Tell Your Co-Workers How Much Money You Make
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's so damned hard to identify the reasons for these disparities and what "fair" means, which is the best way to alleviate bad feelings. A couple years experience at the right companies, a particular project you've done, a team you've been on, the degree you have, the right people vouching for you, a lucky day of interviewing, etc. Tiny variations in those can take you from no offer to a crazy high offer. There's so much noise in the system that leads to salaries. In this imperfect information game of hiring, I can't fault companies for paying heed to those factors and paying more/less based on them, but after that information is revealed and you've been working together for a while, things usually don't equalize. The initial lucky/unlucky salaries persist.
The whole thing is weird. To too high a degree, the open salary discussion is now, "Yeah, I got pretty lucky." Doubly so with the stock comp we get in tech.
Having come into this enviroment mid career from another country I considered whether or not I should look up colleagues. Naturally I was interested.
I decided not to. The main rationale, I was reasonably ok with the salary and very much enjoyed the job. If I discovered colleagues doing similar work and getting paid more I would find this demoralising and didn't want to bring that into a job I enjoyed.
I do understand this knowledge could be a negotiation tactic, but 1) happiness is more important than money to me and 2) my personal experience is most companies are reluctant to significantly change salary without promotion, and even at promotion they tend to bump you up under market rate. So maybe I could have gotten more money, but at the risk of reducing the enjoyability of a job I really liked. So if you are going to announce your salary, I would suggest you do it in an enviroment where you know the other people want to hear it.
For me I've found the best way to make more money is change companies.
And side point: A bit disappointed the article had this like '“Let’s face it, it’s 2018 and there’s still serious disparities in pay based on race and gender,”"
Regarding gender I believe this has been fairly comprehensive debunked with multi-varied analysis. Once accounting for careers choice, age, occupation and personality-type etc and the commonly quoted 18% gap reduces to 2% on gender, and currently under 30's men are paid less than women.
Based on your experience, do you think this characterizes the workplace in Norway?
(I am honestly interested in hearing the answer, although I don't think so. There are so many things you can be jealous at which are completely in the open at work - company perks, travel, type of work, team.. And nobody ever claims the same problems here. I think it's pretty much a non-issue, basically jealous people will be jealous and catch straws if they don't have the information and normal people will be normal regardless whether they have the information or not.)
So for example, just because this sort of thing works reasonably well for a Scandinavian country wouldn't mean it would necessarily work well in, say, California.
In other words, maybe the people who want to talk about salaries openly are sort of "scandinavian" subculture in "californian" culture.. We cannot really judge them from the "californian" vantage point.
However, I don't think that wages being published online is a big contributor to this. More important is being generally quite egalitarian, low degree of personal exceptionalism, and not so much money-is-success.
Also, it is not uncommon to use an average wage (for the role, education,years), as published by unions and state, as one reference point to negotiate around, especially for people without a lot of experience. Practically everyone has 3-months bidirectional resignation period, which makes changing jobs slow but safe.
With more detail, the 2 variables I feel impact this and makes it hard to compare doing this in other countries are;
1) Norway has a strong culture of being reasonable and non-conflicting. My theory on that is it comes from being stuck indoors so much with each other...but for whatever reason, it is the case.
2) Norway has had this system a long time. So when you take a job this information is available to you, not suddenly after years at a company. The latter could more easily cause issues I feel.
So while this does not create issues from what I saw in Norway, I dont think its fair to lift and shift that view to other countries.
Can you provide a citation? That is new to me.
On the other side of the coin: when I was a law clerk I accidentally was given a pay-stub for another clerk. Said clerk was notoriously incompetant, but somehow making almost double what many other clerks were making. I said something to our senior administrator, and he did not even know why she was making so much. Likely, when she was hired a judge asked for her to start at her salary and she started there. Her contract was running out and she ended up not being re-hired. I felt like a jerk, and that was not my intention, but had I not known her salary nothing would have happened. Or if I could have kept my mouth shut, but that is difficult when I see such pay disparities.
edit: grammar
2. If somebody consider that he doing the same job (have the same skill) it doesn't mean that it's true.
The metric of “how well you do your job” is highly subjective anyhow; between an employee, their manager, their product manager, their coworkers and HR there would be significant variance of opinion.
I had 0 experience with this software stack/language but I am an extremely fast learner. The other guy boasted 30 years of software experience and 8/9 in this specific tech stack.
After ~2 months he was let go in his probation period and people had told me that I had already picked up, was doing more work and knew more than what he was showing in the same role.
He was on just under double my salary - my salary did not change. I believe people should be evaluated and have salary adjusted based on merit and value over time
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As an extension to the merit thing, I changed to this new job because my old one had the directors of the company, who didn't really have a huge understanding of individuals roles across the 150-200 person software section employees, telling us they pay on merit.
