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Comment by paisawalla | Hacker News Reader

Under the system you propose, there is zero chance that any mean worker will look at the pay of his higher-producing counterpart and not simultaneously claim to be underpaid and unfairly measured. You have to be completely unfamiliar with human nature to believe otherwise.

There's two types of systems you can choose to live under: one that makes it comfortable to be a mean producer, or one that incentives extreme output. It's fine to argue that the mean producer deserves more but let's not pretend that's not a tradeoff.

Extremely productive workers would not want pay transparency because that paints a target on their backs.

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> There's two types of systems you can choose to live under

Evidence? I would argue it's more likely that everyone benefits if pay transparency exists, especially the workers that provide the most benefit.

What would the incentive be for a mean, or even underperforming, worker to look at the pay of a top performer and do anything other than argue for more pay for the same amount of work? The value a worker brings is not a completely tangible assessment, it has vague and qualitative components to it. Whereas, how much that worker is paid is a hard quantitative fact and is not debatable.

If you remove the ability of the manager to obfuscate where an employee's earnings stack up in the absolute rank, or how much additional pay is on the table, then the only thing to argue about is how much value the worker brings. The worker will always be able to claim that they deliver unmeasured value, or that their tangible contributions are not properly valued. Multiply this conversation out across 50% of your work force, and quickly the only rational thing to do, as a manager, is to bring down the top earner's pay to a level that will not generate complaints from the mean worker.

This is the aim of all collectivism frankly, to appease the mean producer at the expense of society ultimately.

If you don't believe this, explain please the chain of reasoning that would lead a lower paid worker to conclude their pay is fair and that they should not try to argue for more money.

Because "a top performer" is not a wholistic judge of what someone is doing, how they got there, the circumstances surrounding that individual, etc.

You're speaking of this hierarchy of "obfuscated" value brought to the table and then comparing it to a somewhat simplistic ( rank 1 is 1x valuable, rank 2 is 2x,...nx valuable) image of compensation. that's not how the real world works. You're abstracting to the spherical cow level of understanding of reality, there isn't "the worker" and "the manager" there are positions and responsibilities, if a manager lost all their workers tomorrow, they would be more out of luck than if a set of workers lost their manager, on balance, the workers have the implicit understanding that they formulate the important core of whatever network they support. It's really only the social scaffolding we construct that maintains that hiearchy.

You haven't addressed any part of this argument at all.

Managers can and do stack rank their employees, and pay them differentially according to that ranking, I'm sorry if you're learning this just now. If anything, you've validated my point by agreeing that employee value is a holistic assessment -- i.e. it has non-quantitative elements.

That understanding is what makes it possible for someone who produces less value for the company to argue that they actually produce more. Once they understand exactly how much is available to bargain over, the manager has no leverage to push back, and there is no reason not to make the case that one's non-quantitative competences are worth all of that gap. It costs approximately nothing to keep asking for more money.

You're forgetting that there are other employees and other firms in the world. Either class is free to look outside the current relationship if they are unhappy, and this can rely entirely on subjective judgement.

If you see a bunch of people who are paid more than you, you can judge that you'll be able to find another employer who will pay you what you want, but only if you have a reasonable overview of what the salaries are in the system.

Same goes in the boss side, he can decide whether he wants to hit or stick.

Information is absolutely crucial in markets.

"What would the incentive be for a mean, or even underperforming, worker to look at the pay of a top performer and do anything other than argue for more pay for the same amount of work? "

He can argue for more money and management then has to justify why there is a difference. That's not different from some people being promoted (and paid better) faster than others.

And why would the top performer want just pay to get public and get a target on his or her back

Because the top performer most likely doesn't make the most money. They might also have a better negotiating position if other companies are pressured to do the same and reveal they pay better for a similar performance.

All of this is somewhat of a moot argument though as individuals hold very little bargaining power in the general work force. You might have some leverage when applying for a C-level position (but let's be honest, you don't go through a regular hiring process for positions like that) but if you want anything that's a significantly deviation from what the company will happily give you, you'll get nowhere without collective bargaining (and in fact you will more likely just get replaced). Individual workers don't hold much power, even if they're made to feel like celebrity athletes with foosball tables, fruit bowls and free drinks on tap.

Mosr people who think they are top performers and paid accordingly really aren’t paid better than others. They are just lied to by their managers.

The top performer is not necessarily (and, in my experience, is seldom) the best negotiator.

You're literally making an argument based on the 19th century Great Man theory[0].

