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Comment by thekashifmalik | Hacker News Reader

I really struggle to understand this equal pay business; I'm not (and don't ever expect to be) paid the same as other equally qualified engineers on my team. Each engineer's pay is the product of their skill level, how they negotiated as well as competing offers they had.

This model rewards those who put in the effort and is definitely biased towards people with certain personalities (disagreeable, etc). If we want to change this model, fine, but that's not the world we live in right now and I'm not convinced that it's necessarily a better world.

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> I really struggle to understand this equal pay business; I'm not (and don't ever expect to be) paid the same as other equally qualified engineers on my team.

Yes, and random pay discrimination (or discrimination on job-irrelevant traits like “salary negotiation ability”) are, on their own, legal.

However, if that is systematic by sex/gender its illegal discrimination, including if it is an indirect result of facially-sex/gender-neutral discrimination that has an unequal impact by sex and insufficient tie to legitimate business necessity (that’s “disparate impact” discrimination.)

On a nation scale, pay tend to be adjusted based on hours worked while not counting permitted leave, vacation, and sick days. This does have an unequal impact by gender.

> I really struggle to understand this equal pay business;

I suspect you are not being truthful here. This:

"Each engineer's pay is the product of their skill level, how they negotiated as well as competing offers they had."

Is an assertion. Or at least, it's an assertion if you make the implicit "and nothing else", explicit.

Regardless on where you or I personally come down on the truth value of that statement, it isn't hard to understand why it is controversial.

In this case some would add gender to your list, and it's not immediately obvious or empirically proven that they are wrong (or right).

I really struggle to understand how in 2021 someone could think that "pay is the product of their skill level". Perhaps they are very young and naive.

I believe this is the case for much of the software industry. There's even places where women/minorities make more due to diversity efforts. And then there's the few bad apples like AB where there probably was blatant pay discrimination.

The fact of the matter is: you have to have some negotiation skills if you want to get paid the best you possibly can, regardless of your gender.

> The fact of the matter is: you have to have some negotiation skills if you want to get paid the best you possibly can, regardless of your gender.

I think that is still a pretty big issue on it's own. This feels pretty shitty when we bring neurodiversity into view. Coworkers with Autism will have a very hard time negotiating for that pay raise to the same efficiency of others.

This is a strange take - why wouldn't you want to be paid the same as equally qualified members with the same title on the same team?

Simply put, I'd like to make the most my negotiation position makes possible. Different people with the same qualifications and title would not have the same circumstances. If negotiation played no role, the practical outcome is that wages would stagnate as employers would engage in some version of a cartel, which would be worse for the people at the bottom of the bell curve as well.

> If negotiation played no role, the practical outcome is that wages would stagnate as employers would engage in some version of a cartel, which would be worse for the people at the bottom of the bell curve as well.

You mean, the thing that repeatedly happens under the existing system, despite negotiation?

For example, https://www.cnet.com/news/google-adobe-apple-intel-settle-wa...

Exactly that thing. If you believe it wouldn't be a lot worse with no negotiation I'd like to hear your reasoning.

Negotiation is entirely irrelevant. Why should a 2-5x variance in individual compensation factor into whether or not companies form a cartel to suppress all salaries?

Because there needs to be a trickle to start the flood. All companies are incentivised to co-ordinate prices to some degree, it's the desire to fill a particular role quickly or poach a particular superstar that causes companies to break from whatever happens to be the"industry standard", and those variances become factors in future negotiations. If there was never any variance in individual pay there'd be no pressure to adjust salaries at all, barring collective action. Which has its own negative externalities.

Cartels are weak because every individual member and every non-member is motivated to break them. That particular one was broken by Facebook.

Because a very high percentage of programmer types (of whatever sort of title) genuinely believe that they are well above average, and thus that performance-based pay would advantage them over others.

This is, of course, statistically impossible to be true for everyone who believes it.

Even if it were true, there's no contradiction. More granular roles could be created or more scrutiny could be had in promotions.

Unless you're overwhelming overpaid irrespective of your actual ability, no employee would suffer any downsides from pay transparency. If you (not you specifically, but any reader) disagree feel free to present a scenario.

Oh, no; I'm fully in favor of pay transparency. It's absolutely clear to me that pay opacity benefits only the employer.

Negotiations and bluffing.

I lie to every employer about competing wages.

