Workers are often told not to talk about pay. That's not legal
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
Want to know what some internal career change might look like? Just take a look. Want to see what career path got someone else to where they are? Take a look. Want to know if you are being underpaid/discriminated against? Click on the job title next to your name and see where you stand compared to all employees with the same role.
At a place where Diversity Equity and Inclusion is a stated goal I think this works well. I also know that people don't always get paid the same amount, and (as I often explain to my six-year-old) fair doesn't mean the everything has to be equal, but it is very useful to know where you stand.
At my new job, the information on Levels seemed accurate based on my offer, and I was very happy with it.
Professors can't do what he does: bring in big-ticket spending, sponsorships and donations.
Basically, people don't act rationally so the market is irrational.
I wouldn't so quickly ignore the additional tuition revenue athletics departments bring in at non-Tier 1 schools.
University athletics are a weird thing. But if the pay bothers you, think of it as a commission. Going cheap on that will likely cost more than it saves.
Some schools, like LSU, have reported a 100x return or greater on their investment in their football coaches salaries, with respect to increased alumni donations, memorabilia sales, etc.
https://moneywise.com/managing-money/employment/the-10-highe...
It's best to not think of athletics as part of the university at all, except when they start to lose money and become parasitic.
ESPN is doing something like $5B (billion) at maybe $450M per year going forward for the SEC conference? Some parts of that deal are going up 3x+.
https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2020/sec-esp...
So it's been going up like crazy. The key thing is to get the athletes paid in my view.
These sports are not your average rec league type pickup games.
That ties into massive fundraising by university that rides the back of these games.
However, consider the other group of people this helps. Minorities, H1B holders, other commonly discriminated classes, who discover they are doing the same work as a colleague and being payed 1/3 the rate. Should these folks get screwed over so you can get your negotiated high pay? Has the trade off even been considered?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I just want to make clear what the other side is arguing for - and it's not some evil plot to screw you in particular. It's to help a different group.
It might not be an ‘evil plot’, but corporations routinely support wage suppressing measures.
They’re not getting screwed over. They’re getting paid what they agreed to when they took the job, just like everyone else is.
Leverage comes from alternatives to an agreement.
The asymmetry in negotiations is that in most circumstances, employees or candidates tend to have zero (remaining unemployed) or one (remaining at a job) alternatives.
People think they have more alternatives, but there's a huge difference between an alternative at an exact moment, and alternatives that are theoretical within days, weeks or months.
Employers have alternatives, even if they aren't great, right now. So you're not on an equal footing whether you are interviewing or talking to your current employer.
Not to mention, when you do have leverage, exploiting it to the hilt can poison or destroy a future relationship.
You're commenting as though this person somehow has proof of what they apparently do not want to know.
If you actually are better then you’ll negotiate better pay.
You’re saying the equivalent of “I don’t want a free market. If other people have the same information I do then I won’t be able to benefit off the information disparity and have to compete on merit”
That's absolutely NOT how it works in practice. It is widely studied that there are HUGE differences in programmer productivity. While the theoretical "10x" programmer may not be that common, I see "2x" programmers all the time.
But you hardly ever see 2x differences in salaries, even though this would be the fair thing if you were looking at output. Once pay becomes public, management is basically constrained to keep people in relatively tight bands because it's trivial for anyone on the lower end of a pay scale to complain that Programmer X gets paid more money, even if Programmer X gets shit out the door 2x faster.
But I don't think you are claiming there are not significant differences in productivity? Given that, it's not unreasonable for the more productive people to ask for more compensation, even if it is difficult to identify who they are.
It's definitely a hard problem. There is probably a lot of room for improvement in general for how we approach this.
That said, while it can't be measured, I also don't think anyone would disagree that it does exist, in that I've easily see engineers that can produce reams of quality code in a fraction of the time other engineers can produce buggy code.
But yes, I do think there is an amount of judgment at the end of the day, which is why this is a tricky subject.
If a trivial complaint from a colleague who, in your theoretical here, is less productive than you can make your employer not pay you more then that means you are only trivially more productive or negotiating pay based on something other than productivity.
Labor is told repeatedly that wages are based on market forces and companies have to act at a sociopathic level of responding to economics.
Why does the narrative always flip to employers having to act emotionally whenever labor would get an up like decreasing the information asymmetry between employers and employees?
While I agree that there can be or at least seem to be that overall difference in productivity between people, utilizing a single metric to make that conclusion is simplifying a much more complex issue.
Or a senior dev may wind up only getting a few tickets done, but it's because they're dealing with meetings and planning to determine the correct course of action for a project that may take a month or more. Or they may be a useful 'repository of knowledge' for the rest of the team, and spend a lot of their time enabling multiple other people to be more effective than they would be otherwise.
If you mean that, between people in the same role, there is usually huge differences in productivity, I honestly haven't seen that, except perhaps for brief periods where someone is late to a deserved promotion.
Did you ever wonder if maybe your negotiation skills aren't as good as you think? Public pay could be a way of finding out if you are selling yourself short.
This would be easier and more accessible if the data was just available.
It's frequent that the salary of a freelancer working for a company becomes public among its employees. That doesn't mean similar employees will ask the same salary, because they know the freelancer can do something they can't, or they can't do it as well.
