What happens when you talk about salaries at Google
wired.com
wired.com
Wonder if there is a special type of Shadow banning submissions on HN
Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. They need to reach out to Google and ask a few questions.
Otherwise, this information is just a shade better than useless. There's a lot of detail missing in these tweets. There's a lot of handwaving where the audience is essentially invited to fill in the blanks with whatever stereotypes -- good or bad -- they feel like.
It irritates me immensely that this story is now out there and getting to be a Big Deal -- and there's no actual journalism to attempt to get to the bottom of it. How time consuming could it possibly be to send a few e-mails, hop on the phone, or go dig up someone you know who works at Google and might shed some light on this?
Maybe Erica Joy is right. Maybe there's a huge problem at Google regarding sharing salaries. Maybe something illegal or, at least, immoral/hypocritical is going on. Or maybe Erica Joy is misunderstanding something about how Google works. About how peer bonuses work, for example. Or maybe some combination of both.
But unless we want to go dig up that information on our own, we just don't know.
Good job, Wired.
In seriousness though, when a news story is breaking, I'd like the news website to provide meaningful commentary from educated and informed people who can contribute to the understanding of the event. I don't care about the lay persons opinion when I'm reading a New York Times story about a world event. I want to hear for someone knowledgeable.
A discussion site like HN is a completely different context with different expectations. I'm coming here for everyone's thoughts.
I've been thinking about data driven news for years now (I'm so fucking sick of Fox, MSNBC, et al.).
Back to twitter, I actually do like the impact of 140 characters on how it compresses information. I would group the OP's article in with a first-person editorial, not journalism. I still read it and I think it merits follow up.
I have seen it on the bbc website as well really poor.
The ability to replace a call to an expert with a twitter search has done serious damage to local news (not that it was much good to start with), and it's increasingly spilling into sources like Wired.
As an aside, I really hope muffycat1974 is the Secretary of State.
It doesn't.
>Our biases are telling.
Case in point.
Erica Joy has shared an important story that we should listen to.
Do you want Fox News? Because this is how you get Fox News.
Wired, on the other hand, stooped to about the journalistic level of Gawker with this. If you're going to run social media content as an article, that deserves background and confirmation. If you're going to implicitly accuse an organization of racism, sexism, and violating labor laws, that demands proper followup and investigation.
Wired had a real opportunity here to do serious journalism here and squandered it.
In one breath she states its "illegal to retaliate for sharing salary information" yet a spreadsheet she implies clearly evidences discrimination hasn't found itself in the hands of a qualified attorney. If the former is true barring legalities I may not be familiar(disclaimer not an attorney) the participants would seem to be protected.
In addition she strongly implies damning evidence can be demonstrated with some "spreadsheet magic" but is very careful not to use specific language. This could be construed as someone avoiding accusations of libel.
I'm interested though if this spreadsheet has the level of adoption she claims(thought I don't quite understand the bit about 5% of former co. if she means google that'd be 2,500 people) It will certainly leak then we can run the pivots ourselves.
Erica has explicitly written that she's not interested in speaking to reporters about the story: https://twitter.com/ericajoy/status/622154558140080128
Of course, if this were a news story and not a copy-paste of a Twitter timeline, it would probably follow those expected patterns.
I kept scrolling, clicked through to the "next page" (not really) and it's... just a collection of tweets? Without so much as a paragraph of context? Is something not loading for me? This is pathetic.
It may not be journalism but it does raise questions that we should try and answer instead of saying "oh well I guess that's just the way things are".
It's not about journalism anymore, it's about getting clicks.
There is a lot that's left out. Once she vaguely mentions that another employee who was "involved" was still getting all of his peer bonuses (which may or may not have been PB's for his "involvement", we don't know), the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me. OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WANTS, as long as we don't actually have any details about it.
Also, generally shit will hit the fan if you tell anyone to fuck off, especially if they're your manager. Again, we don't know that she told her manager to fuck off for being racist (??) because this is a terrible story told in a shitty format. But it's implied. Just like everything else in this "article".
tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected.
You're making the best arguments for unionization I've heard in the tech industry for quite a long time.
What? Workers sell their labor to a company for a price. The whole point of any transaction is to satisfy both parties. Sharing market information is something that both buyers and sellers do. Why do you think this should be unilateral?
/s
Hearsay, rumours, implication, this is professional gossiping. I don't deny the claims she makes, but the form in which she makes them really doesn't help her case, and the form clearly calls to create an online shitstorm.
We should shame publications who use "stories" like these. It's damaging for everyone involved and whatever the subject matter is. I refuse to take seriously what should not be.
The reason we listen to people is to learn things.
Are you sure you're not being an Angry Jack[0] and using that as an easy excuse to reject the story firsthand?
> Also, generally shit will hit the fan if you tell anyone to fuck off, especially if they're your manager. Again, we don't know that she told her manager to fuck off for being racist
Were do you see her telling her manager to fuck off at all? She's the one who didn't try to blame her manager, it's that white male co-worker who wanted to do that, and she declined. You are literally accusing her of doing the opposite of what she did.
Assuming that's an accurate reading of GP's comment, I think it's quite telling that, again, an employee's refusal to be illegally intimidated should be constructed as "telling her manager to fuck off". The sympathies and attitudes thus revealed make me very glad that I don't have to depend on the good feeling of random Silicon Valley magnates and would-be magnates to work in my industry.
Had this story been rewritten to describe the situation as Google (and other BigCos like Apple) erecting arcane and anti-competitive mechanisms to manipulate a market for talent, and the protagonist quitting to found a web-based startup to disrupt their 19th century attitude to business, we might be toasting her as starting the next Uber for people.
How dare those fat cats do dirty deals to prevent the ordinary person from sharing a spreadsheet! SecretSalary to the rescue!
