> Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the same when we're shopping for a job?
Despite the question being rhethorical, the answer is everything that's wrong about this proposal: Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty.
I've got people with the same job title with almost a magnitude of difference in actual output. Sure, on paper, they're "doing the same thing", but if someone forced me to shoehorn them into categories, that would mostly serve to punish top performes with little credentials and push them somewhere else.
I feel strongly about this, mostly because it happened to myself: After being sold, the first company that employed me introduced a "completely fair and transparent" compensation scheme. After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately.
I called a recruiter the next day and was out a few months after.
I also feel very strongly about this. Many moons ago I literally got paid half of what a friend of mine got paid for exactly the same position, responsibilities, and output, and yes, I can gauge the output, as it was a position for which this is quite rigidly defined. Just because he said a different amount than I that he was willing to work for during negotiations.
From that point on I have consistently refused to 'name my amount'. Literally, I would say something like: "A company like yours must have a defined salary scale for the given position, why don't we start from there, and see how it aligns with my expectations?". If they push on, it goes something like: "So, are you saying that salaries at your organization are ad-hoc, and you're looking for the cheapest person who can fill the role?". In which case, I'm really not interested anymore.
> I've got people with the same job title with almost a magnitude of difference in actual output. Sure, on paper, they're "doing the same thing", but if someone forced me to shoehorn them into categories, that would mostly serve to punish top performes with little credentials and push them somewhere else.
Why is transparency a problem here?
The person doing orders of magnitude more work is probably only getting paid 10% more.
Transparency could possibly make this better for both the workers and the employers, or it could make them worse for both - better for one and worse for the other - better for one and no difference for the other - or no difference for either. There's lots of possibilities.
But It doesn't seem like there's reason to believe transparency is surely bad.
> Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty.
Devils advocate- isn't this a bit like arguing peanut butter shouldn't be uniformly priced, but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown: soil acidity, use of pesticides, as well as farmers grit and dedication? A jar is a jar, and ideally, a job is a job. An employee can either do the job, and be paid what it says on the can, or they cannot do the job and have to be transitioned out.
Sure, jars come in different sizes and brands, but we should stop pretending each job is bespoke when employee organizations function on the basis of them being similar, empirically workers are replaceable.
My biggest problem is information asymmetry: even if I were to accept your argument at face value (that important attributes are hard to gauge); the employee has much less knowledge on how much they ought to be paid for their skill-level, but the employer will have that information up the wazoo (both internally, and through industry surveys and back-channels)
Your employer doesn't want you to discuss pay with your fellow workers, because if you did you would realize how badly you are being ripped off. This is why in many countries pay transparency is protected by law. The Wall Street Journal will naturally tell you otherwise, because they are your enemy.
The "lazy PhD" bit there really undermines your entire point. Have you seen what it takes to get a PhD? I'm sure there are some who somehow skated through, but they are the exception, and not the rule.
For the same reasons you cite, equal pay is important. Some employees are better than others, and this is very hard to qualify, and the effect is that those who have less skill at negotiation, are underpaid, completely independent of skill, while those who are better at negotiation are paid more, completely independent of skill.
If skill is not going to be a factor in how people are paid, then pay for the role and not the person.
Any given person can and will grow in their role, potentially earning more (but not getting paid more) than they did a month prior; even moreso if they don't have to stress about money all of the time, and can just have all of those concerns alleviated even a little by higher pay.
Most people want to be better at their career, and are bogged down by the myriad of troubles that tight budgets generally cause. Remove these impediments for those who have reached a point in their career where they've earned the right to be without these troubles, and you will see your people take off, like how plants bloom when they haven't seen water in 10 days.
I was the first engineering hire at a start up. I built the start-up from greenfield to multi-million dollar revenue and 50+ employees.
I was doing ALL of the DevOps and security work, while also contributing to back-end development. I knew the system in and out and was working my ASS off.