At a full-time, salaried job, though? Do you get a higher salary because of your demonstrable value, or just because you've become a great salesman? The latter being why tech companies throw up barrier after barrier in their hiring process to try and differentiate between smooth talking and genuine skill (or value).
The point being, would you even work for a company at all knowing where you stand as a freelancer, or a consultant? From where I'm standing, publishing the payroll wouldn't make a jot of a difference.
Public pay does not mean equality. Most public institutions have public pay, but the janitor does not make as much as the CEO.
> I want to be able to negotiate my value to the company whether that is more or less than others.
In which case, public pay is an incredibly important bit of information for you to frame your negotiation around.
Being unhappy with public pay is like going to a car dealership and being unhappy that there are prices written on the windows of the car its selling. You can still negotiate from those prices. In fact, you're expected to.
Not only that, but more information on costs is still better, even if you have the MSRP.
You want to know the invoice, you want to know the holdback if any, you want to know the average selling price in your area, you certainly want to know how much sales tax is, you probably take for granted the gas mileage is disclosed, is there an extra/excessive "documentation" fee...
Nope. You're paid for your ability to negotiate. Big difference. It's very obvious in some companies where it's easy to find higher paid people who are mediocre compared to their colleagues. They get paid more not because they bring in more value, but because they negotiated better.
And, seriously: Except for a few cases (2 person business or something) no one has an accurate amount of how much you add to the bottom line. It's a safe bet you don't. So the notion that either party knows your value is just flawed.
+1. This is extra impossible at tech companies that "give away" products. How much do you add to the bottom line for improving google search algo? Its directly 0 because a better algo doesnt mean more money (it would at a hedge fund!) and indirectly it could be billions if it means more people use the product (or it could be zero if one thinks that google's 98% market share means the algo is irrelevant)
How much does an employee on Alexa add to amazon's bottom line? Its a huge project that is important to the company, but it makes almost $0 and is obviously not free to run... so should you lose money to be an alexa employee?
How do you measure this at any real company?
The issue isn't whether you can put a dollar amount, but on the confidence in accuracy. I've seen how this is done in my company: Construct a narrative, assign numbers to that narrative (with some justification that doesn't always involve real world data), and come up with a total. They are incentivized to inflate the numbers as their goal is to increase their budget - not be accurate. If all departments did this, and you add the numbers they come up with, we'd easily end up with a number 10x our annual revenue, which is ridiculous.
Some folks who are not vested in this will aim for accuracy. And even then, they will have a large confidence interval - easily off by 2x.
How are you going to go from there and estimate an employee's value? Even if the project's value was 100% accurate, you still need to break that down to each employee. And since most employees don't work independently, you need to model the interaction effects (my work depends on your work - if you perform poorly, my contribution to the bottom line is reduced).
If the estimate of the value of the project is off by 2x, then you've already got a pathetic lower bound on the interval length of your confidence interval.
Alexa is actually an easier case to model. My job is to improve the internal communications infrastructure so that important messages get delivered (IT announcements, CEO communications, etc). How will you model my contribution to the bottom line?
I can assure everyone: At any decent sized company, no one is trying to come up with your value to the company.
With great effort and generally mediocre results. Figuring out the contribution of an individual project is hard. An individual person even more so. And this isn't because we're not smart enough, it's because the idea of an individual contribution when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is not coherent.
So how do you split the returns? Well, the entire field of cooperative game theory has something to say about that, and the answer is complicated but the gist is that it depends less on contribution and more on negotiating power.
Are you willing and able to just leave if you don't get what you want? Are you hard to replace? Can you do your stuff with a different company if you leave? All that is much more important than how much your presence benefits the common enterprise compared to the counterfactual where nobody did your job.
From what I've seen, by horse-trading, and fighting highly political, bitter, zero-sum turf wars that depend way too much on how charming department heads/directors are, and how well they relate to the CxO's and/or board. Its not uncommon for the CEO's pet-project to get a budget completely disconnected from the its value (current or future).
Companies - like anything collective that relies on human judgement - are terrible at digging deeper than first-order effects; which is why sales people tend to get paid much more than the engineers who developed the product: "I closed a $X million deal, so I get Y% of it". The engineers get paid a flat rate, because it's impossible to quantify how much value they added, and when. Baseline engineer salaries are broadly determined by how much other companies are paying, and more specifically by how good the individual engineers are able to negotiate.
Companies that make low margin highly competitive products, like paper mills, are the ones with a rigorous understanding of the costs and benefits of every activity.
On top of that, it does also provide a sales channel that nobody else has. Practically nobody else has a voice-activated robot sitting in people's kitchens that buys paper towels and plays Spotify. It's the difference between all your competitors making sales via telegraph, and you introducing a home telephone just to make orders with your company. Funding it is a no-brainer.
BI, in fact, is almost entirely the artform of synthesizing the answer to that very question for the purposes of executive decisionmaking.
I absolutely agree that people doing ostensibly the same role or with the same job title (but not necessarily responsibilities or time investment) can be deserving of a pretty wide gap in pay based on the particulars but that isn’t the purpose or the reality of trying to keep pay a secret.
Also even if you think you deserve whatever you negotiate, having more information instead of less is probably a good idea during your negotiations.
