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Comment by chrisBob | Hacker News Reader

At my last job, all salaries were public record, and some dude even put together a website (https://umsalary.info) to make searching easier.

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.

View on HN

Frankly, I'll never work for a company with public pay. I don't want equality, I want to be able to negotiate my value to the company whether that is more or less than others. This is why I became a freelancer years ago and have vastly increased my income. I'm paid for the value I provided the company's bottom line, not some arbitrary "equal" amount based on an arbitrary title as a cog in the machine.

You are making the argument that public pay reduces the upper window on merit-based compensation. This may even be true!

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's not some evil plot to screw you in particular

It might not be an ‘evil plot’, but corporations routinely support wage suppressing measures.

> Should these folks get screwed over so you can get your negotiated high pay?

They’re not getting screwed over. They’re getting paid what they agreed to when they took the job, just like everyone else is.

And it's an unethical system where people who have leverage end up able to negotiate more pay for the same output than people who do not. I suspect that if you weren't in a privileged position, you'd be upset about the disparity too.

Leverage is skill and results. Skill and results do not come from "privilege", it is earned through years of hard work, practice and dedication.

Ah come on, we know that this is not true. For example we know that many CEOs come from very select few universities, have typically unique connections through families etc.. So not really hard work practice and dedication

They don’t last long if they can’t do the job though, even if they had an advantage in their climb to the top.

I generally agree with what you're saying, but it's often more simple than that. The greatest leverage in a salary negotiation comes from the freedom to actually quit, a freedom, especially in the United States, that many do not have (and never "earn"). While, on the other hand, the privileged are born with this freedom.

>The greatest leverage in a salary negotiation comes from the freedom to actually quit

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.

Leverage means having the life situation that allows you to walk away. That's something you can build, later in life; but having it from the start can build a huge advantage.

You don't know you're "privileged" until you get the data.

You're commenting as though this person somehow has proof of what they apparently do not want to know.

This is why equality often ends up being a race to the bottom. If you disallow rewarding exceptional behavior and people, or only let everyone have the same thing, then there's just no way around the reality of limited resources and the inherent inequality of genetics and interest/effort.

I don't see calls for equality as meaning that you can't make more money by performing better. I see calls for equality meaning that the basis on which pay rates are decided are applied to all equally.

Maybe we see different things. Many people, including on HN, argue for things like lottery systems for universities, i.e. "you can't get into a better university by performing better in grade school".

Public pay information doesn’t require equality.

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”

> Public pay information doesn’t require equality.

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.

The problem, I believe is in objectively measuring said "productivity". Yes, you say person A is 2X productive than person B. But that's just arbitrary from your POV. Someone in the same team may mark them as 1.5X productive. Heck, the same person you saw working 2X one week might not work the same amount the next. If you have any suggestion on ways of measuring productivity. That'll be cool to hear.

Some people consistently outperform most others in their clique. Fair compensation is a problem without a great solution there, but denial is not the answer.

I agree, measuring productivity is very difficult. And as you said, it can be a moving target as well.

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.

I'm not disagreeing that is a problem, and the reason this is a thorny issue is that there is no reliable way to measure programming productivity: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.htm...

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.

It is trivial to complain in general.

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?

If 2x programmers are paid ~2x then the company is using some performance metric to influence pay, but then for pay to remain secret the performance metric also has to be secret.

If one can't make a compelling case to be in a higher "band," and therefore get paid more, then I'm failing to see how they could possibly make the case that they are actually 2x productive.

At most companies I worked for, I'm sure there is 2x-3x difference in "raw" dev productivity, or even 10x once we keep in mind the affects of the correct prioritization and technical solution, but the salary difference is almost always within 50% band. The most productive people could never negotiate 5x salaries.

I'm not saying there would be a 5x, or even 2x, salary. Only that if one cannot even negotiate for oneself, on the basis of some self-perceived productivity disparity, a higher salary (of literally any meaningful magnitude), then it seems quite dubious that such a productivity disparity even exists (especially at the perceived magnitude), given how flawed comparing "raw" productivity often is.

Let's assume that is true, what has that to do with public pay information. You say yourself you hardly see 2x differences in salary, and I assume you are not only talking about public pay companies (I certainly have not seen it much either even in non public pay companies).