When the time for yearly reviews came, I was excited to get a big raise ( to bring me in line with the median for my job title ), and a pat on the back.
Instead they announced some "point-based pay scale" and told me I was technically already over-paid for my position. No raise, no promotion.
The thing is, the point system was based on reviews from my peers. Who all did their own back-end and front-end work and were never really collaborating with me. I was just loudly as possible running things on the back-end and trying to keep my users happy.
ALL of us ended up around the middle of the chart "with expectations we will move up." "Oh, you built the company? Well uh... you're still just a senior engineer."
A week later I had accepted an offer making +50% and they were out one of their foundational engineers. Most of the other devs followed suit. So the pennies they saved lost them pounds of engineers they now had to recruit and re-hire for. What a bonehead move.
So I definitely hear you here: basing pay off of arbitrary points allocated by your peers instead of actually measuring performance is bad in my experience.
I agree with this, I've been doing the job search thing for the last 3 months and I've spoken with a few companies that have this equality based pay model (DuckDuckGo is a good example), where everyone with the same job title makes exactly the same amount. The pay offered by these places is lower than what I have been able to get at places without the policy, and they have been unwilling to make any exceptions. This one-size-fits-all pay bracket thing really sucks IMO. Also basing pay off of YoE or education level also strike me as old, stodgy ways of paying your workers, like something IBM would do.
You're worth exactly what you can convince someone to pay you, nothing more or less than that.
> I feel strongly about this, mostly because it happened to myself: After being sold, the first company that employed me introduced a "completely fair and transparent" compensation scheme. After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately.
I also am a tech worker with no tech degree (no math, CS, eng, etc).
Pay transparency would be run by administrators inside businesses that would likely implement something as you describe: "So-and-so just graduated cum laude from X with a degree in Y therefore they're at pay band Z."
It will be horrible for people who had to self-educate.
> Second, thanks to the boom in working from home, big national companies that have at least one employee in Colorado now find themselves required to post pay levels for any remote role that could potentially be performed in the state. Some employers tried to get around the new rule by barring Colorado residents from applying for their remote positions. State regulators quickly clarified that such exclusions are illegal, and moved to crack down on them.
While I am a fan of pay transparency, something about this bothers me. Does Colorado actually have standing here?
I wondered this as well, and after searching found the key is that if you have any employees in Colorado, then you are considered a "Colorado employer" and thus you can't post job listings for remote jobs that try to skirt the pay transparency requirements by saying that job can't be performed in Colorado.
If you have 0 employees in Colorado, you're free to do whatever you want then.
Why does it bother you more that Colorado is fighting for their citizens' right to work more than businesses excluding an entire state from being able to apply?
I don't think so. They can't tell out-of-state businesses how to operate. It's not discrimination because geographic location is not a protected class.
Opening up salary information means that everything about salary needs to be equal, fair and objective. Basically the review system will become pass fail.
Reviews will become bland and meaningless, raises will be standard based on the job classification, anything else wouldn’t be objective. If everyone isn’t treated exactly the same there will lawsuits galore.
Bonuses will also go away, because it’s impossible to give each person unique goals and expectations and fairly assess each person and their custom goals, against everyone else at that same level. Lawyers will have a field day.
Time in level determines promotions, not skill, not knowledge, time in level. Time in level is used because it’s the only objective system that works, anything else is too subjective and will open employers to lawsuits
If you you can’t move up the ranks based on skills and effort why bother trying to exceed?
This salary transparency system will be used by corporate America to suppress wages even further.
Yeah or the rungs can still be there. You'll see unworthy people pass you to levels they don't deserve, but the point is that you'll see it. When I don't make principal engineer, but someone else much less skilled and experienced does, I'll know what the score is, versus them keeping this as a guarded secret.
Transparent pay doesn't guarantee the type of "equal, fair, objective" pay concept you mention. There seems to be a bit of a false dichotomy in these threads.
