Breaking the Salary Sharing Taboo
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In my first two companies I would openly share my salary, which worked in my favour since I was underpaid. In my third company, where I had one of the higher salaries, it didn't work so well.
My colleagues refused to share theirs (it transpired they were making less), and that led to a lot of animosity and bad blood. Ever since I don't share anymore, most people have the tools they need online to make an educated guess on how well they are getting paid.
(narrator: They didn’t)
"you shouldn't be earning more than me"
rather than
"I should be earning as much as you"
I wonder why (some) people immediately think the former
The latter statement requires the speaker to admit they screwed up. They can get to that point, if they did research on how to get there or worked on the key things they are missing currently. The former statement puts the agency on the opposing party and basically expects some divine will of the heavens to strike them down for their sin of earning more. Most people don't want to change or admit their own mistakes. Or worse, they are indoctrinated by Calvinism.
Company X needs to employ two people in a role. The person they employ will add $100 an hour of value to the company.
Person A has lots of money in the bank from a large inheritence and doesn't need the job to live
Person B has desparately needs a job to pat the mortgage
Company X offers both $40 an hour
Person B takes the offer, as the alternative is reposession
Person A says 'no'
Company X still wants that extra $100 an hour of value, so offer person B $50 an hour, then $60. Person B then accepts at $60.
Both person A and person B are worth $100, neither get paid what they are worth, but person A is paid 50% more than person B.
If person A in your narrative was capable of creating $100 dollars of value all by themselves, they would do that instead. But they can’t. The $100 opportunity exists because of the company.
The company needs a shovel strong enough to dig up the $100. If one person will sell such a shovel for $40, and that’s the best price available, they’ll take it. That was the market value of shovels. It would be wrong to say the shovel was worth $100. Even if all the shovel sellers in the area knew about the details of this opportunity and decided to set they’re prices at $99, it would quickly become apparent that shovels aren’t really worth that. Two things would happen: sellers would defect and set they’re prices lower than $99 to secure the deal; this would happen as long and there was still and profit to be made. And the company would remember what a shovel was supposed to cost, get suspicious, and look in to manufacturing a shovel of they’re own, or commissioning a rake shop to make one.
This game of price setting is pretty good at approximating worth, especially compared to your proposed strategy of measuring the delta between company profits in reality, and in an alternate reality where the employee didn’t exist and the company didn’t attempt to fill their position with anybody or anything. The latter is not worth talking about.
This is a terrible example. Moving something is not the same as creating that something. Moving $1000 could be worth nothing. It could have negative value. It could be worth millions.
If you’re in the business of creating useful objects out of basically nothing, you don’t even need a company. Maybe you hire somebody to sell your objects for commission, or maybe you sell them yourself.
If you’re looking for a closer analogy, try the shove analogy. Why is it that despite the fact that the shovel makers are creating an object, even out of nothing, that they aren’t worth what is dug up with them? Software engineers are a lot like the shovel makers. Sometimes the shovels we make are used in extraordinarily profitable ventures. But their value is still determined by how hard it was to make them, and to learn the skills to make them. Not what the company uses them for.
I think it becomes hard to see when all the shovels being made are bespoke. Lots of software is written to fill one role for one client. That client will often use that particular thing to make lots of money. So maybe it appears like that thing bit of software created all the value? But this is clearly false. The fact that some part of a system is essential to the whole system’s success does not imply that the worth of every piece of the system is equivalent to the worth of the whole system.
...and then you go on to describe the reason it's a great example.
I'm contending with the belief that somethings "worth" is determined by the effects it has, specifically the effects on the profits of a corporation. As you've pointed out regarding my "move $1000 example," the effects something has can vary in scale from the actions that brought them about. The cost of moving an object of a certain weight a certain distance with certain security measures is pretty stable. The secondary effects, on the other hand, could be massive.
Employment is the same way. One is paid to do a task in proportion to how much others who are capable of it would do it for. That amount is almost totally disconnected from the profits (or losses) the employer reaps from having that task completed for them.
