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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I like best about my industry is that compensation is standardized for people in the first 8-10 years of their careers. At large firms (and government), people get paid based on publicly known scales on a strictly seniority basis. This is bad for people who are good at self promotion (whether or not their is a real basis in that self-promotion), but great for women generally and men who do more than they talk about doing.

I've grown very skeptical about he idea that the "market" will fix discrimination in pay for women. There are a couple of lawsuits happening right now against law firms where female partners are alleging that they were paid a fraction of what men were paid despite bringing in far more business. I suspect that phenomenon is not unique to law firms--just highly visible there because contribution to the firm can be so easily quantified.

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I'm in a country where everyone can easily find out everyone else's salary. I find it weird (because I'm American). Also, unions are more common, but different because management will also often have unions, so they are the ones that do the negotiating. This means the process and facts and figures are much more open.

And while I find it weird, this does also mean that pay scales are more appropriate and fair. You can have seniority plus merit based pay, for example, so long as you are honest about what qualifacations people need to meet to earn more pay, and also lessens the gap between women and men's pay.

Some of the gap between women and men will take societal change, and most likely take laws and such to force people's hand to do it.

> this does also mean that pay scales are more appropriate and fair

It means that the pay scales are more equal. Whether or not that's fair is unclear as determining fairness requires determining a significant component of performance and results.

Paying a mediocre developer and a superstar developer (or salesperson) the same amount is equal, but is not fair, IMO.

You are correct on the definition of fairness, and no system is perfect. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that the pay scales are unfair. I think it encourages folks to be upfront about how they determine payrates, raises, and bonuses. However, the things you describe are more things left up to the employer - and the even-out payscales are in place especially in factories and other such professions. Not necessarily fair, but at least some of those jobs are more difficult to differentiate concrete pay systems as well.

In my opinion, such systems mean one needs to be able to back up the claim that the superstar is superior. Salespersons are easier to measure in this sense, especially if they make commissions. Developers? Simply have standards and be upfront about how said standards affect pay, and apply those. Measurable experience, results, error rate, speed, or whatever measures you have.

I want my coworkers focused on creating business value and trusting that they'll be rewarded for that, not trying to figure out how to game the system to close the most tickets, write the most code, write the fewest bugs, get the most fake wiki edit points, or whatever "objective standards" I could come up with.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

The "via leadership judgement" system absolutely has its flaws (including people trying to game that), but IMO it's the worst system to use, except for all the other systems we've tried.

It is possible to find balance in there. Not all systems fit all workplaces. The main point I was trying to make is that whatever is used should be fair.

If everyone's pay is public, it might not be uncommon to ask "why does person A make more than me?" And There has to be things you can point out (I suppose you can keep quiet, but it probably doesn't foster a wonderful environment). And if they ask how they can increase their own pay or their own job performance to make their pay better, it really needs to be more than, "just suck it up": In addition, the employee has to realize they probably won't catch up to Person A because they weren't doing the necessary stuff from the beginning.

> The "via leadership judgement" system absolutely has its flaws (including people trying to game that), but IMO it's the worst system to use, except for all the other systems we've tried.

Right now, at least with highly in-demand skillsets, it is more like "another company's leadership's judgement".

Paying one developer more simply because they're better at negotiating isn't fair either. As is, we really don't have good ways of determining one developer is clearly better than another.

But you know it when you see the outliers, right? You know who you'd want to go form a 3-person highly technical startup with. You know who else you'd never want to work with if your personal livelihood depending on them performing in a crunch.

I admit that I can't judge who is 10 or 20% better than another developer. I can tell who the 5-10x outliers are. Maybe under other circumstances or at other companies different people would shine, but I'm at this company and under these circumstances.

Is it true that most Americans work in "non public" salary environments? All government employees, most union employees & many big company employees in the USA work with public salaries.

yes and no. Some professions have a 'salary' - as in, they get paid the same amount regardless of how much they work.