And let's be clear here. There is absolutely no downside to the sharing of salary information from the employee's perspective, and absolutely no upside to same from the perspective of management. So when it comes to hauling the employee into a private meeting with higher-ups, who are already outright declaring their displeasure with the situation, I think the "benefit of the doubt" boat has sailed.
Are you asserting that 95%+ of companies in the US have, and sometimes enforce, a policy that actively hurts them? I know companies do stupid shit from time to time, but you are basically saying salary confidentiality policies are some sort of mass MBA psychosis. After all, if there is "absolutely no upside" to management, why do we need labor laws to prohibit these policies in the first place?
Edit: So, I totally mis-parsed that statement. I thought you were stating there was no upside to management prohibiting salary discussions.
Immediately employees would be calling meetings with their manager to hear the justifications for pay rates they felt were unfair. This could repeat with each new hire, promotion, raise, bonus, and change in responsibilities. This generates wasted time and increased turnover. My wife's design company would virtually grind to a halt for a few days. Even after everybody is placated with their pay rate, each doling out project assignments would be a new opportunity for friction over who deserves to do what. Then let's consider accusations of sexism, racism, ageism. The number of discrimination lawsuits would likely be non-zero. There are also social introverts who don't want to turn half of their co-worker interactions into awkward conversations.
So once profitable workplaces that kept everybody moderately polite and happy could face several obstacles. Handing out raises wouldn't solve all of these problems either. I'll admit some worker bees would probably get paid a little more.
What? Sharing salary information is a protected employee activity, and retaliation is illegal.. so maybe she expected there wouldn't be retaliation?
None of this actually says anything about whether she acted correctly, or incorrectly, or whether the company behaved with propriety, or whether information wants to be free, or anything else that--to borrow a phrase from the original HN guidelines--“piques one’s intellectual curiosity."
Here’s my contribution to “she got exactly what she should expect:” Americans got exactly what they should expect when they refused to pay taxes to the King.
What happened next? Why did things turn out that way. What might have happened instead? What could have been done to prevent it from happening? What could have been done to make it happen with less bloodshed?
Those are the interesting questions to ponder.
I'm not sure what world you think we inhabit. Are we humanoid automatons? The whole welter of human emotion more or less always outweighs a programmatic injunction like "retaliation is illegal."
Companies are still people working together. They'll probably never be anything but people working together. It does not matter how protected the activity allegedly is; a giant embarrassment campaign run against your company, especially if in pursuit of a particularly feeble branch on the tree of political correctness, means you're out. Or, at least, things won't be pleasant for you. Because your coworkers, above and below, don't like what you've done to their company. One can't write a law preventing that.
I for one side with the person who threw together the spreadsheet, not with Google who is trying to sneak by with not paying everyone equally.
Your assertion that the poster above you lives in a fantasy world for thinking that sharing salary information is a protected activity is frankly a nauseating attitude. One that I hope we all in tech can fix.
We call this "civilisation".
Living in a community with other people often requires not impulsively indulging every emotional urge.
The only reason this argument makes sense to you is that you relate to retaliating against employees who exercise their rights in opposition to the employers goals. There isn't a crime that this argument couldn't be cited as a defence of, from double-parking to serial killing.
To expect there will be no retaliation for pissing off higher ups would be incredibly naive. Even if what you are doing (strictly speaking) is legal and retaliation is illegal. You can't expect to not suffer any repercussions for pissing off those that ultimately are in charge of your pay cheque. That's just not how people operate - even if that's how the law (and society, on the surface) says they should.
It takes a long time for ideas and beliefs to become embedded in your culture - look at racism, look at sexism, look at the LBGT community. Gradually society is becoming more tolerant, more accepting and less judgmental, but we've still got a long road ahead of us before equality for all is anything more than a surface ideal that the younger generations long for.
Many like the status quo, they are truly uncomfortable with what change represents to themselves personally. Getting these people to accept that future generations ideals and beliefs are not their own, and are becoming the norm is a hard pill for them to swallow.
When a tiger is cornered and they perceive they have no place left to run, the only thing they will do is lash out and hurt you.
Yeah, maybe a tiger attacks people when it feels threatened. You still put it down.
Intent can be inferred from circumstances and other actions alongside the prohibited action; and this is particularly true in civil cases where the standard is a mere preponderance of the evidence rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The whole point is that this is illegal and wrong. We discuss it in order to, hopefully, fix a bad thing rather than throw up our hands and say, "oh well, she had it coming!"
Why is that okay in a Employee / Corporation setting? Is that also okay in a rape victim / rapist setting? Where do we draw the line now?
And, naive or no, it is absolutely reasonable to act as though there would be none, knowing that you may receive it, so that you can draw attention to it if it happens, because it is illegal.
This is, at least nominally, a rule-of-law country, and that law's been on the books for a long, long time.
> exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company
is?
From this reply, it appears that you think Google did nothing wrong - regardless of whether she was 'stirring shit up' or not.
(And I personally think, peer bonuses should be rejected in such cases Because otherwise it becomes a pure popularity-contest. But that's just, like, my opinion :) )
I don't like politics, and stories like this are exactly why - things that may be legal and should not be harmful end up turning into something ugly. You have to worry more about who you are pissing off that what you are doing, whether or not their anger is justified or reasonable.
Sadly, for all but very small companies, politics is the reality in the corporate world.
Politics might appear less evident in smaller companies, because you're more likely intimately familiar with the people at the top. In a larger corporate environment where you really don't know everyone intimately, your perspective of the politics are compounded because you're not necessarily part of the inner circle. The road to the top is all politics though. If you want to get there, you have to know how to play your hand and visibly provide what those at the top need to further their own political agenda.
