Good. Salaries should be public record as an accountability measure. You can't fix the problem of your employer unfairly paying you less than your colleagues if you don't know what your colleagues make.
Are people good judges of how much value they bring a company? You may think you deserve more pay, but you may also have a high opinion of yourself or over-estimate your skill/contributions/merit.
I think making salaries public information is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it reduces information asymmetry and gives you more negotiating power, but on the other it could probably lead to sour grapes and/or hurt feelings among employees where there was none before.
IME skils/merit/value contributions have very little to do with salary. It's mostly negotiation tactics.
Having public data on salaries would help potential employees make more informed decisions about working for companies in the first place.
"Sour grapes" is only really a concern if there is a huge discrepancy between pay when job roles/responsibilities are similar.
I've yet to be convinced that hiding salary information is in any way beneficial to employees, only to employers (at the expense of the employee).
Translation: "if a company doesn't pay well, talented people won't want to work there" - why would a company that doesn't pay well release information that would disadvantage them like that? Unless you are suggesting they be forced by law to make all salaries public. But you can already get an idea of the salary bell curve at a given company with things like Glassdoor.
A lot of A players suck at negotiations, IMO. If they didn't, their career would advance much faster. It's much easier to negotiate if you have the goods, and very few people have the goods.
I'm saying that your ability to deliver is of foremost importance to your comp, more so than negotiation skills (which help, but not replace the ability to deliver). Why? See the first part of my post that you've deliberately misinterpreted. It may seem to you that you can fool your manager, but that's not the case, if they're paying attention.
For exceptional folks it's silly to be the A players unless they have a buddy in the VP ranks who drags them up the ranks, as otherwise they would waste their best years on flat compensation and a bunch of petty bonuses. Exceptional folks should really slack off, become those C players, and build their own gig on a side.
I see what you did there. :-)
It ensures that salary distributions can be justified, and that employees have goals they can strive towards rather than the current variable reward system where you work as hard as you can and hope your employer decides to reward you this year.
When that is the case, it means that the ambient is so toxic that a peaceful coexistence is only possible due to a ridiculous amount of taboo and secrecy (this is social manipulation 101). I say, to hell with these workplaces; they'd better collapse sooner than later.
People are average judges, by definition :) I don't think that's very important though.
There are two ways of looking at this, IMO. In the Hayekian sense, information flow... especially price information makes markets work. This is one of the of the reasons literal markets exist(ed). Markets "clear." All the metal, meat, etc. that needs to be sold gets sold. Even in modern times, you can get great deals on closing days (often sunday) in a literal meat market. Prices move fluidly, and if market conditions dictate that lamb cutlets are 75% off.. that price travels like the market quickly.
The other major factor besides information flow is number of participants, fwiw.
The other way of looking at it is as power gaps. Employers have relatively more power in negotiations because they have more price information.
People may be, but individual persons are not. It’s the individual who is negotiating.
I remember a psychology study about the nature of impromptu pay raises. For the initial weeks they were extremely grateful. After six weeks or so IIRC they felt like they were entitled to that extra money all along. We are incredibly adept at rationalizing the outcome we want. Who wants to admit they don’t deserve a raise when handed to them?
People in aggregate may be good judges of value, but I don’t think too many individuals are. How many people do you know who will say they are insufficiently paid vs. paid too much?
I think the best way to gauge your worth is to periodically put your resume out and interview. If you get a lot of offers that dwarf your current pay you’re probably under paid. If not, you may just be a bad judge of your economic worth
It had a very interesting effect: no one wants to be paid in the bottom 50%, so every job offer (at the executive level) claims to pay in the top 75% or so. Which led to salary inflation.
I'm very curious to see if the same would happen here (and I think it started to happen somewhat with sites such as level.fyi sharing salary info). If you see (in aggregate) what others get for similar positions, you are more likely to get an offer above that average. Which over time, leads to everyone getting raises.
I mean, that's pretty much the whole issue as the company sees it, a frank discussion about a company like that only hurts the company. Because there isn't really a good way to rephrase "well, the gap here between you and Jim here is not because you produce less value or deserve getting paid less, but because we can just get away with paying you less".
And no, I am not dismissing that some engineers produce more value than others and hence they get paid more. This happens quite often. However, in a lot of cases, that's not the reason for why some are getting paid less. And those who produce little value and get paid less are typically very aware of that fact, so they don't tend to raise fuss over the compensation.