Honestly, I think the pay policies in many industries needs a major overhaul. I have seen companies spend endless time working out compensation each cycle trying to balance like hundred different factors and they come out with this overly contrived and comprehensive compensation framework that nobody seems to comprehend. The outcome is this huge spread in pay with even minute differences across same groups of people that only cause more frustration and anxiety for everyone.
I feel these efforts are largely misguided. Companies think optimising rewards is the best way to extract "output" from employees. I can't speak for all industries but at least for those that employ creative skill, this couldn't be further from the truth. People in creative work are more motivated by intrinsic causes like a desire to create something, than by extrinsic factors like pay. Of course, pay is always important but it is something people do not want to think about all the time. Opaque and contrived pay policies create an environment which makes people think and mull over pay all the time which doesn't help anyone.
> Basically the review system will become pass fail.
Not if you want to advance.
> If everyone isn’t treated exactly the same there will lawsuits galore.
Um, no.
> Bonuses will also go away...
We get bonuses.
> Time in level determines promotions, not skill, not knowledge, time in level. Time in level is used because it’s the only objective system that works, anything else is too subjective and will open employers to lawsuits
Time in level results in an increase in level steps, not promotions (pay chart is a grid: level x steps). If it did, then everybody would be promoted at the same time, which can't happen because there are only so many openings. If you want to be promoted (i.e. increase in pay level), requirements are laid out very clearly. They do not happen automatically.
I'm not sure that your conclusion follows. Google has levels and pay bands per level (you can see sampled data of it on levels.fyi). There are many problems with the promotion process at Google, but the malaise you describe isn't one of them.
> Time in level determines promotions, not skill, not knowledge, time in level. Time in level is used because it’s the only objective system that works, anything else is too subjective and will open employers to lawsuits
This seems like a pretty pessimistic take. Employees won’t be bringing lawsuits without merit; if a person has been coasting it will be quite difficult for them to prove that they should be compensated similarly to someone else that did not before a jury. If the differences in contributions are not that significant then differences in compensation do seem unjustified don’t they?
I think pay transparency requirements should be limited to below some compensation threshold. I can't put a number on it myself (maybe somewhere $100k-500k), but after some point, it becomes impossible to compare the compensation of one employee to another. High compensation is probably a reasonable proxy for this.
As a bonus, this might provide some upward pressure on lower salaries. If a company doesn't want to tell the world they pay you $THRESHOLD - $10k, maybe they'll just bump you up to $THRESHOLD. In fact, if it were up to me, I'd probably choose this threshold in a way that this upward pressure affects the most people possible (so, closer to $100k than $500k).
The problem with this is that different industries will hit this threshold at different points in their cost structures. FAANG might hit it for entry level software engineers while other industries might never hit the threshold for any employees. I don't know how to resolve this, but I definitely think transparency above some limit will cause more problems than it solves.
That's been the norm for union jobs, government jobs, and military jobs for a century or so in the US. Plus, in the US you have the right to disclose your pay, regardless of whether the employer likes it.
> in the US you have the right to disclose your pay
This is the real solution. Lower & Middle class people are being crushed financially in part because they don't talk about money. Lots of rich people keep score, middle class people are too "classy" to do it.
ftr Glassdoor data is 100% bullshit. I make about 4-5x what they claim I'm worth.
Levels.fyi is a much better resource. You have to take into account the value of offered equity (not realized equity at time of vest!). For many engineers equity is 50% or more of compensation.
Probably. But then that too will likely become public.
I forget which Scandinavian country this is true for but I think there exists a country where compensation is a matter of public record.
I support this 100%. I want everything to be transparent here. I know where I stand skills and competency wise compared to my colleagues so I will be ok making less than those I am less skilled or less productive as. That being said I think I’m underpaid. A transparent pay structure will only benefit the employees as we learn in Economics: the more information about prices there are in a situation the better each actor can make choices.
Having the same job title and having the same job performance are two very different things. If one person is grossly outperforming another do you have to write them a new job title to compensate them for it?