Absolutely. Which is why I don't understand why everyone is discussing this. Erica Joy apparently doesn't consider it illegal retaliation (and what we know is definitely not enough to warrant such a cunclusion), otherwise she would file a suit. Are we totally sure we didn't just misunderstand her?
You can ignore politics but politics will not ignore you; politics is why tech worker salaries were kept artificially lowered and why Google and others had an anti-poaching arrangement.
She should have prepared a bit better but this was the safe move for her; it's out of her hands and the salary information has appeared on sites like GlassDoor. If she's fired everyone will know it's because of this ugly politics and people will want to avoid working for Google since it's no longer a tech company but a company dominated by managerial power players and sharks. Who wants to work at a place where you have ugly politics like this after all?
She does seem like a SJW and, if any discrepancies in compensation were found between gender/race/... , Google would be ultimately screwed.
Plus, with such large dataset, one could fallaciously assume differences without considering different countries,positions,...
Explicitly exposing facts is the attitude I'd expect from this community, instead of ridiculing and wrongly correlating it with ideologies.
Putting that aside, I share pjc50's bemusement that arguing for equal pay qualifies as a "hidden agenda". I also don't find speculation the same as "explicitly exposing facts".
Companies can still retaliate against salary sharing in any way they want because it's next to impossible for you to prove in court that they acted in retaliation.
"tl;dr I support the establishment"
I read that differently. My reading:
* The fact that he was still getting them points how how arbitrary this was, and that she was being retaliated against.
* The whole story leaves me with the impression that she had ownership/credit for the spreadsheet, and that is why she was specifically being targeted with the rejected Peer Bonuses.
* He may have still be getting the Peer Bonuses because he was under a different manager/supervisor that was more forgiving.
Either way both are completely unverifiable. Take both with a huge fistful of salt until both parties are interviewed and quoted and research is done into what happened.
Well, rigorous proof is possible within mathematics[1]. However, applying that measure to verifying reality is nonsense. Even within maths, rigorous proofs require decoupling of the abstract proposition (what you prove) from reality (your assumptions).
[1] and "theoretical X" for X in {"computer science", "physics", "chemistry", ...}, which all are essentially math as well.
The reddit comment says management mentioned it openly in one of their scheduled all-hands weekly meeting.
Quote: "Friend says the sheet was addressed a company all-hands meeting (it wasn't the focus of the meeting, apparently they have an all-hands every week and it was mentioned. Can that be right tho? Aren't there like tens of thousands of people all across the world? How can you have an all-hands meeting the world over every week? anyway...)"
Once word got around about this spreadsheet, what else can management do? As management, you let everyone know that you know about it and you backpeddle from your problematic "we will fire you for your involvement" position. Someone from Human Resources affirms what everyone now knows (from doing a quick Google search), that this is not grounds for dismissal but that it makes things hard for management, so on and so forth.
Also:
(1) The fact that management can discuss something does not mean they do not object to it. There are many degrees of disapproval.
(2) Management is not a monolith, it's composed of many people taking many sometimes contradictory actions -- the fact that Joe was not harassed on Friday does not mean that Joe was not ever harassed.
Seeing the upvoted comments here makes me /sigh for HN, a bunch of BS, FUD and victim blaming.
All we have is a one sided report from a former employee.
The other 'side' is a post from Redditor 'dickbutt_md', who claims to have called up "a friend" who works at Google. In dickbutt's account, the friend claims not to know Joy personally, and not to have been involved in the events, but manages to describe Joy as "passive aggressive" and "not classy", and closes by saying "Google is fucking awesome and anyone who says otherwise is talking out their ass."
I kind of wish this were not the top-voted comment on an HN thread about pay equity.
The purpose of my comment above was just to share an opposing side of the story. It's good to question things.
Explaining how salary disparities might have happened is very different from saying she's making it up or calling them a rabble-rouser.
Some disparagement seems reasonable, unless she has some more evidence to back up her claims of discrimination.
Note that, unlike the unverifiable hecklers, deelowe did not claim that her experience was invalid or that the numbers in the spreadsheet were inaccurate but instead discussed the question of sampling bias or simply the sample size being small enough to be skewed by other known factors.
It's fair enough being upset about your peer bonuses being rejected. What is not okay is to just to some invalid conclusion about racism and then slander your company in public.
Also I can completely understand why the Googler on reddit chose to remain anonymous. There's a pretty vocal brigade of "rabble rousers"(for lack of a better term) at Google.
On the other hand he is basically spelling out all of the things that I noticed from the original tweets.
1) The tweets mentioned normalizing currencies. In every international company that I have worked in, pay ranges varied by geography. I'm not sure how you could do this accurately as the cost of living between many countries in which Google operates is not directly comparable.
2) In reading the tweets it seemed clear that peer bonuses were only being rejected when they appeared to be for the work on the spreadsheet. I haven't worked at many companies with peer bonus systems, but most of them would have frowned on sending bonuses for something like this. It is outside of the purpose of the system.
3) Yeah, this person likes to "stir the pot" a bit. That's not always a bad thing, but it is bound to have some impact on a person's career (politics are everywhere). It's hard to separate the signal from the noise about what actually happened here.
With sports, people are payed differently even if they fill the same position on a team. Why? They aren't the same. They bring different skillsets. It's the same with movies. The main character will make more than someone 20 spots down in the credits list. Someone with a well-known name will make even more. All of this wage difference that can occur across genders.
But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table.
Edit: To clarify, I have no issue with a company removing any pay difference between employees. I only have an issue with those who think paying people differently is inherently a problem.
Why? Different people bring different value. The same title can have wildly different roles, some positions with the same titles can be much harder to replace than others.
For example: at my company my team has a very specialized role that is far outside the domains of all other developers (we're talking about a large multinational here, with thousands of employees). You bet your ass we make a decent chunk more than most other devs, replacing any one of us would cost a ton of money and require over a year of learning about our stuff; replacing one of the devs who works on our main product? In half a year you could get someone to full productivity.