The only motivation for keeping them a secret at that point is so that your coworkers don’t realize you’re being grossly overpaid for what you do compared to the rest of them and honestly I’m okay with that. Additionally once you get high enough in a company the salary isn’t even what matters or where the money is really made.
> I want to be able to negotiate my value to the company
Another way SWE's got into a better position is the environment not their own ability.
One way this could happen: Let's say that a lot of companies want SWEs and there aren't that many SWEs available. So, you go try and hire and any SWE has a bunch of potential offers. They don't negotiate much, but still have to say no to many people. Those people may then say, well, what if we offer you more? SWE says yes. Have that happen all over and constantly and all of a sudden SWEs are by standard paid more rather than purposefully negotiating higher because their negotiation happened for them in the past based on the environment they were in rather than negotiations.
Actually the 60k guy was the most talented on my 15 person team. The reason is simply when the 60k guy came on they asked him how much do you need, and he said 60k. He never asked for a raise, but they actually bumped him up anyway cause they thought he may be a flight risk if he ever checked out the marketplace.
I also found, people are much more likely to underestimate themselves than overestimate.
Only 10% of employees would consistently ask for more money every year. Everyone else almost never asked for a raise.
Now its not solely just negotiation cause if they were a star they probably got it. If they sucked it just made management like them less. When management doesn't like you, and comes time someone needs to be cut. That's who gets cut.
There were extremely wide pay bands there for the same function and it worked fine because the company was perfectly happy to tell people “that other person is paid more because they are worth more to us”. I find that a whole lot more palatable to the nonsense pay bands I see at the regular tech company.
Don’t lie to people about why your pay is secret (it’s always for information asymmetry in negotiations) and be honest to your employees about their value to the company and everything seems to sort itself out.
There are other reasons; depending on how varied the roles and responsibilities are in an organization, and the people working there (partly 'culture'), this kind of information can make some people get embarrassed or envious. This is obviously most true for company with wider ranges of operations (highly paid engineers vs. lower paid manufacturing workers and/or customer service personnel,) in areas where 'value to company' is not a widely-shared outlook.
Completely untrue. Imagine you spend three years building an app. You'll produce zero revenue during those years, and even after it ships, it'll take years more to pay off the money invested.
In reality, like any other good, your pay is determined by what someone is willing to pay for you.
It seems unlikely that it hurts you directly in your own negotiation, and more likely is a benefit. It might hurt you indirectly - in that it helps other employees, who are making less than you, potentially make more, and thereby reduce your own theoretical maximum pay (this doesn't seem very compelling though)... But, it seems naively egocentric to believe that, over the course of one's career, that indirect harm would be greater than the potential direct benefit...
What am I missing here?
Information overload can lead to analysis paralysis, adding complexity to properly weighing information, and ultimately land into poor decision making processes. In the case of salary information, perhaps I perceive that I'm a below average worker. When handed the average, I might be willing to low ball myself because my thought process may think pay is directly correlated to skill or value given to a company and if I perceive my ability to produce as lower than others, I may be willing, during a negotiation process, to accept low balled values.
In the era of the data deluge, we're learning it's not always the case that more information is better. More and even high quality information needs high quality decision making. If you think of human decision making as flawed (hint: we all make flawed decisions so it is), then our processes will not always make good use of new information, even with high quality concise information. It's very possible for more information to result in undesired or negative effects.
We like to pretend we have all sorts of oracle systems out there but we really don't. In the case of knowing salaries I tend to agree with you: knowing what your competition make is better, most of the time.
Regardless, yes, more information yields the possibility of incorrect analysis, but I don't think that it's obvious that the information in this instance, the salaries of one's peers, would be of such complexity that knowing it would result in frequent misinterpretation to the detriment of the worker. In fact, given the stated goals of the worker in your example, even they use such information to their own (personal) moral, if not their financial, benefit.
The possibility that something won't help applies to every possible advantage. So reject all of them?
I'm not saying we shouldn't provide good information, I'm saying we shouldn't assume providing good information is always beneficial (which a lot of people and models do).
Also, even in companies that don't post their salaries have pay grades and bands.
And as freelance developer, how do you know you're not underpaid? For example, a client offered you $x to build a system, how do you know that's a fair amount without market data?
My compensation information to me is private. I never felt like sharing it either when I was poor or now when I'm better off.
It's like having an open sex life. It's not for me. I don't want to know how often you get laid, nor do I have the need to share my sex life either.
Neither is "wrong" they're just not things I want to share.
Would you be ok with nobody posting MSRPs anywhere?
So I don’t need to know what Jane, or my boss or whomever paid for their F-150 and none of them need to know what I paid. But I don’t mind knowing the distribution so long as none of the data points can be tied to any particular person.
Does that mean you are against salaries being published beside names, or you feel any possibility of identifying people should prevent a dataset being released?
I don't understand how this affects your ability to "negotiate your value" in the first place. The party you're negotiating with already has this data, regardless of whether you yourself have it as well or not.
State employers, such as state universities, are generally1 required by state law to make data they generate, including salary data, available for public inspection. The penalties for non-compliance may be criminal as well as civil.2 Thus the incentives to make salary data available, as well as its purpose, are clear (the purpose is government transparency, not employees personal interests around their careers). This rationale for making salaries public and the incentive for complying pre-date the emergence of "diversity and inclusion" policies.
