* not all people in the same position are equally qualified * reducing the difference to bonuses might mean a lot more overhead * salary might cover for things other than just competence, i.e. Alice and Bob are equally qualified, but you hire Alice out of college while Bob already had a well paying job
I wish there was enforce transparency about salaries but I'm not sure all of them can be just leveled to position+bonus.
Joel Spolsky had an interesting approach to this, a more complex formula but still public and consistent for all employees:
For instance, Dev level 2 makes 100k with 10k additional per every 3 years professional experience - you have differences amongst the staff but less room for people to complain about the variances.
The point is, salaries are not arbitrary, which is the basis of the anger when staff compares against their peers.
How do you measure that? In most teams I've been involved in, the entirety of the team suffered with the weakest link. My 'merit' was tied to the efficiency of poor team members. A colleague of mine (different company) was on a team with about 15 others in his dept - 60+ folks in all. The daily incompetence he described was rather high, but not surprising when you have non-tech folks making tech decisions. I said "hrm... perhaps people would be motivated to care/do more and improve if they got some sort of profit sharing bonus". He said "WE DO! My bonus continually gets eroded because we've got incompetent do-nothings who continually shoot down progress" (paraphrasing).
I don't particularly want a large/variable portion of my income to be that tied to situations that I have that little control over.
Because people aren't cogs and they all function at different levels of productivity.
I've literally never worked with anyone who I would consider to be of precisely equal value to me. Everyone else has been either more valuable or less valuable, by a tune of at least a few thousand dollars annually.
Fixed salaries prevent paying people by their value and instead mandate a rigid adherence to "years spent" and "grades." I would literally never work for a company with fixed salaries.
Like for most types of work -- that's probably wrong. But people only ever figure it out when it's too late.
At my previous workplace (a research institute) I believe pretty much 100% were organized, both researchers, developers, sys.admins and other staff.
E.g. in German universities, your pay is just a table lookup. The position has a certain pay scale (as advertised with the position) and within that scale the number of years of experience at pay scale level is counted.
Such a system may have its downsides (when trying to acquire people). But it is inherently fair: you earn the same regardless of gender, position on the intro/extrovertness scale, etc.
That's bunk. Number of years of experience being a major factor is one of the quickest ways to kill any kind of meritocracy. It's true you earn the same regardless of gender, extrovertedness, etc. But it means you also earn the same regardless of competence, creativity, or general usefulness as an employee. Talented people go where they can be rewarded for being exceptional. Mediocre people dig in and count the days until their next automatic raise for continuing to breathe in and out.
If you, as professor, for example, start a research project that is interesting, you also often get funding from the industry – part of which goes directly to your salary, too.
So, exceptional people still have chances to get exceptional pay, but only if scientific organizations like the Fraunhofer Institute or industry corporations are interested in it.
But I used to work as a VLSI (computer chip) designer and in that area USA (Silicon Valley) and Israel are tops. After Silicon Valley, Israel has the most computer chip designers in the world, about 20,000. Intel employs 10,000 Israelis in two design centers and two fabs. One of the fabs is a 22 nm node being upgrade to the 10 nm node. It was the Israelis that were in charge of mobile and instigated Intel's change of higher performance from lower clock rates.
Apple looked all over the world for its computer chip design center and chose Israel where it now employs 700 and hiring more. Tim Cook was there in February dedicating a new building. His VP in charge of hardware/computer chip design is an Arab Israeli who has his BS and Masters degrees from Technion, the MIT of Israel.
As you said, a lot of the stuff happens outside of europe currently, but that’s also due to extreme electricity prices.
There is probably no strong correlation between creativity/competence and the skills to negotiate a salary. There is probably a strong correlation between salary and gender, extrovertness, etc. and some correlation between years of experience and competence (within a particular scale). So, yes, it is inherently (more) fair.
Also, if someone can't negotiate their own salary, that's their own problem. Not being able to convince a company you are worth money either means you don't understand what value you can provide or you actually aren't providing that much value. It's not up to the company to do that for you. Doing it is less fair to anyone that knows what they are doing.
Well, no, because presumably the more competent employees get bumped up a payscale, and the truly "useless" ones are quickly dismissed.
It was one of the reasons I resigned and will start at a smaller company next month.
It's fair in a world where all people are equal. Since people are unequal this is the opposite of fair.
My point is that disparity in income (let's say in the same organization) is mostly to do with value that a given individual brings to the organization (in the eyes of the management who decide on this). Negotiation is an order of magnitude less important.