In other words: some employees are more expensive to replace than others, either shower them with €€€ or pay a much higher cost when they go work elsewhere.
I didn't actually mean that. I thought the rest of my comment would give context that statement is what the opposing side is saying.
It's a complex issue and you should avoid people on either side who try to scrunch it down to one sound bite.
Half my team are women and they make more money on average then the guys because they don't take shit from anyone.
It doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman. You will never get what you don't ask for. It's in the best interest of every company to pay as little as the employee will take so every employee has to stand up for themselves.
We can't keep blaming "society" for things we need to do as individuals for ourselves.
It's in the best interest of every company to pay as
little as the employee will take so every employee has
to stand up for themselves.
Otherwise I kind of agree with you.
Dismissing the anecdotal evidence of the women on your team, you have no idea of the differences in environmental stimuli women experience vs men.
GENERALLY speaking, and no, it's not universal, but on average, women are much less aggressive and assertive in situations where there is risk to social standing or cohesion. And it's not just their self-perception, others (including other women!!) perceive women as negatively for acting in ways that is rewarded in men.
I'm sure you've never done it yourself, but the fact is it exists, and it will not go away if we pretend that there is no bias, there is no further progress to be made.
Similar to how claiming we live in a post-racism society promotes racism.
At least his comment was based on personal experience of successful women on his team.
And when social pressure increases, more people drink alcohol, eat fast food, keep up with celebrities, etc.; when it decreases, people do these things less.
Going against the social current entails loss and risk of loss. It's strange that libertarian types don't understand economic incentives, since they expect them to alone hold society together.
Work hardness (how do you measure this, anyway?) and salary are weakly correlated above the minimum in most work places.
There's always things you could be doing, but they're often not critical (or even necessary). If someone is staying late to do those things (or doing them during the day and staying late to do the critical stuff) then they deserve no additional recognition. People should go home when the important stuff is done.
If people can't fit all the important work in to their day then they're either not good enough at their job or their manager is giving them too much to do. Either way, there is a problem.
Correlation is NOT causation.
I think, given what I've seen so far, women are given less leverage to start with, they are subject to the chilling effects of gender biases, and they are discouraged from negotiating more often than not.
Sure, a woman can overcome these obstacles, but she shouldn't have these extra obstacles in the first place. The "pay gap" is almost certainly not due to managers thinking "oo I'll pay her less because she's a woman," but it is still indicative of some (more complex) gender inequality.
What you are saying might be true if most hiring was done by CEOs and not department managers.
Obviously it wouldn't outright prevent negotiating - you could still ask for $15k above what they listed in the job posting - but it WOULD help candidates navigate some of the smaller moments during the interview process that can unknowingly undermine their negotiating position (e.g. "How much did you make in your last role?").
Publicising that a new unproven hire is earning more than existing proven staff is simply going to cause people to leave, which is even worse for the business than not hiring new staff.
Mechanisms like publishing salaries allows for a fairer salary whether you are cooperative or competitive. If you earn more, you probably can justify it in front of colleagues and bosses.
Some say cooperation over competition is a 'female' trait, but personally, I feel the same. I am successful at negotiation, but I'd rather know that my colleagues earn the same when they work the same, which is why I try to encourage talk about salaries.
The problem with open salaries is that it spurs continual second-guessing. And if anyone thinks that open salaries are less susceptible to popularity contests, they're wrong.
Assessing value is hard. We'll always get it wrong somehow. Encouraging people to become better negotiators may be the best way to handle salaries. When people make a case for their value and are rewarded in money for it there is at least an extremely grounded avenue for correction. The company will continually look at whether a person is worth that amount of money.
I think is much more ethical to treat people like this but maybe your colleague isn't doing such a good job as you.
He told me that I was worth the extra money but if I hadn't asked for it, he wouldn't have given it to me extra money.
If wage disparity follows gender lines then it is a gender issue.
>Nothing. It's illegal to retaliate against employees for sharing salaries.
This answer in fantastic and I wish more technical people learned with this.
As a programmer, some managers assume(often rightly so) that you have no clue about laws, finance and business in general.
They're just asking for insight into why this could be a problem (think 3rd grade, "Do you know why this is wrong?") and she shoots back aggressively. I think her inability to produce any sort of thought besides oppression shows that she probably isn't able to handle issues like this.
(edit: politeness)
Whether or not it's legal for her to discuss those things, it's also legal for her employer to be upset that she's making the work environment more difficult for others.
The problem with these noble issues is that there's a view that you can do no wrong as long as you're fighting for what's right. She clearly sees herself as some Snowdenesque whistle-blower, and she's surprised that it's cold in Russia.
I guess I'm not done, because I am compelled to point out that this is completely false. That's the entire point of all of the legality around the protection of these discussions under United States law: that, no, your employer cannot be "upset" at you for choosing to exercise that right.
Yes they can absolutely be unhappy that their employees are causing a problem, that's why they tried to discuss it with her. But they didn't do anything to her for it.
When your employee does something that is entirely legal and protected, you don't have a "discussion" with them. You nod, say "OK", and you do absolutely nothing else, because nothing you do in response to it, as it pertains to that employee, can be anything other than hostile--and hostility of your direction. Not the employee's, not now and not ever.
In any event, it seems to me that it was good advice given the context.
I'm skeptical, given the vastly divergent goals of employer and employee. I'm borderline-dismissive at Google scale, where there's no meaningful employer/employee relationship to be found at most levels of the hierarchy (and a relationship with a manager isn't the same thing). Of course, there are models of organization (co-ops and the like) where one can have a mutualistic relationship with the other stakeholders, but--these aren't that.
> What if the "discussion" was intended entirely in the interest of the employee?