In contrast, private entities are under no such legal obligation to make salary data available. Perhaps that may change in the future but it will never be the same as what is required by "open government" laws, like the one that required the parents salary to be public information.
As for the OP, US labour laws do not place any affirmative obligation on private entities to share salary data. It is true that its illegal to prevent employees from sharing data, but how much much incentive is there to comply when the only "penalty" is reinstatement and backpay. There is arguably more incentive to make employees believe they should keep quiet about their salaries. Historically, that has not been difficult to do in the US since it has been part of the culture.
1 I would guess there are no exceptions but I have not checked every state.
To the people who think they negotiated really well and want this to be kept from their coworkers I say that a lot of you have been lied to and you are making what everybody else makes or even less. I still remember a guy proudly telling me about his great contract and his face when I told him that I made almost twice as him.
If salaries are public it isn't a super rare case where friendly coworkers will help to build you up to asking for that promotion.
I agree with this 90%. More information is very useful most of the time, as long as it is high quality.
However, given that we humans do not have infinite processing power or infinite emotional capacity, there are obviously limits to the amount of information we want to have at any point in time. And these limits will change depending on the situation and our own internal state.
Personally: I've reached the point where I don't want to know what my colleagues make. I know many of them make significantly more, but that's fine. In some cases I'm outright happy for them.
Yes you are exploited if you don’t know what would be possible.
Here’s an analogy. Say I wait tables at a restaurant. If I discover my boss has been skimming off my tips, I’m going to be upset — even if I was perfectly happy with my pay before I learned that.
Outside of some progressive companies, what jobs exist where everyone's salary is public at the time of negotiation (when hired?) and people can negotiate salaries 2x or more for the same position?
Do you think you deserve to make 2x what your colleague does?
Did you tell your colleague why you think you deserve 2x their salary?
But the main point is that knowledge is power. Ignorance may protect your fragile ego from inconvenient truths but it’s not bliss.
And when they can't, do you think they will raise your coworkers salary to match yours, or bring yours down? (I know what I'd bet on) Persons who benefit from that asymmetry of information may not even know it. I'm not saying you are one of those people, but if your first reaction wasn't "Yes I deserve to get paid 2x my coworker", then I suspect you won't continue to be in a transparent system.
You also skipped over my first question in my previous reply. I am interested in your feedback on that. You claim that "knowledge is power". Can you point to an industry or large segment of jobs where this sort of salary negotiation (such as yours) takes place in a transparent system. Alternatively, can you point to any study/research that backs up your claim?
"
One example is CEOs and top execs. Their salaries are public and have shot through the roof in the last few decades. Pro sports also comes to mind. It's much easier to ask for more when you know how much your peers are making.
I've changed job positions and let them know my previous pay since they are in that role now. Sadly I think their pay is generally smaller since I negotiate until I embarrass myself and my friends are women and I understand that the negotiations are less aggressive from that population in general.
I made 12% more than them at the same job role.
And at my current I'm also about that much higher than the bottom paid (a guy internal promotion).
I asked for 12% raise citing my usefulness to the team as a whole. Still waiting on the results of that. It seems I negotiate in a very clumsy manner but still getting better results than those I know about.
Possibly those that get paid less share their pay, but those that get paid more do not?
Every year, the local SPEEA rep would post an anonymous graph showing compensation compared to experience. The org was large enough that you couldn’t pinpoint everyone, but you could easily see where you stood WRT your peers.
Pay was tied to numerical career grades. Everyone's numerical career grade was public information. Salary ranges (fairly broad and overlapping for each grade) for each were published each cycle. While there was a ton of griping along the lines "seriously, X got promoted to 23!? They just suck up!", it was at least consistent across disciplines and clearly tied listed job responsibilities to a pay range to make justifications for a promotion easier.
I know it's a very common system, but my current company doesn't have that, and I quite miss it.
We somewhat do via titles. E.g. I know the 25 year old engineers who have the title "principle staff engineer" despite not being trusted to do anything directly are absurdly overpaid, but it's really murky and not consistent. E.g. If your title says "software engineer" you're on a completely different scale than someone who's title says "data engineer". And if you have actual experience in the field, you'll be considered a "scientist" or a "technician" instead of an "engineer" depending on the exact role you're hired into.
At any rate, it's really, really, really unclear how anything relates, and going from a "staff X" position to a "junior Y" position is often a pay raise.
My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much you got paid. There's only 1 reason, they are underpaying someone. They propose that it's to my benefit because they can then pay me more.
Then a coworker got a better job and told everyone how much he was being paid. This angered lots of people because they were being paid much less and did much more.
What blows my mind. Minimum wage is $15/hr and they were getting $24/hr as senior sysadmins with tons of experience. Soon as they decided to get a new job, they got a nice raise near instantly and they were gone. Yet their time was billed out above $100/hr. It was literally the greed of our employer who kept their wages low begging for someone to offer more money and steal them. Such a high risk for minimal benefit in greed.
If you're in the US, I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
Not in the US, but you know whats funny. The timeline of this job was outgoing government who passed the law making it illegal. Then a very short period of time, the incoming government deleted all the previous government's labour laws. So in fact during that time, it was in fact illegal.