Yes, that would be preferred, I think. Write a new job title with defined expectations, so that other people in the organization would know and understand why this person is paid more, and what it is that they should strive for if they want to reach the same level.
I guarantee you that if you look at the job title "Vice President" at, say, JP Morgan's Corporate and Investment Bank you're going to see total compensation that ranges over an order of magnitude.
If someone outperforms another person, you have to be able to prove that with numbers. Being upfront about pay does mean that you are upfront about pay differences. For example: Alex has a higher degree or more experience, Robin tends to be finished before the last minute.
Things like job performance are harder to measure unless folks are put in very similar situations. For example, if you measure a cashier's performance by the number of customers they serve, the overnight cashier is almost always going to perform badly simply because there are fewer customers at night.
There has been an attitude through the entire duration of my career in IT that it is taboo to share the details of how much you are making with your fellow coworkers. I have been unabashed in sharing that information though because keeping it to yourself only benefits your employers not your coworkers.
If you want people to be fairly compensated for the work they do, forget salaries, look at the companies growth and profits. I think all employees should get a taste of any dispersal of profit, divided evenly, based on time served since the last payout. (Annually?)
> Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the same when we're shopping for a job?
This is the opposite to how a job should be thought about. Shopping for a job seems to imply a business already owns my time, skills, etc. when they are really the ones searching. And transparency would further exacerbate that idea, as the job candidate is now bounded without even being able to show what they are capable of.
On the flip side, my employer is fully transparent about salaries from the c-suite all the way down and nobody seems to mind.
The idea we should share our salary information presumes that work and value are fungible, a premise which is absurd.
Why not just run a website where people can report their company, role, and salaries? (e.g. glassdoor) And if you can't solve that effectively, I guarantee regulating it into existence isn't going to be any better or have fewer perverse incentives.
The reality is that coders are systematically underpaid and mostly fungible. The cliche is that you get a raise when you switch jobs (and your new employer knows the least about you). Not that you get a raise when you stay at your old job and differentiate yourself more and more from those other, less competent people who have the same title and qualifications as you, but are somehow worth less to the company.
Coders will never voluntarily allow their salaries to become public. Every coder thinks that he is better than average, and that the salary that he is paid uniquely reflects his superior technical and negotiating abilities. In a misanthropic industry, coders feel that the other employees are their enemy, out to prevent them from being secret ninja superstars.
What does "pay scale" mean?
Does it mean that the employer has to provide an exact salary for every person at the company who has the title the prospective employee is applying?
Does it mean a min-max scale?
What if it is a new position?
In the extreme and assuming the min-max scale, employers will now be incentivized to give everyone either totally unique titles or exactly the same titles, such that it will remove any disadvantage.
In the more likely scenario, this will probably raise the bottom payouts, while incentivizing more aggressive negotiating on the part of the employers. One can imagine many more take-it or leave-it scenarios, as the higher pay for the lower end has to come from somewhere.
Companies disclosing employee salaries is a major thing, but for me the first step for companies is to provide transparency for *salary bands* for each role, internally and externally. Funnily enough I wrote about this earlier this week
I like how it works at big tech companies nowadays.
Publicly, you know what level you and other employees are, and the bands for the levels are mostly known (at levels.fyi). This means you have an idea of where your salary relates to others, but not a perfect idea. You can coherently talk about when you should be earning more, and have a direct conversation about how your ability compares to employees at other levels, but you don't know the pay amounts so precisely that you can be disgruntled by a single other person, or worried that someone else will be secretly annoyed with you.
[+] [-] ram_rar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lomkju|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endymi0n|4 years ago|reply
Despite the question being rhethorical, the answer is everything that's wrong about this proposal: Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty.
I've got people with the same job title with almost a magnitude of difference in actual output. Sure, on paper, they're "doing the same thing", but if someone forced me to shoehorn them into categories, that would mostly serve to punish top performes with little credentials and push them somewhere else.