The interest of the employee just happens to involve not rocking the boat, not ensuring that everybody's got an accurate picture of the market, and depressing workers' negotiation position so that the company can profit? To me the possibility of this what-if is so remote as to be laughable.
It's good to know that my employer can never question anything I do legally without being hostile, though.
But I cannot envision a situation where the question "do you realize what could happen?" is not implicitly suggesting that the realization to be made is one of company harm--and thus, yes, threatening.
Everyone can respond how it is legal, their right, etc, but the fact that you are now known as a troublemaker won't bode well for you.
The corporation exists solely at the sufferance of the society that grants it its charter. Someday maybe we'll remember this instead of throwing our hands up in the air and giving up.
The world is not black and white, no matter how naive folks here believe it to be.
The world is not black-and-white. This is. I do not understand, Steinbeck notwithstanding, the steadfast desire to take the minimal power of the worker out of the worker's hands.
It seems that you're advocating a 'punishment as deterrent' strategy for society along the lines of capital punishment. "If you violate the rules even slightly, you will be executed." Is that a good strategy for encouraging lawfulness while preserving efficacy? And is law the perfect (or the best) mechanism for encoding moral behavior?
It determines the values of your society. Fuck with the powerless at your own, extreme risk. If your values are more important than your spreadsheets, then the violation of the rights of the weak must take precedence. And, for me, it does; I'm proud to say that I've been pretty on-point about hewing to that in my adult life, even when balancing managerial responsibilities to an employer.
We can argue about the level of impact that must be assessed; I'll bend on something like the revocation of a charter for this (though there are plenty of corporate crimes for which it's a fair response). But suppression of worker rights should involve a very, very harsh penalty that makes the company not simply think twice from, but recoil in utter fear about, doing so again. (Perhaps a personal consequence to the actor involved; I don't really believe in the fictional person of the corporation and I'm okay with holding its agents responsible for its bad behaviors.)
> It seems that you're advocating a 'punishment as deterrent' strategy for society along the lines of capital punishment.
Essentially, yes, but there's a multiplier involved that makes this comparison fuzzy. Organizations, which are not people, should be held to significantly higher standards of moral rectitude than any individual due to their geometrically (even exponentially?) greater power and ability to impact others. Impacts that would be "small" on the individual scale are seismic at Google-scale, and the punishments must reflect this.
I think there are better strategies for encouraging lawfulness (and, more important, ethical behavior) at the individual scale, and even at the societal level. But the modern corporation's entire schtick is being above that society--look how many useful idiots speak positively of the "amorality" of a corporation. If an appeal to the better nature of which people celebrate its non-existence, I'm okay with giving fear a go. I mean, we already live in the cyberpunk dystopia of the eighties, minus the mohawks and shoulderpads--at this point, inaction is acceptance.
And before anyone says that Google is too profitable an organisation for this to be an issue, remember that PLCs have shareholders who can demand that costs be cut in order to increase profits. If you have a pension, you could indirectly be that shareholder.
But if somebody rightfully publishes some information that is sensitive to Google, look what happens...
X is a Y that wants to have all information int the world. But if somebody ... look what happens....
you'll find several solutions for Y='company' and many more for other Y in {'Secret Service', 'Tax Collection Agency', ...}
I work at an enterprise with ~5,000 employees, and attitudes toward topics like transparency vary wildly, even in cases where there is an official company stance. This is because it is common to give managers a lot of freedom to manage their departments without interference. So, for example, our company has a pretty good work-from-home policy, but your manager is completely allowed to ban it in your department if he or she feels like it.
Basically, it is possible that both sources are mostly accurate, and they represent the perspectives from different parts/levels of the company at Google.
And we have HN posters reposting it like it means something.
I think we just hit the peak of this "do anything to discredit a woman who has a beef with a tech company" thing.
In fact if getting info is getting money/an advantage/..., then wanting all of it while not wanting others to have it, and not liking yours being given away, makes total sense.
Not taking side for or against Google here (and if I did, I would be all for salaries being publicly accessible), but you can't blame them or accuse them of being hypocrite when they do what they believe makes sense for them.
Well, the whole definition of being a hypocrite is to subscribe to a belief for others while doing something entirely for yourself.
In fact, it potentially hurts their bottom line because then they'd have to have pay equality amongst their ranks - and I don't mean pay equality from a male/female standpoint (though that is a concern), I mean from an employee to employee standpoint. Pay transparency gives everyone an equal footing on the negotiation playing field. This also means that even the worst negotiator in the room can potentially earn the same as the top superstar on the team. What do you think that does to Google's bottom line? They could have been paying the superstar with the shitty negotiation skills peanuts to earn them millions, now they've gotta pay him the same as the pretty good developer with excellent negotiation skills because he has them over a barrel and he knows he is the only one that has the ability to provide what they need to get where they need to go.
I wouldn't say this is hypocritical, this is accounting. Accountants want to keep the bottom line at the absolute minimum. When this means paying people different amounts to do the same job, salary discussion pisses people off. In the interest of keeping the peace and getting the job done, salary discussion must be suppressed or people figure what they're worth amongst themselves and they have more negotiation power. More negotiation power causes the bottom line goes up, counter to the accountants' mandate. You would have to completely upend accountants' viewpoints on capitalism to turn that perspective around, and until you do, law or no law, practices like this will continue.
Salary negotiation since the dawn of capitalism has been like a game of poker. You need to figure out their motivations and what value they're trying to extract from you. Once you know what your value is to them and what return on their investment you are capable of providing them, the negotiation begins. People make the mistake of comparing themselves against others in order to negotiate their salary when in fact it comes down to the game you play at the negotiation table. The game is to understand what value you provide to the company in the role you're pursuing and figure out a number you're both comfortable with. Too high and you don't get hired, too low and you get exploited. It doesn't matter whether you're male or female, it all comes down to figuring out the value they know you will provide them and exploiting that.
