At my last job, all salaries were public record, and some dude even put together a website (https://umsalary.info) to make searching easier.
Want to know what some internal career change might look like? Just take a look. Want to see what career path got someone else to where they are? Take a look. Want to know if you are being underpaid/discriminated against? Click on the job title next to your name and see where you stand compared to all employees with the same role.
At a place where Diversity Equity and Inclusion is a stated goal I think this works well. I also know that people don't always get paid the same amount, and (as I often explain to my six-year-old) fair doesn't mean the everything has to be equal, but it is very useful to know where you stand.
At my new job, the information on Levels seemed accurate based on my offer, and I was very happy with it.
Frankly, I'll never work for a company with public pay. I don't want equality, I want to be able to negotiate my value to the company whether that is more or less than others. This is why I became a freelancer years ago and have vastly increased my income. I'm paid for the value I provided the company's bottom line, not some arbitrary "equal" amount based on an arbitrary title as a cog in the machine.
"At my last job, all salaries were public record, and some dude even put together a website (https://umsalary.info) to make searching easier."
State employers, such as state universities, are generally1 required by state law to make data they generate, including salary data, available for public inspection. The penalties for non-compliance may be criminal as well as civil.2 Thus the incentives to make salary data available, as well as its purpose, are clear (the purpose is government transparency, not employees personal interests around their careers). This rationale for making salaries public and the incentive for complying pre-date the emergence of "diversity and inclusion" policies.
In contrast, private entities are under no such legal obligation to make salary data available. Perhaps that may change in the future but it will never be the same as what is required by "open government" laws, like the one that required the parents salary to be public information.
As for the OP, US labour laws do not place any affirmative obligation on private entities to share salary data. It is true that its illegal to prevent employees from sharing data, but how much much incentive is there to comply when the only "penalty" is reinstatement and backpay. There is arguably more incentive to make employees believe they should keep quiet about their salaries. Historically, that has not been difficult to do in the US since it has been part of the culture.
1 I would guess there are no exceptions but I have not checked every state.
One thing that surprised me is that the highest salaried employees seem to be in Athletics ( https://umsalary.info/numbers.php ). Is it something specific to that particular university or a normal thing in the US universities?
A simple rule for negotiations is that whoever has more information has an advantage. That means if workers don’t know the exact pay scales they are almost by definition at a disadvantage while the company has the full info.
To the people who think they negotiated really well and want this to be kept from their coworkers I say that a lot of you have been lied to and you are making what everybody else makes or even less. I still remember a guy proudly telling me about his great contract and his face when I told him that I made almost twice as him.
I've found a few years ago some people were making more than me at generally lower skill and abilities. So I started giving my other colleagues my past pay history and raise %s and it turns out they were getting significantly less pay. I'm glad for them to be brought up so that my party doesn't seem drastically higher as well when I all for mine.
I've changed job positions and let them know my previous pay since they are in that role now. Sadly I think their pay is generally smaller since I negotiate until I embarrass myself and my friends are women and I understand that the negotiations are less aggressive from that population in general.
I made 12% more than them at the same job role.
And at my current I'm also about that much higher than the bottom paid (a guy internal promotion).
I asked for 12% raise citing my usefulness to the team as a whole. Still waiting on the results of that. It seems I negotiate in a very clumsy manner but still getting better results than those I know about.
Possibly those that get paid less share their pay, but those that get paid more do not?
This sort of illustrates why I dislike talking about salary. This person went from super happy with his life to unhappy, and nothing is any different in his life. I understand that this unhappiness is part of what drives income equality, so I’m glad more people are having these conversations, but I was once in a job for a number of years, where for several reasons I just needed to weather the storm, and I certainly didn’t need to know what my coworkers were making at the time.
> A simple rule for negotiations is that whoever has more information has an advantage
Outside of some progressive companies, what jobs exist where everyone's salary is public at the time of negotiation (when hired?) and people can negotiate salaries 2x or more for the same position?
Do you think you deserve to make 2x what your colleague does?
Did you tell your colleague why you think you deserve 2x their salary?