The other sorts, yes. For example, I worked in a call center. Nearly everyone started at the same rate, raises were scheduled, and everyone got the same percentage, dependent on how long you worked there. Pay was capped. The way to earn money was to have some sort of promotion or transfer.

A lot of factories are set up in the same way. It gets a little fuzzier in retail sectors. In the states, this is often (but not always) result of having a union for the employees.

(emphasis mine)

> One of the things I like best about my industry is that compensation is standardized for people in the first 8-10 years of their careers. At large firms (and government), people get paid based on publicly known scales on a strictly seniority basis. This is bad for people who are good at self promotion (whether or not their is a real basis in that self-promotion), but great for women generally and men who do more than they talk about doing.

It sounds like it's great for people who want to do the bare minimum too. If excellence pays the same as mediocrity, why strive for more?

Perks. Better offices, better gear, professional recognition, more respect, more autonomy.

I hire contractors and consultants all of the time who are very well compensated. As part of that, we recorded 350 engagements and had at least 3 peers rate the people we hire. In my experience, there's no correlation between pay and rating, with limited exceptions.

Because people aren't motivated by money! Why is this mistaken idea still in circulation? Surely we've all seen Drive by now:

https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/rsa-animate/2010/04/r...

Human society revolves around getting, trading, saving, and spending money. I think that money is a primary motivator for many, many, many people. Including myself - why else would I show up to a job every day?

I show up because I need money. I perform at a high level in order to ask for more money. I use that money to do things that I want. Money is a great motivator - I care about trivial things because I am paid to care about them. I would never care if I weren't being paid.

Obviously money is my primary motivator for going to work, but offering me more of it won't necessarily make me work more or in itself convince me to go work for someone else. Two salary negotiations ago I turned down money in exchange for more vacation days for example. I've turned down jobs offering more money because they placed greater demands on my time. I've also taken jobs offering less money since they offered me more intellectual freedom and autonomy as to how I go about my work.

I only go to work for a pay check! I wouldn't be doing what I do if I was financially independent.

I stopped working more than 40 hours after 3 months of 65-75 hour weeks and realizing I wasn't getting squat for it. Other people were getting paid the same I was and they weren't doing the extra hours.

So I stopped. Why put in the extra effort if it isn't paying out? Don't get me wrong. I am not doing sub-par work. I just don't do extra unless I am paid for it.

Saying people aren't motivated by money is fallacy, IMO

I think it would be more accurately phrased as "people aren't necessarily motivated more by more money". Money matters a lot, but there's a saturation point. Once you have enough money that you're not routinely confronted by the issue of "giving up" things you want, I think additional money is mostly tied to other things that have more to do with social status.

I think this is true only to the point of perceiving that you are compensated correctly relative to the market, i.e. that you can't switch jobs tomorrow and get a 10% or greater pay raise. After that definitely the motivations put forth by Drive apply. At least, this has been my experience with myself and past/present coworkers. There are also some cases where one will take a pay cut for more meaningful work, but that requires a position of relative privilege to contemplate.

Because mediocrity gets managed out.

> Because mediocrity gets managed out.

So for the first 8-10 years, keeping your job is your bonus? Honestly that doesn't sound very pleasant.

Yes, Big Law (and quite a few other fields) work on an up or out system. Not everyone is expected to keep their job.

Why would high performers stay in this environment when they could leave to work somewhere where pay is tied to performance and not seniority? It seems the only people who would be happy with this setup _are_ the mediocre.

> Why would high performers stay in this environment when they could leave to work somewhere where pay is tied to performance and not seniority?

Because most places that claim "pay is tied to performance" actually don't tie pay to objective measures of performance (or even know how to objectively measure delivered value), they tie pay to either:

(1) an objective measure of something, but something often not tied to your performance of the duties of the job,

(2) a subjective ranking of "performance" that can reflect a decisionmaker's biases and/or your effort and ability in deploying social manipulation unrelated to your nominal job function on the decisionmaker.