Not all of their crawlers respect robots.txt
Like the time they didn't feel the need to harass everyone into signing up for G+ any time one used an unrelated service?
It would be better to tweet, "Guys, I updated my blog with a story about this thing (link)".
I guess if all you want to do is post a bunch of tweets and not write any context or additional information about it this is the way to do it, but if you actually want to be a journalist TOS means nothing.
Has anyone ever been sued for stringing 20 tweets together into plaintext?
a company is a company. an agent for making money, first and foremost. any positive change they bring is a side-effect, and due to their ever greater power they must constantly be policed, at least by releasing unpleasant information like this.
To be regarded as the best of the best, I think they make pretty shitty software.
Having worked at Google, I think it's worth saying, their software is fucking astonishingly amazing. The magic tricks that go into the simplest things are mindboggling, and what's been built behind the scenes to enable it all is pretty incredible.
Also, um, a lot of their software is far from shitty: Gmail, search, docs+spreadsheets, new photos, youtube to name a few. If you think any one of those are "pretty shitty", well...I dunno what to tell you.
searchif you will pay more attention to what i actually wrote, i never implied that "making money" and "positive change" exclude each other, nor did i ever say something so incredibly stupid like saying that providing a livelihood for people was wrong.
edit - ok, after rereading the comment: i'm sorry, this was an over the top reaction..
Erica was a tech stop employee, which is Google's help desk. in terms of technical ability, hiring standards for tech stop are lower than for SRE, where she ended up. every non-erica tech stopper, including me, who wants to transfer into the technical side of the org is required to pass a full suite of interviews, same as an outside candidate. it would be obvious from examining her submit history that Erica is not really meeting this bar. and yet a door was opened into SRE somehow.
she stayed a few months in SRE, underperformed, and spent a lot of time ranting on internal platforms. again, this is verifiable because commits at Google are public. she chose to join a team of about 50% women working under a female director, so I have a hard time believing discrimination is the major factor here. now she is gone and believes she was wronged and is telling everyone so. the similarities to michaelochurch are strong.
If that's the case it looks like she wasn't aware of it; especially if you're suggesting a door was opened for her maybe there's some more transparency that's needed in the process.
>the similarities to michaelochurch are strong.
IIRC he was wronged and he got an apology for it: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/my-name-is-c...
Aside from Erica and her situation do you feel the salary sharing was a good thing? Did it negatively impact Google?
I personally really appreciated the spreadsheet because I am anti-capitalist, but I find Erica's version of the facts to be distorted in a self-serving way. I find it hard to believe this would meaningfully impact her career.
On average everyone thinks they're above average
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority#Reference...)
Two people of equal value and skill will both think they're better than the other person, and thus deserve higher compensation. How do you reconcile that with salary transparency? Seems like you'll be making more people unhappy.
Would wages turn into status goods, where both of those people continuously ask for raises because in their view they're underpaid, and eventually get denied, which will probably offend them and cause them to leave?
Secondly, does this actually solve any problems that simple backchannels between employees don't? People already talk about salary at lunch breaks or over coffee; the advantage is that those are private conversations between friends, rather than your salary being broadcasted to everyone for them to judge. What problem does this actually solve?
However, the resolution is pretty simple. Employees can either accept the justification given by management or not. If they are disgruntled about it, they can try their luck at a different employer, or use the information to learn how they can get a raise. This last point is one of the benefits for employees—they learn what would get them more money at their current employer.
Example: person 1 makes 15% more than person 2, and now both are aware of it. Person 2 is upset and talks to their manager. They find out the reason is because person 1 has additional education/certification and a couple years more experience. Now person 2 knows they can pursue the extra education/certification and use it as leverage to get a raise, when prior to the transparency they would have had no idea and possibly gone awhile longer making less money.
It's really hard to provide salary transparency unless you have a spreadsheet with all the variables that go into creating it -- considered a closely guarded secret at most companies. The irony of all of this is that if you provided this to people, they would likely either agree with the formula or have constructive ideas for change.
The salaries of public sector workers are public, as are the CEO and other parts of upper management in public companies. Everyone's salary is some countries are available to the public.
Quoting from that Atlantic article:
> The worse the individuals' pay was relative to the median, the worse their satisfaction. Those at or above the median, however, experienced no change in job satisfaction or job search intention.
> These economists conclude that pay transparency just makes workers who are on the low-end of the pay scale feel worse about their jobs, so it accomplishes little. Linda Barrington notes, however, that this contention misses a benefit of being unsatisfied: the likelihood of moving on .... to another job, which would match that improved performance with better pay
Regarding the second, backchannels, again we can look to real-world examples to show how difficult or delayed those backchannels might be. Consider Lilly Ledbetter, who was hired as a supervisor in 1979. It wasn't until (quoting from http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1874954,0... )
> Shortly before she was due to retire in 1998, an anonymous co-worker slipped a note into her mailbox at work comparing her pay against that of three other male counterparts. Ledbetter was making $3,727 per month, while men doing the same job were paid $4,286 to $5,236 per month.
Quoting now from http://www.nwlc.org/resource/lilly-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-0 (emphasis mine):
> Her co-workers bragged about their overtime pay, but Goodyear did not allow its employees to discuss their pay
She filed an EEOC complaint, which the Supreme Court said wasn't allowed under the law because it the discriminatory acts of the past decades were older than the statutory 180 days for filing an EEOC complaint. The result was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which resets the clock after each paycheck made from the result of a discriminatory act.
Here's another article, http://www.financialsamurai.com/never-tell-anyone-how-much-m... , which says, basically, never tell anyone else your salary.
Since it's easy to show existing cases where people don't talk about their salaries though back channels, your belief that "people already talk about salary" may be true for some, but surely is not universally true.