You don't see differences in salaries perfectly correspond to differences in outputs for the same reasons that companies want to pay less for remote work. Pay in general doesn't correspond that great to value provided. Potential complaints about pay comparisons are way down the list of reasons.

That tracks latency, but not throughput. Sure, a programmer may get a given ticket out the door 2x faster, but they may create 3x as much technical debt that winds up being addressed as separate tickets. That's a useful skill if you need one particular feature urgently for a deadline, but less useful for steady-state development.

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.

At your large, in vogue, non-neflix companies, pay often has fairly well known bands, and approximately doubles (or more) every two levels (well not at Microsoft). This holds true at Amazon, Facebook, Google, Uber, Snap, Apple, Stripe, etc.

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.

I don't think public pay means you can't negotiate your salary to get paid what you believe you deserve.

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.

It's easy to contact salary services to know what the market rate is for your position. If anything, people with better "negotiation skills" do this proactively, while other people wander and complain without realizing much of this information is already publicly available.

> It's easy to contact salary services to know what the market rate is for your position.

This would be easier and more accessible if the data was just available.

You mean like on levels.fyi? In my experience (as an employee and an employer), their data seems very well aligned to reality. Its main flaw is that it’s US-heavy.

You're conflating openness with equality. Public salaries don't mean they have to be the same salary for all, because people are not the same.

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.

Or more literally, you can't take a freelancer on a 3 month contract at 700 a day and say, "well based on what they're being paid, my salary should be 170k!"

Arguably, freelancing or starting your own business will continue to be the best way to achieve this (and it comes with considerable risk), as your negotiation skills and business acumen will contribute to your income, as well every other skill not directly connected to the job description for a specific role.

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.

I wouldn't want my to work at such a company either, but not because of negotiation power. I'd avoid it because I think it would lead to a sense of competition with coworkers over pay, complete with resentments, and that would be irritating.

Are you actually able to do that in any typical company. Usually your stuck in a pay band ime

Shouldn't your performance influence the title you end up having? Just because your pay is based on your title doesn't mean your relative performance level can't be rewarded. Perform better = increase grade in career track.

I completely agree. My pay is based on a private agreement between me and my employer. It has nothing to do with other employees, just as their pay has nothing to do with me.

> Frankly, I'll never work for a company with public pay. I don't want equality,

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.

>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.

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...

> I'm paid for the value I provided the company's bottom line

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.

> no one has an accurate amount of how much you add to the bottom line. It's a safe bet you don't.

+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?

Also, it doesn’t take into account skilled/hard-to-hire roles that are effectively cost centers, like security. How much revenue am I responsible for as a security engineer? Probably none, especially since the consequences for a breach are usually negligible.

It is most definitely not impossible. How do you think companies decide on budgets? They're not just guessing; they're predicting how different projects will impact revenue. Alexa isn't important to Amazon because it's "cool" — it's important because they've put an actual dollar amount to its return on investment.

> it's important because they've put an actual dollar amount to its return on investment.

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.

> How do you think companies decide on budgets?

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.

I have never seen these things come from anything other than guesswork. It's educated guesses, but guesses nonetheless. It's why products get killed too early or too late. Measuring these things properly and causally is hard and sometimes infeasible.

> How do you think companies decide on budgets?

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.

I make planning software at a quantitatively sophisticated tech company, and it’s quite ironic to me that we don’t have a precise understanding of the expected impact of our software on the company. But that’s normal. We don’t build software that will barely break even. We build software that we expect can be massively successful, and the resource allocation is more about opportunity cost and uncorrelated bets than predicted outcomes.

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.

They don't need to put a dollar amount on ROI of Alexa to develop it. Alexa is a loyalty-generating machine. Even if you never use it to make a purchase, it helps the brand, and it keeps you using Amazon products.

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.

Hate to break it to you, but any accountant with any data savvy can you give a more or less accurate ballpark figure with the right details. (This is also why you should be chummy with Tim in Accounting; you'll be amazed the things you can pick up shooting the shit with the finance department).

BI, in fact, is almost entirely the artform of synthesizing the answer to that very question for the purposes of executive decisionmaking.

