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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

I really . . . hope . . . that governments will become incapable of keeping anything a secret.

Does that include personal information about you, for example your personal medical information that is part of the treatment records of a government-administered medical insurance plan? Some countries (not many) make personal income tax filings public information. Do you live in such a country?

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I've made my company fully transparent, including, for example, all salary information. Most of those steps seemed very scary at first. In hindsight, there was nothing to be scared about, really.

This is not to say that extreme transparency applied to all things is right - just that it often looks a lot more scary than it is. When you act transparently you relinquish some control, and some people hate the very idea of giving up any control.

The salaries of all your employees? Doesn't that violate their own rights to privacy? Or does this only extend to the board of directors?

Is there such a thing as a right to privacy at work? The employer can install cameras, monitor computer usage, monitor entry and exit... there's no privacy at work, including what your salary is.

Why would it violate any rights to privacy? What rights are you talking about, anyway?

The only thing we don't share openly in this manner is personal health problems.

To clarify: It's my right, if I so choose, to keep my salary and any other personal financial information private from the rest of the world (minus of course, my employer and the IRS). So your releasing that information is a violation of my privacy.

Which jurisdiction are you talking about? swombat looks like they are sitting in the UK.

I grew up in the UK and know that the UK abides by the European Convention for Human Rights which has a clause 8(1) concerning privacy. The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. Article 8(1) of the Convention provides guarantees that such personal matters are kept private unless you explicitly provide consent for them to be released.

The European Union takes this matter pretty seriously - hence the whole do not track and cookie notification policies that you see with European websites these days. I live in Canada now, and here they have two federal privacy laws, the Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act - though some provinces are deemed federally exempt because they have their own legislation that is substantially similar in nature to the federal mandates. I guess this "right" isn't accounted for in U.S. law?

Here's article 8 of the convention:

> Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life

> 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

> There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

I am not a lawyer, however I think this refers to personal and family matters. How much you're being paid by your employer is not a personal matter, it's a business matter.

There are many public employees whose salaries are published openly and regularly. If this was a breach of human rights, then it is a breach that the UK government is guilty of on a regular basis.

Ref: http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/005.htm

According to whom? To your sensibilities or a specific law? There is no general right to privacy in the U.S. like there is a right to free speech. AFAIK unless there's something in the contract prohibiting it, they're just as free to disclose it as you are to not disclose it. (ianal tinla)

edit: of course, if this is something you feel stongly about, you should just add it to any future employment contract you sign - I imagine most employers would be pretty flexible about this sort of thing.

Nope, it's not a right - or rather, that right is not protected in any kind of legal document. It's not a legal right or even a legal privilege. It's just a custom that stems out of the fact that most employers are worried about employees knowing each other's salaries, because often they have multiple people doing more or less the same job for very different salaries.

Would you mind posting your company salary information here? I've always been interested to see how a real-life startup salary structure looks.

Or is it only transparent if you're in the club?

That's an interesting challenge. We've posted revenue numbers on our blog, but not salary information. That said, the first job ad we put out will have pretty clear salary information, so, ok, I'll answer.

Here's the payscale in short, then. There are 2 main roles within the company: client management and sales.

Salespeople get £20k p.a., plus a 15% commission on sales, plus a share of the bonus pool. The base salary never goes up according to the current scheme.

Client Managers get £28k p.a., plus a share of the bonus pool, but their salary goes up by £2k/quarter for the first year, £1k/quarter after that, up to £40k.

The bonus pool is calculated by taking all the turnover, halving it, then deducting overheads, commissions and base salaries. The remainder is the bonus pool, split in a number of shares.

Kudos for being so open. (Although to relate the point back to the Original thread about Government openness, Governments (and lots of Big Corps) also tend to be quite transparent about Salary bands, Bonus, etc.)

Now to derail the discussion:

How do you reward excellence? There will surely come a time where an employee has been working considerably harder than his colleagues asks for a pay-increase. How do you envision this would go down with the other employees? Your Client-Manager salary infact seems to be based purely on duration of service, not output.

Also, your company seems very unique to only have two roles, which perhaps explains why you can reveal this information freely. Full transparency would include how much you get paid, how much the office admin gets paid, the lawyers, accountants, coders, etc.

> How do you reward excellence? There will surely come a time where an employee has been working considerably harder than his colleagues asks for a pay-increase. How do you envision this would go down with the other employees? Your Client-Manager salary infact seems to be based purely on duration of service, not output.

First, it's worth noting that this is a work in progress. We have quarterly meetings where the whole company decides on what changes they want to see made to the compensation scheme, so this stuff might very well change over time.

Secondly, they are rewarded for their hard work already - but as a team, rather than individually - via the bonus scheme. Whatever's left of their 50% of revenue is in the bonus pool, so if they generate an extra £100k of revenue, that will translate into an extra £50k of bonus pool.

Are there individual incentives? Not at the moment. They may well come in in the future, of course.

> Also, your company seems very unique to only have two roles, which perhaps explains why you can reveal this information freely. Full transparency would include how much you get paid, how much the office admin gets paid, the lawyers, accountants, coders, etc.

My cofounder and I get paid the amount of wage and dividends that allows us to pay no income tax. It's pretty standard (and not all that high) in the UK. There's just one director and one office manager, so I'm hesitant to post their current salaries as that is private and specific information, at least outside the company, I think...

I always liked the idea of making income tax filings public. Seems like it would make catching people who are dodging tax and the relevant discussions around it a lot easier.

As it is in Sweden.

also, makes it easier to figure out who to kidnap and also who to blackmail.

Good point. But aren't there plenty of other public indicators of wealth?

No easier then driving around the nearest gated multi-million-dollar community. Or a trip through the Trader Joes parking lot.

There are some millionaires who choose to live modest and discreet lives. (or some I'm told). Publishing everybody's tax return does deny them the discreet part of their choice. That may be acceptable, but it is a real consequence.

While you are at it, might as well make voting rights proportional to taxes paid (perhaps plus a free allowance to allow poor people to have a say at all).

there is a difference between keeping something confidential (because it relates to an individual and doesnt really need public scrutiny, indeed there is no public interest in scrutinisg the data e.g. a private citizens medical or tax records) and keeping something secret, something that is purposefully being kept from the public and there is a public intertest element in it -e.g. government behaviour, secret laws that would impact on private citizens etc.

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