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Comment by pmichaud | Hacker News Reader

I see this sentiment a lot, but it seems blatantly false.

This assumes that employees are a fungible commodity whose price should be set by some efficient market rate, but that's not true at all.

Under the current regime, the setup helps top performers be compensated more highly, without torpedoing morale.

You can fantasize about a world in which the salaries are transparent and everyone has frank conversations like "Yes Jill makes 50% more than you even though you're nominally at the same level. Her compensation reflects her superior contributions to the company." But that's just not how it is.

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It's weird that you call this "blatantly false" and talk about "the current regime", but my whole point is this "regime" only exists, culturally, in a relatively small subset of countries. I don't need to "fantasize" about how this would work because many other countries are already completely transparent about salaries. Not to mention that even in the US there are some locales that post everyone's salaries in government jobs, from the mayor down to the teaching assistant at the local university.

Also, FWIW, Joel Spolsky pretty famously detailed his company's transparent compensation plan, which took into account both experience and unique skill set.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/30/fog-creek-compensa...

Yes, the solution in different regimes is to homogenize compensation, as government jobs do. And my point is that doing so is worse for top performers who would tend to be paid more than the homogeneous compensation would give them.

In Sweden, everyone’s tax records are public information. It does not seem to be a destabilizing force for their society.

If anything, I think the taboo nature of people’s economic worth and the games played to around it are what’s toxic to society.

There is that old Steinbeck gem about how poor or middle class Americans don't think of themselves as that, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Hence wanting to hide their real worth.

How do you sell conspicuous consumption / Veblen goods to people if you can know, for sure, that they're really broke af?

I think that if you took the US exactly as it is, then make tax records public, after the initial explosion of interest, nothing particularly would change. The reason is that although the records would be available, only a tiny fraction of people would look at them a tiny fraction of the time.

On the other hand if you took Sweden as it currently exists, and put up a real time scoreboard on every office wall with the name and total comp of all employees (or all employees of that particular department, or whatever), you'd have pandemonium--except in workplaces with homogenized, formulaic compensation.

At my previous job the most highly paid developer used to regularly say at standups "yesterday I did nothing, today I will do nothing". However he was confident at good at negotiating

Was he actually doing nothing?

I think your point is that not everyone who gets paid a lot deserves it on merits? I agree with that.

Still, do you think that compensation and merit are correlated? I do.

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