Every year, the local SPEEA rep would post an anonymous graph showing compensation compared to experience. The org was large enough that you couldn’t pinpoint everyone, but you could easily see where you stood WRT your peers.
Yeah, that's actually a key thing I miss from my previous bigcorp job many years ago.
Pay was tied to numerical career grades. Everyone's numerical career grade was public information. Salary ranges (fairly broad and overlapping for each grade) for each were published each cycle. While there was a ton of griping along the lines "seriously, X got promoted to 23!? They just suck up!", it was at least consistent across disciplines and clearly tied listed job responsibilities to a pay range to make justifications for a promotion easier.
I know it's a very common system, but my current company doesn't have that, and I quite miss it.
We somewhat do via titles. E.g. I know the 25 year old engineers who have the title "principle staff engineer" despite not being trusted to do anything directly are absurdly overpaid, but it's really murky and not consistent. E.g. If your title says "software engineer" you're on a completely different scale than someone who's title says "data engineer". And if you have actual experience in the field, you'll be considered a "scientist" or a "technician" instead of an "engineer" depending on the exact role you're hired into.
At any rate, it's really, really, really unclear how anything relates, and going from a "staff X" position to a "junior Y" position is often a pay raise.
First thing a union does when they enter a workplace is talk about what everyone is paid.
My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much you got paid. There's only 1 reason, they are underpaying someone. They propose that it's to my benefit because they can then pay me more.
Then a coworker got a better job and told everyone how much he was being paid. This angered lots of people because they were being paid much less and did much more.
What blows my mind. Minimum wage is $15/hr and they were getting $24/hr as senior sysadmins with tons of experience. Soon as they decided to get a new job, they got a nice raise near instantly and they were gone. Yet their time was billed out above $100/hr. It was literally the greed of our employer who kept their wages low begging for someone to offer more money and steal them. Such a high risk for minimal benefit in greed.
These numbers do not seem to correspond to actual salaries. If I look up my company I can see multiple entries for job titles that I have specific knowledge of, and the quoted salary is much much lower than anyone's base salary has ever been.
I’m in my 50s. When I was younger, no one talked about pay ever. It was never ever broached.
These days, all my younger coworkers openly discuss pay. I really like the openness today. It’s shared in a way that you’re trying to help your coworker, like “dude you’re totally underpaid I made $20k more than that! Go ask for a raise or find a new job!”
It’s a different sense of camaraderie that people share these days instead of the zero-sum game from when I was younger.
I'm also in my 50s and recall when it was completely taboo. Except I worked at a startup a few years back where I was told going in that we were all making the exact same pay from engineers to CTO. We all knew it was below-market pay, but it was supposedly so the company could bootstrap. One day I was having a conversation with a Russian co-worker (on an H1-B, I think) and I said something along the lines of "we're all making $XK/month which is about 25% below market, but hopefully we'll get some funding and that will change soon...". The look on his face told me that something was wrong. "You're making $Xk/month?!" he said. "Yeah, you are too, right... right?" "No, he replied, $2K/month less." I was really surprised because this guy was doing pretty much all of our hardware development and he was pretty brilliant. Shortly after he went to the CEO and (rightly) demanded parity.
Millennials certainly seem more willing to openly discuss salaries, which is a promising trend. I've also noticed that people in NY are much more eager to discuss specific salary numbers than people in SF.
Cost/benefit analysis says there is nothing for me to gain by discussing my salary with my co-workers and only potential downsides.
Everyone wants to be paid more than they are of course and I'm no exception, but overall I feel like I am being paid pretty close to what I am worth. After accounting for the fact that I work for company with a decent culture, don't take part in an on-call rotation and pretty much get to pick my hours outside of scheduled meetings. I know what the market rate is in my area for my skills and experience, and I negotiate my pay (and raises) with my employer according to that data.
