10 ms·

Hmm. My experience tells me that a lot of this depends on the details of the team, and that there isn't a right-for-everyone policy. My story: I worked for a

• news_to_me 10y ago
  > You could say the takeaway is don't work for companies out to screw their workers, but that's most of them. Seems like this is something transparent salary policies might change.
  • hx87 10y ago
    Exactly--open salaries might cause some companies to crash and burn, but these are companies that /should/ crash and burn.
    • jjnoakes 10y ago
      I'm not arguing one way or the other about open salaries, but should a company really crash and burn for hiring someone who was willing to work for some price $X, even if it is lower than their peer? I mean the person did accept the job knowing $X, right?
      • edoceo 10y ago
        Yes. And then more data becomes available, which changes perspective. Then employees leave for better opportunity
        • jjnoakes 10y ago
          No disagreement here; I just don't know how "companies might crash and burn because they pay their employees lower than market rate" equates to "companies that pay their employees lower than market rate should crash and burn". One doesn't follow from the other, and I don't agree that there's inherent evil just because the salary was lower than elsewhere.
          • ozzy6009 10y ago
            It doesn't, what he is saying is that the companies that do crash and burn after revealing salary information to their employees are the ones that should crash and burn. There is not an inherent evil in paying a lower salary. On the other hand,if the only reason they are able to pay a lower salary is because their employees do not know any better, they are more likely to be negatively affected by opening their salary information.
          • jungturk 10y ago
            I didn't read it as a moral judgement. The important characteristics of the companies he's talking about is that they're in an unstable equilibrium dependent on wage ignorance. Meaning that wage info itself would destabilize them rather than any of the mentioned toxicity. I think he's excluded "companies that underpay but are stable in the presence of wage info" from the class that "should [be expected to] crash and burn".
      • hx87 10y ago
        If the "willing to work for $X" was based on flawed or incomplete information, and X would be higher if more complete information was accessible, then yes, I would say they should crash and burn. OTOH, if two people with access to the same information were willing to work for different salaries, that would be fine. IMO, information asymmetry that is enforced and not the result of research costs is a form of rent-seeking and should be abolished.
    • IshKebab 10y ago
      Which is exactly why it won't catch on.
• jsprogrammer 10y ago
  >This changed the team dynamics in a fundamental, toxic way. It engendered bitterness from them not only toward the company but to me as well, which ultimately led to all of us leaving the company for greener pastures but with lots of bad feelings all around. The dynamics weren't changed, you were all just able to finally see the reality of your situation: you were being taken advantage of and no one told you.
  • ryandrake 10y ago
    Another way to look at it is: Before salaries were revealed, the company managed to get their "good team dynamic" without paying for it.
    • sheepmullet 10y ago
      But they didn't. One of their employees was already concerned about their low salary. If anything this changed the situation from a developer leaving without notice for a higher paying role at a different company into a situation where the company could have retained them.
• marme 10y ago
  no two employees with the exact same job title should have more than 10% difference in pay. If someone is making 40% more than others with same title then they should be promoted to higher title and if they dont deserve that title then why is the company paying them so much. It is one thing to want to minimize salary costs but another to disrespect employees with absurdly low salary.
  • Joof 10y ago
    What if they do different jobs? Is the title so important?
    • Salgat 10y ago
      Agreed. Title doesn't really mean much, unless you force a ton of different titles.
  • mason55 10y ago
    Doesn't the Peter Principle come into play here? What if we do the same job but I do it twice as fast? That doesn't mean I'd be a good fit for the next level up, it might just mean I'm really good at doing this specific job very quickly.
    • ellisv 10y ago
      In my mind this is one of the cases where "Jr" and "Sr" titles can be useful.
      • jsprogrammer 10y ago
        Or a 20 hour work-week with full salary.
      • mason55 10y ago
        I suppose it's ambiguous but generally I feel like "senior" means "responsible for more pieces or higher level pieces" not just "faster at the simple stuff".
• andrewla 10y ago
  What you are saying generally rings true for an opaque-salary workplace (which is all I've ever worked at). In the end, though, the dissatisfaction is an edge-triggered phenomenon, not a level-triggered phenomenon. The introduction of an open-salary model to an opaque-salary environment seems tough for everyone, especially if there is a large disconnect between people's perception of their peer's performance vs. their actual salary. But in an open-salary environment, especially one with a feedback loop, it seems like it would be difficult to get into that state in the first place.
• pcsanwald 10y ago
  As a manager, I've always felt that I have zero incentive to pay anyone under a fair market rate. I also have always managed salaries in such a way so that if we had open salaries, there wouldn't be any surprises and no one would feel they weren't being paid fairly. Most people I know in similar roles to mine act in a similar way. So I'm not so sure that most companies are really out there trying to underpay their employees. In terms of running the business, I want to pay people fairly for a good day's work.
  • roel_v 10y ago
    "As a manager, I've always felt that I have zero incentive to pay anyone under a fair market rate." But are you a line manager or is part of your performance KPI's the profit of your unit? Or are you an owner in a small business whose own income is directly influenced by salary expenditure, like when you're running a (small) body shop or sell hours? Those are all very different situations to be in.
