Should You Tell the World How Much Money You Make?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My coworkers, by-and-large, were furious. I found it really helpful. I found out where I was relative to my peers (I was only behind by a few hundred bucks/year - we were all basically equal if we had the same title, except for one guy that had abused the state 10% raise when switching departments). One guy in our DBA/Ops team discovered he was getting a relatively paltry amount while his peers were all getting 6 digits (which was all on the bosses - his peers were also bothered by this). One or two people had very questionably high salaries and were suddenly held by others to be delivering at that level. Mostly, though, it calmed people down about salary differences.
Honestly, it was awkward for some people, but honestly I think the benefits outweighed the costs, at least within the office. Much of my coworkers' outrage was about people OUTSIDE the office finding their salaries, such as friends, family, neighbors, people wanting money, etc.
Don't think it'd be that useful at a "we don't do seniority rituals, everybody is a software engineer" type place, where you just see you're in a band from $60k-$480k. If the bucket is large, distribution information would be more useful.
Meanwhile in America the topic is taboo. Apparently you can get five years of jail for leaking someone's tax information — in the same country where personal information privacy barely exists otherwise. Strange.
Thus, I don't really buy the myriad of reasons presented here for why this is such a bad idea.
By comparison, in the public sector & military, everyone's is public, and on top of that there is no salary negotiation.
And even if every pay grade was fixed, a salary negotiation can take the form of "I deserve to be moved to a higher pay grade because XYZ." People don't get promoted on a fixed schedule.
There is some salary negotiation in the public sector, especially at the executive level; now, even those positions that are negotiable may often (but not always) have narrower constraints than a private employer would have in practice, but not all positions in public service have strict salary bands with objective rules for placement within the bands.
This is failing to address the scenario where not sharing salary is company policy and/or part of the employment agreement or contract. If my personal experience is any indicator, I would speculate that this is quite common at large companies.
And, I don't know, having other people share their salary information is good for me, but sharing mine can certainly be used against me in a variety of subtle ways. People are consciously and unconsciously judgemental by nature. Sometimes I have a relatively good deal and I know it, so sometimes I don't want to share salary because I know it would only make other people feel bad. Sometimes I don't want to know that someone makes more than me because it would make me feel bad, when ultimately it doesn't matter.
I am genuinely interested in the idea of sharing, but I really want some stronger reasons of why it's to my actual personal benefit today to share that information, assuming my employment agreement allows it. I didn't see any in this article.
https://www.nlrb.gov/resources/faq/nlrb#t38n3180
Adults can absolutely handle fair pay discrepancies without "feeling bad," and if they can't then they are so immature that I doubt they'd otherwise make a good employee. It works plenty fine in many industries where salary is public information and even in whole countries where salary is public.
BTW I realize I may have some of my experience with contract work mixed into my fallible memory. But, that's another reasonable point here, more people are turning into independent contractors, and they're not subject to employee rights protection, it's perfectly legal to have a compensation non-disclosure in a work-for-hire contract.
> Adults can absolutely handle fair pay discrepancies without "feeling bad," and if they can't then they are so immature that I doubt they'd otherwise make a good employee.
I think this might be too dismissive and perhaps over-simplified. Everybody, including "adults" wants fairness in their life. Most people don't know what actually constitutes the range of "fair" pay even within their own company, and there are often situations - it is very common - where someone is paid more or less than others not due to experience or skill but due to circumstances, timings, negotiating power, specialized company requirements, and a variety of other things.
Still, even if sharing didn't cause me any large problems, why is it in my interest to share?
I stopped talking to family about it though. Different countries and CoL means my raises end up being more than their total package. So discussing that leads to nothing wholesome. Instead I try to silently absorb more of the family costs than proportionate.
I think this goes overboard: a min/mean/median/max for each job title would be good enough to know where I stand in a salary negotiation. I also like Ms. Zaloom's idea from the article to share salaries among close friends and family.
> the gig economy has made salary comparing a near necessity for many.
Obviously, most freelancers would love if this information was public. If rates are public, you know where you are standing and where to start if you want to provide a service. That is not exactly the same as telling how much money one makes—one can only infer so much. Despite this, most freelancers are still secretive about their rate—as if this was always an advantage.
Should you tell the world how much money you make? Are you altruistic?
So the question is what situation would someone think better serves their interests? Of course, whether one person describing their salary would evoke reciprocity or not is a question, whether another person would tell the truth is a question.
That being said - if an employee were to come to me and say "I want $X because so-and-so (or 'others on the team') are making that much", I would deny their request outright. That's a childish way to ask for a raise. It doesn't highlight what you're bringing to the team; only what you want to take from it.
People get killed in some places for $100. $1000 is enough to kidnapped in some places. Besides if people know how much you make, you will get custom pricing. Do you know there are countries that have 2 menus, one for foreigners and one for locals? Because they foreigners make much money so are charged higher prices?
That's why it ends with a question mark, so that it makes the title not-technically-incorrect (author is "just asking a question"), while driving the engagements that have nothing to do with its content.
It's very nice that they keep special menus written in English. Well wroth the extra cost, which is cheaper than eating out in LA anyway.
Additionally, lack of price transparency hurts the market as a whole, since prices are how the market conveys information as to where supply is needed. Restricting this supply is good for those benefiting from the extra profit, but not for society overall.