What _would_ hurt me (or at least my image) is if someone who does similar work to me went to their manager and said, "hey manager, bityard says he makes $x more than me, please give me a raise." Now maybe the manager is a completely reasonable guy and agrees completely. But it's a small company and maybe that particular manager isn't so reasonable. Now I'm the bad guy in that manager's eyes for "bragging" about my take-home pay and making him do the work to convince _his_ managers to approve the raise and justify the increased operating costs, passing along my name discreetly to them as well. Or maybe the raise is denied, and the guy quits. Then I'm the bad guy. Or the raise is denied and the guy is fired for something unrelated. It all gets murky and resentful real quick.
Further, if you ask someone at work what their pay is, how do you know they are telling the truth? I can think of several reasons people might lie about what they make by shifting the number in either direction.
At the end of the day, going to your boss and saying you and the other employees compared salaries is frankly a pretty lazy (and likely ineffective) way to ask for a raise. The _right_ way to ask for a raise is to do your own research on market rates, and then _prove_ to your employer why you deserve the going rate (or higher) based on your work performance and other relevant factors. As it always has been.
> nothing for me to gain by discussing my salary with my co-workers and only potential downsides
That sort of makes sense from a social consequences standpoint. But, if the data is open, the only real solution for employers is to correct upwards. They aren't going to lower the salary of high salary outliers. It seems like it would raise the water level for everyone.
It's also useful as a way to know you should ask for a raise. You don't have to necessarily mention it when asking.
I appreciate your pragmatism, but it falls apart in the statement "do your own research on market rates". How do you discover those without openness about salaries? You could interview at other companies, but then you'd only find other employers' opinions on what they could pay specifically you, not what they could pay someone else like you.
> The _right_ way to ask for a raise is to do your own research on market rates,
This only works until some point.
I showed my employer that they pay me around 15% less than median for software engineers in general (there’s public data here on this from taxes). The result was that they told me that 15% is too much offered me “even” an inflation-adjustment and in the end didn’t give me anything. All while also telling me they want to keep me and how I’m one of their best developers.
Often getting a proper raise only works through jumping the ship.
I want to talk about pay, and make choices based on what I know about other people's pay. I've attempted to do this several times with friends, but for a lot of people pay is just too intimate a number to discuss objectively.
In one case, we discovered that one friend was getting paid $30k less per year than I was, which seemed mostly to be related to the fact his parents convinced him that no one was actually getting the insane tech salaries people talk about here and thus he didn't negotiate. Maybe he took that information with him to his employer and successfully negotiated up, maybe he didn't. I don't know because he started treating me differently and eventually stopped talking to me altogether.
It's not like job title maps to the actual work anyways. Some companies only expect SWEs to work various parts of a huge monolith that magically gets deployed somewhere. Some companies only expect SWEs to own every single part of the process for getting an application from a whiteboard to prod. Some companies have different expectations depending on your org. Some companies vary these expectations based on what they sense they can get individuals to do. That's not even discussing the idea that people can be better (and thus take less time) than others even if they are doing the "same" task. How is pay a useful number in that context?
I'm just soured on the whole idea, I don't see how a system based on this kind of radical transparency doesn't result in either completely leveled salaries or pay reflecting (and enforcing) social hierarchies. I just see people using different social tools based on group perceptions more than the modicum of individual agency I have when I'm able to advocate for my specific contribution's value during negotiations.
The problem is that you don't know the value of your contribution - unless you're in accounting or the CFO. At least with knowledge of what other people make, you can know the ratio of relative contributions to compensation.
Without that, you know nothing. You'll be making the case that your performance deserves a 20% raise, and they'll negotiate you down to a 10% raise. Meanwhile everyone else is making twice as much as you. Your estimate of 20% was not based on your value it was an estimate that you made of what sounded reasonable, and what you thought you might be able to get away with. That's easily nullified by the boss always playing hardball, and always giving the impression that they're paying you as much as you possibly can.
How can you possibly know how much you should be paid if you both don't know how much other people are paid, and you don't have access to the books?
A friend of mine worked as an editor for a news paper. He was a new hire, and a woman who has been working as an editor at the same news paper for 9 years asked him what his salary offer was. It turned out she after 9 years was getting paid $3k less than what he was offered as a new hire.