This suggested that they had added a thousand dollars of value, whereas you presumably meant no such thing? Your example gave me the impression that we were in direct disagreement.
Continuing the discussion, now that I understand what you were saying; having recognised that what people are paid is disconnected from what value they bring to a company (and thus that someone could be worth millions to a company, but paid peanuts [0]), is it right that recompense is "almost totally disconnected from the profits (or losses) the employer reaps from having that task completed for them"? This is something of a moral judgement and we stray into different grounds; the great god Market is very popular hereabouts.
[0] Some argue that by defintion, what someone is paid is what they are worth. Fortunately, because that is presented as a simple definition, we can discard it as easily as it is presented.
Netflix directors and above can see all salaries though. I wonder how that's working.
I had a good understanding of the value I was providing to the business, of what my next best offer was, and I negotiated my salary regularly. (Where my colleague was accepting a rate that was clearly below the market rate)
It was challenging for me to share my salary in this case. On reflection, the situation was not politically in my favour to do this: perhaps I should have negotiated a different job title (but I didn't care about that at the time).
Public salaries on the other hand reduce a company's flexibility: When negotiating a new contract, they cannot offer 10% more anymore. On the other hand, no one should apply if the salaries do not match their expectations...
I guess it can work reasonably well, but individual cases would suffer somewhat.
Why not?
People wouldn't be job hopping if you could get the same raise as the new guys.
Not saying I like this but it's the current situation in Europe where the power lies with the company and the ones who loose are those that are too loyal to the company(most employees outside SW dev don't bother looking around every few years like we do).
Lots of employees here have bought into this company spread propaganda that job hopping like in the US will make you unemployable in the future.
As the employees get older and get tied down with families and homes and also Job Stockholm Syndrome they're less likely to shop around for new jobs so the savings on salaries on seniors being paid below market are huge.
But is that ultimately true? It feels to me that the companies hold the power to make that true, regardless of the propaganda. So even if you try to job hop, after a certain age they have all the power to make you unemployable. Am I wrong? (I hope I am)
I think constant job hopping is bad in 3 situations: 1) If you work a non lifelong-learning job. 2) If you work a job that is mostly industry-specific relationship based. 3) If you are jumping around to different job roles entirely, where you never really become exceptionally talented at any single role.
My general rule of thumb for deciding when to job hop is when I feel as if I've stopped learning new things.
And afaik, large companies and large successful projects tend to have more stable core team behind them.
2. If you don't want people to job-hop because they see what some new hire earns, then you're either overpaying the new one (and unnecessarily alienating your workers) or you're underpaying the current employees, and you should raise their salary or expect them to hop.
2. That's how it should be in an ideal world but the reality is different and companies know through years of experience that the current system works better for them rather than the one you'd want.
Supposedly you can because you're offering them 10% more than the rest of your employees...
I hate this approach, but for most companies in Europe it's the reality that works in their favor.
- Worth is subjective. I'm sure we've all had conversations about someone where some view the person as great and others view the same person as meh or under performing. Value is also determined based on information, which usually people don't have the same amount of. So very possible the hiring person or committee sees different value in a person than fellow engineers or teammates.
- Value judgement, especially for hiring is also point in time. Could very well be the person as presented during interview is a rockstar, but after landing on the team doesn't perform well for whatever reason.
If you have established salary bands, then you cannot justify offering somebody something outside of that range. That defeats the entire purpose of having salary bands to begin with, and not complying with them would be lying to your employees. What salary bands are, is a levelling mechanism. The answer to “why does x get paid more than me?” should be “because for some particular reason we decided x was worth more to us than you”. With the levelling mechanism, you have less options for paying people what they’re worth, instead you simply decide that everybody will get paid +/- a few % of whatever the average value of an employee in that role is, regardless of their contribution.
This sounds like a massive win for all but the bottom of the barrel tier companies. Finding and training new people (while giving them 10% more) as the old guys who know their shit leave for a better job is super expensive.