If you're not a commissioned salesperson [0], ties to an objective measure of performance are hard to find.

[0] And even there, there are some problems, as even getting the base right for a sales commission to really measure performance and not an imperfect proxy that becomes an incentive to acts which make the measure look good but are detrimental to the real goal of the job is harder than it looks.

... Or people who are not good at self-promoting. Or people who are punished for self-promoting (Women).

I'll know meritocracy when I see it, and most of corporate America is anything but.

Anecdote to anecdote but "... Or people who are not good at self-promoting. Or people who are punished for self-promoting (Women)." is pure conjecture that doesn't align with the results I've seen in industry.

What's to stop a high performer from becoming an entrepreneur (thus interacting with the market more directly)? The Google engineers making >300k /annual are definitely an order of magnitude more skilled than the Java dev making 75k in my experience. Despite the rhetoric, high performance is linked to pay if the employee does basic due diligence in job shopping.

EDIT reply to child comment since I can't post to this thread anymore:

Do you make that much money because you were highly assertive or are you highly skilled? I'm sure it's the latter, Google wouldn't be paying you that much if you weren't worth it.

> And there's a million reasons for why a high-performing IC should not become an entrepreneur.

Indeed, but it is an option, as is raising your skill level to the point where you can work at Google.

> Speaking of Google... It's found that equally capable women are routinely under-rewarded, as they rarely nominate themselves for promotion. [1]

Not receiving a promotion they didn't ask for does not sound like a problem in any way. We're talking about adults not children, if you want something, ask for it.

http://www.glassceiling.com/being-assertive-can-be-costly-fo...

Fortunately for the average woman, you don't see any problems - I suppose that means that they don't exist.

And there's a million reasons for why a high-performing IC should not become an entrepreneur.

-A just-shy-of 300K Google engineer.

Speaking of Google... It's found that equally capable women are routinely under-rewarded, as they rarely nominate themselves for promotion. [1]

This is a problem - why women don't ask for promotion is not relevant to this conversation. What is relevant is that I just gave an example of a group that benefits from homogenized compensation... And said group is not composed of talent-less layabouts.

[1] http://www.wnyc.org/story/google-test-case-gender-bias/

>What is relevant is that I just gave an example of a group that benefits from homogenized compensation.

They don't benefit from a homogenized compensation plan, it just means others don't benefit more than they do from a non-homogenized plan. It's like saying the solution to racial bias in judicial proceedings is just make sure everyone is always found guilty.

I find it strange that you assume that high performance is actually what is rewarded even in non-standardized payscale environments.

It most definitely is in tech. 10X engineers exist and if they aren't being paid handsomely, it's because they've put zero effort into finding the correct job.

I can't speak to government work since I'm in private industry.

That's being rewarded for 'finding the correct job' not performance.

Not in government.

> This is bad for people who are good at self promotion (whether or not their is a real basis in that self-promotion), but great for women generally and men who do more than they talk about doing.

On the other hand, it seems that improving one's skills and increasing one's value to one's employer goes unrewarded.

Often the case anyway. Especially when you have specialized skills and employers aren't able to accurately judge them.

>Often the case anyway.

Because of a failure of negotiation. For negotiation to work you need leverage, and being an asset to your company is the obvious way to generate it.

There's plenty of markets dominated by non-technical employers hiring programmers and they have no clue how to assess how good you are.

Hence they all use poor rules of thumb and treat people like cogs. 1x and 10x developers get more or less the same offers.

Not a failure of negotiation. The only way to win that negotiation is to exit the market (if you even can).

>Not a failure of negotiation. The only way to win that negotiation is to exit the market (if you even can).

For non-technical people, you have to paint to the other person the picture of what's going to happen if you quit, and for him/her to realize that they do not understand the scope of what you do.