Similar situations arise constantly in the tech sector. If you stay with a company for a few years, you'll probably get surpassed in salary by new college grads depending on the market at the time.
If you let it go too long before you bring it up, when you finally do, you'll get some BS about how they "can't" bump you up because they "can't" authorize that large of a salary bump. A purely BS, arbitrary, rule.
This is business as usual in all industries. Companies don’t value tenure and you’re often better off changing companies for promotion, salary increases, etc.
To be honest, $3k sounds like a tiny variance. I frequently see 20-30k differences on middle management roles. Often 10%-30% differences. Getting several years of 3% increases can put you well behind the market.
This is one of the reasons salary bands are so wide. Employers don’t want to bring current staff up to market but want the ability to hire top talent. Also, there’s a fair bit of budget exceptions that get made when a great candidate comes along (whether they’re great or not, TBD)
There is a sort of stagnancy that can surround people who have been there for years though.
For many devs, the first 3ish months you lack context to be super useful, then that first 2-4 years of hard work and enthusiasm are probably your peak productivity. It gets harder to maintain enthusiasm as the years go by, so some devs who are cruising with 5+ years might actually provide less long term value than a new hire.
A friend screened a female candidate years ago. She was highly qualified, with serious experience. When asked what her salary expectations were, she said what she made, but confessed she doubted the prospective employer could possibly pay that.
The reality was she was quite under paid. It's quite saddening that her prior employer seemed to have convinced her that such low pay was top of the industry mark.
Even as a man this has happened to me. In my case at least (and I think in many cases) is that the market price of labor changes, which requires employers to pay more for new hires, but they don't go back and adjust the salaries of existing employees.
In another life I worked in a warehouse, eventually I was promoted to Warehouse Manager, one of the first things I did was to try and get everyone a pay raise.
And there was a lady worked in the warehouse who was basically waiting till she could retire, and she'd worked there longer than I'd been alive and she was on an absolute pittance, we literally got guys in off the street (from an agency) and paid them twice what she was on.
She accepted it, and because not talking about salary's was encouraged no-one knew, I don't think even the directors knew how little she was on. But when I brought it up and encourage everyone to talk about pay, she realised, and I got her a raise.
Treat your workers like people and respect them. Look after them and they'll look after your business, I don't understand why so many businesses seem to struggle with understanding that.
My company was purchased a few years ago and everyone had to sign new contracts. The contracts included language prohibiting people from discussing their compensation with others.
Someone pointed out that this was just straight-up prohibited, so the contracts were rewritten to remove the clause. The funny thing is that nobody that I know of has shared, or wants to share, information about their compensation. They just wanted the option to do so should they choose.
Worker protections have no teeth in the US. It's to the point where factory management can literally be caught on camera saying they fired a worker for trying to organize a union (see American Factory) and the company gets nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Nothing is 'illegal' if it's not enforced.
In the US, it's entirely legal to fire someone because of the side they part their hair on, or because you're too attracted to them[*]. As the asshole, I mean person who was fired, your obligation is to eliminate every possible cause other than belonging to a protected class or some specific labor law corner case. If they didn't write about you in an email, you're in trouble.
Even if you want to maintain an old-style decorum about keeping salaries private, reaching out to people leaving the company is a great way to get an idea of your coworkers' pay.
I am starting work at a DAO (distributed autonomous organization).
Governance is done with a token and all votes are on the block chain. "Departments" ask the token holders for a budget and must get buy-in to get their proposal approved.
Everything is public because there is no legal entity to hold anything private. All payments to any address's are visible on the chain and can be easily traced.
As an engineering group we recently sat down to discuss what budget we would like to request which required us to specify how much each person would be receiving from the treasury each month we found that everyone preferred the transparency of knowing how much each person or position was making and people felt that their pay was more fair when they knew that it meant how it matched up with other engineers.
That’s why we created https://levels.fyi to collectively help people understand compensation and leveling across companies. While individually sharing data points is great, our goal is to help bring all this information completely into the public sphere so even people that don’t have a network or are starting their first tech job have a resource to ensure they’re not getting lowballed.