If companies had pressure to give raises internally, this would give less reason to hop jobs. I think that's a good thing for mostly everyone (including their employers). Everyone except dirt cheap shops where nobody wants to work anyway if they have choices.
But who is encouraging you? Since in Europe/Rest of the World(except US/UK) companies never mention how much they're willing to pay and even the recruiters they hire are sometimes not allowed to mention the upper range to their candidates. So nobody knows they're underpaid unless you're willing to take your free time and apply to jobs, contact recruiters and go interview at a few companies and go through some rounds of negotiations.
And even then lots of companies will look at your application very suspiciously that you're applying to new jobs so soon and they'll expect something's wrong with your relationship with your current employer or with you so some might not even make you an offer.
For most senior employees with families that's a lot of trouble to go through so they don't even bother unless a recruiter knocks on their door with the offer of a lifetime.
Not if the new guy is 10% better at what they do.
And if he's not, then maybe the others actually deserve that 10% more.
Good thing.
In most cases, this is not the case. In fact, it's often the case that the new person is really new and will require significant hand holding to be productive.
They pay them 10% more because the new person has multiple offers, and most existing employees aren't seeking alternatives, so they have little leverage.
Seems to be a good idea to change that.
That sounds like a huge win for companies.
By the way, there's at least one more incentive/mechanism at play here: since western society tends to confound fiscal achievement with value as a person, people hesitate (and with reason) to share their salary, in case it is too low. There's some nice discussion to be had there about Calvinism and the general relationship between religion and the attitude towards individual achievement. But I think that would just devolve into a flame-war so maybe let's not go there. :)
Or in the case of Europe, if it's too high. Most youths here are very left leaning and don't like high earners so if you work in tech and want to make friends outside of tech you'd better not mention salaries.
Its not just youth or politics. Its mostly culture and unwillingness to deviate from it, coupled with some strong expectations. People "expect" managers to be paid well, doctors to be paid well, etc, so they don't get angry at these people for getting paid well. On a smaller scale, only if you start deviating from the norm do people make mention or get angry, because a large part of Europe still solemnly believes in Calvinism (especially the Netherlands).
You end up with a risk-averse, middle-of-the-road populace where everything different from the status quo is quickly snuffed out and most stars only get to shine if they are lucky or working for an American megacorp, where excellence is valued more (with its own set of problems). I'd figure that has to do with our lack of a Silicon Valley equivalent as well.
I don't think this jas anything to do with cultural norms (trust me, I don't conform to many of them). It has to do with fairness, and our broken economic system rewarding the wrong things.
Well sure, but the power that sustains that mechanism is very unevenly distributed, and skewed towards the people it benefits. Most people have little choice but to go along with it in their day to day lives.
> If anything, most likely than not you are paid too little as people rarely maximize their negotiating leverage.
You mean, most likely I could be paid more. This is probably true. But it is not at all the same as deserving that pay.
If you take supply and demand as your moral system, then you can justify all sorts of immoralities, after all I have no doubt that there would be plenty of demand for assassins. As a society we choose to disincentivise assassination because we believe that we know better than the market. We can, do and should do the same for economic activity. And just because the status quo incentivises things in a certain way doesn't make it right.
The information is still available, but rate limited, and the person you look up will get a notification. So you can still look up last year's tax return of the person offering you a job - but that person might take offense.
That said, there are a couple of good reasons for the change; digital publication is qualitatively different from having to go down to the city administration to look up the numbers on paper - among other things it makes collecting/checking date of birth trivial (it's part of the dataset - which is municipality of residence, full name and dob).
I don't know where the idea that Calvinism links individual achievement to individual value comes from, but it's found nowhere in Calvinist theology. If anything, it teaches the opposite in that it asserts that every person is implicitly valuable, regardless of race, gender, status, or occupation, by simple virtue of being made in God's image, an inseparable quality of being human.
I think the prevailing incentive for most employees would be to have that information, and break the information asymmetry.
That said I don't think clear economic incentives are the only thing at play. Public salaries is, in old leftist terms, a material cultural change. Material meaning that salary dynamics will change as a results of it.
