Comment by JamesVI | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamesVI | Hacker News Reader

It’s mostly a benefit for employers. It reduces the penalty for underpaying people. No one is going to up and quit because they get paid more than people on the team who they perceive as equals (or even if they get paid less than people they clearly perceive as more senior), but they’ll certainly bail if they feel relatively underpaid.

The only thing keeping salaries secret can possibly achieve is paying people less than their peers (in the same company or the same industry).

In other counties salaries (or at least relatively narrow bands) are well known and the world hasn’t ended.

One of the things I was most proud of my time at Second Measure (and this is due to the cofounders) is that we had 11 “levels” for engineers and data scientists and everyone at a given level was compensated (pay and equity) exactly the same. If you figured out the level of someone on the team (and we were transparent about the criteria used for leveling) you could pretty much work out their comp by extrapolating from your own.

World didn’t end. People didn’t quit en mas. Some people left because they felt under compensated. They were wrong; they weren’t as good as they thought and I’m fine they decided to leave. (Some people also left because they got insanely good offers elsewhere and I genuinely congratulated them and wished them well).

Talk about your compensation with your coworkers. Then use that information to demand fair compensation.

As an employer in a small company (circa 50 employees), salaries are one of the harder things to get right.

Firstly, most everyone rates themselves relative to their peers higher than they rate them. Anecdotally I had 3 staff, "doing the same job" all (individually) complain to me that they were better than the other 2, and thus deserved more.

Of course at this level there's no such thing as "the same job" and a myriad of factors come into play. Some emps are quiet, but effecient - some appear to get more done but ultimately their work needs more oversight and correction.

Some put in hours at home (leading others to think they work longer). Some used to be effective, but have lost motivation etc.

(bear in mind that it's hard to reduce salaries, so some end up being overpaid for a while before remedial action is seen. Most of that action, while ongoing, is also not advertised to other staff.)

Some people offer value to the whole outside of the formal work parameters. They help their peers get unstuck, they are good teachers, they create cohesiveness and model our desired culture and so on. Customer support is a job, and two people can do it, and solve the problem, but customers might perceive it differently based on other softer skills.

All of this to say, when it comes to salaries we do yhd best we can.

We don't advertise because if we did we'd be explicitly inviting people to compare themselves in a success / failure way. Ie a zero sum game. And doing that means most of the staff will perceive failure, even the ones who get more. It creates unnecessary psychological input which has mostly downside to everyone.

Everyone has value. It's unnecessary to start ranking people explicitly based on salary.

Edit: We have no problem with people comparing salaries, and people can an do ask for raises.

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