Though in context, nobody was punished. We were 2 senior staff down already. They had no opportunity to punish anyone.
It's back to legal today. Your employer can have such a rule.
This assumes of course, that they pay those employees fairly. At my company, we do, so it's a useful source of salary info when negotiating salary.
These days, all my younger coworkers openly discuss pay. I really like the openness today. It’s shared in a way that you’re trying to help your coworker, like “dude you’re totally underpaid I made $20k more than that! Go ask for a raise or find a new job!”
It’s a different sense of camaraderie that people share these days instead of the zero-sum game from when I was younger.
(New hires would mention this, because one of the first things I'd tell new hires on my team was how stack ranking worked, amongst other parts of the performance review process.)
Everyone wants to be paid more than they are of course and I'm no exception, but overall I feel like I am being paid pretty close to what I am worth. After accounting for the fact that I work for company with a decent culture, don't take part in an on-call rotation and pretty much get to pick my hours outside of scheduled meetings. I know what the market rate is in my area for my skills and experience, and I negotiate my pay (and raises) with my employer according to that data.
What _would_ hurt me (or at least my image) is if someone who does similar work to me went to their manager and said, "hey manager, bityard says he makes $x more than me, please give me a raise." Now maybe the manager is a completely reasonable guy and agrees completely. But it's a small company and maybe that particular manager isn't so reasonable. Now I'm the bad guy in that manager's eyes for "bragging" about my take-home pay and making him do the work to convince _his_ managers to approve the raise and justify the increased operating costs, passing along my name discreetly to them as well. Or maybe the raise is denied, and the guy quits. Then I'm the bad guy. Or the raise is denied and the guy is fired for something unrelated. It all gets murky and resentful real quick.
Further, if you ask someone at work what their pay is, how do you know they are telling the truth? I can think of several reasons people might lie about what they make by shifting the number in either direction.
At the end of the day, going to your boss and saying you and the other employees compared salaries is frankly a pretty lazy (and likely ineffective) way to ask for a raise. The _right_ way to ask for a raise is to do your own research on market rates, and then _prove_ to your employer why you deserve the going rate (or higher) based on your work performance and other relevant factors. As it always has been.
That sort of makes sense from a social consequences standpoint. But, if the data is open, the only real solution for employers is to correct upwards. They aren't going to lower the salary of high salary outliers. It seems like it would raise the water level for everyone.
It's also useful as a way to know you should ask for a raise. You don't have to necessarily mention it when asking.
True, probably not. But I have worked for companies that would simply stop giving meaningful annual raises if forced to for some reason, which would be the same net result.
> You don't have to necessarily mention it when asking.
Also true, but if person A tells person B what they are being paid, person A has no guarantees that person B will keep their identity a secret. I like my co-workers but I don't trust them as much as I trust my family and friends so it's just not worth the risk.
The easier route:
* Lots of web sites report aggregate salary information by profession and location. Often these are not to be trusted because {algorithms and marketing} but can still be a useful data point.
* Look for job listings with compensation information in them.
* In-person networking with your peers in other companies. Every decent-size city has meetups for developers and other tech professionals. Not everyone is going to be willing to share what they make with a near-complete stranger (especially if friends are nearby) but some might. This is pretty much the only time I would voluntarily share my earnings with another person besides my wife. There's no reason for me to fib, and unless I'm being profiled for identity theft or something, there are no downsides.
* Virtual networking, a.k.a. join a Slack, Discord, or other kind of forum with people like you and just ask what someone with your experience and skills should make. Since you (probably) don't know any of these people, there is little consequence.
These are all data points to gather and consider in combination in order to arrive at some kind of ballpark figure. You don't have to show any of your research to your employer, but trust me when I say that it's a crucial step because your employer absolutely does already have a very good idea of what you are worth to them. This is data for you to make sure your number is accurate.
This only works until some point. I showed my employer that they pay me around 15% less than median for software engineers in general (there’s public data here on this from taxes). The result was that they told me that 15% is too much offered me “even” an inflation-adjustment and in the end didn’t give me anything. All while also telling me they want to keep me and how I’m one of their best developers.
Often getting a proper raise only works through jumping the ship.
In one case, we discovered that one friend was getting paid $30k less per year than I was, which seemed mostly to be related to the fact his parents convinced him that no one was actually getting the insane tech salaries people talk about here and thus he didn't negotiate. Maybe he took that information with him to his employer and successfully negotiated up, maybe he didn't. I don't know because he started treating me differently and eventually stopped talking to me altogether.
It's not like job title maps to the actual work anyways. Some companies only expect SWEs to work various parts of a huge monolith that magically gets deployed somewhere. Some companies only expect SWEs to own every single part of the process for getting an application from a whiteboard to prod. Some companies have different expectations depending on your org. Some companies vary these expectations based on what they sense they can get individuals to do. That's not even discussing the idea that people can be better (and thus take less time) than others even if they are doing the "same" task. How is pay a useful number in that context?
I'm just soured on the whole idea, I don't see how a system based on this kind of radical transparency doesn't result in either completely leveled salaries or pay reflecting (and enforcing) social hierarchies. I just see people using different social tools based on group perceptions more than the modicum of individual agency I have when I'm able to advocate for my specific contribution's value during negotiations.