Plus, how many of those people are not telling the full truth?
When the typical doe-eyed college senior steps into the real world and is tempted to drink Eric Schmidt's kool-aid about changing the world (and how the honor of working at Google offsets the lower wage), such disclosures will help him understand that Google is just another money-making corporation. No more, no less.
There was a book recently, Work rules! by Laszlo Bock who happens to be a head of people operations. He describes exactly those inequality patterns. It's nothing unusual, some of it is accepted (some people earn more for their higher value) and some not (woman not asking for a raise so easily). Seriously, just go and read a book, not some stream of contextless tweets gathered together.
Unfortunately, that care was not taken in this case, and of course, you see opponents dismissing the data. The worst part is that this effort may actually prevent proper data collection in the future: "remember what happened last time we did that?"
Sidenote: Most of the people around here knows glassdoor but i have worked with a lot of people who never heard of it..
One Sunday, some former coworkers & I were bored, talking about salaries on the internal social network instance. A spreadsheet was created. we put our salaries in the sheet, realized that it was created on a public to the world spreadsheet, so I copied it to internal. I then put a form on it and posted the link to the form and the spreadsheet on my internal social network account.
It took off like wildfire.
It got reshared all over the place. People started adding pivot tables that did spreadsheet magic that highlighted not great things re: pay. I did some general housekeeping stuff to the sheet (normalizing the gender field where it could be, exchange rate stuff, that sort of thing).
More reshares.
More people adding pay.
It became a thing.
I was invited to talk to my manager on Mon or Tues. Higher up people weren't happy. She wasn't happy. Why did I do it? "Don't you know what could happen?" Nothing. It's illegal to retaliate against employees for sharing salaries. "Wellll....".
Meeting ended.
Sheet kept going.
People were thanking me for it. They were also sending me peer bonuses. here's how peer bonuses work @ former co:
If you did something good, someone peer bonuses you, you get $150 net in your next paycheck. An important thing I learned during that time: peer bonuses are rewarded at managers discretion. My manager was rejecting all of them. Wasn't sure if this would be good for the company. Wanted to see what the outcome was. Mind you once a PB is rejected, that can't be undone.
Meanwhile, one of the other people involved, a white dude (good friend I won't name, he can name himself if he wants), was also getting PBs. His weren't getting rejected. I told him mine were. He was pissed. Wanted to tell everyone what was happening. I declined. A smattering of people knew what was going on. Backchannels being what they are at former co. (lol IRC #yallknowwhoyouare), it got around. Rejecting PBs was so unheard of, ppl didn't know it was possible. There was outrage when they found out. Shock that I wasn't talking abt it. Meanwhile, spreadsheet still going, getting spread around, pointed questions being thrown at mgmt about sharing salary ranges (hahah no). Most people agreed that it was A Good Thing. PBs kept rolling in. Rejections kept rolling out. One PB eventually got approved. Way after everything died down. Because the person worded it in a way that was vary vague. Any that were outright about the spreadsheet got rejected. 7 total in the end I think?
Higher ups still pissed. Some I used to support as an exec tech would pointedly not interact w/ me anymore. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Before I left, about 5% of former co. had shared their salary on that sheet. People asked for & got equitable pay based on data in the sheet. The world didn't end. Everything didn't go up in flames because salaries got shared. But shit got better for some people.
I explicitly gave ownership of the sheet to someone else before I left so it couldn't be taken over by mgmt when I was gone (can happen).
I am thinking of this because of everyone celebrating the fact that Google put Ida B. Wells in the doodle yesterday. Ida B. Wells was great. She did stuff to affect change of such a magnitude that if I'm half the woman she was, I'm doing pretty good. I don't claim to come close, but from time to time, I do stuff that will make things better for people at the expense of the establishment. I'm a pretty big believer in justice and fairness and will fight for both if necessary. Fighting for justice & fairness INSIDE Google doesn't go over well. Salary sharing is only 1 example. Blogger porn. Real names. Many others. Shit WILL hit the fan if you tell a racist (a well documented racist) to go fuck themselves though. In defense of the racist, obvi. So sure. Rah rah, Google did an Ida B. Wells doodle. Guaranteed that if Ida Wells were alive & working at Google today, there'd be many private calendar meetings focused on "her future" there.
tl;dr the sharing of one doodle does not a bastion of support for justice and civil disobedience make.
That could be said about 95% of the content on HN. If you think that's a problem I suggest joining a different community.
She did however mention that one bonus passed through, arguing it was too vague to be given because of the spread sheet. Hm.
1. Does the spreadsheet really cover 5% or so of google employees? If so it has pretty decent statistical validity despite selection bias etc?
2. Is the spreadsheet accurate, or at least will the reporting differences cancel out?
3. Assuming the above two are correct, and it seems fair to say yes, then whether she used Twitter, or is grinding an ace is totally irrelevant - Google has a fair pay problem, and really needs to deal with it.
On a personal note, a company is not a market. Class's theory of the firm says it eschews market discipline to achieve more efficient allocation of hard to judge resources. and as such I do not believe that saying "negotiate better" is a valid option for a company of this size. It's bad for everyone but the good negotiators.
I think most of us probably work at a company that discourages salary transparency (most people do in general). I think we could have a more valuable discussion about how our experiences compare/contrast to the content of the tweets, and save the "omg a bunch of tweets are not an article!" comments for when someone writes a blog post about that and shares it on HN.
Big companies have the rules in salary increase rate for the current employees, but are willing to pay more to hire new employees from other companies.
For example, A's salary is $5000 and yearly increase rate is 5%. Two years later, A's classmate B is hired. B's salary is $6000. A's salary is $5512.5.
Similar thing happened to me. Luckily I got an exceptional salary increase years later. But eventually I left that company after 6-year service.