I feel strongly about this, mostly because it happened to myself: After being sold, the first company that employed me introduced a "completely fair and transparent" compensation scheme. After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately.
I called a recruiter the next day and was out a few months after.
Pay transparency is something that has upsides imho, but isn't a clear-cut win. It can turn out to be a net negative. Some further reading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-downside-of-full-pay-transp...
[+] [-] jgilias|4 years ago|reply
From that point on I have consistently refused to 'name my amount'. Literally, I would say something like: "A company like yours must have a defined salary scale for the given position, why don't we start from there, and see how it aligns with my expectations?". If they push on, it goes something like: "So, are you saying that salaries at your organization are ad-hoc, and you're looking for the cheapest person who can fill the role?". In which case, I'm really not interested anymore.
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|4 years ago|reply
Why is transparency a problem here?
The person doing orders of magnitude more work is probably only getting paid 10% more.
Transparency could possibly make this better for both the workers and the employers, or it could make them worse for both - better for one and worse for the other - better for one and no difference for the other - or no difference for either. There's lots of possibilities.
But It doesn't seem like there's reason to believe transparency is surely bad.
[+] [-] sangnoir|4 years ago|reply
Devils advocate- isn't this a bit like arguing peanut butter shouldn't be uniformly priced, but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown: soil acidity, use of pesticides, as well as farmers grit and dedication? A jar is a jar, and ideally, a job is a job. An employee can either do the job, and be paid what it says on the can, or they cannot do the job and have to be transitioned out.
Sure, jars come in different sizes and brands, but we should stop pretending each job is bespoke when employee organizations function on the basis of them being similar, empirically workers are replaceable.
My biggest problem is information asymmetry: even if I were to accept your argument at face value (that important attributes are hard to gauge); the employee has much less knowledge on how much they ought to be paid for their skill-level, but the employer will have that information up the wazoo (both internally, and through industry surveys and back-channels)
[+] [-] thescriptkiddie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naikrovek|4 years ago|reply
For the same reasons you cite, equal pay is important. Some employees are better than others, and this is very hard to qualify, and the effect is that those who have less skill at negotiation, are underpaid, completely independent of skill, while those who are better at negotiation are paid more, completely independent of skill.
If skill is not going to be a factor in how people are paid, then pay for the role and not the person.
Any given person can and will grow in their role, potentially earning more (but not getting paid more) than they did a month prior; even moreso if they don't have to stress about money all of the time, and can just have all of those concerns alleviated even a little by higher pay.
Most people want to be better at their career, and are bogged down by the myriad of troubles that tight budgets generally cause. Remove these impediments for those who have reached a point in their career where they've earned the right to be without these troubles, and you will see your people take off, like how plants bloom when they haven't seen water in 10 days.
[+] [-] honkycat|4 years ago|reply
I was doing ALL of the DevOps and security work, while also contributing to back-end development. I knew the system in and out and was working my ASS off.
When the time for yearly reviews came, I was excited to get a big raise ( to bring me in line with the median for my job title ), and a pat on the back.
Instead they announced some "point-based pay scale" and told me I was technically already over-paid for my position. No raise, no promotion.
The thing is, the point system was based on reviews from my peers. Who all did their own back-end and front-end work and were never really collaborating with me. I was just loudly as possible running things on the back-end and trying to keep my users happy.
ALL of us ended up around the middle of the chart "with expectations we will move up." "Oh, you built the company? Well uh... you're still just a senior engineer."
A week later I had accepted an offer making +50% and they were out one of their foundational engineers. Most of the other devs followed suit. So the pennies they saved lost them pounds of engineers they now had to recruit and re-hire for. What a bonehead move.
So I definitely hear you here: basing pay off of arbitrary points allocated by your peers instead of actually measuring performance is bad in my experience.
[+] [-] Dig1t|4 years ago|reply
You're worth exactly what you can convince someone to pay you, nothing more or less than that.