One time I took a suitcase to my office and told my manager I was away for some interviews. Subsequently told him I didn't feel like I was earning my market rate - this was after my performance reviewed raise+bonus. Gained another 15% that way.

Because I want to be paid the same as equally performant people. I want the company to hire equally qualified people and pay according to equal performance.

Considering we all know hiring is an imperfect measure of skill, I would expect that pay diverges over tenure conditioned on identical qualification at hire.

What I do not want is for equally performant people to be paid differently on non-job-characteristics: so if, for instance, two people are roughly in the same bucket of performance, paying the woman less/more is unacceptable. Obviously individuals will see individual variation, but if across a number of employees, n, you see x% lower/higher pay for women than for men something is strange for sufficiently large x and n.

That is, either your hiring practices for women and men are not congruent, or they are and for some reason you're seeing poorer/better performances from women/men, then you have to identify the cause. The null hypothesis is that gender does not affect ability.

> Because I want to be paid the same as equally performant people. I want the company to hire equally qualified people and pay according to equal performance.

Without pay transparency you wouldn't know regardless so I'm not sure what your point is.

I'll try again. We seem to have suffered some context-loss. I'll keep the question and answer close to each other to avoid that.

Your question was:

> why wouldn't you want to be paid the same as equally qualified members with the same title on the same team?

My answer is "because performance is more important than qualifications and once you're in I could give a flying fuck about your qualifications". That's the point.

Pay transparency is a different discussion. I am fully capable of transmitting and receiving pay information without forced pay transparency.

You're missing the point. For two people who just started, without transparency they could've been paid differently irrespective of their qualifications or nonexistence performance at their role.

Furthermore even if there are discrepancies in pay and performance without transparency you wouldn't know anyway. My question was in the context of the other post - in the context of your post it's the same question except with respect to performance.

So, are you against pay transparency, or not? You say you're capable of receiving and transmitting, but ultimately you aren't receiving the truth, only what is told to you - which may or may not be the same.

> So, are you against pay transparency, or not?

Against. Not because of the ideal but because sufficient numbers of capable engineers I'd like to work with are simultaneously poor evaluators of whether others are capable. i.e. lack of pay transparency permits us both to turn the situation into a low stakes situation if we do not highly estimate each others' ability to evaluate others.

> You say you're capable of receiving and transmitting, but ultimately you aren't receiving the truth, only what is told to you - which may or may not be the same.

I am capable of having trusted relationships where I do not need third-party enforcement of truth. Just like I'd believe a friend who says she's going to the store without having to check her location on Google Maps, I am capable of believing my trusted co-workers when they express things like this as truth. I do not lie to them and I am capable of forming relationships where I believe they do not lie to me.

What do your negotiating skills contribute to an engineering team that they should be affecting your compensation to the same extent as your skill level?

> What do your negotiating skills contribute to an engineering team that they should be affecting your compensation to the same extent as your skill level?

Negotiating comes in a few flavors. One is in the form of a competing offer, which you could just as easily ask the same question: "What does a competing offer contribute to an engineering team that it should affect compensation to the same extent as skill". Of course, the answer is that competing offers don't contribute to engineering teams at all! But, if a company ignores all competing offers, it will not hire anyone who manages to get one. I'd guess competing offers correlate highly with being a successful engineer, so that sounds like a terrible strategy to me. They also serve as another form of vetting (like VCs piling on after but only after the first bite).

I think this question fundamentally misunderstands labor markets. They are, in fact, markets! Employees are not paid by the amount of value they generate (potentially over a million per person at FAANG), but according to supply and demand for the position.

Nothing. But the reality is that it's in the company's interest to secure labor as cheaply as possible. If Charlie had competing offers and negotiates better pay than Daniel who did not, this isn't discrimination. At least not discrimination on the basis of protected class, it's discrimination on the basis of competing job offers. Swap out Daniel for Danielle and it's no different.

Good negotiation skills = good communication skills. Communication is a skill that 80% of the engineers I meet don’t have. Don’t be upset that someone negotiated a higher salary than you when they were hired, you could have tried just the same.

I don't buy this. I've known a lot of people, especially from a south-east asian background, that are extremely reserved when it comes to self-advocacy wage-wise and still remain extremely strong and clear communicators in the areas that matter. Additionally various factors of neurodiversity bring this into an even worse light, being mildly Autistic can make this difficult to accomplish even if you're able to communicate well with the team on a day-by-day basis.

