Comment by Gustomaximus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gustomaximus | Hacker News Reader

In Norway the Government publish how much tax you paid for the year. This makes it fairly simple to know what a PAYE employee is earning.

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.

Another comment here states: "all this idea will create is animosity, jealousy and politics at work"

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.)

Not GP. Having worked in a number of countries and having managed people from many tens of countries, I do think there is a pretty strong cultural bias around competitiveness/ambition and the degree to which it is considered good form to show it. (Of course, any individual can behave and feel vastly differently from any cultural stereotypes!)

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.

That's an interesting point about culture. But then it raises a question - many people here judge others, how they will be resentful and so on if they talk openly about salaries, and they do it based on the culture they are in. But shouldn't we judge people as individuals rather as members of the culture?

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.

I am from Norway and have worked with companies in Norway, Germany, US and Finland. In my experience, Norway is typically less competitive/backstabbing/maneuvering. It helps that wage differences, both in society at large, within a company, and for a given position is smaller than other places in the world.

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.

To answer you questions directly - no.

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.

> currently under 30's men are paid less than women.

Can you provide a citation? That is new to me.

See second graph: https://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap

That graph shows percent grow in pay, not the absolute pay. In fact, it notes that at the age of 22 men earn $40,800 while women earn $31,900 (median, in both cases). The difference in growth does not suffice to close that gap, let alone rise women's pay above that of men's.

You're right. Here’s better sources: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704421104575463... http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274...

https://www.google.com/search?q=women+under+30+paid+more+tha...

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