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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

This might work for a company of 25, but what a disaster it would be for a company of 100,000+

Really? A lot of governments are one of the few employers with more than 100k+ employees, and have a lot of open salaries for civil servants.

I'm currently working for a UN-agency (as a contractor) and the salaries for staff are fixed based upon your job level and number of years of service, so basically everyone knows what everyone else gets:

http://icsc.un.org/resources/sad/ss/sal201201.pdf

A senior developer is usually P-3 or P-4. It may seem on the low side compared to market rates if you in New York or Geneva - but bear in mind they don't need to pay taxes and get quite a lot of other benefits.

Edit:

This site has more details on the salaries, benefits and theory behind it:

http://www.un.org/Depts/OHRM/salaries_allowances/index.html

First, are you sure that everybody is paid according to that table? Or it's just a guide line? Secondly, if it's true, then the salary is not related to performance, and I would image people just stay there, the longer the higher salary.

This sums up most government jobs. Also, the job security is an added bonus. When was the last time you heard of the government having a mass layoff?

2013?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_governme...

How many people were actually fired or laid off from this? There was a bit of a kerfuffle with temporary unpaid leave and some people working without pay for a bit(they got back pay latter) but nobody lost their job.

Most (all?) government jobs are like this. My wife is a GS something step something else (I would say, but I can never remember). You can find the public matrix and COLA adjustment based on location and know her exact salary. This is true for all federal employees that I know of.

Performance is how you move up GS and step levels.

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't government positions paid the same across the board? Financial compensation is companies (particularly in tech) isn't standard across the board for a particular position, each employee can garner a different salary.

There's a complex social dynamic related to that feature in companies.

No, there's flexibility in the general schedule system. It both goes from $18K to $133K, and includes cost of living adjustments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Schedule_(US_civil_ser...

Just looked at the Locality Adjustments, and as a person who has/does live(d) in NYC and Houston, TX, for them to have pretty much the exact same adjustment doesn't make ANY sense.

My rent in Houston was $1100/mo for a 2 bed, 2 bath 1200 sqft luxury apartment in a nice development with hiking and biking trails. My rent in NYC for a 1 bed, 1 bath, 600sqft luxury apartment in a nice building with a doorman every other day (idk why) is $2300. More than 4 times the price per sqft.

Every day staples are 20-100% higher in NYC than Houston. Car insurance is almost triple. Parking which used to be free and assigned is now in a garage and $200-400/mo depending on where you are (thankfully mine is in the rent).

I think the government needs to re-evaluate their adjustments.

Locality ≠ COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment)

Locality is to make a job's salary competitive with other job salaries in the local market, whereas COLA is exactly what it sounds like.

Houston has a high locality rate because of all the high-paying jobs there that one could potentially get instead of the govt job.

I work for the govt and receive both locality and COLA, albeit the COLA is way too low in my opinion (Honolulu).

You also have GL (for law enforcement), WS (Wage Scale), WG (Wage Grade), and for contractors the Davis Bacon Act. They all also change depending on locality. I don't know what all goes into determining locality pay, but I can say with certainty it's not just the cost of living in the area.

In the WS scale the 3 highest paid is in KS, MI, and Atlanta. I think they consider what other positions in the same kind of fields are paying for the area.

Here's the US Government salary table for GS-schedule employees.[1] Pre-Internet, this was available on a wallet-sized card.

[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

True, but it seems like they have a system where everyone can share feedback on whether someone else gets a raise or not. That's certainly not the case in the US Govt.

But don't most governments have pretty rigid definitions of what your salary will be based on role and experience? This open salary implementation seems to have a lot more wiggle room for change, variance and dispute than a typical governmental role.

Governments are not Fortune 50 companies.

And how's that working out for them?

Pretty well? Seems to me there's a big problem in the public sector of extreme difficulty of terminating non- and even anti-performers, but that's orthogonal to relatively narrow and seniority-based compensation bands. But those are just my nth-hand impressions on both. Would love to read some good papers on either or both.

Sweden, Finland and Norway do it: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-06-18-salarie...

That's clearly one of the more disaster prone areas of the world.

I'm in Norway, and this is very misleading. Tax data is no longer available anonymously, but even when it was:

- you only seen tax return figures, and depending on your family situation, property ownership, tax class, benefits the spread in paid taxes can be easily 2x on same amount. Hardly usable for finding out if someone makes 20% over you.

- the data was available with 3 year delay.

And yet small companies often try to adopt "best practices" from megacorps 1000 times their size! One of the huge advantages of working in a small companies is that you can do all these things that don't scale.

Why? Certainly one would expect the form of the discussions to be a bit different - eg, as part of a performance eval tool, instead of a company-wide discussion - but I don't see why it would be a disaster.

In fact, given the number of people who said this would be a disaster for a company of 25 people two years ago, there's an even greater onus to provide real reasons transparent salaries couldn't work at other companies.

Big companies are not foolish. The information asymmetry exists because it is benefitial for them to keep it that way. Then again the asymmetry can work in your favor as well.

Don't companies with that size have budget-salaries which are equal for all employees on the same rank / position / experience level?

I doubt that BMW has an engineer that earns more than his / her colleague at the same position.

Perhaps that's the appropriate way to discriminate pay? If for whatever reason one engineer should earn more than the other, then make it explicit in the labeling.

Bob is Engineer, and Joe is Engineer+; it's clear to everyone that Joe is earning more, and if Bob feels underpaid then the explanation for the salary difference is explicit in that he's not (for whatever practical reasons) doing the work/quality/quantity/whatever of an Engineer+.

At one mega-corp I worked at we had job levels (say 20-35 or so) each with a corresponding salary range.

All they'd do was promote you to the next level and give you a salary in the next range.

Usually the pay for a job is within a range. This range can be quite large so you will have people with the same job making different money.

Let's take the BMW example. Most of their engineers in Germany are paid according to a collective agreement where the salary is determined by looking at a table based on your actual position, your background, and seniority. There is an additional salary based on some specified performance metrics but that usually accounts for a difference of 5% maximum.

Only few engineers in leading position and with larger responsibilty are paid based on an individually negotiated contract.

I have worked at German companies with union pay (IG Metall, same as BMW). You are right that there is a table, but where you are on the table is still very negotiable. Maybe people think this can't be negotiated but in reality it is. I got bumped up several levels after I complained that my colleagues were much higher while doing the same work.

Why would it be a disaster for a big company?

Why?

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