Sharing Salary Figures on Facebook

As the number of measurable work metrics increases, it becomes (roughly) exponentially more difficult to assess employee net value. If we can triangulate this measured value, we still may have immeasurable metrics--which will always break the formula. To the extent compensation is tied to immeasurable quantities, all employees should resent the system as unfairly hackable.

Some work systems are possible to measure and thus compensation may be formulaic and (roughly) just. For example, if I offered you a monetary reward to enter a boolean into a form, you either do the work (by entering a 1 or 0) or you don't. With Mechanical Turk, I can design complex algorithms with failsafe controls that will objectively assess and reward worker value. To the degree I can describe real-world problems and automate inputs and outputs, I can build an efficient and viable organization. Is a fair, transparent system intrinsically "happier"? I am not sure, but I do know the wealth creation potential here is massive.

The only other company that I know that does this is Whole Foods Stores. Each store has all the salaries listed up for all the employees to portray a completely transparent display of trust.

However, i'm not quite convinced that it works.