Why all the hoops? Companies have shamed us into thinking sharing salaries is bad. It's not. People should share freely, in my opinion it benefits all parties except the company.
You know what those top earners are going to do then? Quit. And then you end up with overpaid mediocre talent and a product roadmap that is suffering from the loss of top performers.
The more we celebrate victimhood as some kind of hero status, the more we shame and punish those who achieve and create success the worse off we're all going to be. A private company has every right to compensate its employees with its private capital anyway it wants, and they're going to want to do it in a way that achieves the goals of the business. They're not distributing welfare checks, they're a business.
It may well be, if not more likely to be, the other way round - you could be a GOOD performer, but since you can't or don't gork office politics, you are underpaid or even not at the level of challenge and seniority you should be.
If the CTO sits no more than 2 cubicles away from every engineer he better know who the top performers are. If employees are playing politics at a small company, that company is already doomed.
You can blame office politics, you can blame your lack connections, or whatever hand you were dealt. It probably wasn't a fair hand, but it's on you to make the best that you can out of it.
I don't cry about unfairness. I look at what I want, and I figure out how to get it.
It would seem that most employers would rather bear the cost of replacing someone than increasing their compensation to align with the value provided.
Hehe.
These are merits. They mean you're easy to work with, people want to work with you, you know how to make and maintain important relationships. You'd make a good leader. You can recruit talented people. You can get preferential treatment from vendors. Your projects get noticed.
If you can't play this game, it doesn't matter if your technical skills are better. You won't have a chance to put them into practice. You won't have allies. No one will want to work with you or listen to your opinions.
Perception = you are good at communicating your work to others
Connections = you have a strong network and stay informed and know who to talk to for different tasks
Face time = you are easy to get along with
Ability to handle office issues = you are a lubricant that make the group dynamic work
If you don't do those things, then you could write fantastic code, but: no one will know about it, know to ask you about it, be aware you're doing it, and find you somewhat of a drag on the office atmosphere. Basically, your work is not useful to the company that is paying you, and you should be paid less because of this.
This is not about spending time chatting up people all around the office and networking. It's about responding clearly when people ask you questions, when you have your 1:1 with your manager, and in how you write your emails, etc.
And saying that if no one knows about you you should be paid less is so false. Because, everyone will know about you when you leave and things stop working. Im not talking about single point of failure. But say all non communicating developers are gone from software company one day, id say company would feel that.
But it is also perfectly possible to achieve good perception, strong connections, lots of face time, and ability to handle office issues, while also being really bad at your actual job, and without any of the positives you mention (except for the fairly bland "easy to get along with").
The real problem, of course, is that what office politics optimize for is extraversion over performance, so anyone who's introverted (which a disproportionate number of programmers still are) is going to come in at a disadvantage.
And, um...if you're writing the code that's required of you, by the people who require it, and you're writing it well and in a timely fashion, it doesn't matter if you brag about it to everyone around, it's plenty useful to the company. I don't know where you've worked where the primary work you've done has been code that you've come up with on your own, which you've then had to "sell" to your own bosses and coworkers, but that's definitely not the norm.
Second of all, you seem to be looking at things in very black and white terms. Of course you need to be able to communicate project requirements and dependencies and whatnot, both within and between teams. That's nowhere near the same thing as "networking" or "making connections" in the commonly-understood sense, which is much more about going over to have a chat and a laugh with Steve or Patty down the hall...or, to take it a step further, going out for a game of golf and running into the CTO there, and just happening to have a chat about your upcoming review.
So, in short: yes, of course "being good at your job" requires communication and people skills, as well as (in our case) coding skills. But there are many places where the skills required to advance—both financially and in your career—are exclusively the people skills, regardless of the fact that the skills that are primarily relevant to job performance are the coding skills. This creates perverse incentives, results in unqualified people getting managerial positions, and massively disadvantages those who genuinely care more about doing a good job than "selling themselves"—especially introverted people—in the workplace.
These things are all extremely important pieces of keeping a company functioning well. To the extent that if you're good at these things and mediocre at whatever your main job is you are probably more valuable to the company (as in very literally adding more value) than someone who excels at their main job but can't cope with working in an office. If it's true that people who are good at those things are being rewarded more than people who aren't then we are actually doing pretty at basing pay on merit.
Office politics are, obviously, something you need to be good at to achieve seniority in an office.
I’ve been with my company for nearly 2 decades and only know about 10 people, and only 2 of those well. I worked with one person for five years on a daily basis before they learned I was married with a bunch of kids.
My salary has gone up 84% in those 18+ years. I make way more money than I feel I deserve (though I’m not complaining). I’ve never asked for a raise or anything like that. They just keep giving me raises on their own. Just recently in the middle of the pandemic they gave me a 16% raise out of the blue.