Without that, you know nothing. You'll be making the case that your performance deserves a 20% raise, and they'll negotiate you down to a 10% raise. Meanwhile everyone else is making twice as much as you. Your estimate of 20% was not based on your value it was an estimate that you made of what sounded reasonable, and what you thought you might be able to get away with. That's easily nullified by the boss always playing hardball, and always giving the impression that they're paying you as much as you possibly can.
How can you possibly know how much you should be paid if you both don't know how much other people are paid, and you don't have access to the books?
Surveys & data on job sites, staying plugged into places like this where people discuss salaries semi-anonymously, getting to the offer stage at other companies and seeing what they propose. It's not a perfect strategy, but I'd rather have individual agency over giving companies an excuse to level salaries.
If you let it go too long before you bring it up, when you finally do, you'll get some BS about how they "can't" bump you up because they "can't" authorize that large of a salary bump. A purely BS, arbitrary, rule.
Oh - just FYI - be prepared to jump ship if you do this. Some people are manipulative assholes that react strongly and quickly to any employees standing up for themselves - and other companies are legitimately failing and can't afford the pay bump. In either case you're better off at the new shop. Having an actual job offer to another shop should give you the confidence to risk your current position.
To be honest, $3k sounds like a tiny variance. I frequently see 20-30k differences on middle management roles. Often 10%-30% differences. Getting several years of 3% increases can put you well behind the market.
This is one of the reasons salary bands are so wide. Employers don’t want to bring current staff up to market but want the ability to hire top talent. Also, there’s a fair bit of budget exceptions that get made when a great candidate comes along (whether they’re great or not, TBD)
This is very true. They value your ability to do a job. If you've been around a long time and aren't being valuable in your current job they often won't value you. But, if you are being useful in your current job they will value you.
Tenure is not valued. Usefulness to the company is. Whether you're 20 or 60 this same thing applies.
> you’re often better off changing companies for promotion, salary increases, etc.
This depends.
Companies often view their people as expenses. They often want to get the maximum they can out of someone at the least expense. There are exceptions to this but it's the rule.
So, you need to learn to maximize the thing you value if you want that. Things like position and compensation.
When being courted by a new company they will use these to pull you in. But, if you learn the system at your current employer you can use that system to your benefit as well. Your current company doesn't often see benefit from paying people more and promotions. In some cases, they're looking for the people motivated enough to seek them and not wait for them to be given. Especially at the higher levels.
Of course, using your current companies system to your benefit means you want to stay there.
> 10%-30% differences
Hiring companies are looking for that number which will pull people away. Even from a job they like. What they initially offer is almost always lower than they are able to go.
Just my 2 cents after many years in the systems.
I think this point is correct - but I think a more important point is that companies forget how much value an employee that prevents fires creates. If you work in a position where you reduce risk to the company you'll need to work hard to constantly remind the company of how much risk you're helping them evade.
> Hiring companies are looking for that number which will pull people away. Even from a job they like. What they initially offer is almost always lower than they are able to go.
That's absolutely a core truth - nobody wants to pay more than they have to and salary negotiation is one of the only fields where (in western cultures) we actually haggle over prices. Employees almost never have significant experience advocating for themselves since haggling is a very rare activity.
For many devs, the first 3ish months you lack context to be super useful, then that first 2-4 years of hard work and enthusiasm are probably your peak productivity. It gets harder to maintain enthusiasm as the years go by, so some devs who are cruising with 5+ years might actually provide less long term value than a new hire.
The reality was she was quite under paid. It's quite saddening that her prior employer seemed to have convinced her that such low pay was top of the industry mark.
And there was a lady worked in the warehouse who was basically waiting till she could retire, and she'd worked there longer than I'd been alive and she was on an absolute pittance, we literally got guys in off the street (from an agency) and paid them twice what she was on.
She accepted it, and because not talking about salary's was encouraged no-one knew, I don't think even the directors knew how little she was on. But when I brought it up and encourage everyone to talk about pay, she realised, and I got her a raise.
Treat your workers like people and respect them. Look after them and they'll look after your business, I don't understand why so many businesses seem to struggle with understanding that.
Someone pointed out that this was just straight-up prohibited, so the contracts were rewritten to remove the clause. The funny thing is that nobody that I know of has shared, or wants to share, information about their compensation. They just wanted the option to do so should they choose.
[0] Discussing your salary.
Most workers cannot afford to take their employers to court, and the businesses know this and take advantage of it every single day.
Your best option is to find the sleaziest, most experienced lawyer possible. A lawyer who is adept at delay, distraction, and costly legal requests. The company will settle for a moderate amount (maybe a couple years salary in exchange for your silence.) You'll give half to the lawyer.
I'm pretty sure that in a lot of cases it's the same lawyers threatening to sue the same companies over the same behavior, and getting the same settlements in return for the same NDA. It can become a relationship between lawyer and company functioning like an external severance pay arbitration department.
[*] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/opinion/fired-for-being-b...
Governance is done with a token and all votes are on the block chain. "Departments" ask the token holders for a budget and must get buy-in to get their proposal approved.
