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>Devils advocate- isn't this a bit like arguing peanut butter shouldn't be uniformly priced, but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown

Unlike the peanut butter example, the economic value provided to the business by skilled employees varies not just by orders of magnitude but can even go negative.

If you ate $100k worth of peanut butter each year, and some of the jars were only 10% full (or worse, contained horrible peanut-butter guzzling insects that ate parts of your good jars), you'd definitely start negotiating with the peanut butter industry.

I always want to negotiate when buying a car, but I still want at least the MSRP as a reference point, and more information is better.

In Econ 101 you learn there's different pricing models.

Goods on a shelf, like peanut butter, are called commodities and will obey a commodity pricing model.

Anything else? Won't. They will have different pricing models often better fitting an auction model, of which there are several. For example, rare art. Second-hand or used goods. Employee salaries.

For any skilled employee, there is no such thing as a single fair price for their salary because there's such a right-place-at-the-right-time effect. You can look up Timofey Mozgov, a bad NBA player who lucked into a ridiculous $64 million overpay contract he worked less than 50% of, because he happened to become a free agent during a summer the budgets went up and everybody was getting overpaid.

Labor is a commodity and it obeys market forces (given adequate information); employees get paid salaries because they are selling their time. Employees are replaceable - when one leaves, they are replaced by an equivalent, and the show goes on.

I think the current (labor) sellers-market that's happening in tech sector gives the illusion that this is not the case, and that we are auctioning high-value, rare skills and not sellers of commodified labor, which has congealed around standardized tech stacks that make sure you're the right type of cog.

I mean, wine ranges in price from $4 to no real ceiling based on exactly those sorts of factors...

And yet in most cases the price of each bottle is still clearly marked.

Right, but there are still differences in prices between different makes of the same type of wine. For example a bottle of Charles Shaw Cabernet (ie. two buck chuck) vs. a Robert Mondavi Cabernet. So to put that in employee terms Alice makes $X and Bob makes $Y. They are both front end developers. Alice makes significantly more because she produces more and higher quality work. So what is gained by making these "prices" transparent?

I'm not quite sure what your point is. Your analogy is to two difference bottles of the same type of wine that have clearly marked prices that are very different. No one is questioning whether it sometimes makes sense for different bottles of wine to have different prices, or whether there are sometimes legitimate differences between employees in the same type of role that justify different salaries. What we're questioning is whether the salaries ought to be transparent, as the prices are for the bottles of wine.

If peanut butter was $200k a jar and not $2 a jar, then I would imagine there would be a lot of talk about the soil and pesticides.

Hand-assembled hypercars can go for much more than $200k, but are not priced according to the years of experience, grit, or expertise of the craftsmen who sew the leather seats or molded the carbon-fiber elements. One doesn't have to haggle with Koenigsegg over the provenance of their steel.

Such cars are all roughly interchangeable between themselves (& sometimes between competitors), hence an average price. In certain fields, employees are not similarly interchangeable for a given position.

> In certain fields, employees are not similarly interchangeable for a given position.

In most fields, they are. I'd hazard 99.9% of all workers are interchangeable, albeit with some variance in productivity. If a worker dies today, the vacancy will be up by the next Monday and the position filled within a few weeks.

Speaking of individual productivity, most comments here are overestimating its importance: if you are able to crank out a feature in 2 weeks that your colleagues can manage in 4, how much higher should your salary be? You have double their productivity (sometimes), but if this doesn't move the needle on the release date - it rarely does - how much more valuable are you? The release date is still 2 fiscal quarters away, others will need to integrate your work and make it usable.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. There are salary bands precisely because of this. Also productivity isn't the only metric. A person may get a higher salary for the same position because they bring in more experience or relevant skill set. A good chunk of more senior development work is figuring out which problems are worth solving in the first place. A junior engineer with that talent is far more valuable & senior engineers can differentiate themselves in that way as well.

As for replacements, for more senior positions its not a 2 week process. You typically have someone more interim step in if there's nobody existing on the team that can step in.

That's because you buy a Koenigsegg to show off how rich you are. You don't haggle over things you are buying for the sake of spending money.

And you over look the Ferrari components that come from the FIAT parts bin.

Like you hire from Harvard to show how rich your law firm is :)

Are you really comparing people to a thing ? Time is being bought from employers. Years of life that can never be taken back or used to something else. We are not products. As social being the price our time is being compensated define a part of our intrinsic value. Otherwise everyone would be paid the same right ? So if our value is publicly displayed in the eyes of everyone to see, a new door opens. Will I be judged by others based on that ? Will I be able to change company with no leverage because they know my actual worth and won’t pay me from what they are ready to pay someone ? Will other people in the company or society treat me differently based on this public « worth » ? Transparency could also reveal inequalities and fix them.

Of course we are interchangeable in jobs, but what about a junior developer and senior one with the exact same job. Should the junior have a senior pay or the senior being stuck at a junior pay until the next carrer change ?

maybe part of the solution is that companies should be transparent from the start. What their envelope is and no more bargaining. Everyone the same amount.

I agree that the information asymmetry is unfair, and that jobs should advertise a minimum starting point. It communicates ball park what they are willing to pay to get the quality of candidates they are looking for.

But I'm strongly against any law that makes _my_ actual pay public.

I think they are two separate issues.

I'm not arguing for individual's salaries to be made public, however the minimum and maximum should be published - the minimum alone is not adequate.

That could still reveal a lot of information on individual salaries depending on the company.

Not the maximum salaries being paid to current staff, but maximum salary for the position in the budget, for an ideal candidate (this number is known internally, its just not published).

> but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown

Not comparable because while peanut butter brands may have very different characteristics, every jar from a given product line is the same. Brand X and Brand Y do have different prices, but every jar of Brand Y is identical (jar was filled from the same giant vat) and thus the same price.

People though, are all individual. Even more granular, the exact same person can be 10X to negative, depending on job environment.