It's not guaranteed to work, but that's just like every negotiation tactic out there.

To look at it another way - assume you want to hire somebody and you have no idea what they do. How do you trust the picture of disaster that they're painting if you fire them?

The answer is nearly always you have some (poor) rules of thumb and you're skeptical of the ones who say that they're 10x better than the rest.

You need leverage, but you need a lot of other things, too. Feeling comfortable negotiating, for one. Given that we're an industry that trends toward the introverted side, that may be hard to come by.

It's an acquired skill like any other. Sure, social butterflies are more likely to be better at it than the rest of us, but we can still learn it. We owe it to ourselves to overcome our own nature if we want to get what we want.

I think more radical salary transparency across the board would help salary equality between the sexes more than anything else, honestly. I(a male) was being radically underpaid for the first few years of my career simply because I hadn't broken into the "club" necessary to learn what the market rate for my skillset actually was, despite what I thought was negotiating hard for each position I had taken. I can only imagine how much harder that discovery process must be for women in any tech-related field.

So isn't there a lot of money to be made by a firm hiring women? Or an all woman firm?

Not unless you're planning to underpay them. Besides, an all-woman firm isn't such a great idea. That "diverse teams perform better" stuff is for real, and it works both ways. Cutting out half the human population from your talent pool is a disadvantage to your company no matter which half you're planning to cut out.

Quite possibly, but converting hidden talent into money isn't straightforward.

Discrimination against women isn't just discrimination against current hidden talent. It can start in early childhood when a girl is discouraged from men-dominated careers, or in school when the same thing happens, or later when participation in the industry is discouraging for social reasons.

A log of discrimination can go beyond simply perceived inequality, but manifest in actual inequality.

So the solution is a race to the bottom? (Rhetorical question.. I realize now many solutions to big social problems are equally a race to the bottom.) How do you feel being paid the same as someone who doesn't produce as much because years_of_experience?

Seeing as rayiner said it's one of the things they like best I'm gonna go out on a limb and say 'feels pretty good about it'

What's your industry? How does it motivate people, and how do companies compete for talent?

Legal. Studies show that individualized bonuses don't necessarily do much to improve motivation: https://hbr.org/2010/06/youre-getting-a-bonus-so-why-a. Firms generally compete on non-compensation factors: quality of training, quality of work, etc.

I'm not suggesting that pure lockstep will work for everyone. In the legal industry, much of the variation within levels is accounted for in the often black-box "up or out" promotion process. But I think more transparency is good, as is keeping people at the same level around the same compensation. E.g. at Fog Creek, salaries at each level are transparent and the "superstar" bonus is like 10%. I think that's a great model.

From the description, it sounds like Gov't jobs or industries that work closely (Defense contractors, etc). The advantage is rock solid stability. You know what you're getting when you get in, you do some "due paying" and you have excellent long term benefits.

This appeals to a great deal of people that want to use that stability to build their lives, like having kids and a house. The company can rest easy knowing their employees are long-term, thus they can groom and train talent while keeping expenses predictable.

This isn't the most efficient system, but it is designed to last decades or longer.

There's no "rock solid stability" in defense contracting. You're only paid as long as there's a contract in place for you to work on; as soon as something goes wrong there, you're on furlough.

As least with government jobs, when you get furloughed, you usually get back pay after the dumb government passes a new budget and fixes the problem. But with defense contractors, there's no such thing. The only advantage to being a contractor is more pay (while you're being paid). The downside is more risk. It's also much easier to lose your job; if the client doesn't like you, they can have you leave at any time, and if your employer can't find a place for you to work (a contract for you to bill your hours to), then you get furloughed, and if that goes on too long (they can't find another department that wants to bring you in to work under some contract), then you get laid off. The main advantage to this line of work is that the expectations are pretty low: as long as you're doing at least as well as the government workers (who are usually either not great, or are fresh out of college and only there for a little while until they get a better-paying job in private industry), then you're pretty safe. But I would not call this "rock solid", not like actual government jobs.