I do believe anonymous pay transparency is very different from full individual pay transparency too. Anonymously contributing even partially can mitigate a lot of the social stigma around attaching your real identity to compensation figures. That said, it’s still always a good idea to discuss these things with friends!
I've started posting my salary history, prompted by the situation with Apple and a lot of friends on the job market - had some mixed feedback, but positive from my peers at least
I actually recently did a blog post in which i talked pretty openly about my pay, earnings, savings and how purchasing power parity fits into all of that (or doesn't): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
That said, it always feels a bit shameful to talk about how much you earn, in part due to social conditioning, because of which you correlate how much you earn with your worth. No one wants to be told that their work is worth 10-20x times less than that of someone else (even if knowing that is also useful), which is a revelation that stares me in the face after comparing my salary with that of people abroad.
Oh well, i don't see why openness would be a bad thing, apart from me deciding to be open about this stuff, potential employers deciding that they can underpay me because of these figures, which would put me at a disadvantage compared to the other people who wouldn't talk about that stuff - a problem, that's there in the first place because everyone's salaries aren't public to begin with. It feels like some sort of a catch 22.
I think that telling your workers not to discuss pay is BS.
I also think publicly posting pay is BS as well.
They are opposite ends of the spectrum of extreme secrecy to extreme openness.
I have a few friends in the industry that candidly discuss compensation, and it's great to understand where one stands/what is achievable.
Besides pay for performance, experience and seniority..
Compensation is very path dependent.
PersonX stayed in a job paying low raises for 10 years keeping their head down until they got cut, then took the first job they could find.
PersonY actively manages their career, moves every 5-7 years, moving proactively when a new firm entices them with better pay.. not when they are desperate to get out of current role / in between jobs.
Of course if these two people land in the same firm in a similar role, they are going to come in at different salaries.
It's more than just negotiation. PersonY may value themselves, in terms of compensation, more than PersonX because the path they've taken them has lead to higher salary. They therefore require an even higher salary to be enticed to move.
In freelance networks I've worked in this is par for the course. I understand the rationale- they'd like their network to be more valuable by being the gatekeeper on everything- but it's extremely off-putting to hear you're never allowed to mention rates. In general, I mistrust services and systems that derive value from opacity.
[+] [-] chrisBob|4 years ago|reply
Want to know what some internal career change might look like? Just take a look. Want to see what career path got someone else to where they are? Take a look. Want to know if you are being underpaid/discriminated against? Click on the job title next to your name and see where you stand compared to all employees with the same role.
At a place where Diversity Equity and Inclusion is a stated goal I think this works well. I also know that people don't always get paid the same amount, and (as I often explain to my six-year-old) fair doesn't mean the everything has to be equal, but it is very useful to know where you stand.
At my new job, the information on Levels seemed accurate based on my offer, and I was very happy with it.
[+] [-] nightski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago|reply
State employers, such as state universities, are generally1 required by state law to make data they generate, including salary data, available for public inspection. The penalties for non-compliance may be criminal as well as civil.2 Thus the incentives to make salary data available, as well as its purpose, are clear (the purpose is government transparency, not employees personal interests around their careers). This rationale for making salaries public and the incentive for complying pre-date the emergence of "diversity and inclusion" policies.
In contrast, private entities are under no such legal obligation to make salary data available. Perhaps that may change in the future but it will never be the same as what is required by "open government" laws, like the one that required the parents salary to be public information.
As for the OP, US labour laws do not place any affirmative obligation on private entities to share salary data. It is true that its illegal to prevent employees from sharing data, but how much much incentive is there to comply when the only "penalty" is reinstatement and backpay. There is arguably more incentive to make employees believe they should keep quiet about their salaries. Historically, that has not been difficult to do in the US since it has been part of the culture.
1 I would guess there are no exceptions but I have not checked every state.
2 http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/openmtg.pdf
[+] [-] vibien|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
To the people who think they negotiated really well and want this to be kept from their coworkers I say that a lot of you have been lied to and you are making what everybody else makes or even less. I still remember a guy proudly telling me about his great contract and his face when I told him that I made almost twice as him.