Even in that type of system, there are ways to make high performers get compensated better, and there is very little of any alienation. You can also see this at play with corporate officers whose salaries vary dramatically.
I worked some years in Norway where tax information is public making it fairly easy to estimate what people earn. I chose not to view this information given I was happy with my salary and work.
I felt if I saw similar level people earnt more and I raised this but didn't get equalised it could hurt my sense of justice and how content I felt in the workplace. Given I enjoyed my work and company I didn't want to risk this as something that might bug me.
Also "Ignorance is bliss." Which could be interpreted either way.
I was already paid reasonably well which likely helps take this position. Once that threshold is met I value happiness over a bit more money.
If I was frustrated with my income I'd likely be viewing the tax info and looking for negotation points, or knowing a company is a poor payer in general.
No 'right' answer, only what is right for you.
Shouldn't it, though? It's like saying your partner is cheating on you, but you don't want to know because it could 'hurt your sense of justice and how content I feel in the relationship'.
I mean, I'll grant you that if you're happy in your job, and honestly don't care about pay, it's different. Just like if you're in an open relationship, and genuinely don't care if your partner sleeps with other people. That's fine. But by saying it could hurt you, you're implying it does matter. And if it matters, the first step to righting any wrong is to know about it and to be able to take adequate steps.
Put differently, suppose other people knew they were worth more, took that information and asked more, got more, and you didn't, even though you could've. That doesn't sound right to me.
What I think could be a useful tool is to take that raw Norwegian tax data, run a basic condition on it, and then spit out only results you find 'relevant', which can protect you from knowing things you don't want to know.
e.g. input 10 names of your peers (who should be earning the same), and only show those salaries that are say 20% above your own. That prevents you from knowing Bob earns 5% more for reasons that may never be resolved, which could still annoy you. But if say Bob earns 20% more, that's something I'd want to know to see if I could take action.
Or, perhaps even more conservative, to only get a sense of where you stand versus company average (for your function) and versus market average. That takes out a lot of the personal but tells you whether you should be happy where you are, or asking for a raise or another employer.
I have never read through the full list of what anyone makes. I honestly don't care. I have checked whether a particular engineer has got a raise I have advocated for or what I believe they are worth, but that's different.
The biggest benefit from this is that even relatively junior people are willing to recommend offers for candidates that actually match market rates based on their skills. To be able and confident to quote offers that are higher than what you make is an incredible leveler.
ß: our market maker unit deviates from this - they found out that hiring from banking or hedge fund backgrounds, new people were not comfortable knowing/disclosing the exact numbers but are okay with salary band granularity. Sure. Fine. Whatever works.
I suppose I'm naive, but it seems obvious to me that a company should want to pay its employees as much as possible—that is, as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver. When I say "should", I don't mean morally. It just seems obviously in the company's interest.
From Chapter 3 of the book: "The Spanish Theory...held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people's back."
I think that most folks, once they're a few years into their careers, have seen and understood that this theory of management and value extraction is alive and well in corporate America today.
From the same chapter: "Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference."
So I agree with you. It seems obvious to me as well that companies should pay as much as possible. But they don't think that way, because they're coming from a different value set.
I'd be curious to see an economist take a look at what's going on here. The software-development profession continues to incentivise employees to constantly change jobs, despite that employers pay a real 'onboarding penalty' for employee churn.
If someone knows the answer I'd be interested to hear it.
> as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver
But what does that mean? If an employee delivers $100,000/year of value, how how much should you pay them? Surely the answer (regarding the employer's self-interest) should factor in the odds of them leaving at any given pay-grade. The answer presumably isn't $99,999. The employer is looking to 'capture value', after all.
"As much as possible" is everything. So no.
> that is, as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver.
If companies paid for the value the employees delivered, the company would have no profit. Companies make money by taking a share of the value employees delivered.
> It just seems obviously in the company's interest.
Maybe in a disneyesque/"it's a wonderful life" fairy tale but not in real life. Obviously it isn't in the company's interest because no company does it your way.