Everything is public because there is no legal entity to hold anything private. All payments to any address's are visible on the chain and can be easily traced.
As an engineering group we recently sat down to discuss what budget we would like to request which required us to specify how much each person would be receiving from the treasury each month we found that everyone preferred the transparency of knowing how much each person or position was making and people felt that their pay was more fair when they knew that it meant how it matched up with other engineers.
I do believe anonymous pay transparency is very different from full individual pay transparency too. Anonymously contributing even partially can mitigate a lot of the social stigma around attaching your real identity to compensation figures. That said, it’s still always a good idea to discuss these things with friends!
That said, it always feels a bit shameful to talk about how much you earn, in part due to social conditioning, because of which you correlate how much you earn with your worth. No one wants to be told that their work is worth 10-20x times less than that of someone else (even if knowing that is also useful), which is a revelation that stares me in the face after comparing my salary with that of people abroad.
Oh well, i don't see why openness would be a bad thing, apart from me deciding to be open about this stuff, potential employers deciding that they can underpay me because of these figures, which would put me at a disadvantage compared to the other people who wouldn't talk about that stuff - a problem, that's there in the first place because everyone's salaries aren't public to begin with. It feels like some sort of a catch 22.
I have a few friends in the industry that candidly discuss compensation, and it's great to understand where one stands/what is achievable.
Besides pay for performance, experience and seniority..
Compensation is very path dependent.
PersonX stayed in a job paying low raises for 10 years keeping their head down until they got cut, then took the first job they could find.
PersonY actively manages their career, moves every 5-7 years, moving proactively when a new firm entices them with better pay.. not when they are desperate to get out of current role / in between jobs.
Of course if these two people land in the same firm in a similar role, they are going to come in at different salaries. It's more than just negotiation. PersonY may value themselves, in terms of compensation, more than PersonX because the path they've taken them has lead to higher salary. They therefore require an even higher salary to be enticed to move.
They already do this for stock trading for example, via NBBO. Yet the two largest asset classes: salaries and real estate are entirely in the shadows, traded over the counter as if it's a meat market.
I'm not sure if there has been much discussion on the topic here, but it's something I would definitely like to see changed.
At least there is no provision in the contract that I can't talk about provisions in the contract...
"Of course, many workers don’t withhold their salaries out of respect for their supervisors’ wishes but because it can be deeply awkward.
“We have a culture that discourages it,” Pardo said. “People don’t want to talk about money. It’s like talking about religion and politics. It’s uncomfortable.”
As a result, many may be unaware of what the person in the other cubicle or on the other end of the Zoom call earns.
While employer review websites like Glassdoor offer a window into company pay, UNC’s Hirsch pointed out this data is often incomplete and certainly not uploaded for all companies."
And wealthy people around here don't tend to offer many. Being flashy is considered a bit trashy.
All poor indicators IMHO.
That makes it inappropriate to bring up in a random conversation, but not inappropriate to have on record, or to provide within the shared context of helping each other.
You know what encourages equality? Open verification that there is actual equality.
For whom? The richer ones who know they’re richer and not equal? That’s a really weird way of putting it, as pointed out on other comments.
If you want to practice some pretty deep humility consider that your opinions about what is right/wrong/polite/impolite might be on the wrong side of history.
So I dug deeper, and discovered this was an activism piece, not a scientific study, by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research - not a group well known for objectivity.
They commissioned a poll but did not disclose the details of the poll such as the exact questions asked and the responses for each question, which is the basic minimum required to take a poll seriously.
Instead, they published a glossy "brief" - https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pay-Secrecy-Poli... - which claims 12% of employers prohibit discussing pay -- that's much more plausible than 50%. So how do you get to the headline 50%? Because that is how many people reported being "discouraged" -- but were they discouraged by their employer, by their peers, or by their own conscience? Here is where knowing the actual questions to the poll would be useful.
Please do not listen to any reports of a poll when only the summary results are provided but the specific questions and breakdowns of the answers are not provided. Particularly when the poll is commissioned by a pressure group not known for objectivity.
If you can afford to put together a big glossy "brief" then you have the bandwidth to host result text files that disclose what the questions were and the poll methodology. This is the minimum bar for credibility, an outfit like USA today used to be aware of this, and so is any think tank worth their salt.
Thus my spidey senses detected there is a good chance this is an activism piece that is intentionally misleading to promote some "greater cause".
A good approach is to look at what other stories the same author wrote, to see if there is a track record of spreading propaganda in the name of some moral cause or whether it's just shoddy work.
And indeed the author is a crusading reporter, that is, one who focuses on moral causes and issues rather than news. Real news is messy. Sometimes it supports your beliefs and other times it doesn't. But a look at his articles (as well as their social media presence) reveals an activist who cannot be objective or professional. E.g. the "news" story about racism causing food deserts and creating food "injustice". I get that this is an issue that many on the left are passionate about. But it's not news. it's a cause. And when you start reporting your causes as news stories, then you lose credibility and also hurt your cause.
Here the problem is the general compression: There is a process of learning the truth about a situation, coming to some conclusion about it, and then figuring out the appropriate course of action.