"what that dolt Hardcastle is getting 2 mill, there barely profitable I should be on more than that."
If it does lead to sour grapes, it's a benefit for the employee - she realizes that either the company is not one worth working for and she ought to leave, or that he is not worth it for the company and must improve performance or look elsewhere.
BTW before I get flamed I have seen the anonymised data for a big UK tech company >175k employees and there where obvious pay problems based on Sex, Race and Disability.
Then that’s the problem to fix.
Not public companies, but public sector; seems to be that some folks do believe there's value in this kind of transparency.
Too much time is spent trying to measure ourselves against others only to breed unnecessary dissatisfaction.
Then how do you know how good you are at negotiating?
I can assure you your company knows exactly how much other companies in your area are paying for every role. Market participants with incomplete information get taken advantage of.
> You need to decide what your labor is worth.
Based on what?
> The number you’re willing to work for.
There's no set number. I'll take as much as an employer is possibly willing to part with. Since I can't know that number, the next best thing is to know how much they pay others and start negotiations at > than that number.
You're worth as much as your employer can/will pay for your skills. Why would you ever take any less, assuming you like everything else about the job? How much you value the non-money aspects of the job is irrelevant to the discussion of how much you should be paid. If you like the non-money aspects treat it as a bonus meant just for you, because it is.
You should be happy in your job, no question about it. But happiness vs money is usually a false dichotomy.
Companies will just show you the public chart if you try to negotiate.
Want to fix the problem? Learn how to negotiate your value to a company. This skill comes in handy in pretty much all aspects of life.
Companies don't just give great negotiators whatever number they want. They know how much they're willing to pay for a certain role. I've failed to hire people because they wouldn't take what HR would let me pay. Sucks, but those are existing company problems.
How is making salary numbers public going to change that? They'll still need to find someone to do that job, and if they publish too low a number they won't be able to hire the people capable of doing the job.
When you say in a later post that you made 40% more in your first-out-of-college job compared to a colleague due to your "experience and negotiating skills," I'm skeptical of the "experience" aspect since it was your first job. So I'm all for things that in that case would have put you two both making exactly the same amount. And then if your on-the-job skills are better, yours will go up faster; if they aren't, you aren't getting overpaid just for being better at an unrelated skill set.
To further the anecdotal train I can tell you I have a few first hand examples that prove you wrong: - Due to me negotiating well during the offer stage I received a title bump (to meet mandatory max salary range reqs) and had budget pulled from other open positions to pay for mine as I was now 40% (I'm guessing) above max pay for the position I interviewed for. - Before my latest job I've had one way candid conversations with coworkers (i.e., I know what they make) and I've always been significantly above them (25-40%) for the same level of experience or less.
I'm completely against making salary numbers public for obvious reasons.
They walked away from the offer we gave them instead, as was their right.
In the non-anecdotal part - yes, someone like you would be hurt with this. I consider that a net benefit. Your negotiation skills are not helping you write better software than me or anyone else, but they're redirecting money towards you instead of me.
I distrust organization because I want to be able to make more than people based on skill and output, but I am all in favor of problems at all with measures to tie salary more strictly to output, or to make that more transparent.
Heck, I've even managed people who made considerably more than people at their same title band, despite less experience - it was based on on the job performance, not years of experience or negotiation before being hired. The salary band for the range was wide so that it could accommodate both strong performers and poor ones.
Wrong. The way to fix the problem is to organize. Collective action works.
Why would I want to do that? I already make many multiple times more than my peers due to my specialized skill set.
I remember my first job out of college. Somehow, salaries got leaked and I was making 40% more than my colleague, in the same position (he sat right next to me).
The difference was my experience and negotiating skills.
'Collective action' as you say just adds a middleman that won't do much for me..except prevent me from getting a raise on my own terms.
Again, no thanks.
Collectivism is typically preferred by people below median in whatever metric you are considering.
So, in that sense, OP is still correct - it's beneficial for workers to organize for collective action, so long as you draw the proper boundaries within which that collective action will operate.
I beg to differ. Most companies treat their IT employees as exchangeable cogs. Hell, there's an entire offshoring and h1b industry built around that fact, not to mention local dumpsterfires like Accidenture.
> yet people still act like they're forced to put in 70+ hours a week in a coal mine boggles the mind.
Well, many of us work 80+ hours a week and are happy because they're allowed the honor to work for SpaceX/Facebook/Google/... so yeah.