[+] [-] inafewwords|4 years ago|reply
I've changed job positions and let them know my previous pay since they are in that role now. Sadly I think their pay is generally smaller since I negotiate until I embarrass myself and my friends are women and I understand that the negotiations are less aggressive from that population in general.
I made 12% more than them at the same job role.
And at my current I'm also about that much higher than the bottom paid (a guy internal promotion).
I asked for 12% raise citing my usefulness to the team as a whole. Still waiting on the results of that. It seems I negotiate in a very clumsy manner but still getting better results than those I know about.
Possibly those that get paid less share their pay, but those that get paid more do not?
[+] [-] milesvp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tathisit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stagger87|4 years ago|reply
Outside of some progressive companies, what jobs exist where everyone's salary is public at the time of negotiation (when hired?) and people can negotiate salaries 2x or more for the same position?
Do you think you deserve to make 2x what your colleague does?
Did you tell your colleague why you think you deserve 2x their salary?
[+] [-] coredog64|4 years ago|reply
Every year, the local SPEEA rep would post an anonymous graph showing compensation compared to experience. The org was large enough that you couldn’t pinpoint everyone, but you could easily see where you stood WRT your peers.
[+] [-] jofer|4 years ago|reply
Pay was tied to numerical career grades. Everyone's numerical career grade was public information. Salary ranges (fairly broad and overlapping for each grade) for each were published each cycle. While there was a ton of griping along the lines "seriously, X got promoted to 23!? They just suck up!", it was at least consistent across disciplines and clearly tied listed job responsibilities to a pay range to make justifications for a promotion easier.
I know it's a very common system, but my current company doesn't have that, and I quite miss it.
We somewhat do via titles. E.g. I know the 25 year old engineers who have the title "principle staff engineer" despite not being trusted to do anything directly are absurdly overpaid, but it's really murky and not consistent. E.g. If your title says "software engineer" you're on a completely different scale than someone who's title says "data engineer". And if you have actual experience in the field, you'll be considered a "scientist" or a "technician" instead of an "engineer" depending on the exact role you're hired into.
At any rate, it's really, really, really unclear how anything relates, and going from a "staff X" position to a "junior Y" position is often a pay raise.
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|4 years ago|reply
My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much you got paid. There's only 1 reason, they are underpaying someone. They propose that it's to my benefit because they can then pay me more.
Then a coworker got a better job and told everyone how much he was being paid. This angered lots of people because they were being paid much less and did much more.
What blows my mind. Minimum wage is $15/hr and they were getting $24/hr as senior sysadmins with tons of experience. Soon as they decided to get a new job, they got a nice raise near instantly and they were gone. Yet their time was billed out above $100/hr. It was literally the greed of our employer who kept their wages low begging for someone to offer more money and steal them. Such a high risk for minimal benefit in greed.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|4 years ago|reply
If you're in the US, I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|4 years ago|reply
This assumes of course, that they pay those employees fairly. At my company, we do, so it's a useful source of salary info when negotiating salary.
[+] [-] ttmb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] farmerstan|4 years ago|reply
These days, all my younger coworkers openly discuss pay. I really like the openness today. It’s shared in a way that you’re trying to help your coworker, like “dude you’re totally underpaid I made $20k more than that! Go ask for a raise or find a new job!”
It’s a different sense of camaraderie that people share these days instead of the zero-sum game from when I was younger.
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] standardUser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dml2135|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tathisit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bityard|4 years ago|reply
Everyone wants to be paid more than they are of course and I'm no exception, but overall I feel like I am being paid pretty close to what I am worth. After accounting for the fact that I work for company with a decent culture, don't take part in an on-call rotation and pretty much get to pick my hours outside of scheduled meetings. I know what the market rate is in my area for my skills and experience, and I negotiate my pay (and raises) with my employer according to that data.