You’re right, being a bad negotiator does not always correlate to being a bad communicator. But being a good negotiator almost always correlates to being a good communicator.

I don't agree with this. I had a great salary negotiation, over the phone. It was all prepared, i had answers ready for me for the negotiation, prepared by my stepsister (who recently had a mission at a recruitment firm), she listened to the interviewer/manager, pointed me to the correct idea for negotiating, and i landed +60% of my old salary (loosing two vacation weeks, i only have 8 left, but still). Nothing to do with being a good communicator.

I did say “almost always”. Also you showed (somewhat morally ambiguous haha) problem solving and resourcing—two highly sought after skills.

Let’s also not discount the fact that negotiation is a skill itself, and you were learning from your stepsister who sounds like a skilled negotiator. If you had to negotiate another raise in-person I would bet you could think back to the cards and knock it out.

Negotiating skills ARE useful engineering skills (as much as we would like to pretend otherwise), just not included in the typical skills bucket.

It’s not about equal pay, it’s about not paying differently simply due to gender. You can do so for other reasons even ones correlated with gender. It’s very hard afaik to prove such a case so a company needs to be really blatant about it.

California law is more strict. There is a whitelist of allowable reasons, consisting of: seniority, "a merit system", quantity and quality of producrion, and the catch all

> (D) A bona fide factor other than sex, such as education, training, or experience. This factor shall apply only if the employer demonstrates that the factor is not based on or derived from a sex-based differential in compensation, is job related with respect to the position in question, and is consistent with a business necessity. For purposes of this subparagraph, “business necessity” means an overriding legitimate business purpose such that the factor relied upon effectively fulfills the business purpose it is supposed to serve. This defense shall not apply if the employee demonstrates that an alternative business practice exists that would serve the same business purpose without producing the wage differential.

In particular, prior salary is explicitly not a valid defense.

By this standard, if there is a pay gap in California, the burden is on the employer to demonstrate they are not discriminating

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

What? Why wouldn’t you expect that?

This is so incredibly defeatist. What is your reasoning behind equal pay for equal skill not being better for everyone?

Because at the end of the day "equal skills" doesn't exist. You can't just measure a developer's overall skill with a single power level number like in some anime. Different people are good/bad at different things and two engineers at the same level/experience can contribute to the team in completely different ways.

That's why compensation exists in bands, which is aimed to reflect that skill levels exist in bands (not all L4s are equal, etc).

Also some kinds of compensation are intended to keep you for the future, and some are for past efforts, and not all of that is about "skills".

Equal purely engineering skill no? There is more to bring an effective engineer than a coding metric

The parent specifically said "I'm not (and don't ever expect to be) paid the same as other equally qualified engineers on my team."

I understand your point, even if I think it's a little narrow, but the original comment seemed to apply that there was no point in even trying to achieve equal pay. That just totally baffles me.

Equal pay forces metric-based assessments which imo is detrimental. I think(?) that's what op what refering to. It's incredibly hard to evaluate how to pay 2 different people, allowing negotiation allows the free market to determine the price, which is the best way we have found as a society to allocate assets.

There main point following some of there other comment is

equally qualified != equally performant

Yep, but imagine who you're up against:

People who were given "You're #1" ribbons and awards for participating regardless of their performance.

If you agree agree with the GP that people should be paid based on their negotiating skills, then you also support paying people regardless of their performance. Those are two mutually exclusive criteria.

>that people should be based on their negotiating skills, then you also support paying people regardless of their performance

Nah, it's finer grained than that. Negotiating skills are the cherry on top, but they are dependent on performance.

You can't negotiate if you don't have offer a level of performance that justifies the negotiation.

You won't even get the interview (and therefore opportunity to negotiate) without the "performance" i.e. actual work related skills.

We're not discussing a binary, though. Negotiating skills can't completely untether compensation from qualification/performance, but they absolutely loosen the two. If I am a junior employee who is skilled at negotiating comparing my salary with a senior employee who is not, the delta will be far smaller than if our qualifications were the same but our negotiating skills were reversed.

We are discussing a binary:

Participating in interview *: 0 or 1

Participating in negotiation for a higher income: 0 or 1

* Note: An interview is only obtained based on past performance (that is, a person previously performed work at a certain level).

Negotiating skills is just recognizing your true value to the business. You need to actually have value (performance) to negotiate that higher salary.

I don't think that's true because your negotiating power comes from how valuable you are, not only on your "negotiating skills."

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