These can be separated into information gathering, issue debate, and then solution advocacy, and are best done by different people with different skillsets. Everyone must do their part well, which means everyone must have integrity. The reporter must seek the truth of the facts, not whatever servers their agenda, and the think tank must have integrity and a commitment to look deeply into issues.
Reporters are supposed to be uncovering hidden information. Not advocating well known issues like food deserts or that many people don't like to reveal their exact pay to their coworkers.
Think tanks who employ PhDs are supposed to be thinking through solutions and advocating solutions. Not pretending to uncover "news".
So when the reporter with a bachelors degree skips over the news gathering part and dives into synthesis or solution advocacy, you can be sure it is a poorly thought out synthesis or solution.
Just as when the think tank tries to create "news", you can be sure the think tank's press release is not newsworthy and sacrifices were made to try to make it "news". It's not like we get a steady stream of new issues to put on a newspaper.
Thus they both do a shoddy job because they lack professionalism and discipline, which unfortunately is the current state of both modern news as well as think tanks. Everyone wants a podium to stand on and shout about the injustice of the world, rather than, you know, being good at a job so that progress can be made.
For example, with this type of misinformation we don't even know what the problem is. If the study had been done right and the actual questions posted, we could have had useful breakdowns of how big of a problem this really is, what industries it's concentrated in, and the methods used by employers. This could then provide real actionable intelligence. But it wouldn't grab headlines. So this is an interesting area that a think tank can do a real study in. But we don't know the results -- all that useful information was sacrificed in order to inflate the problem to make it "news worthy".
I have been told this formally only once. Every other time was an informal meeting over dinner or at a bar, or being told some nebulous statement like “that’s not really part of our culture here” when a manager discovered that I would freely discuss pay with coworkers.
It is explicitly illegal to require employees to not discuss pay. Of course you’re going to find that most people who were instructed to not discuss it felt “discouraged” and can’t point to some paperwork where it was official
I also don't know how representative my own experience is. I've only worked a few kinds of jobs, so whether or not I've been told explicitly not to discuss pay isn't relevant to most of the population.
Talking about salaries have always resulted in better or equal pay for everyone involved (except the higher ups, like you) in my experience, and the experience of everyone I know.
Your post sounds like companies claiming that unions would actually hurt you.
If you're underpaying people in order to get to an IPO, people deserve to be aware of that and know the risks involved.
It's not like the parent comment is defending the practice, just how it's done in practice to discourage employees. Yes, groups of employees that don't band together believe that it will hurt their own bottom line if they talk about pay.
I'm honestly not sure what you're saying.
What is the exact source on this? I highly doubt every company in existence has the budget to pay everyone "better or equal"
I'm not claiming a universal truth. I do think that the original post is much farther away from the truth than my claim, though.
- lower paid employees don’t get anything, and start looking for a better paying job
- lower paid employees get compensatory raises
- lower paid employees get nothing and the higher paid members are expected to get lower pays. They proceed to leave for greener pastures (and they only need to find at least equal paying jobs to make it worth it)
The scenario where salaries go down and employees don’t do anything is unrealistic.
If ability, experience, and performance are part of how you pay your employees, then a discussion about comparative pay of employees inherently means you are opening up a discussion about the comparative ability, experience, and performance of employees.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- but -- some feelings might get hurt in the process.
Discussing the raw numbers of pay exposes that fact as well.
But people say they should be paid based on ability, performance, and experience. So this is what the conversation will be centered around, whether it is the complete reality for the considerations made by the employer or not.
Alice won’t care that Bob was hired for $10K more because there was a labor shortage and the company was going to lose a contract if they couldn’t hire another person. She just wants her $10K. So, the marginal cost of hiring an additional employee is not only the cost of that employee, but the additional wage demand that would result from the rest of your workforce. This is likely why we see many companies giving bonuses in this labor crunch rather than higher base wages.
I hope you've provided some very concrete examples how talking about pay delayed an IPO by a certain period of time, and quantified how much exactly hires were losing because of it, in exact dollar values.
Because otherwise, it's just a gaslighting scare tactic.
> It's not a threat if you just explain how the real world works and that actions have consequences.
One of the consequences of bullshitting new hires with vague examples of how the real world works is that you end up with people willing to drink the kool-aid, regardless of their skills and ability. Now maybe that was your primary goal in the first place, but somehow I doubt it.
You could take this as an indication that your pay scale is screwed up.
But I guess it's easier to just bully your employees.
You don't need to explicitly stop people from complaining about a manager's behavior or other toxic workplace features, you just need to explain to people how discussions around how they feel about a particular management style almost always leads to interpersonal friction, resentment, conflict, lower work productivity, and slower progress of our company toward an IPO.
You see, it's not a threat if you just explain how the real world works and that actions have consequences. /s
If they were that valuable, they should've paid them accordingly. Compensation is the most direct marker of "value". If you're valued more, you get paid more.
> often to everyone's detriment
Presumably not the acquiring team's.
> See US women's soccer last year
They played 1 game in 2020, which they won. This year, their W-D-L record reads 15-3-2, which is pretty damn good.[1] Their contract negotiations might have been fractious, but they still performed on the field.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_women%27s_nation...
Try this one with your SO:
"Talking about chores almost always leads to interpersonal friction, resentment, conflict, lower work productivity, and slower progress of our relationship towards marriage"