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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

It seems that GP did that, and learned that these studies ignore inconvenient factors.

What we should mandate is transparency. We all think we are expert negotiators but we are all idiots. We will all be better off if all salary and all compensation information is public and easily accessible. Sadly, a lot of people think they have something to lose and will never support it.

I don't want my salary to be transparent. There is something called privacy. My salary is a private matter. I really don't believe I'm any kind of expert in negotiation.

His point is that your need for privacy is preventing group wins. You want to avoid a bit of shame or envy but by making this decision we, as employees, lose a lot of our leverage.

You wouldn’t have to negotiate a better salary if it would be obvious that you are underpaid.

I think a "fair" distribution of pay for software engineers would more unequal than it is currently. (This is the logical financial conclusion of believing in the 3x, if not 10x, engineer, which I do.)

I have people who work on my teams who are absolutely fantastic and, while already well-paid, probably should make more. I have other people on my team, with the same title, same education, same on-paper responsibilities, same city, same years of experience, who might be below the median pay and are still overpaid based on my estimation of their contributions relative to their peers.

You can't look only at a spreadsheet and determine that it's "obvious that you are underpaid", IMO.

That only works the way you think it works if most people agree with you. I doubt that... Plus it's really hard to determine who is actually a 10x contributor, even more so universally (across projects, teams, companies).

It's really not that hard to see, on a single team, who's contributing twice as much as who else. You don't even have to be a manager - sometimes managers are the last to be sure, actually. Generally people who complain about lazy coworkers end up settling on a lot of the same people... Being a manager just gives you official venues like feedback requests to realize "oh everyone else sees it too."

Managers are usually terrible at knowing who is contributing on a software team and they're the ones who set pay.

This is 100% a red herring as far as pay transparency is concerned anyway. If you're not being unfair you have no reason to hide anything.

It would also prevent raises.

You're assuming that I'm a world were transparency goes up, good negotiators go extinct? :)

Logically, if I know that in giving one person a raise, everyone will ask for the same raise, I just won't give anyone a raise that isn't negotiated by the entire group, which takes longer and is less likely to occur without conflict.

It actually extends to the whole market, too - if all salaries are transparent, then an RN makes x. They can't make more than that, anywhere they go. It gives a floor, sure - if they get hired, they'll get paid the same as everyone else; it just also makes a ceiling, and, I believe, may slow income growth in general.

Salary growth for the past 30 years has been slower than productivity growth.

So I'd see your point as already happening, companies have already capped salaries, except for executives, who basically set their own salaries.

However consumer prices have gone down over the same period. A refrigerator today costs much less in terms of labor hours than it did 30 years ago. So productivity growth has led to a rise in living standards.

> So productivity growth has led to a rise in living standards.

I love seeing this statement. It's true but the people who post it never follow up evaluating whether or not productivity growth has far out-paced the rise in living standards. If productivity growth has been exponential while the rise in living standards has been linear that's a sign that there's a problem regardless of whether or not living standards have risen.

No the assumption is that a good negotiator now has to negotiate for everyone. Because if you give a raise to him, others will come to know and ask for similar treatment.

Why? What benefit does that entail? Is is greater than the benefits of transparency?

Yes. My privacy is not a trivial matter.

Think of it like this. Will you be willing to post your entire web browsing history to a publicly available archive regularly? It will help prevent a lot of illegal activity if everyone agreed to do that.

> I really don't believe I'm any kind of expert in negotiation.

That means that transparency works _for_ you, not against you.

But that doesn't mean I'm ready to give up my privacy.

That is exactly what they want us to think. I'm glad you at least realize there is information asymmetry at play here. Thank you for keeping an open mind. You have come farther than many people I've talked to. We can get there.

It would be an interesting experiment. Has it been done before? That could lead to some unpleasant things:

    * A lot of unavoidable angst as people of less worth to the business are proven to be paid less in no uncertain terms.
    * More internal strife as people jockey for identifiable rank within the organization based upon their salaries.  "Why is Sue paid $10k more than I am?  Sue wasn't at her desk all week last week while I was here busting my butt."
    * Eventually, many managers and organizations would just sidestep the battle by paying everyone the same thing based upon easy-to-identify metrics like seniority.  As a result, the people with more value to the business will find jobs at companies that pay them according to a better measure of their bottom-line worth.  With no one left but the lowest-common-denominator employees, the company flounders and fails.

In certain Nordic countries (Sweden at least, I believe), all tax data is public. By extension, everybody's income is public as well. It doesn't seem to be an issue.

A quick Google turned up some refutation of your statement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9907147

Looking further, it appears that Sweden has decreased the amount of transparency by requiring that people make specific requests that notify the taxpayer of the request.

http://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-salaries-freely-availa...

Apparently, there were issues. I'd like to see this experiment run for a longer period of time in more culturally diverse environments, though.

> Eventually, many managers and organizations would just sidestep the battle by paying everyone the same thing based upon easy-to-identify metrics like seniority. As a result, the people with more value to the business will find jobs at companies that pay them according to a better measure of their bottom-line worth. With no one left but the lowest-common-denominator employees, the company flounders and fails.

In most fields, there are already companies which pay wildly different amounts for the same jobs, so the people contributing more in those similar roles are already highly incentivized to leave for higher-paying pastures.

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