Actually, employees salaries, like rent, fuel costs, supplies, etc are viewed as costs/expenditures for a company. Something all companies want to reduce as it eats into their profits.
With this approach it is our task to come to the negotiating table:
- informed on floor and ceiling for the position's compensation (there are websites and unions and many ways to get this info besides asking)
- ready to show what I can bring of value that it's worth paying more than a mere floor compensation, or above the ceiling.
In the past I've only shared information with people I know will be discreet in how they use it, and it has helped them, and it has helped me. The interesting thing is that most of these cases are internal moves. You can't just ring people in the company you are interviewing for and ask...
Public grades/salary on the other hand makes it hard to work with people. You can’t look at another person without thinking of their worth and compare it to yours. It creates unnecessary drama, makes people think they’re more important than they are, and distracts from the actual work. Glassdoor and recruiters already should give you a good idea of what you’re worth. Knowing other people’s compensation will only lead to jealousy of others and others of you. It’s one of those human nature things that can’t be turned off so best not to exacerbate it.
Everyone sharing information equalizes the imbalance of power in the workplace. It may not be comfortable for everyone, but it definitely helps people get what they're worth.
Apparently those of my colleagues who now know what I make believes that I'm under paid by around $1000 per month. At the same time I feel that my pay is excellent and that my co-workers deserve every cent they make.
Drama around people salaries could arise, but only if your company rewards people randomly. Knowing that a colleagues makes more than you should prompt you to ask your boss what it is that you're doing or not doing that keeps you at a lower pay, and your boss should be able to tell you exactly why you're paid less.
In my experience recruiters and public salary databases isn't that useful. Most large organisations have their own, or buy access to salary statistics and will use those. In my case recruiters have been off by as much as $15000 per year, not including existing bonuses and overtime.
Salaries should in my mind should be public. I believe it will result in more equal pay, but also lower salaries to a large group of people who currently enjoy a salary that isn't reflective of they responsibility or the importance of their job.
This assumes that your boss is rewarded for keeping you happy. In my org, we use a form of stack ranking; so my boss just gives whoever he likes the highest rank. Everyone else gets a COL raise. My boss is rewarded for being a tough negotiator with vendors and staff; that makes his boss happy. And my boss, despite his lack of self-awareness, isn't technical in any way. So he has no ability to either direct my work, or to judge it in a technical manner. This limits his ability to tell me exactly why I'm paid less. He's a typical middle manager who's more of a negotiator than a technical manager. Yet he holds my career in his hands.
'Why' is a qualitative measurement. You will never agree. The debate will never end. It will always be well be, "he did X, I did Y, I think Y is more important, so I think I should be paid more" times a thousands of employees.
Believe me grades are a public salary microcosm. I worked at a company for 4 years that added grades to titles in the middle of my stay. It was a disaster. People were never happy, always jealous, constantly asking their boss 'what they need to do' to achieve a subjective thing.
I think you're right it would lead to more equal pay because that would be the only way to avoid the drama. It does put the company at a competitive disadvantage now because -
Your competitors know how much all your positions make, while they don't have to make theirs public
Hiring a dev at a discount is impossible because they will complain
Hiring a dev at a premium is impossible because current employees will complain
Holding on to talent is harder because if they leave for a better offer - you cant match their pay because everyone else will complain
Pretty much end up with grades like those seen in government [0] and then that might not be sufficient. Do you apply grades company wide, department wide, or even down to the team level? Do you get points for additional skills, how do you adjust for these intangibles? How much does seniority count for?
Seniority might help for some issues but I know many of us can bring up stories of people just overpaid simply for being there too long. We can even point to many who came in are not qualified. Finally yes we can all point to those we know who should make more but publishing salaries is not the solution, audit and HR solutions can cover obvious cases of discrimination.
Salary guidance and ranges could be published without issue but I think salaries except for compensation numbers required to be disclosed should be treated like any other personal information.