At the end of the day, this is what I am curious about - was there inequality in pay, and if so, what was the difference.
It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous
This information is usually already expressed in the titles/roles the employees get. I don't see how publishing salaries would make any significant change to this.
Also, you are assuming that salaries do express the value for the company, which is to be doubted, according to the story at hand.
Absolutely. Gather 10 people from a company in a single room and I really doubt they will be able to agree on it. Especially when it's not even about how good they are, but how much value they provide. I have seen this issue in a team of 3 people I managed, it's hard to imagine what it will look like with 100+ people.
I can't tell from context whether she was supporting or stopping "blogger porn" and/or "real names."
I take "fighting for justice & fairness" to indicate that she approved of the reversals.
This is unreadable.
First we had articles spread over dozens of pages for the laugh, now we have articles split into 160char segments, grrrrrr
Google has some sort of Peer Bonus scheme, Erica got lots of them but management decided to deny pretty much all of them.
She left google.
Lots of people helped tweak the sheet adding data visualizations, comparisons, etc.
Google management told her they didn't like it, she pointed out that you can't be fired for sharing salary information.
Lots of colleagues were giving her "peer bonuses" for setting this up, but her manager kept blocking them, something which is apparently unheard of to the point that most people didn't know they could be blocked.
By the time she left, 5% of staff were apparently using the sheet.
Even more TLDR: Nothing particularly happened except that Google showed they dislike colleagues talking about salaries.
edit: sibling comment says $100, could be either or.
Not only did Google NOT fire anybody for it, they haven't even removed the spreadsheet from their own internal network. They simply refused to approve some $150 "peer-recognition" bonuses, meant to reward the employee for creating the spreadsheet. THAT is apparently enough to engage some kind of weird quasi-SJW outrage. As opposed to the real world, where everyone involved would be fired and given a negative reference for the rest of their career.
TL;DR It's illegal to fire your employees for discussing salary in the US. California isn't special, neither is Google.
I'm not making a normative statement about the way things "ought to be", I'm making a positive statement about the way things "actually are" across most of the world (http://beta.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/positive-and-nor...). Shoot the messenger if you like.
So reality is a parallel universe ?
And did you really link to a tutoring lesson about objective and subjective statements to 'prove your point'? What a useless thing to do. Your knee-jerk anti-establishment opinion about how the world works, based on your limited experience is not a good bellwether. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sophomoric); shoot the messenger if you like.
You know--things that any worker should want to know.
In 2 previous jobs, I found out what others at the company were making. OK, they were managers, but still, it just made me pissed off. It didn't make me happy by any means.
As others note, people tend to generally think they're above average. Can you not see that exploding their delusion might not be such a great idea? Some of them have to be below average. A team who doesn't share salary info, can all be happy that they're all above average. If they start sharing salary, half will be below average and probably pretty pissed off.
The people who benefit, are people who are generally happy as they are. Would you like to know how much money your neighbours have? Why should it matter?
The key is having information specifically to formulate your company's BATNA. The notion that salary sharing is bad for the employee is hogwash from unfair labor practices developed over decades.
Would you buy a car from a dealership if the dealer told you "you shouldn't comparison shop it will only make you resentful"? Yet we are willing to accept that claptrap from a company. Not in this lifetime.
Her manager talked to her saying "Don't you know what could happen?". Well management couldn't fire her for that, but could make her work life less then ideal. Possibly holding back bonuses out of spite? Worse job assignments?
The huge job salary scandal that Google was a part of kinda shows hows they can't be trusted to be honest about salaries and supportive of their workers.
You feeling ok with what you are getting paid is not what matters. What matters is getting fair market value for your worth. Many people make less then what they are worth because they either don't know how much they are worth, or are even too afraid to argue for what they feel they are worth. Companies exploit this and use salary negotiations as a way to hire employees for the absolute least amount possible.
We applaud companies for making record breaking profits, but we don’t applaud them for decreasing their profits a bit in favor of increasing all their employees spending power.
I find the idea that sharing salaries will cause drama highly suspect. Causing some to go and ask for equivalent pay is probably a good thing, managers don't have to go out and give you raises all the time, it's usually on you to push for it. With this information you can have a better idea of what to ask for and make negotiation more efficient.
If most companies were transparent, employees would be a lot more knowledgeable about what leads to more pay. I think we would see more negotiation and engagement and healthier conversations about money. People would be upset at first, but once we start collectively understanding the legitimate reasons for pay discrepancies, and we eliminate the illegitimate ones, I think most people would be happier.
There are always exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions. The existence of an exception or outlier does not disprove what generally holds true for everyone else.
Are you verifying that the users are actually who they say they are when they share salaries? What if I were to go into the form and say that I was you, and that you made a billion dollars more than everyone else. Would that cause drama?
This just seems like a horrible idea. Feelings will be hurt. Productivity will be lost. Someone will quit. Maybe someone will benefit, but it's almost certainly not good for your team or your company.
People agree to work for salaries. They put down numbers like what they earned at their last job, or what they are looking for in the new job, and then employers make offers based on that. If someone agreed to work for a number, and is getting paid that... why make drama?
and no, you don't just come with any number you would like to see to an interview. if you overshoot too much, you probably won't be hired, depends on recruiter and company.
Pay really does, more often than not, reflect the individuals contributions. Why? Because as Joe's manager, I want to keep Joe. I know what market rate is for his position, and I do what I can to make sure he is paid above it. Steve... fuck that guy, let him make below average... he didn't deserve the job in the first place, and we'd all be better off if he quit.
Anyway the fact that it's not by name (so you can compare yourself to another person) makes it worse in my mind. If you are just going to share the salary for your position, we'd need to make different positions for Steve, Sally, and Joe... It would be Title Blah, Rank Joe. Everyone is different.
All names changed of course.