  • throwaway4job 10y ago
    I don't try to underpay employees, ever. I try to make sure I never lose an team member because of a dumb comp issue. However, open salaries would be problematic for me, because I've made some bad bets on new hires who are overpaid compared to what they deliver, but where it's not reasonable to fire them either. Imagine, for a moment, a team with 100 engineers, 96 of whom I think are paid fairly. But 4 of them are, in my opinion, overpaid by 25% or 30%. I could fire those four, but that would cost me more than freezing their pay until they level up, or a lot of time passes. so instead, I keep them on, and hope their peers don't find out what they make, because they might come to the wrong conclusion.
  • kbutler 10y ago
    Throwaway4job wrote: > open salaries would be problematic for me, because I've made some bad bets on new hires who are overpaid compared to what they deliver, but where it's not reasonable to fire them either. Open salaries would give you precisely the leverage you need to reduce those employees' salaries. "Your initial salary was X, expecting better-than-average performance. Your performance has been comparable to Amy and Ben, so your salary now matches theirs." They would either accept the reduction or would leave, without you having to fire them. The bigger problem would be it would tend to reduce the variance in salaries (why does Carl get 50% more than I do?), which may result in under-paying top performers, reducing their incentive to stay.
• rlpb 10y ago
  > You could say the takeaway is don't work for companies out to screw their workers, but that's most of them. By definition, if most companies are underpaying their workers, they're actually paying market rate.
  • stale2002 10y ago
    Not necessarily. Employees aren't always aware of how much other companies pay. I define underpaying as "other companies in the market would gladly poach these employees". But just because there are tons of companies willing to poach them, doesn't mean that the employees know this information.
    • exclusiv 10y ago
      That definition breaks down big time though depending on the nature of the business. I know one of my senior engineers could get more but I know he'd 1) work more hours, 2) have less freedom, 3) have less flexibility. I can't pay him what others would pay because it's a consulting business and it's getting harder and harder to get the high rates for the work we usually close. I'm not screwing him. I make it up in other areas which is why he's still with me. But he's suggested his market rate is like 30% more when I know the hours he'd have to put in for that are at least 30% more. So other companies would gladly poach him but it's not apples to apples, and I'm not going to play the game of "high salary" and then squeeze my people to make it make sense.
  • emodendroket 10y ago
    Great, but he's talking about fairness and not "market rate," which are two distinct concepts.
• Spooky23 10y ago
  I had a similar issue back in 2000. I was a new grad making the princely sum of $50k as a DBA. The woman who trained me and was incredibly capable made $27k -- literally less than she would make running a Gap. It got out, people got pissed, which they should have been.
  • gcb0 10y ago
    didnt even know you could live in sf with 27k in 2000
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      Wasn't sf, still, don't know how she lived.
• mathattack 10y ago
  Anytime two people compare salaries, at least one person gets angry. Sometimes two.
  • exclusiv 10y ago
    So true. Most people can't handle it. It's all relative to them and it's not usually logical. I worked for a small startup some time ago where the owner was paying me more than she paid herself but eventually we only had 2 employees left and everything became transparent. My friend (in sales) became all upset about his salary in relation to mine and they gave him a bump. I was eventually the last one left though. That was my first professional job and it's ironic my buddy in sales couldn't negotiate a rate he thought was fair. He's actually quite good. People are perfectly fine working for YEARS with their own valuation and then all of a sudden they think they're worth more because someone else is making more. And then they don't even offer a compelling reason for why they think they are worth more, which is really why they weren't being paid what they think they should have gotten in the first place. It's every employee's responsibility to know their value and to be able to articulate it. That's a very important dynamic of the workforce whether people like it or not. My favorite collegiate course of all time had only one agenda - to teach us to think differently in a way to be compelling and persuade. Every project was related to that premise. We don't have enough of these types of courses and that shifts more power to the employers.
    • sgift 10y ago
      > People are perfectly fine working for YEARS with their own valuation and then all of a sudden they think they're worth more because someone else is making more. Is that an argument? If yes, I don't see it. If people believe that they couldn't earn more they are probably "perfectly fine" due to this missing information. Then they learn what their peers make and think - rightfully* - "just a moment, I do the same job, to the same quality, why is my peer earning more than I am?" which in itself is already a compelling reason (so, your next point usually does not apply). > It's every employee's responsibility to know their value and to be able to articulate it. That's a very important dynamic of the workforce whether people like it or not. And open-salary makes this easier and harder to screw people over using information-asymmetry. * Yes, there are some people who just don't work as good as their peers and that's the reason they don't earn as much. From all I've seen over the years I am absolutely sure that this doesn't count for a significant part of the workforce compared to the part of the workforce that does a job comparable to their peers but still earns less income.
• emodendroket 10y ago
  It seems to me like this was a positive outcome for those two people you spoke to.
• eloisant 10y ago
  > You could say the takeaway is don't work for companies out to screw their workers, but that's most of them. Well, we're lucky enough to be in an industry where there are more jobs than qualified candidate. So if you know your market value, make clear what you want when interviewing, you can find a job that will pay you what you're worth.
• r_smart 10y ago
  The worst bit about this is how they held it against you as well. I've had a similar experience (over much smaller amounts of money) and it caused nothing but trouble for me. Revealing your salary to your co-workers is just a good way to get them pissed off at you, or, possibly, you pissed off at them.