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Comment by freyfogle | Hacker News Reader

The problem is if they give you your special deal, they have to give everyone their own special deal which becomes an absolute nightmare to manage.

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And here's an opportunity for smaller companies.

I have a small company, and I can't offer my employees the prestige or high salary that larger companies offer.

But I can offer to accommodate whatever other special wishes people have. Want to work just 4 days a week? Fine. Want to work from 12pm to 8pm? Fine. Want to take a day off on short notice? Fine with me.

Larger companies have all kinds of rules and policies in place. In a small company, you can design the policies together with the employees.

This is basically what we do. I think we offer competitive salaries, but also give tons of work flexibility. We judge on work produced, not hours in seats (within reason for meetings or time critical items like customer support) or any other useless metric.

Since each person has to be thought of individually, I can see where it would be hard to scale in a really large environment. Some employees also have a hard time without strict policies in place (weird I know). We make sure to let people know in the interview that responsibility comes with the freedom.

One last thing, we treat every position in the company this way and not just the developers.

I think that's bullshit. I think it's purely about trying to keep everybody in the dark about each other's compensation packages.

It's easier to keep employees in the dark about money because of the taboo talking about it. If Tom spent the last month sunning himself in the Maldives, on the other hand, he's probably not going to shut up about it.

Compensation secrecy is a fairly straightforward way of dragging down payroll costs, which are going to be the biggest drag by far on the bottom line in a software company.

In my experience as founder of a 20 plus employee start-up, I assumed all employees would find out each other's salary. There is no way to enforce secrecy, people talk. For exactly this reason it is better to have a clear policy. Having 20 different special deals - like "I want to work one month less, but get paid less" etc - means you spend all of your time managing HR. Everyone thinks the other person's deal is better. Absolute nightmare to manage. Much better to transparently say "This is what we pay, this is what we offer in terms of benefits / flexibility (location, time off, etc). If that matches your needs, great. If not, we are not the right employer for you."

In my experience employers will often profess transparency but will refrain from sharing salary information (citing 'personal secrecy') and rely upon the taboo around discussing compensation do its work, which it usually does.

You sadly professed transparency and then immediately gave the game away when you said this:

"Everyone thinks the other person's deal is better."

That happens when compensation packages are kept secret or are revealed suddenly, not when they are open as a matter of policy.

It's not being 'transparent' when you share details of everybody's holiday entitlement, because it's easy to spot when people aren't in the office and there is zero taboo surrounding sharing how many days of holiday you take or whether you took friday afternoon off. It's simply a tacit acceptance of reality.

It's actually illegal to attempt to enforce that secrecy, at least in CA.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/California_Equal_Pay_Act.htm

Yes and there often fixed overheads per employee (desk space, health insurance, payroll costs, management overhead) that don't necessarily go down when the employee chooses to work less.

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