What _would_ hurt me (or at least my image) is if someone who does similar work to me went to their manager and said, "hey manager, bityard says he makes $x more than me, please give me a raise." Now maybe the manager is a completely reasonable guy and agrees completely. But it's a small company and maybe that particular manager isn't so reasonable. Now I'm the bad guy in that manager's eyes for "bragging" about my take-home pay and making him do the work to convince _his_ managers to approve the raise and justify the increased operating costs, passing along my name discreetly to them as well. Or maybe the raise is denied, and the guy quits. Then I'm the bad guy. Or the raise is denied and the guy is fired for something unrelated. It all gets murky and resentful real quick.
Further, if you ask someone at work what their pay is, how do you know they are telling the truth? I can think of several reasons people might lie about what they make by shifting the number in either direction.
At the end of the day, going to your boss and saying you and the other employees compared salaries is frankly a pretty lazy (and likely ineffective) way to ask for a raise. The _right_ way to ask for a raise is to do your own research on market rates, and then _prove_ to your employer why you deserve the going rate (or higher) based on your work performance and other relevant factors. As it always has been.
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
That sort of makes sense from a social consequences standpoint. But, if the data is open, the only real solution for employers is to correct upwards. They aren't going to lower the salary of high salary outliers. It seems like it would raise the water level for everyone.
It's also useful as a way to know you should ask for a raise. You don't have to necessarily mention it when asking.
[+] [-] Leszek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legulere|4 years ago|reply
This only works until some point. I showed my employer that they pay me around 15% less than median for software engineers in general (there’s public data here on this from taxes). The result was that they told me that 15% is too much offered me “even” an inflation-adjustment and in the end didn’t give me anything. All while also telling me they want to keep me and how I’m one of their best developers.
Often getting a proper raise only works through jumping the ship.
[+] [-] malwrar|4 years ago|reply
In one case, we discovered that one friend was getting paid $30k less per year than I was, which seemed mostly to be related to the fact his parents convinced him that no one was actually getting the insane tech salaries people talk about here and thus he didn't negotiate. Maybe he took that information with him to his employer and successfully negotiated up, maybe he didn't. I don't know because he started treating me differently and eventually stopped talking to me altogether.
It's not like job title maps to the actual work anyways. Some companies only expect SWEs to work various parts of a huge monolith that magically gets deployed somewhere. Some companies only expect SWEs to own every single part of the process for getting an application from a whiteboard to prod. Some companies have different expectations depending on your org. Some companies vary these expectations based on what they sense they can get individuals to do. That's not even discussing the idea that people can be better (and thus take less time) than others even if they are doing the "same" task. How is pay a useful number in that context?
I'm just soured on the whole idea, I don't see how a system based on this kind of radical transparency doesn't result in either completely leveled salaries or pay reflecting (and enforcing) social hierarchies. I just see people using different social tools based on group perceptions more than the modicum of individual agency I have when I'm able to advocate for my specific contribution's value during negotiations.
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
Without that, you know nothing. You'll be making the case that your performance deserves a 20% raise, and they'll negotiate you down to a 10% raise. Meanwhile everyone else is making twice as much as you. Your estimate of 20% was not based on your value it was an estimate that you made of what sounded reasonable, and what you thought you might be able to get away with. That's easily nullified by the boss always playing hardball, and always giving the impression that they're paying you as much as you possibly can.
How can you possibly know how much you should be paid if you both don't know how much other people are paid, and you don't have access to the books?
[+] [-] pope_meat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comeonseriously|4 years ago|reply
If you let it go too long before you bring it up, when you finally do, you'll get some BS about how they "can't" bump you up because they "can't" authorize that large of a salary bump. A purely BS, arbitrary, rule.
[+] [-] conductr|4 years ago|reply
To be honest, $3k sounds like a tiny variance. I frequently see 20-30k differences on middle management roles. Often 10%-30% differences. Getting several years of 3% increases can put you well behind the market.