Yet I had joined and quickly become one of the more knowledgeable people on the team, so much so that people would often come to me. I did a lot of the software releases, worked (unpaid) overtime a lot, especially around said releases, worked to improve processes and in my spare time worked on tooling. No recognition other than from the team and one of the principal developers. All while someone who had half my throughput with daily work but had worked there for 30 years, had about 1.8* my salary.
What was it more, loyalty, that they meant?
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Overall, me knowing other peoples salaries in similar/the same position just demotivates me (partly due to my mindset at the moment) in that some people can have such well paid positions while blagging, or doing little in comparison. Why do I even bother trying? At the same time, I am always at home teaching myself something new, learning something to better myself for my career, but that is more my nature than to do with knowing salaries.
Also, all this idea will create is animosity, jealousy and politics at work. Everyone thinks they're hot shit, the egos in the bay are out of this world.
In any case I know a much more effective way to increase my salary: getting a green card and moving to the US. The flipside is that my American wife would have a hard time finding a good job in her field in the US.
If a company is not willing to pay a person more, then they're likely not worth that much to them. And that is something they can then work on, instead of living in a dream world.
There are already salary survey sites, but they seem removed from the individual's situation, as the results are averaged over so many people and the underlying assumptions aren't clear. Knowing your immediate coworkers' salaries seems much more immediate.
Trust and privacy would have to be absolute, so people have complete control over the spread of any information they submit, which rules out most existing websites.
--- Edit:
On further thought, I'm not sure that I agree with my own proposal, in that it's a complicated solution. Wouldn't it be better to establish the necessary level of trust with your coworkers in real life and talk about it? There's also less of a paper trail and information leakage that way.
But all this is actually in the interest of the people working there. They may get higher salary and better work somewhere else.
Scenario B: They make more money than me, I (despite my best intentions) slightly resent them.
Beyond that, I’m not really in an industry where you can easily/beneficially jump ship to another firm, so I wouldn’t even have any recourse if people are making more than me without good justification (superior performance, etc). I’d have to exit the industry.
Every year all staff were ranked, completely ignoring current salary, and then new salaries were set from that. Some would see a decrease.
I got used to it quickly and it felt very liberating.
Just do what everyone else does... snoop around on the network drive and try to find unsecured documents that list compensation.
Someone hacked the password to the HR account and dumped the database for IS I was the highest paid programmer at $50k for a $150k average job. It made me unpopular and people did not want to work with me after that. I had more experience than the other programmers is why.
What if there was some other reason people did not want to work with you? I know plenty of people who work more than I do for the same work that I do, however it does not make me hate working with them or something.
And then, have a look at the bibliography in the video description!
The best strategy is to use competitor salary information, taken from the likes of Glassdoor or similar.
But there's a few important and complex psychological factors at work here:
- Self-serving bias. There's a study that about 80% of employees think they're better than average. Obviously, that's impossible, but it already sets the stage on a path to unhappiness.
- Group bias and Dunning-Kruger. People mostly don't know _why_ exactly someone else earns more than them. Excluding real unfairness or the points below, there are often time cases where people really don't get the importance of some roles in the company or think they can do as good or the company can do without. As a techie, I've personally ridiculed the "business side" until I've witnessed the importance myself (and how much difference a bad to a good execution in this regard matters).
- Global and local unfairness and market development. Firstly, local markets develop for hotly contested skills, sometimes very fast. Also, it makes a heck of a difference in which company stage someone is hired. A year later, I might have to pay someone much more to get into the same team.
- Lastly, there can even be unfairness in fairness, hidden in plain view: Does someone getting relocated into a hot market really have to suffer paying double the rent as someone living there for years? Is having a family a personal luxury or partly beared by a socially responsible employer? Does someone with a PhD who's being outperformed by a young smart college dropout earn the same? More? Less? I don't know the answer to these questions, but all possible answers have some merit. Often times, I try to factor something about this in when deciding salary. In any case, it's freakishly hard to develop such thing as a "fair" salary over a whole company as an employer.
- In most countries including mine, it's prohibited to _lower_ someone's salary, so the only way you can ever adjust local or global unfairness is to raise wages.
What's following is this: All of these factors work together to create a lose-lose case to talking salary with others. The chances are enormously high you'll get demotivated. Most likely from your own salary, but even if you earn more than the others, it's awkward and hard to handle emotionally.
Although it's probably good for your brain and overall heuristics development to do so, it will be bad for your heart. Proceed with care — and if you want my personal 2 cents: Don't keep what you learned from always giving your best and optimizing for learning. Keep up your spirits, stay positive and don't get into a defensive attitude. Search for like-minded people who see your real value and you'll keep reaping your fruits later on, trust me.
It’s not impossible.
If Bill Gates walks into a room, most other people in that room (99%?) will have below average wealth.