This is pretty much the long and short of it entirely. And it’s why there shouldn’t be secrecy in salary. The idea that you’re paid your value to the company on-balance gets even more absurd the larger it is. You aren’t an exact quantified line item on revenue vs expense. That isn’t even the criteria except in the abstract or in a very, very small business.

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.

You're 100% right and they seem to know that but not realize that they know that. This quote before saying "I'm paid for the value I provide" spills the beans...

> I want to be able to negotiate my value to the company

Do you really think the average marketer at a company is poorer at negotiating than the average SWE, and what do you think their comparative salaries are?

Not necessarily.

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.

If you actually wanted to be paid for the value you bring, you should look for profit sharing/commission rather than freelance work

Your negotiation, but also your perceived value. During my time as a manager I was shocked by the difference in salaries. I mean one person making 60k another 120k. I mean, same job, same experience.

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.

You seem to be thinking these are contradictory things. In fact, they are complementary. The payment depends both on value (of course, that's subjective, market-driven, influenced by fashions and passions, insert all disclaimers here) and on negotiation skill. If you're a fresh intern knowing next to nothing, no negotiating skill would give you the position of a senior architect with accompanying salary. Bad negotiating skills though can harm you, even though extreme lowballing is dangerous for the employer too - people know what are general salary levels and if you lowball to the extreme, they'd get pissed off and leave for better pastures in exactly the worst moment. Because other employers have interest in high-value people too (or even in cheap moderate-value people).

I worked for a trading firm that had public pay & it certainly wasn’t about equality. It was simply recognition that people will talk about pay and it was easier to get in front of any ill will & miscommunication.

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.

>"it’s always for information asymmetry in negotiations"

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.

> I'm paid for the value I provided the company's bottom line

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.

I'm interested to know how having access to information, which the opposing party in said negotiation has access to, would hurt 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?

There tends to be an assumption that more information is always better but it ultimately depends on how one interprets and uses that information (time and absorptive capacity is important). Most models that push for more information assume perfect decision making (utilizing all the information effectively and optimally). That is not always the case (I might even argue often).

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.

Your example, while potentially leading to a lower salary, is not actually an argument against public salary information, unless you assume the goal is universally higher salaries... Which, in your example, you explicitly state is not the goal of the worker... The prior is, in my opinion, generally the safer assumed goal.

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.

>It's very possible for more information to result in undesired or negative effects

The possibility that something won't help applies to every possible advantage. So reject all of them?

The point is that we assume positive effects of more information and ignore negative effects of more information. I wanted to point out that more information is not always better and can lead to degraded decision making. I see it happen often enough. We bombard people with good information and assume it helps, it can, but it doesn't necessarily. Signal to noise, both from information provided and absorptive capacity are important.

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).

You can more accurately ascertain the true market value of your work by knowing the salaries of your peers. It has nothing to do with equality.

Also, even in companies that don't post their salaries have pay grades and bands.

As an employee, if you consistently deliver measurable and outsized impact, you get high ratings and promotions that will increase your pay dramatically.

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?

I wouldn't say never but I'd prefer not to.

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.

Do you want to know how much other people paid for a car, when you're shopping for one, or any other big ticket item?

Would you be ok with nobody posting MSRPs anywhere?

Anonymous? Sure. Do I need to know what Jane Blow paid? No.

What does that mean? The average is enough and you would actively avoid information about the distribution if you could get it?

No they can give me the distribution, I just don’t need to know what Jane Blow paid.

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.

>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?

It's not the ability to negotiate that you want, because that wouldn't go away just by public pay. You think that in an information-scarce negotiating environment, you can do a better job than your colleagues. You don't want them being able to reference you in their negotiations.

> I'll never work for a company with public pay. I don't want equality, I want to be able to negotiate my value to the company whether that is more or less than others.

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.

I’ve never understood why people think this is a good idea. If you share your salary with someone, it will go one of two ways - either they will be angry that you make more or you will be resentful that they make more than you. I don’t see what good can come of sharing salaries.

Public salaries don't mean that everybody gets paid the same. It just brings the differences to light. If you have the same job title as somebody else but you manage twice as many projects, there's no reason you should both earn the same. But if you contribute the same value to the firm, management should have to explain why you earn more.