PS: I really dislike articles that attempt to guilt people into agreement. Right off the bat they are trying to imply you are wrong for disagreeing, this is just as mickey mouse as saying "for the children". If anything I just tune it all out when they start off like that. It isn't journalism, it is pontificating
[0] https://gogovernment.org/pay-and-the-general-schedule-gs/
We never bitched about the pay someone else was making. It was just the way it was.
But then they are not doing the same job, and it is reasonable that they earn more.
In a grocery store, the prices are public and visible to all clients and other stores. You are reasonably sure that the seller is not reaching a "private agreement" with most other clients. This kind of public information is a basic tenet of a market economy. Otherwise the whole thing is taken over by arbiters (aka "negotiators") instead of productive people. I honestly do not understand why such an important part of the economy (the actual salaries!) is not bound by the same rule.
I'm not supporting the practice, I just don't see how it could be any different,unless you start forcing key actors in this system to disclose.
Lest the workers unionize and make it stop.
The issue is wether everybody realizes they aren't doing the same job.
> In a grocery store
Comparing performance of people is a lot more subjective than comparing food. Your comparing apples to oranges here.
If performance was easy to compare, it'd be a lot easier to push for transparent salary information.
If performance is not easy to compare, what is the point of assigning different salaries to people?
When I look back over my career, I know which 20 or so engineers I’d want to hire for a startup where engineering mattered. Even if I can’t assign an exact percentage how much better they were, I sure know who they are.
What? If anything, that would be an argument IN FAVOR of public salaries ...
> "There are arguments on both sides"
It's possible to create strata -- junior, mid-level, senior, etc. -- and say that for a particular open role, you are hiring for only mid-level engineers. But there's always going to be some wiggle room.
Maybe you'll get one applicant with 3 years of experience applying for a mid-level role, and you see a lot of promise in them, but you realize they'll need a higher level of training. And maybe you'll get another applicant with 10 years of experience applying for the same role, and you know they're solid and will need very little ramp-up time or hand-holding.
So it makes perfect sense to offer the latter candidate more than the former candidate, even if you're willing to hire them both. (And chances are, the latter candidate will expect more than the former candidate.)
In government, your salary comes from taxes, or absent sufficient tax revenue, from inflation (i.e. the government just prints more money).
However if I can open and hire for ten donut shops per year, I've got their combined revenue as leverage for negotiating my salary. I'm not competing with you, but with my fellow executive who can only open and hire for six per year.
What do you think the analogue is for government work?
1. Salaries were public info.
2. There was a large disparity in pay (even for the same tenure level and same department).
https://www.emploi-collectivites.fr/grille-indiciaire-etat-m...
https://www.emploi-collectivites.fr/grille-indiciaire-etat-p...
Do you mean the same job or the same job title?
Unless you are working in a job where it is very well defined what your responsibilities are different people even with the same job title might be doing very different work.
I have the same job title as the guy next to me and he can't write a lick of JavaScript and spends all day writing VB / C#. All I do is JavaScript pretty much. I am sure we are paid differently as my skills are less valuable to the business (I believe).
Because the group that gets the highest salaries is also the group that wouldn't put up with lower salaries.
And the group that gets the lowest salaries, is also the group that puts up with the lowest salaries.
That's why nothing changes. People don't randomly get more money. They get it because they ask for it, demand it, push for it, negotiate, plan, make deals, long-term agreements etc, which results in a pay raise. Others quietly and diligently do their jobs, and don't.
Fact is that most managers will not give you a raise by themselves, unless it's standard company policy, which is quite rare outside of government organisations. A manager giving you a raise means two things: either he has to get more budget from his manager, which means asking for a favour, making a business case, spending his political capital within the organisation, time, headaches etc. Or the manager already has budget available, and he'll be most keen to spend it on hiring extra manpower, or spending it on a raise on the other people who are asking for it (and at risk of leaving).
That's why there's no reason for a manager to give you a raise, unless there's indications he actually has to. e.g. because you're at risk of leaving to another department or company, or staying with the company but unsatisfied which damages the manager/employee relationship. The fastest way to give your manager this indication is to start up the conversation, be vocal about your career aspirations and expectations.