Obviously I'm not complaining, because I want to earn as much as possible, but it does seem a bit unfair. On one hand, I guess I'm better at negotiating a higher salary (mine's not that much higher, maybe 5-10%), but at the same time, it seems unfair that he does the same work and gets paid less.
How would discussing my salary with him benefit me (in a purely capitalistic sense)?
You can make your job a little bit more secure by encouraging your colleague to demand more pay.
Mostly it's based on seniority and experience. Even if you do the exact same tasks and maybe sometimes even faster maybe sometimes slower. The salery will not reflect that at all.
Rule of Acquisition no. 1 says: "Once you have their money, you never give it back".
But if you did, the next best thing is suggested by Rule 111: "Treat people in your debt like family... exploit them".
But if you also downvoted me, maybe you missed both my pun (a capitalist should be able to assess the value of everything) and my point.
Hence the penultimate rule in the HN guidelines - "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
You have no way of knowing who downvoted you, or why, unless they step forward.
I like to joke that my company is ashamed about what it pays me, therefore I shouldn't talk about it. And I am a nice guy, and don't want the company to feel the shame without a good reason.
That means, how can I trust them with other things? For example, something goes wrong and they mess up. Will they be afraid to tell me, because they will be worried that I am going to be angry or depressed?
Now, it's perfectly fine to be afraid of other person's emotional reaction (that's why it's non-judgemental). But if you are still afraid after I made the first step, then it's a good thing for me to know about you.
See, it's a prisoner's dilemma type of deal (actually, it's a different game). I offer cooperation - you can either decide to deny it (by keeping your salary private) or cooperate also (by stating your salary back). If you decide to reciprocate useful information, then we might cooperate more in the future for mutual benefit.
So it's useful information whether you want to get into coalition with me. I don't care the same way about your health or your porn.
> See, it's a prisoner's dilemma type of deal (actually, it's a different game).
All of this is your opinion. Has it ever occurred to you that others might not see salary negotiation this way, and therefore could have other reasons for not joining your "coalition" besides cowardice?
I and many others see salary negotiation differently than you do. I negotiated my salary with my employer when I started my job. That means I consider it worth my while to do the job for that amount and my employer thinks it's worth that amount to employ me. Otherwise one of us would have walked away. The fairness of my salary is independent of whether the guy next to me makes twice as much or half as much. I couldn't give two shits how much he makes.
I would not "get into a coalition" with you because I would find it irritating to know that I helped you in your entirely self-interested crusade to raise your own salary in the name of "fairness" or "mutual benefit" or "fighting the man" or however you might characterize it. I also simply don't like to associate with people who use words like "coward" to describe anyone who has more of a social filter than they do (you sound like you're seventeen). You can attribute that to spite if you want, but cowardice would be quite a leap.
Yes, it totally did! That's why I am not judging them. I am afraid though you don't want to understand where I am coming from, either.
I understand that people want to have their lives and don't want to fight, politically or economically. It's just good to know who they are.
Frankly, I find it curious that people do not want to openly discuss salaries. It's not like the stakes are very high (in Western societies, anyway). But maybe in the U.S. they actually are higher than, say, Norway. It's almost as if collective bargaining is a taboo topic in the U.S.
The word "coward" is probably not ideal, but I don't know of a better equivalent. You could take my example, and change "discussing salaries" into "discussing government" in a society which (relatively softly) represses freedom of speech (like for example, communist society in Eastern Europe, where I do come from).
So in these hypothetical circumstance, you can make a certain statement, which can be interpreted as being critical of the government, which is a taboo in that society. The other people can either take the bait and break a taboo slightly too, or they might not. It's useful information for you to know whether or not they are willing to break the taboo, because if the push ever comes to shove, for example you would suddenly find yourself in some uncomfortable situation, say somebody from dissent would ask you for help, and you would need help of another person, then you would naturally choose somebody who you know was willing to break the taboo before. So that's the meaning of the word "coward" in that context.
It's not being judgemental, because as I said, it would be immoral to force the people to participate (in activity that is considered bad by society and thus taboo). It's a simple test of boundaries, you want to participate or not.
"The fairness of my salary is independent of whether the guy next to me makes twice as much or half as much. I couldn't give two shits how much he makes."
I don't think it's quite true, because if it truly had been the case, then you wouldn't consider it taboo to discuss it. Just like, you know, we don't consider it taboo to talk about whether or not we have kids or cars and how many.
If you uninvitedly told me your salary I’d think you’re a clown.
For complicated human reasons, it's a bad analogy. Although you're right that the game-theoretic reasons for humans hiding their genitals and hiding their salaries might actually be similar.
Interestingly, there was nudism movement, which was basically about right to display your genitals (in non-invasive way). And I think we should, as humans, also have the right to count our money in public. Shouldn't we?