I don’t know for sure how much others make, but I’m fairly certain I’m one of the top earners. It frankly baffles me.
84% raise doesn't sound like much if you've also increased in seniority in that duration.
Entirely possible the Parent comment was getting paid 6 figures years ago and is now up to 200-300k total comp... but that's still paltry compared to SV, NYC, or cleared Washington DC work.
My salary went up 300% during the first three years of my career... but it mostly meant that I had no idea about the market when I was freshly out of university, and my employer was happy to take the advantage of my ignorance. (As I later found out, the increased salary was still way below the market rate.)
I am not contradicting your judgment, just saying that increased salary may also have another interpretation. And how much you feel you deserve, that also depends on your background, etc. For example, it felt quite weird to me when I was making more money than both my parents together; and yet, it was below the market rate for my type of job.
No, a business will spend money in a way that optimizes the goals of the various middle-managers in between those with money and those who make the decisions with that money. Those middle-people aren't paper-clip optimizers and so their decision making does not approximate that of a profit-maximizing firm.
And we all are top earners, right? Statistics tell me most of us aren't. The consequence of sharing salaries is not equity but people being able to negotiate better so most likely average salaries will go up. CEO salaries have been public for a while now and I haven't seen them going down so top earners shouldn't worry. Instead they can negotiate better too.
The people that already negotiate have no incentive to share salaries
The people that can’t negotiate won’t be able to just ask for a higher number
This is a common kind of one-sided argument. For the sake of argument [1], let's say I grant than an organization has the rights and freedoms like you say. There is another side to it: employees have rights and freedoms too. In a democracy, people can and should use their influence and political power to address their concerns.
[1]: Employers do not have "every right" to compensate employees "anyway it wants". As one example, see the Equal Pay Act: https://www.eeoc.gov/equal-paycompensation-discrimination .
Maybe, maybe not.
The opposite could be true: employees might more likely to quit a company that generally pays other employees poorly. There are lots of reasons why this might be the case.
Here is one type of scenario where that may be true. Many people recognize that company performance is not a simple linear combination of individual employee performance metrics. Having a well-functioning team is a substantial component of overall company success. With this in mind, it makes sense to work for a company that recognizes value more broadly, and understands that even "top" individual performers exist in a context of "non-top" individual performers. Therefore, if those "top" performers think it through, they will want the "non-top" people to be paid fairly.
For me, finding out that my more skilled colleagues make more money than me would be encouraging. It would mean that if I learn more, I could possibly get a raise.
The bad news is to find out that the people whom I admire because of their god-like skills actually make the same money as I do. That means that I have most likely already hit the financial ceiling.
I recommend that you disabuse yourself of such a comparison.
Arthur Clarke is famous for saying "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As you build your knowledge and skills over time, you may find that others are just as impressed by you as you were by this other person.
To elaborate on my comment: I'm suggesting that an employee's full value to the organization should be reflected in their pay. For example, someone with slightly less than average skill in some area (e.g. as indicated by project performance up to this point) may have other strengths.
What is motivating this interpretation? Do you interpret something in the original article as suggesting this?
What about the article (which contrasts multi-million dollar executive pay against minimum-wage workers) suggests to you that someone is "celebrating victimhood"? If so, who is this someone?
> ... the more we shame and punish those who achieve and create success the worse off we're all going to be.
Can you unpack your assumptions and logic in coming to this conclusion?
This is a false dichotomy. I see this kind of language frequently in discussions. In my experience, it does not tend to invite more thinking. On the contrary, it tends to polarize and discourage discussion of other options.
So, please, let's move away from overly simplistic arguments. So instead of false dichotomy, let's explore a range of options.
Consider this proposal: First, reduce the CEO's compensation (call it C) by multiplying by X (where 0 < X < 1). Second, use what is left, C(1-X), to increase compensation of the other employees. For various allocations [1], what are the possible outcomes?
One would hope [2] that companies operating in a relatively free and somewhat capitalist system like the US would directly or indirectly explore the values of X in order to find better and worse results.
As for me, I would bet there are values of X that lead to better outcomes for both the company and the satisfaction of its employees.
I would be interested in models and studies that examine this question. Would anyone like to share some they have read?
[1] Some (e.g. libertarians) might call this a "redistribution" and look at it with a negative light. I suggest calling it an "allocation" because I think of it as an optimization problem. The goal is not to maximize CEO pay. The goal is to maximize company success and overall employee satisfaction. (We might define success as (i) profit or (ii) or accomplishing some mission.)
[2] I say "hope" but I do not expect it. There are many market failures and organizational factors that may get in the way.
Maybe one of the biggest myths is that we can appraise performance objectively and that pay is nothing but a function of that performance.
In reality, this is nothing but price discrimination for the price of labor; just like it would be in an airline's best interest to squeeze the most individual dollar amounts out of every individual passenger for the same flight, it is in employer's best interest to pay the absolute minimum that can convince each particular employee to do the same work.
