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Comment by mkl95 | Hacker News Reader

I once worked for a bodyshop where the director was the only guy hired by the actual company we were working for.

One of the first few things we learned about him was that a clause in his contract forbid him from discussing our salaries and working conditions with us.

Long story short, I switched jobs shortly after because we were doing a lot of unpaid overtime, and tons of things that had nothing to do with a software developer's job.

But the straw that broke the camel's back was that we found out every engineer had a different contract -different salary, bonuses, etc.-, even when we had similar experience. The director's boss thought we wouldn't find out just because of that silly clause.

If you are being asked not to discuss your salary, apply Occam's razor, and either deal with it or run away.

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That seems so much more complicated and expensive than just offering compensation and bonus based on a standard scale. Obviously there's some wiggle room within the pay scales to reward higher performing employees but to have totally different compensation schemes for each employee sounds extremely complicated and unnecessary.

I never understood the need to make things so complicated. The additional gains per year with that scheme vs giving everyone the same contract were just a few thousand €.

I should point out that US law protects employees rights to openly discuss their salaries. It is entirely reasonable and legal to forbid a supervisor from discussing/publicizing the salary of all their subordinates. Whether that is a good business decision is a very different question.

I live in the EU. I have never seen anything similar before or after. Is it common in the US?

I'm sorry, I'm not 100% sure what you are saking. You haven't seen anything similar to bosses not publishing their employees salary? Or US law protecting the rights of employees in something?

Sorry, I meant explicitly forbidding a supervisor from discussing working conditions or salary with their subordinates is pretty rare in Europe, and in fact that's the only time I've been told of such thing.

I was wondering if that kind of clause is a common thing in the US - for instance limiting job mobility by not allowing you to work for X client for N years is common in Europe, while I get it's rare in the US from what I read on social media / HN.

In the US its rare for a supervisor to divulge what your coworkers are making. It's normally not "forbidden" just not done. Heck, look how antsy some people are at telling other people their salary in this thread. Does your boss tell you what your peers make?

As someone who has worked in a French SSII, and talked with other consultants: it's common here too. The intermediaries want to maintain information asymmetry.

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