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Comment by knaekhoved | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a lot of the people who are into salary transparency stuff are not high earners. I would like to see some game-theoretic analysis of salary disclosure dynamics from someone who is on the right tail of the distribution; my suspicion is that salary disclosure is bad for the rightmost X% of the distribution, where X is somewhere in the 10-50 range, depending on things like:

* What is the scope of the distribution? Industry, company, friend group?

* What are the social dynamics of their company/industry like?

* Is there a partitioning mechanism that reduces the stress of having a wide range of salaries for the same conceptual job type?

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People's pay and financial details is something I'm happy to not know. Once you know, you cannot "unknow". That knowledge would leak into my perception of neighbors and friends. It would also change their perception of me. Regardless of the number. It's human nature.

This information is easy to back into using public information like house purchase price and car price. Even occupation/employer is usually enough to get upper and lower bounds.

Last year I earned more than the value of my house (pretax though). I really doubt anyone would guess that. My car is about 1 week of earnings.

Of course this year it’s much less with the market being down.

People like you are few and far between.

Lots of people with a house and car they cannot afford, though.

> It's human nature.

Not at all, it's culture.

In many places in the world there is no such level of envy and competition between friends and family. Where do you live?

Where are people free to achieve massive success without being clawed back by punitive taxes etc? In most places, envy is codified in law.

Is it envy or is it solidarity? They look the same if you close your eyes.

I'm happy for you to live in a culture with little envy. Personally, I'm yet to experience such a culture and am myself a long way from being free from this human emotion.

Note that my original comment didn't mention envy. I merely stated that peoples behavior changes in subtle ways around those with more or less means than them.

Anecdotally, I felt all SWE were happy to discuss details of offers during internships and within the first 3-4 years of industry. Now many years later, it seems only my closest friends talk about this freely

Can't speak for others but for me it's embarrassing how much money we make to twiddle around in a command line and text editor. In a lot of places it's rude to flaunt wealth among polite company.

I wonder if you're right. What do you think the risks of disclosure are for those towards the right of the distribution?

Things I worry about, as someone who's (I think) very/moderately/somewhat far to the right for my industry/sub-industry/company:

* Coming across as bragging

* Having people who earn less than me be jealous/envious/resentful

* Making it harder for employers to justify my salary because people will be publicly envious about it and cause a stink. This could be anything from coworkers/candidates/random people saying "well why are you paying Knaek $X and not me?" (I have experienced people harassing my employers for lesser reasons) all the way to people seeing my industry as a political outlet for their envy

* It's leaking strategically valuable information, probably more valuable than the info I would get in return (plus no solution to free rider problem)

* It might help less aggressive people negotiate a larger slice of a finite salary budget, which has a negative impact on me

And so on

I think is extremely shortsighted to openly show your salary, kinda like making a shopping list for criminals.

While I agree with most of your points, this one I can't get behind:

> It might help less aggressive people negotiate a larger slice of a finite salary budget, which has a negative impact on me

While it might indeed have a negative impact on you, if they deserve a higher salary, I'd personally feel bad for them too. I am fully aware that salary is highly related to negotiation skills (which is why job hobbing is so popular: you can at least always honestly say "my current salary is X, I'll only switch for more" — even if you are bad at negotiating), but that's the thing that's unfair.

So I like to consider those openly sharing their salaries as in service of those who do proper work and none of the shitty stuff you bring up, but simply can't negotiate their salaries properly.

Whether that's worth it is another matter altogether.

In my experience it's always coworkers on the lower end of the bell curve getting pissy. Nobody likes to be told he's just worth less.

And tbh I don't like salary transparency because it usually tightens the range of comp for a position. I've always been on the right side of the curve (getting promoted faster etc) so that would suck for me.

> And tbh I don't like salary transparency because it usually tightens the range of comp for a position.

Well yes, that's kind of the point. It's supposed to be a good thing, since the theory is that salary variance is caused by unseemly factors rather than simple skill variance.

I've had people sabotage me in a company I was working in as a contractor on $2,500 per day.

The most bizarre one was a very formal review where I was told I needed to stop taking long lunches and be at my desk. I asked where in my contract it said I had to work at a desk rather than a picnic table. They couldn't point it out. In the end they terminated me four weeks before the end of my year long contract and had to pay out 6 weeks of severance.

I'm still deeply confused about the whole thing.

I've had to deal with very bizarre behavior like this a few times in my career. It's been shocking to me to learn how vindictive, petty, or simply mentally unstable some people are.

I once had a coworker concoct a story about me and report it to management because I interrupted him during a yoga session in the office gym...

Anyway, the less people like that know about the details of my employment, the better.

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