Information symmetry or collective bargaining destroys that advantage.
What Blizzard workers did might feel like a revolt in the US, but there are countries where total income and taxation information of each individual must be publicly listed annually.
This doesn't matter at all, information asymmetry based extraction is still there.
The employer is buying labor in large quantities from many sellers, and because they don't appraise all units of labor individually (they can't), they are individually negotiating the least amount of money they can get away with. The fact that prices are concealed between these individual sellers (candidates/employers) is the only way this can work (information asymmetry).
When a buyer is shopping for a airplane ticket, they are shopping for the relatively same service from many providers, but they know these different prices and choose the cheapest (no information asymmetry). When, however, the airlines are using personalized pricing and the buyer doesn't know this (information asymmetry), the buyer is screwed over because they pay the maximum they would for the same flight, while the next guy is potentially getting a steep discount.
In both cases, if the information asymmetry is cured (as in sharing your salary or what money you paid for a ticket), the strategy no longer works because this changes the individual price points (people have huge loss aversion bias and they definitely react to the idea of being screwed over). The fact that they are buyers vs sellers in these transactions doesn't matter at all.
"Shopping for the best offer" depends on knowing what offers were available to you and the others to begin with.
This would work if all sellers were selling the same goods. Such as in case of hourly labor. Incidentally, in these cases, the salary is known and is same for the laborers with the same skill set and responsibilities.
In case of salaried jobs, such as in Blizzard, the labor of each employee is unique and you cannot sensibly price it wholesale thus there are salary negotiations for both sides to come to an agreement. I personally do not see how knowing other people salaries is going to help you in a negotiation as this does not give you any additional leverage but if you think it will - go ahead and disclose your salary to your coworkers, see how it will go.
>"Shopping for the best offer" depends on knowing what offers were available to you and the others to begin with.
And who is preventing you from asking? I don't see how asking your coworker salary is going to help you to learn what offer you can get in another place without applying there.
Yes, that is exactly what I am claiming to be a myth. That unique price point is not a result of appraising the worth of that unique labor. Anyone involved from interviewing to making the hiring offer so don’t give a crap about finding your unique value, let alone your expected value, nor they have the means necessarily. Which means price points are mainly a result of negotiation power of the each party, which is severely handicapped for the candidates, because they don’t know the offers made to others in comparable experience and education. So they don’t know the best counter offer they could make and still get hired. That unexploited margin goes to the employer which has tons of data on past rejections and acceptances so that they can better minimize the offer they make.
In some labor markets, the non-negotiable salary is advertised with the job ads. Not claiming that is an infallible solution, but it makes for a drastically different labor market.
>which is severely handicapped for the candidates, because they don’t know the offers made to others in comparable experience and education
It does not matter. If you are not satisfied with the offer - ask for more or walk away. If you are - then it does not matter what others got especially to you, who have not evaluated them at all. What you think is "comparable" might be far from that in my view and vice versa.
>In some labor markets, the non-negotiable salary is advertised with the job ads. Not claiming that is an infallible solution, but it makes for a drastically different labor market.
Yeah, I gave an example in the post you replied to: the unskilled labor market. Amazon pays the same rate to every warehouse drone and it's known in advance. Same as many retail jobs, same as many trades.
There is no magical essence to markets that justifies any agreed pricing point as the best price that ever could be. Especially under information asymmetry markets don't operate well i.e. they don't set prices as efficiently.
> It does not matter. If you are not satisfied with the offer - ask for more or walk away.
Sounds like it does matter in your argument because here you are constructing a satisfaction criteria that hinges on not knowing the other offers.
If knowing other offers changes your satisfaction level, was it really an objectively satisfying offer in the first place?
> Yeah, I gave an example in the post you replied to: the unskilled labor market
I was thinking more of labor markets in some European countries, which are not at all exclusive to unskilled positions, e.g even includes managerial positions. I think there might be some sort of confirmation bias here preventing the acceptance of the possibility that some labor markets do have transparent compensation for even highly skilled positions and they work OK.
True. Has anybody claimed the opposite? The only thing market ensures is that both sides agree with transaction. Which is the best you can get.
>Sounds like it does matter in your argument because here you are constructing a satisfaction criteria that hinges on not knowing the other offers.
I do not do such thing. Even more, I specifically ask why would it matter if you knew about other offers? If you are okay to work for 30K then why you are suddenly not okay if you learn that somebody else gets paid 50K at the same company? This makes no sense to me. Even considering opposite, you know in advance that other people got 50K for the similar position and you are offered 30K, what would be different? It's not like you are going to get 50K just because of your knowledge of other salaries. And you can always ask for 50K with or without such knowledge.
