since it
| encourages humility and a sense of equality.
|
| For whom? The richer ones who know they're richer and not
| equal? That's a really weird way of putting it, as pointed out
| on other comments.
| hhs wrote:
| Indeed, towards the end of the piece, the author acknowledges
| this:
|
| "Of course, many workers don't withhold their salaries out of
| respect for their supervisors' wishes but because it can be
| deeply awkward.
|
| "We have a culture that discourages it," Pardo said. "People
| don't want to talk about money. It's like talking about
| religion and politics. It's uncomfortable."
|
| As a result, many may be unaware of what the person in the
| other cubicle or on the other end of the Zoom call earns.
|
| While employer review websites like Glassdoor offer a window
| into company pay, UNC's Hirsch pointed out this data is often
| incomplete and certainly not uploaded for all companies."
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| To what extent was this cultural stigma created by companies
| who wanted to discourage their workers from discussing pay,
| though? It seems more like an effect than a cause to me.
| blululu wrote:
| I think that this is a much older sentiment than modern
| corporations. For one thing the aversion to discussing
| wealth is more potent in contexts where the information is
| less related to market forces - people are more open to
| information about salaries when it is related to their line
| of work. Saying how much money you make in public (even
| among friends) is seen as a jerk thing to do. Instead
| people will say things like 'the starting salary in my
| field is...', or 'a senior level employee doing this makes
| around...' - a actual number for them personally is seldom
| offered (nor should it be outside of very intimate contexts
| (family). From an informal observation this prohibition is
| common across Protestant societies, though I think it also
| shows up around the globe. Talking about money publicly is
| seen as vulgar and viewing people in terms of money is seen
| as demeaning to their fundamental worth. You can find
| religious antecedents to such sentiments from thousands of
| years ago, so it is unlikely that these were promulgated by
| corporate interests.
| splistud wrote:
| It's completely cultural. Talking about money is
| considered by many to be crass. I mean, one might as well
| have tattoos!
| lamontcg wrote:
| Or we should change social norms so that people stop seeing
| that as a good thing and start seeing it as a bad thing.
|
| If you want to practice some pretty deep humility consider that
| your opinions about what is right/wrong/polite/impolite might
| be on the wrong side of history.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > One thing that is frequently overlooked in discussions of
| publicizing salaries is that there is also a strong social
| stigma to flaunting wealth or talking about affluence.
|
| That makes it inappropriate to bring up in a random
| conversation, but not inappropriate to have on record, or to
| provide within the shared context of helping each other.
| blululu wrote:
| Agreed, I mention that a service like levels.fyi is a very
| good idea. My point is more that a peer to peer discussion of
| salary has some potentially serious downsides and it offers
| an unrealistic comparison relative to a distribution of
| salaries.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > encourages humility and a sense of equality
|
| You know what encourages equality? Open verification that there
| is actual equality.
| osrec wrote:
| Indeed. Sense of equality != equality. The OP almost suggests
| it's better for people to live under a false sense of
| equality.
| blululu wrote:
| A sense of equality is very important for a variety of good
| reasons. Whether this is more important than equality is a
| complicated question that is made more complicated by the
| fact that equality is hard to measure. True equality is
| generally rare in a high dimension space. People bring a
| lot of different things to the table so it is unlikely that
| two people are doing the exact same - hence differences in
| pay will always exist. Add to this the fact that people may
| feel that they are better than average (most people do) and
| thus entitled to a bump over their peers. Having
| approximate equality is more realistic. If you accept this,
| then a comparison against a distribution rather than
| against a specific individual comparison is a more
| realistic evaluation.
| cma wrote:
| Like striving for just a sense of low-corruption. A big PR
| coverup of something bad is a huge win under this goal.
| blululu wrote:
| Verification of parity in compensation encourages equality
| only if there is a clear mechanism to equalize levels. In
| general there will be mismatches in market forces, budgets,
| and the like (as well as seniority, the difference between
| people's opinions of themselves and their opinions of others,
| etc...). Having some ambiguity about such levels is also an
| effective social mechanism that allows us to see each other
| as equals without needing to get out a ruler. Again, having
| an anonymous reporting scheme like levels.fyi strikes me as a
| very good idea, but open and interpersonal salary discussions
| strike me as a potentially bad idea.
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