"At my last job, all salaries were public record, and some dude even put together a website (https://umsalary.info) to make searching easier."

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.

2 http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/openmtg.pdf

One thing that surprised me is that the highest salaried employees seem to be in Athletics ( https://umsalary.info/numbers.php ). Is it something specific to that particular university or a normal thing in the US universities?

Extremely typical. There are cases where the highest paid employee in an entire _state_ is an athletics coach at a state university.

I was flabbergasted to learn Nick Saban from University of Alabama makes $9.3 million annually(2019)[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Saban

too much or too little?

Too much - universities obviously benefit a lot from the revenue that sports bring in but it'd be nice to see that benefit spread a bit more evenly across professors.

> universities obviously benefit a lot from the revenue that sports bring in but it'd be nice to see that benefit spread a bit more evenly across professors

Professors can't do what he does: bring in big-ticket spending, sponsorships and donations.

This is true - but professors provide the real value that students retain over time - so admissions fees should pretty much all be funneled to them. This is a problem with how hard to market the value professors provide is - a lot of admissions care more about a good sports team than a good set of professors even though the later factor will be much more important to them two years in.

Basically, people don't act rationally so the market is irrational.

> professors provide the real value that students retain over time - so admissions fees should pretty much all be funneled to them

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.

I think the broader point for the HN crowd is this is a great example of why you want to be part of a profit center instead of a cost center in a business. If it's easy for management to try a direct line from incoming revenue to the work you do (like a sales person or, in this case, a football coach), you are in a great negotiating position. If you are in a cost center, management will do everything possible to reduce your salary, even if it the grand scheme of things that cost center is critical to running the business.

One can also try to work for companies that properly appreciate the value of all necessary components of the business, even if one can't directly tally their contribution. Most important factors to success are not easily measurable.

The irony is that the people who do the central work for the business, academics at the University, engineers designing the next products, even factory workers often are often cost centres. This leads to the somewhat perverse insentive to remove more and more of your central workers to hire managers and administrators.

...or the Athletic Director. Unfortunately that can usually cost the state long after they are gone as the retirement system is usually setup based on final salaries. In the case of the State of Oregon the 3rd highest paid PERS recipient is Mike Belotti who was the head football coach for 13 years and then AD for 2 years. He gets almost $50K/month in retirement. The only two higher recipients are doctors that worked for the state more than twice as long as Belotti.

https://gov.oregonlive.com/pers/

Athletics typically brings in the most revenue and exposure for a university. I do not agree with these programs being so handsomely rewarded. But it seems most of America disagrees based on college football viewership.

At many schools, the football and/or basketball programs literally fund all other athletics programs...including the scholarships for those other athletes.

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.

LSU alum here, and I can confirm that our athletic performance is a rising tide. It's my understanding though that LSU athletics pays employees from its own revenue. So it's not like LSU is diverting funds meant for academics to athletics (in the macro sense). As an alum I frequently get asked to donate to the LSU Foundation which is an entity separate from the Tiger Athletic Foundation, which is where you can donate specifically to the athletic department.

Technically only men's football and men's basketball are usually profitable for universities. Most other sports programs are run at a loss, and funded by football and basketball.

Collegiate athletics, especially at the highest division (which University of Michigan is in), can be lucrative revenue streams, particularly in football/basketball; top positions within are compensated nicely.

The basketball or (American) football coach will be the most highly compensated individual at most tier 1 athletics schools

Yea it is pretty common in US universities, coaches are also often the highest paid in the state.

https://moneywise.com/managing-money/employment/the-10-highe...

I found a similar website for a different university a few weeks ago and have been shocked by the same thing. Some of the people had total compensation listed at over $3 million which is a completely insane number if you're not from the US.

College athletics are an entertainment industry grafted onto an educational institution. They bring in an enormous amount of revenue, and must employ star power to compete. Star power costs money.

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.

Normal - a reminder that US Football probably brings in a LOT more money than a soccer club at an german university.

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.

In universities with teaching hospitals, it's common for doctors or medical directors within the hospital to be very well-compensated (>$1M/year, say).

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