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Comment by spinax | Hacker News Reader

These articles never seem to touch on the point which matters to me: I don't want the workplace social peer pressure of who makes more, or less, etc. and the drama which comes with it. The belief that every employee wants there to be open sharing of salary data is not universal.

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I don’t want to know what bob or jill make but i do want to know the company pay bands. It’s really silly when im looking for other jobs that i pass everything then get to the offer to counter it and ooops looks like your 5k over the band for what we wanted to hire you for. Great would have been nice to know up front that unless I interview at whatever your requirement is for staff level on the day of the interview this wasn’t going to work. Its draining and a waste of everyones time.

Why don't you want to know what Bob or Jill makes? If they make more than you and are better than you, you can see where you will be after you improve. If they get paid more than you and are worse than you, then you can use that knowledge to get a raise. If they make less than you and are better than you, you know they're going to start getting paid more which will make everyone better off. And if they get paid less than you and are worse than you, they'll be more receptive to mentoring.

and if they believe they are better than you, but you believe you are better than them, it causes conflict.

And the someone who made that decision can explain why one of you is paid more. And instead of one of you spending your career thinking you're so great, you find out that X skills are lacking or Y skills are not valued where you are. So you improve your skills or find a job with a better fit. That sounds great.

The employees at tech firms I’ve worked at solved this by “anonymizing”. Basically a few folks maintained a big publicly readable spreadsheet with columns like Title, Level, YOE, YOE at Company, Office Location, Gender, Base Comp, Total Comp. Technically the fields were sufficiently granular that some rows could in principle be de-anonymized, but that wasn’t really the point.

N.b. This was just random employees collecting volunteered information, nothing HR-sanctioned.

The fact remains that this seems likely to increase the perception of unfairness, lower the level of individual happiness, and increase the time spent complaining and analyzing salary discrepancies.

Things will never be exactly equal. Why focus time emphasizing the differences?

> Things will never be exactly equal. Why focus time emphasizing the differences?

Why remain ignornant, and potentially lose out on acertaining one's true market value, because it might hurt someone's feelings?

Price discovery via markets can only work with transparency. Opaqueness leads to inefficiencies.

If you want to optimize for everybody getting paid perfectly fairly, sure. If you believe there are diminishing returns to that and our time as people is better spent growing the pie, then that isn't information, it's noise.

As an individual, why would I care about growing the pie and not my own salary? It's not about optimizing everyone getting paid fairly. It's about optimizing your own pay.

"Growing the pie" means making the company more successful, and if you have any equity in it, then it's likely to make you more money long term than arguing for more cash. Also, if you happen to be at a good company with honest and responsible management, then your compensation will be accurately adjusted based on your business value. So, doing good useful work will optimize your own pay as well as benefit everyone else.

If you're at a crappy company with crappy managers, then yeah maybe you just need to play politics until you're paid enough to justify not quitting. If you have the means to move on from a job you don't like, though, you should probably work toward fixing that regardless of the compensation.

> if you have any equity in it, then it's likely to make you more money long term than arguing for more cash.

It depends on how much equity. If you have a greater percentage of ownership than you do of total salary, that makes sense. (Unless it's publicly traded, because then you can buy more stock with the more money.) But that seems unlikely most of the time. So, yes, it's better for founders or major shareholders.

I don't follow that asking for more money is "playing politics"

Equity is a long term investment which ideally compounds exponentially over time (even if it only matches inflation) in a way that you, as an active participant, can positively or negatively influence. Salary is steady income that linearly accumulates (and loses value over time unless invested), so it's kind of apples to oranges. Undervaluing a modest amount of equity when you're young can lead to a large missed opportunity cost decades later. It's certainly hard work with an element of luck to get equity in a company that takes off like a rocket, but that's why high-risk high-reward is a saying.

If your compensation doesn't accurately reflect your merit to the company, then it instead reflects arbitrary social power dynamics. If you stick around somewhere that you believe is taking advantage of you, and try to up your pay through leverage or non-merit based arguments, then that definitely seems like politics to me.