[+] [-] themolecularman|4 years ago|reply
I also am a tech worker with no tech degree (no math, CS, eng, etc).
Pay transparency would be run by administrators inside businesses that would likely implement something as you describe: "So-and-so just graduated cum laude from X with a degree in Y therefore they're at pay band Z."
It will be horrible for people who had to self-educate.
[+] [-] hamandcheese|4 years ago|reply
While I am a fan of pay transparency, something about this bothers me. Does Colorado actually have standing here?
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
If you have 0 employees in Colorado, you're free to do whatever you want then.
https://www.gibsondunn.com/colorado-department-of-labor-and-...
[+] [-] xmprt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehappypm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watertom|4 years ago|reply
Opening up salary information means that everything about salary needs to be equal, fair and objective. Basically the review system will become pass fail.
Reviews will become bland and meaningless, raises will be standard based on the job classification, anything else wouldn’t be objective. If everyone isn’t treated exactly the same there will lawsuits galore.
Bonuses will also go away, because it’s impossible to give each person unique goals and expectations and fairly assess each person and their custom goals, against everyone else at that same level. Lawyers will have a field day.
Time in level determines promotions, not skill, not knowledge, time in level. Time in level is used because it’s the only objective system that works, anything else is too subjective and will open employers to lawsuits
If you you can’t move up the ranks based on skills and effort why bother trying to exceed?
This salary transparency system will be used by corporate America to suppress wages even further.
[+] [-] P_I_Staker|4 years ago|reply
Transparent pay doesn't guarantee the type of "equal, fair, objective" pay concept you mention. There seems to be a bit of a false dichotomy in these threads.
[+] [-] potamic|4 years ago|reply
I feel these efforts are largely misguided. Companies think optimising rewards is the best way to extract "output" from employees. I can't speak for all industries but at least for those that employ creative skill, this couldn't be further from the truth. People in creative work are more motivated by intrinsic causes like a desire to create something, than by extrinsic factors like pay. Of course, pay is always important but it is something people do not want to think about all the time. Opaque and contrived pay policies create an environment which makes people think and mull over pay all the time which doesn't help anyone.
[+] [-] hondo77|4 years ago|reply
Government employee here.
> Basically the review system will become pass fail.
Not if you want to advance.
> If everyone isn’t treated exactly the same there will lawsuits galore.
Um, no.
> Bonuses will also go away...
We get bonuses.
> Time in level determines promotions, not skill, not knowledge, time in level. Time in level is used because it’s the only objective system that works, anything else is too subjective and will open employers to lawsuits
Time in level results in an increase in level steps, not promotions (pay chart is a grid: level x steps). If it did, then everybody would be promoted at the same time, which can't happen because there are only so many openings. If you want to be promoted (i.e. increase in pay level), requirements are laid out very clearly. They do not happen automatically.
[+] [-] boulos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|4 years ago|reply
This seems like a pretty pessimistic take. Employees won’t be bringing lawsuits without merit; if a person has been coasting it will be quite difficult for them to prove that they should be compensated similarly to someone else that did not before a jury. If the differences in contributions are not that significant then differences in compensation do seem unjustified don’t they?
[+] [-] sschueller|4 years ago|reply
They justify paying you less for the same work because of your location. So you are as qualified as someone else but make way less.
On the other side their products cost the same globally.
[+] [-] creato|4 years ago|reply
As a bonus, this might provide some upward pressure on lower salaries. If a company doesn't want to tell the world they pay you $THRESHOLD - $10k, maybe they'll just bump you up to $THRESHOLD. In fact, if it were up to me, I'd probably choose this threshold in a way that this upward pressure affects the most people possible (so, closer to $100k than $500k).
The problem with this is that different industries will hit this threshold at different points in their cost structures. FAANG might hit it for entry level software engineers while other industries might never hit the threshold for any employees. I don't know how to resolve this, but I definitely think transparency above some limit will cause more problems than it solves.
