Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

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I always come at this from an "information == power" standpoint. If any one worker only knows the data points from their own (possibly non-existent) previous employments, they will be at a disadvantage against a company that has already negotiated hundreds of such contracts. So if you assume a more-or-less free market (kind of reasonable in professions far off minimum-wage regulation) then players with more information will statistically end up better off. Put like that, sharing your salary becomes a pretty basic act of solidarity, and should be reciprocated.

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. :)

> people hesitate (and with reason) to share their salary, in case it is too low.

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.

I wouldn't want to be friends with anyone who gets upset because of my income or title. My salary is modest in terms of what I do, however compared to many other fields, it's pretty darn good. So if'd talk to someone who works in tech, they'd puzzled why I don't try to get a better paying job,while people in other fields would tell me how lucky I am compared to them.

From experience, it's not that they get upset as much as they will come back to it in random conversation about how they should earn a similar salary because "Do X and it's much harder!".

Or if you ever mention how stressed and overworked you are they'll chime in with how you shouldn't complain since you're well paid.

>Most youths here are very left leaning and don't like high earners

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.

Comments like this from ambitious Europeans appear so often that I can't help but feel the US is still in a relatively strong position despite the mess of a clusterfuck it feels like from the inside.

For what it's worth, I'm a software developer (in europe), and I think I definitely get paid too much, relative to the value I contribute to society. I could get paid even more if I will willing to go and work for EvilCorp.

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.

Doesn’t society put its own value on your work by sustaining the mechanism which keeps paying you? If anything, most likely than not you are paid too little as people rarely maximize their negotiating leverage.

> Doesn’t society put its own value on your work by sustaining the mechanism which keeps paying you?

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.

I'm sad that Norway stopped publishing all tax return lists (ie, taxable income).

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).

Oh really? I often mention my salary when relevant, and I have never experienced any negativity.

How much is it? If you don't want to say that (I wouldn't), how many multiples is it of the salaries of the people you're mentioning it to?

Two, but sometimes closer to three.

> There's some nice discussion to be had there about Calvinism and the general relationship between religion and the attitude towards individual achievement.

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.

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