>thus they can groom and train talent while keeping expenses predictable

That's the pickle employers that provide training to their employees face that aren't in this setup. The company spends money on training their employees and then the employees, being a more valuable asset, also want more money. So now companies are damned if they train and damned if they don't.

This used to be less of a problem when companies demonstrated loyalty towards their employees. Employees also demonstrated loyalty in return.

It was "deemed" more efficient on Wall Street to scale up when needed and lay off everybody when not, though. Apparently that doesn't breed loyalty.

For example, tech companies that spend a few hundred on a pluralsight subscription for their employees will face having to spend thousands more in the near future for demands for higher salaries.

So if the company makes the employee worth more should they not have to pay market for that employee? I wouldn't expect the company to benefit from sending an employee to cooking class but if they are learning stuff that benefits the company, and they are worth more as a result, yes you can expect them to have a higher market rate.

Look at another way; if you buy a developer a faster computer, do you expect them to not ask for a raise later? "Hey, but we got you a new computer! You should be grateful!"

Or the employee spends the $25 per month on their own subscription and ends up either leaving for another employer that will give them a more beneficial package or using that as leverage for promotion/salary increase.

Which is where I get hung up. If the company is paying for it and using it like a perk then the company is investing in the employee and losing/risking that investment. If the employee is using their own earned income for it then the employee is investing in themselves and should expect being compensated for their increase in value. So, should companies bother paying for things like pluralsight or leave it up to the employees to invest in themselves?

This is a double edged question for me...

I'd like to work for companies that will invest in me like that, and as long as I see a path for career growth and actually realizing the growth I am seeking, I'll stick around until I'm the CEO. If my employer isn't going to invest in me, I'll invest in myself and make my own career growth.

I pay for my own Pluralsight, Safari Online, Resharper and other training resources and tools that help me to grow. Do I see I should have to, well, the tools I believe the company should pay for, but honestly, they make my life easier, so if I can pay for tools to make my life easier, I will and do. The training resources I believe are a part of my career growth and most places I've worked aren't really looking for career employees any more, they're after someone to fill a gap to achieve their current objective. As soon as you help them achieve that objective, they're onto the next one and if your role is no longer useful, "no hard feelings, this is just business."

Today's market on the whole (although I've seen resumes that counter this in some cases, but mostly I stand by my observation) just doesn't appear to support people who come in at the bottom in a company, apprentice, get promoted and work their way up to the C Suite. It requires working at a place until you hit the proverbial glass ceiling and when you start to feel resistance to growth, finding a way to sidestep that and frequently that either means leaving or having the company over a barrel by becoming so ingrained in so many of the company's operations that they can't live without you and have to promote you in order to keep you.

if a company is not willing or able to compensate employees in a manner that satisfies their employees, then they will suffer the consequences (losing their workers). what about that is a hang-up for you?

Sounds like "What if we train our employees and then they leave?"

"Well, what if we DON'T train them and then they STAY?!"

They're only damned if they don't want to pay what people are worth.

Despite my username, I agree that the market will not fix discrimination. (Which I used to not believe was a problem, until I saw it first hand).

Markets are made up of individuals, and if most of those individuals are irrational, irrational outcomes will result, whatever the incentives for rational action. The only real fix is free speech and free association: i.e., those who belong to discriminated-against groups swapping information on the best and worst places to work, and forming professional associations for mentorship, career planning and networking. (Forcing companies to make diversity hires can only be counter-productive).

>There are a couple of lawsuits happening right now against law firms where female partners are alleging that they were paid a fraction of what men were paid despite bringing in far more business.

Source? I see this popping up all the time but never actual examples.

Is it actually discrimination if its women's own actions that cause them to get paid less? i.e. not coming back with competing offers. I think we are losing sight of what the word discrimination means.

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