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agentdrtran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta3928283211|4 years ago|reply
This is the real solution. Lower & Middle class people are being crushed financially in part because they don't talk about money. Lots of rich people keep score, middle class people are too "classy" to do it.
ftr Glassdoor data is 100% bullshit. I make about 4-5x what they claim I'm worth.
Levels.fyi is a much better resource. You have to take into account the value of offered equity (not realized equity at time of vest!). For many engineers equity is 50% or more of compensation.
[+] [-] zachlatta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdblair|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigatexal|4 years ago|reply
I forget which Scandinavian country this is true for but I think there exists a country where compensation is a matter of public record.
I support this 100%. I want everything to be transparent here. I know where I stand skills and competency wise compared to my colleagues so I will be ok making less than those I am less skilled or less productive as. That being said I think I’m underpaid. A transparent pay structure will only benefit the employees as we learn in Economics: the more information about prices there are in a situation the better each actor can make choices.
[+] [-] kweinber|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgilias|4 years ago|reply
Otherwise it just reeks of favoritism.
[+] [-] NovemberWhiskey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|4 years ago|reply
If someone outperforms another person, you have to be able to prove that with numbers. Being upfront about pay does mean that you are upfront about pay differences. For example: Alex has a higher degree or more experience, Robin tends to be finished before the last minute.
Things like job performance are harder to measure unless folks are put in very similar situations. For example, if you measure a cashier's performance by the number of customers they serve, the overnight cashier is almost always going to perform badly simply because there are fewer customers at night.
[+] [-] stillbourne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yakshaving_jgt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aantix|4 years ago|reply
Even if there's an order a magnitude difference in productivity between workers?
[+] [-] tyjaksn|4 years ago|reply
This is the opposite to how a job should be thought about. Shopping for a job seems to imply a business already owns my time, skills, etc. when they are really the ones searching. And transparency would further exacerbate that idea, as the job candidate is now bounded without even being able to show what they are capable of.
On the flip side, my employer is fully transparent about salaries from the c-suite all the way down and nobody seems to mind.
[+] [-] literallyaduck|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umeshunni|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yakshaving_jgt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|4 years ago|reply
Why not just run a website where people can report their company, role, and salaries? (e.g. glassdoor) And if you can't solve that effectively, I guarantee regulating it into existence isn't going to be any better or have fewer perverse incentives.
[+] [-] shahbaby|4 years ago|reply
Corporations left uncontested will selfishly take as much as they can.
[+] [-] legerdemain|4 years ago|reply
Coders will never voluntarily allow their salaries to become public. Every coder thinks that he is better than average, and that the salary that he is paid uniquely reflects his superior technical and negotiating abilities. In a misanthropic industry, coders feel that the other employees are their enemy, out to prevent them from being secret ninja superstars.
[+] [-] djoldman|4 years ago|reply
What does "pay scale" mean? Does it mean that the employer has to provide an exact salary for every person at the company who has the title the prospective employee is applying? Does it mean a min-max scale? What if it is a new position?
In the extreme and assuming the min-max scale, employers will now be incentivized to give everyone either totally unique titles or exactly the same titles, such that it will remove any disadvantage.
In the more likely scenario, this will probably raise the bottom payouts, while incentivizing more aggressive negotiating on the part of the employers. One can imagine many more take-it or leave-it scenarios, as the higher pay for the lower end has to come from somewhere.
Good? Bad? Blend of both?
[+] [-] lylo|4 years ago|reply
https://headey.net/salary-roulette/
[+] [-] lostdog|4 years ago|reply
Publicly, you know what level you and other employees are, and the bands for the levels are mostly known (at levels.fyi). This means you have an idea of where your salary relates to others, but not a perfect idea. You can coherently talk about when you should be earning more, and have a direct conversation about how your ability compares to employees at other levels, but you don't know the pay amounts so precisely that you can be disgruntled by a single other person, or worried that someone else will be secretly annoyed with you.
I think it's a healthy level of transparency.