Just asking for money if you think you deserve it isn't inherently politics, though. If you're genuinely being underpaid and think the company is dropping the ball but acting in good faith, then having an honest conversation with your manager is healthy, and should result in the situation being resolved favorably.

sgtnoodle said it well. I'll only add that if everybody thinks only of their own salary and not the company, you enter into a tragedy of the commons that kills the company (taken to the extreme).

If you feel that way, then don't participate. Others might feel differently about learning the truth instead of remaining ignorant of it.

Just looking at it from what I think is a bigger picture perspective. I think it's worth considering of there is a point where there is TMI.

Don't limit yourself based on what others make.

If you accept a job, wait a year, then start interviewing at least one interview every 6 months. You'll improve your interviewing skills and learn your market value.

What your coworkers make at your current job is not a strong indicator of your market value. What actual employers are willing to pay you is much better data.

Don't forget, a huge component in salaries is social skills.

If it bothers you then don’t look at it.

If it increases the "perception of unfairness" it's because things were already unfair and you just weren't aware of it.

Yes, they are, and they always will be. I don't disagree that we shouldn't make things fairer, but i believe there's a limit at which of becomes a meaningless exercise.

I think it has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with negotiating your salary. The more you know about the market, the bigger your leverage is.

And if it so happens that you earn less as a result of gaps in your skills, you should own it and work on yourself.

> Things will never be exactly equal. Why focus time emphasizing the differences?

This line of thinking leads to interesting conclusions:

- people will never live forever, why heal them

- discrimination will always exist, why fighting it

- efficiency will never be 100%, why improve it

- universe will end with heat death, why do anything at all

Yes, I agree. I'm providing another perspective that I think is missing, not arguing that we should always think this way. It's healthiest to consider multiple viewpoints.

Maybe the reason for the lower level of happiness, more time spent complaining... is different (unfair) pay for essentially the same job. How about treating the cause instead of blaming the messenger.

The fact remains that there is literally no valid argument where being ignorant is better than being informed. Full stop. Simple math.

Finding out that your loving wife cheated on you early in your relationship after 40 years of marriage. Learning that people don't care about you as much you think they do. Knowing exactly how you will die.

These are things you may personally emotionally prefer to be ignorant of, but in all cases you are more capable and armed with the knowledge than without.

I don't know the answer and see where you are coming from, but I think there is a valid argument too be made that you are wrong

Please note that the piece does acknowledge this:

> Recent years have also brought more clarity around best practice on transparency: many workers favour a non-specific kind of salary disclosure where firms reveal ranges, averages and information about wage gaps rather than individual data.

nod I think these are two branches of the tree and this problem is more in line with role disclosure (I'm not saying this well - for example, the need on job postings to list the actual salary range up front, like I know some non-US countries and I think recently Colorado? implemented into law).

The branch of this problem tree I speak of intersects more like "OK the band for level 3 is 50k-60k USD. Mark makes 60k and I make 50k but I feel my work is better than his and I've been here longer." This article is mostly about individual sharing, I think that quoted part is a nod in context to the other branch of the problem root which is just as important in it's own way. Not the best at making up examples, sorry.

Bands still seem helpful to the discussion. If Mark is making 60k then its clear the company is valuing him more and that might open the door to a beneficial discussion.

Seems like it at least gives you some metrics to compare to rather than just favoritism.

While I loathe the seniority system that Union folks use, at the very least their pay is all out in the open and everyone knows what everyone makes and it still works. The biggest issue is just overcoming the cultural hurdle of acknowledging that your pay is not your identity, it's just a number that you can negotiate and if you're undervalued, instead of pissing and moaning to other employees, you go find a new job that pays what you're worth.

Do you make more than most of your peers in your work place, or less?

> The belief that every employee wants there to be open sharing of salary data is not universal.

I would have thought that the desire to know if you're being treated fairly is universal. You really wouldn't mind making a fraction of what your coworkers make?

What if you had a pool of anonymous employee-contributed data about title + pay + benefits that showed you where you were on the distribution? Would you contribute to, and view, that.

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