>I was thinking more of labor markets in some European countries
I get spammed with a lot of European jobs on LinkedIn (I have no idea why they would shop for programmers in the US to be honest), none of them have fixed salaries. UK,Netherlands, France, Norway,Sweden,Finland even Iceland - they have a wide range at best, most are "DOE".
I think you've just claimed it again?
> I specifically ask why would it matter if you knew about other offers? If you are okay to work for 30K then why you are suddenly not okay if you learn that somebody else gets paid 50K at the same company?
If you learned you were paid %30 less than everyone else at your level, wouldn't you go for a renegotiation with your manager or go back to the labor market? Would you internalize that difference as "I guess the company knows my worth exactly and I deserve it"? If you knew the average price for your level as a candidate, wouldn't you use that knowledge in your next negotiations? I mean, I thought this was common sense, self-explanatory game theory. You are claiming the knowledge of the competing price points to have zero value in price setting, and it is a strong claim that requires matching evidence.
> I get spammed with a lot of European jobs on LinkedIn (I have no idea why they would shop for programmers in the US to be honest), none of them have fixed salaries
Your personal sample is hardly representative because we are trying to establish existence of transparently priced positions that are not low-skilled. From the top of my head, if you have access to paper version of 'The Economist', you will see plenty of such ads. Granted, this might be my availability bias, but definitely there is no hard rule of concealed pricing for highly skilled jobs.
I see. Not even trying to make an argument because you disrespect the conversation or because you are out of arguments? Either way it does not seem to be going anywhere.
>If you learned you were paid %30 less than everyone else at your level, wouldn't you go for a renegotiation with your manager or go back to the labor market?
I don't have "a level", my job is unique as well as other people in my org. Hence I get a salary and not a hourly rate because I do not produce a well measured labor at constant rate. But if I decide that my negotiated salary is not to my satisfaction anymore it's not going to be because I learned other people salary but because I feel that my value has increased. As I said above: your reasoning only applies to hourly laborers whose labor is already openly priced at "levels" and there is not much room for negotiation.
> You are claiming the knowledge of the competing price points to have zero value in price setting, and it is a strong claim that requires matching evidence.
Nope, you proposed that there is some strong relation between one's negotiated salary and other people's salary without any evidence and when I asked how this is supposed to work you claimed I made a strong claim. You are not even trying to defend your argument, are you?
>Your personal sample is hardly representative because we are trying to establish existence of transparently priced positions that are not low-skilled
I see where confusion is coming from: you think that positions that require some skills are not low-skilled. I used low-skilled in the sense that US DOL uses to distinguish between salaried and hourly workers.
I think this discussion is by and large irrelevant to any so called "top earner". If a person is highly paid and then considers any subsequent conversation about pay in a "cost-benefit" mindset they are pretty much not going to be a useful voice for equality.
I'm not condemning them mind you. To say one view or the other is better is a question of personal conviction. But if they're regarding their superior pay as strictly a matter of their personal benefit then I find it very unlikely any ethical argument would sway them to act in their coworkers benefit.
I like that you said "top earners" as if it implies that "top earner" equals talent. It's far more likely that there is underpaid talent in the company that is about to leave for a better job. This is what employers are scared of. They want to underpay people that deserve more and you're just playing right into that trap as if it somehow benefits you. What if you aren't actually a top earner? How do you know that there is no "overpaid mediocre talent" already in the company?
>A private company has every right to compensate its employees with its private capital anyway it wants, and they're going to want to do it in a way that achieves the goals of the business. They're not distributing welfare checks, they're a business.
As I said. Salary transparency does not change anything about that. The welfare argument can be made by both sides. Employees shouldn't distribute welfare checks to their company either, they're not volunteers.
That's exactly what your boss wants you to believe. What if you somehow, without sharing yourself, found out that you actually were nowhere near a top earner? Would that affect your conclusions?
Public servants have a progression table, so by knowing their level, you know the salary.
Companies either have an union agreement, so it goes back to the same level agreements, or they have internal evaluation with salary matrix, so again by knowing department and skill level, it is relatively easy to get the salary value, minus possible bonus.
They are even part of some job offer descriptions.
So at the end of the day it is hard to grasp why it is so sacred to discuss it on US.
I've seen it a few times, people with 30+ years of experience being paid massively more than newcomers, and just waiting for retirement. There's absolutely no point to do more than the bare minimum not to be fired in this situation (and if it's a government job, then it's pretty much impossible depending on the place), and it absolutely shows.
I also have many seen people waiting for retirement on the private sector.
In the case I know (nurses), it's about a nurse taking care of twice as many patients, and usually better. Not trying to change things, just doing their job.
What I can tell you is that those people doing more either quit or just give up and stop caring.
For what is worth my experience is mainly with the private sector. It's just that usually they are a bit more willing to sack people.