This is one of the reasons salary bands are so wide. Employers don’t want to bring current staff up to market but want the ability to hire top talent. Also, there’s a fair bit of budget exceptions that get made when a great candidate comes along (whether they’re great or not, TBD)
[+] [-] ericmcer|4 years ago|reply
For many devs, the first 3ish months you lack context to be super useful, then that first 2-4 years of hard work and enthusiasm are probably your peak productivity. It gets harder to maintain enthusiasm as the years go by, so some devs who are cruising with 5+ years might actually provide less long term value than a new hire.
[+] [-] twistedpair|4 years ago|reply
The reality was she was quite under paid. It's quite saddening that her prior employer seemed to have convinced her that such low pay was top of the industry mark.
[+] [-] lliamander|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twistedpair|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] new_guy|4 years ago|reply
And there was a lady worked in the warehouse who was basically waiting till she could retire, and she'd worked there longer than I'd been alive and she was on an absolute pittance, we literally got guys in off the street (from an agency) and paid them twice what she was on.
She accepted it, and because not talking about salary's was encouraged no-one knew, I don't think even the directors knew how little she was on. But when I brought it up and encourage everyone to talk about pay, she realised, and I got her a raise.
Treat your workers like people and respect them. Look after them and they'll look after your business, I don't understand why so many businesses seem to struggle with understanding that.
[+] [-] JohnFen|4 years ago|reply
Someone pointed out that this was just straight-up prohibited, so the contracts were rewritten to remove the clause. The funny thing is that nobody that I know of has shared, or wants to share, information about their compensation. They just wanted the option to do so should they choose.
[+] [-] comeonseriously|4 years ago|reply
[0] Discussing your salary.
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
[*] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/opinion/fired-for-being-b...
[+] [-] rpmisms|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osiris|4 years ago|reply
Governance is done with a token and all votes are on the block chain. "Departments" ask the token holders for a budget and must get buy-in to get their proposal approved.
Everything is public because there is no legal entity to hold anything private. All payments to any address's are visible on the chain and can be easily traced.
As an engineering group we recently sat down to discuss what budget we would like to request which required us to specify how much each person would be receiving from the treasury each month we found that everyone preferred the transparency of knowing how much each person or position was making and people felt that their pay was more fair when they knew that it meant how it matched up with other engineers.
[+] [-] zuhayeer|4 years ago|reply
I do believe anonymous pay transparency is very different from full individual pay transparency too. Anonymously contributing even partially can mitigate a lot of the social stigma around attaching your real identity to compensation figures. That said, it’s still always a good idea to discuss these things with friends!
[+] [-] Gortal278|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabbo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamietanna|4 years ago|reply
https://www.jvt.me/posts/2021/09/09/public-salary-history/
[+] [-] KronisLV|4 years ago|reply
That said, it always feels a bit shameful to talk about how much you earn, in part due to social conditioning, because of which you correlate how much you earn with your worth. No one wants to be told that their work is worth 10-20x times less than that of someone else (even if knowing that is also useful), which is a revelation that stares me in the face after comparing my salary with that of people abroad.
Oh well, i don't see why openness would be a bad thing, apart from me deciding to be open about this stuff, potential employers deciding that they can underpay me because of these figures, which would put me at a disadvantage compared to the other people who wouldn't talk about that stuff - a problem, that's there in the first place because everyone's salaries aren't public to begin with. It feels like some sort of a catch 22.
[+] [-] steveBK123|4 years ago|reply
I have a few friends in the industry that candidly discuss compensation, and it's great to understand where one stands/what is achievable.
Besides pay for performance, experience and seniority..
Compensation is very path dependent.
PersonX stayed in a job paying low raises for 10 years keeping their head down until they got cut, then took the first job they could find.
PersonY actively manages their career, moves every 5-7 years, moving proactively when a new firm entices them with better pay.. not when they are desperate to get out of current role / in between jobs.
Of course if these two people land in the same firm in a similar role, they are going to come in at different salaries. It's more than just negotiation. PersonY may value themselves, in terms of compensation, more than PersonX because the path they've taken them has lead to higher salary. They therefore require an even higher salary to be enticed to move.
[+] [-] jackconsidine|4 years ago|reply