I know that we like to make bold claims of 10x or 0.1x developers sometimes but imagined "extremely productive workers" don't exist in the absolute, businesses are not meritocratic and the people being paid 10x, 100x, or 1,000x that of the lowest earning worker or even the median earning worker in the company don't contribute in proportion to the company's income.

> You have to be completely unfamiliar with human nature to believe otherwise.

"Their" ideology is always unreasonable and superstitious while "our" ideology is always common sense and based on familiarity with human nature. Of course "our" ideology isn't an ideology to begin with, because our politics are fact-based and free of the constraints of ideology, they're just based on premises we hold to be self-evident. Did I get that about right?

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

"Under the system you propose, there is zero chance that any mean worker will look at the pay of his higher-producing counterpart and not simultaneously claim to be underpaid and unfairly measured. You have to be completely unfamiliar with human nature to believe otherwise. "

It's you who is unfamiliar with actual human nature. There are plenty of places with pay transparency (Congress staffers for example). There are huge differences in pay and people are OK with that.

> There are plenty of places with pay transparency (Congress staffers for example)

Imagine thinking Congressional staffer, a job

- whose main value are the connections and opportunities available immediately after finishing a successful tour, and

- for which your current employer is approximately the only possible employer for you (if you want to be rep X's staffer you need a connection and endorsement to rep X, it won't help you much to have worked for rep Y unless Y is endorsing you to X)

imagine thinking these dynamics have anything to do with the common person's (or even a software engineer's) working situation. The pay is transparent precisely because there is nothing you can (or would) do about it, and the salary is not the point of the job anyhow. The reward is a lifetime of milking valuable connections and endorsements, and getting to one day feed at the same publicly funded trough as the other pigs, not a $3,500 salary increase.

You do that job because it's a pipeline to lobbying and other influence-peddling scumbaggery, not because you get rich or even make a reasonable living.

Do you get paid to be a staffer? Do you have to be at work at certain times?

Yeah, that's a job. Even if you are doing it for experience, it is still a job.

Many, if not most jobs don't let you become rich or make a reasonable living, and they aren't non-jobs even if people try to say they aren't.

This entirely obscure example, if anything, is the exception that proves the rule. Do you have an example that doesn't involve just 3e-6% of Americans, all of whom are politicians or their aspirants/sycophants -- mostly contenders for worst people in America. Maybe something a little more relatable than the system of elite influence that undergirds the Capitol?

The entire point of the argument is that transparency in pay creates incentive to argue your pay, and weakens the incentive to increase your output. Here, there is a strong, shared understanding that the compensation received is not the salary, and therefore one is not underpaid in a true sense.

Pay transparency wouldn't tell you much about the actual value of the job. If instead, your congressional rep helped a lazy coworker get placed at an extremely selective top lobbying firm, but only helped you (the hard worker) to get placed with the manure farmers of America -- then you might suddenly feel that you were unfairly treated.

Show me that level of transparency and I could change my mind.

No rational argument should ever include the phrase “exception that proves the rule.”

Unfortunately, the world is not full of Platonic ideals and closed-form solutions.

“ You do that job because it's a pipeline to lobbying and other influence-peddling scumbaggery, not because you get rich or even make a reasonable living.”

Not true. Congress is full of staffers who view as a regular job and do it for decades. The people who go to lobbying are a very small group.

First, it doesn't seem like a small number or rare phenomenon to me, and I'm far from the only person who's made this connection. [0] If you've got some numbers to quantify your claim that Congress is "full of" dedicated, dutiful, lifelong civil servants, I'll be happy to see that.

But, second, it doesn't take a majority to make that motivation a characterizing element of the job. Maybe some people are motivated by love of country or whatever to go earn $35,000 as a college graduate. But it doesn't mean that access to exclusive opportunity is not the well understood perk of the job, whether or not you avail yourself of it.

Of all the strange stands to make in favor of radical pay transparency... I personal would think that having to defend the honor of Congressional staffers would be a strong indication that the plot has been lost.

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/top.php?display=M

In my experience, the mean worker will look at the pay of the higher producing counterpart and not care. There definitely will be outliers, but they usually aren't the higher producers. They're just the people that are better at negotiating.

Companies that pay workers what they're worth is rare as fuck.

>"Companies that pay workers what they're worth is rare as fuck."

How do you determine 'what they're worth' in the abstract? Wouldn't the best guess as to any service's 'worth' be the price currently being paid for it?

Yes, and that guess would be a lot more accurate* if all market participants had access to full information.

Nobody on either side of a transaction ever has access to full information. Each side has some information the other doesn’t, and markets usually work pretty well despite that fact.

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