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Comment by pixie_ | Hacker News Reader

If salaries were transparent wouldn't that create an incredible amount of animosity between co-workers? When HR has to negotiate and pay someone more to join the company everyone else is going to be extremely jealous. You think people are going to understand? They are not going to. People are not rational. It's more common sense than fear. Disclosing salaries is going to create way more social problems than it solves. Companies aren't forcing anyone to keep their salary secret. People themselves don't want their salaries disclosed, and for good reason. Kind of hard to work together when everyone is reduced to a number.

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You can already see how 100% salary transparency works in Finland or Sweden.

Anyone can look up a co-worker's salary from data made available by the tax office. (Of course the information is about a year out of date because it's based on tax returns.)

Are employees "reduced to numbers" in Sweden and Finland? Certainly not. On the contrary, these societies are considered some of the most open and equal in the world. Maybe salary transparency has something to do with it too.

Actually, I believe employees are reduced to numbers in Sweden and Finland. You don't see star employees or developers making what they make in the US. Everyone is in something of an equilibrium—decent pay, but not much incentive to strive for more.

   decent pay, but not much incentive to strive for more

Isn't that a good thing? I mean striving for more based on intrinsic motivation than financial. My observation in over the past 12 years working in the software industry is that bad motivation (both carrot and stick) tend to drive out the good (desire to build something or solve a problem).

I don't believe in rock stars.

> When HR has to negotiate and pay someone more to join the company everyone else is going to be extremely jealous.

You're assuming that this model, where pay is determined by how well you banter when you sign up, is the only possible one. This model is entirely manufactured by employers to let them fleece employees, and they make rules to forbid discussing your salary precisely to keep employees from realizing how bullshit it is.

In a transparent salary environment, the management is incentivized to pay everyone equitably based on their actual value to avoid the "OMG Susie gets paid 40% more than I do for exactly the same job" problem.

In a transparent salary environment, the management is incentivized to pay everyone based on their socially perceived value, to avoid the "OMG Susie gets paid 40% more than I do for the same job," even if Susie is actually 40% more valuable than you are.

Which means management is incentivized to probably pay mediocre employees a little more, and stand-out employees less than they could have otherwise earned.

Ok, but wouldn't catering to that OMG crowd be a little self-defeating? Why not just hire adults?

Where will you find these adults?

That is adults. Many people I've met that are bad at their job don't know that they're bad at their job. And the truly talented folks are going to be demotivated somewhat when they're being compensated for their 4x work the same as someone producing 0.8x.

Unionizing creative industries (I'm including most of software development here, as it's what I do) would serve to put a big safety blanket around the tons of mediocre talent there is out there, makes it harder to fire poor talent, and make all of our overhead higher (i.e. software costs more or profit margins are much smaller, both a bad thing for bootstrapping new products) without much overall boost to productivity or talent in the industry.

Mediocre/poor talent wins, everyone else loses. Doesn't sound particularly attractive from either side of the coin.

This is a myth easily dispelled by the existence of countries where salaries are publicly available (e.g. Sweden or Finland) or cultures where people talk about their salaries freely (e.g. most of the world outside US).

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