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The big reason for the taboo against talking about income is jealousy. Almost every job feels harder than it looks, and almost everyone feels more skilled at their work than they look.

So if you tell someone your salary, your job probably feels more difficult to you than it looks to them, and you probably feel more productive than they think you are. If you make the same or more than they do, there is a very high risk that they will think you are overpaid.

This is obviously a risk to the company, which is why most companies (at least in the US) have a policy against it. But it is also a risk to you and your relationship with that other person, which is why few people share their salary information with their friends.

You are right that this is a fundamental problem for equality. But it is not an easy or safe thing to change, which means it will take a lot of time and effort.

I am not saying that the status quo should remain. I'm just pointing out the reason it is difficult to change.

Read patio11's words on this: "We have strong cultural training to not ask about salary, ever. This is not universal. In many cultures, professional contexts are a perfectly appropriate time to discuss money... If I were a Marxist academic or a conspiracy theorist, I might think that this bit of middle class American culture was specifically engineered to be in the interests of employers and against the interests of employees."

(Don't Call Yourself a Programmer: www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/)

From the other side of the curtain, most companies have "salary bands" that they apply semi-uniformly, i.e., as a "junior developer" you can make from X1-10% to X1+10%, as a "senior developer" you can make from X2-10% to X2+10%, and as a "project manager" you can make from X3-10% to X3+10%.

The invisible hand of the market will lead prople to companies with the highest value for X2, which are usually also those where the productivity (i.e. contribution to company revenue) per person is highest.

> This is obviously a risk to the company, which is why most companies (at least in the US) have a policy against it.

What's amazing to me is that every company I've ever known of has a policy along those lines, yet it is illegal to sanction employees for talking about their pay with coworkers under the National Labor Relations Act and has been for a long, long time.

I also wonder to what extent the jealousy argument applies in the real world. It makes sense, and I'm sympathetic to it, but I've worked at two jobs where it was pretty well known what everyone made. There were huge disparities in what people made for doing the same work in both cases. It didn't cause any resentment issues I know of - but I suspect it did make people more likely to ask for a raise when they knew what was possible, which I think is the problem that management really has with it, because it becomes much harder for them to justify to the employee why they can't or won't pay them more, even though there may be valid reasons for it.

I started my career in the public sector where salary is published and set in stone before you even apply for a position. Everyone knows everyone's pay grade. I never once saw any kind of jealousy about someone making more than someone else for doing the same job title.

This has two effects (1) Saves me a lot of time on the negotiation front. If the announcement doesn't pay what you want, don't apply to it. Saves me and the hiring manager a lot of wasted time if I were to apply to a post thinking I'll get paid $X when it will really pay $Y. And (2) Since it's all public anyway, everyone knows that if you want to make $X then you need to train into position Y and you have a pretty concrete list of knowledge/skills that you can hack away on to achieve that. None of this blind guess work.

Someone I know who worked in public education got hired at a school district the year before a pay freeze; which did not lift during her 9 years there. She was jealous that teachers with 1 year of experience were getting hired at higher pay scales than she was making.

[I have no explanation for why she stayed there for 9 years]

>This is obviously a risk to the company, which is why most companies (at least in the US) have a policy against it.

These policies are actually often illegal due to the National Labor Relations Act.

I don't believe the jealousy argument is correct. I've been in a position a long time ago early in my career where I was severely underpaid. I found out when me and my colleagues shared salary information. It didn't cause me to become jealous, or change my perception of them the tiniest bit, in fact, I was grateful to them to have hard facts on how much more I should earn.

Their salaries gave me the incentive to demand a big raise from my employer. Which I did and didn't get, so I quit and got myself a much better paid job.

People need to be ok with talking about it, but at the same time, it still should ultimately be each person's choice to talk about it.

[$67/hr, 2 years of experience, senior frontend engineer, Palo Alto]

Not to pry, but is this typical on the West Coast or are you contracting/including bonus in your hourly? I think I do pretty well for my age but you're killing it.

[$46/hr, 5 years of experience, Software Engineer, Boston]

You have to adjust for cost of living. There is a lot of cost of living over there then compared to around Boston.

I did not include a signing bonus or equity in that number - I am probably an unusual case admittedly due to my speed of learning and speed of execution

Varies by job; currently around that but as a consultant/contractor my rack rate was $150/hr with discounts for big projects down to $100/hr. [30 yrs experience, embedded, network and wireless, midwest ]

Charge more. Just humor me and pitch the next client at $125/hr, which is more in line with market in your neck of the woods. (And the necessity for this post, folks, is one of the many, many mechanisms by which a norm of salaries being hidden screws over employees via information asymmetry.)

I'm not a contractor - if I were contracting, I'd definitely charge around that rate.

That's the first time I've ever heard a US-based engineer quote their salary as an hourly number. My mistake. Assuming my mental math is correct and your package is described as "$120k annual salary plus the standard benefits for white collar employees", I withdraw my objection.

If OTOH you're not billing 160 hours a month or you're not getting the standard benefits (healthcare, etc), then you're contracting whether you describe yourself as a contractor or not, so the objection would stand in that case.

(This distinction made for the benefits of other HNers, since I have from time-to-time run into people who think they are employees but who are actually consultants who just happen to have a very thin client list and substandard rates.)

Well, it's $140k + $9k signing bonus + equity + standard health & dental insurance - I'm already looking at a potential raise in compensation in about 2-4 months or so with a promotion to lead engineer.

Personally, I'm at the point where I don't care as much about the money, it's more about the people I work with. For those not at my point though is why I provide salary info though - it is a nice data point to use to assess for others.

On my first day at one job, HR called me into a conference room to review my compensation package and everything. The HR rep wrote a number on a Post-It and handed it to me, saying, "This is your salary. Here at BigCo we hold salary in confidence between you and the company. In other words, please do not discuss this number with any of your co-workers." I responded, "Don't worry, ma'am. I'm just as ashamed of that small number as you are." [low 6 figures, 28 years experience, Upper Midwest]

Agreed 100%. I find the "don't talk about it" culture surrounding pay in companies pretty disgraceful. In a more civilised future, I'm pretty confident all pay will be totally open and public, and a swathe of problems will be solved as a result. Sure, there will be an awkward transition period, but progress is usually challenging.

[38K, ~15years experience, tiny non-technical startup in London]

British Pounds or USD? If most of the people are talking in USD, then you're making roughly 76k USD.

Less roughly 38k GBP ~= 61k USD. It's been a good half-decade since it was two dollars to the pound.

Also taxes.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rates-and-allowan...

Company culture of not talking about earnings helps me not feeling bad if I were to find out that my colleague who does the same job is paid more, or be on the reverse end. I'd rather not know. On the other hand, differences between different companies I can explain/comprehend/think are useful.

But what if knowing lets you make moves that improve your salary (if you are on the lower end) or encourage your coworkers to ask for a raise (if you are on the higher end)?

I started out making 10% more than what I was initially offered since I knew what coworkers with similar experience made and asked for that amount. And I know what coworkers with much more experience (10+ years to my 2 years) make, so I can gauge whether I am on the right track.

Congratulations. Salary negotiations is not an area I am good at, and I guess I don't need a constant reminder about that wondering what if because the benefits a job gives us is a complex issue.

And in response to the valuation, they could of changed their math; But in the last two years most economies have had growth, so that value to go up to adjust for growth and inflation. The only real reason I can think of that value going down is much more supply to the work force, which I know isn't that true.

A lot of people are just plain uncomfortable talking about it because in a lot of places your projected image is tied to how much you make. [$25/hr, software developer, 6 months until graduation, midwest]