There's a group of people who aren't vocal like that, and they overlap almost entirely with the group of people that doesn't call to arms. It's the same people. That's why the system stays like this.
> I find it rather strange to know that in private companies the salaries are not public.
Why does this come off as “people still watch TV. I haven’t owned a TV in 20 years”? Are you really saying that you didn’t know that the private sector doesn’t publish salaries on a website?
> How do people put up with this bullshit?
The same could be said about why academics put up with the “bullshit” of “low” salaries.
Why is it so strange that people would make different trade offs than you do?
But yes, perhaps it's less than 50%. Hard to tell
That may depend on industry and location though. Different jobs are likely to attract different people.
In order to avoid drama in the workplace, companies adopting this sort of policy would undoubtedly adopt a standard pay scale that excludes their top workers. Maybe the existing employees are grandfathered in? Or maybe not. In either case you end up not being able to spend extra on that one employee who could really help your business goals.
And I say that as a person who pretty freely shares what they make (though not typically with current coworkers) and also earns well above average in my region.
Just imagine having the sorts of discussions we have about ostensibly-overpaid NFL players, except about George in Logistics and you’ll start to see what I’m imagining.
While bad from a companies point of view, salary transparency is one of the few free market mechanisms in sports, and it does generally result in meritocratic distribution. The very fact you can mention someone who is perceived as overpaid implies scrutiny far beyond anything possible in a major corporation.
Frankly, I suspect this would be worse for company profits more than anything else. In sports they have a strict % of total revenue that salaries can come out of,which limits the pot. Employees would certainly have no such artificial limit, in fact such a thing would likely be illegal.
In Russia, for example, “how much do you make” is a question as common and unusual as “What city are you from?”
How should I imagine a feminist minded co-working space?
Now imagine "open salaries" making it obvious that the "women underpaid" is just a lie. An entire industry of "feminism" would die.
Maybe NYT should not push too hard for this "openess".
And reading the brief content:
> There are a couple of reasons that the pay equity analysis required more adjustments in 2018, compared to 2017. First, the 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women. Secondly, this year we undertook a new hire analysis to look for any discrepancies in offers to new employees—this accounted for 49 percent of the total dollars spent on adjustments.
I suppose a natural question would be if an overpaid se4 is an underpromoted se5, or if an underpaid se4 is an overpromoted sr3.
I understand the try to correct for "similar roles" - but that doesn't mean the promtion/roles are accurate.
Either way; interesting link.
I was extrapolating from "men at Google are underpaid while the official narrative pushed to make all believe that women were".
What industry do you have in mind?
less than 1% is not "much more". Please don't editorialize. Especially when the data I have (and I have more than most!) on Google's internal salaries shows that women do appear to be underpaid by some measures.
The average L4 SWE at Google is taking home more than $200K annually, and has a salary well over 100K, so these changes amounted to less than half a percent of total comp, and less than one percent of salary.
As for "some measures", the short answer is that when you control for performance rating and level, as Google did here, things generally look reasonable.
The problem is that there are good reasons to believe that historically equally performing women were less likely to be promoted (for various structural reasons that I won't get into, weren't malicious, and have been at least somewhat addressed). The result then is that high performing women may still be under-leveled or under-compensated in relation to their actual performance.
So a completely reasonable interpretation of this sequence of events is that women were as a group, somewhat under-leveled. Their managers, individually, noticed this and did (as Google leadership suggests) what they could to use manager-discretionary compensation to address this underpayment. Again, individually and stochastically. The overall analysis notices this, and because one stochastic process (promotion) previously had a bias against women, and because the recent analysis didn't control for that, I get an extra $1K.
Which is nice, but it's not anything particularly special.
So they disproved the "wage gap" lie with hard data, and, as if nothing happened, you pull out the next unfounded myth?
Got any hard data?
And yes, but not publicly.
They do try to build community that emphasizes supporting entrepreneurs who are women, but not exclusively.