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Comment by thrwaway1985882 | Hacker News Reader

thrwaway1985882

> It's not information that is terribly useful

This opinion feels alien to me. Some of the most useful information you can have in a company is around salary/bonus/commission structures. From a purely self interested perspective, knowing this makes you a far better negotiator around review season. And from an organizational perspective, understanding what kind of things get people their bonus or commission goes a long way to understand what kind of decisions they make and how to influence them.

As a manager, though: thanks, employees with this perspective reduce the number of awkward meetings I might have.

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I think that it's a matter of priorities. I am not interested in making the most money I possibly can, I'm interested in doing the most interesting work that I possibly can. I have even taken jobs where I was paid well below market rates because the work itself was interesting enough to me or taught me a skill that I really wanted to learn.

As long as I'm being paid at least an amount that I consider fair, it doesn't matter to me what anyone I'm working next to makes. If I disclose my salary and I'm making substantially more or less than my teammates, that can cause reactions in them that make the job much less tolerable regardless of my pay rate. So I don't want to know what they make, and I don't want them to know what I make. I have to work with these people, and want that to be as pleasant as possible.

Now, saying that is not saying that people who prioritize maximizing pay are wrong at all. They just have a different priority.

I don’t care about money, that’s not my personal issue. I’ll happy to pay my bills, have good food on my table, and have a roof over my head.

It’s the feeling that I’ve been hoodwinked that I refuse to tolerate.

If I'm making less than someone else doing the same job, I don't feel that I've been hoodwinked. I negotiated a rate that I found acceptable, and so did they. Nobody was deceived.

I'm curious if you would feel the same if all products were bought and sold this way? Let's say you bought a new TV and you negotiated a price of $3. Then your friend tells you that she bought the same TV on the same day from the same store for $1k. Wouldn't you feel cheated? If so, how is that any different?

depends on whether you feel like you have the leverage to do something about it, or if all that happens now is you do the same job with the same pay and the additional knowledge that someone else is making more.

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