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No thank you. My salary is private. I do not want my family and friends to know how much I make. I also have never told a potential employer my salary. I beli
by cracell 9y ago
No thank you.
My salary is private. I do not want my family and friends to know how much I make.
I also have never told a potential employer my salary. I believe it stopped things from going on to the interview stage but the way they took my refusal made me assume they paid under market rate.
- oh_sigh 9y agoOk, but know that completely rational nations have decided to go with OPs way(like Norway)
- ianai 9y agoAll such information is public there?
- marvin 9y agoWhat you pay in taxes is public (anyone can look it up), and it's normally easy to calculate taxable income from that. (Not always, there could be various events that throws the calculation off). Although in recent years, all lookups are logged and displayed to the other party, which has a chilling effect. I would like the old system back.
- dsacco 9y agoSo you want the data to be public, but you don't want the data about who accesses the data to be public?
- geebee 9y agoYou bring up a very good point, but I'm not sure I see an inconsistency here, Tax records are records owned and controlled by the government. It's information that has already been collected, and is accessible by some institutions, but not others, creating an imbalance in information. I want government to be transparent, and I generally support initiatives to make information public. But I'm not sure I like the idea of the government or some other big brother type knowing who is accessing what information. I say that as a general principle, with notable exceptions.
- taurath 9y agoI'd laugh my ass off if the CEO/upper management of any company in the US had to actually report to their employees how much they made, and not just through salary. There would be an uprising.
- cellshade 9y agoThe full compensation for the officers of any public company is available publicly in their filings.
- harryh 9y agoCompensation packages for CEOs and upper management for public companies are, in fact, public in formation (in most cases, there are some exceptions). This sort of thing is routinely reported on by the press. This has been true for a long time.
- jmcgough 9y agoPeople already know CEO salaries for publicly traded companies, and there's been no uprising.
- falcolas 9y agoNo uprising, but there has been an upwelling of CEO compensation, as nobody wants to lose their CEO due to a lack of compensation. IIRC, it's been one of the biggest driving forces in CEO's salaries skyrocketing. I don't think, however, that it would have a similar effect on our (i.e. employees) salaries.
- secabeen 9y agoIt's the Lake Wobegon effect. No company wants to say their CEO is below the mean, and pay is a signal of CEO quality, so every company is always trying to pay above the mean, and so the mean inexorably rises and rises.
- krupan 9y ago"I don't think, however, that it would have a similar effect on our (i.e. employees) salaries." Why not?
- literallycancer 9y agoI believe that's part of the reason it's not really possible to get numbers like 5 times the average salary in Norway, while it definitely is as a software engineer in the US.
- icelancer 9y ago"completely rational nations" Ah yes, of course, Norway is a rational nation and others are not. For whatever value of "rational" there is. Maybe you mean Norway exceptionally tightening immigration rules after the Swedish terror attacks? Or is it just public reporting of salary you like so much?
- oh_sigh 9y agoI like tightening immigration too. I wasn't saying that the US or other western nation wasn't rational. I was just saying that other countries that have their shit together as well make the exact opposite decision about salary transparency(or more correctly tax transparency).
- marcoperaza 9y agoYes, and excellence is not rewarded in such societies. Edit: Look at how pay works in countries where such information is public (i.e. Scandinavia). My understanding is that within a given line of work, everyone makes just about the same amount, adjusted for seniority, regardless of performance.
- Karunamon 9y agoCould you elaborate? This looks like a very throw-away, pithy comment. Edit: Thanks
- marcoperaza 9y agoSee my edit.
- Karunamon 9y agoThat's a bit different than "excellence not being rewarded" isn't it? Salaries in general seem to be very non-meritocratic, and there are other ways of compensating exceptional people that don't wind up in the check.
- marcoperaza 9y agoI want money for my work, thank you very much. And if I provide more value to my employer, I expect more money than the guy who provides less. Yes, it's up to me to make sure I'm getting my fair share. If I'm too insecure to get what I'm worth, that seems like my problem, not anyone else's.
- conanbatt 9y agoThis happens also in germany and spain and europe in general. Its just america that pays so damn much for developers, because of the competing capital. Price transparency is definitely not harming employees, and its also not harming companies in the long run.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoThey don’t need to ask you anymore. You self-reported it to a credit agency and friends, family, potential employers can get that plus other financial information from these agencies.
- nightski 9y agoWhere are you seeing this? There is zero income information on any of my credit reports. In addition, if it was so easy to obtain how come my credit card bank still constantly begs me to update my income information?
- swamp40 9y agohttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/equifax-breach-fallout-your-salary-history/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/equifax-breach-fallout-y...
- oddlyaromatic 9y ago> In addition, if it was so easy to obtain how come my credit card bank still constantly begs me to update my income information? I suspect this one has more to do with trying to engage you so that they may sell you more credit.
- falcolas 9y agoThe info is supplemental to what is considered to be a credit report, and thus does not have to appear on your pulled credit reports. Similar to how your FICO score is not part of your credit report; it's a separate paid service that the credit unions pay for so they can charge their own customers.
- nightski 9y agoRight, but this information is easily accessible from family & friends as the parent aluded? If so can you provide a link?
- 9y ago
- Sangermaine 9y ago>No thank you. >My salary is private. I do not want my family and friends to know how much I make. But have you thought about why you feel this way? I assume you are American, as am I, and so I understand we've been socialized by our culture to feel this way, but it really makes no sense. It's just a way to harm workers by keeping us from seeing when we're being screwed. I'd even go so far as to wager that this entire concept of salary being private was fostered and encouraged by employers for that very reason, because it gives them enormous leverage.
- icelancer 9y ago>>But have you thought about why you feel this way? Yes. I don't want to increase my attractiveness regarding a house robbery, as I live well below my means in a developing neighborhood, amongst other reasons. I very much understand the concept of leverage and have no problems privately discussing my salary amongst groups that I trust. That doesn't include the entire Internet.
- tclancy 9y ago>I live well below my means in a developing neighborhood, amongst other reasons. And what, hide cash in your mattress?
- icelancer 9y agoNot really sure how I store my money is relevant; are you insinuating that my neighbors and potential regionally-available criminals can get my demand deposit and IRA balances at will? EDIT: Ah, I see, you were making a snarky joke about them breaking into my house and stealing stuff. I do have nice things in my house, yes, not cash under my mattress. Just because I live below my means doesn't mean I don't have things I wouldn't want them to steal. Expensive laptops, computing resources for work, and, oh, I don't know, just not a fan of people breaking into my house in general regardless of what I have?
- throw-away-8 9y ago
- bearcobra 9y agoWe could still do a better job of sharing this kind of information in an anonymized way. It definitely gets tough when it's a small organization, but simply knowing what the salaries are for every employee in a department could make a huge difference.
- ben_jones 9y agoJust thinking, but could you pool the anonymized salaries of all small orgs together? For instance what if all YC start-ups pooled salary info together under normalized job titles? Then they wouldn't be able to pay under market, but the data could be made public without ruining anyone.
- Swizec 9y agoAs a counterpoint, if it wasn't for all the friendly people on HackerNews and similar places talking about how big their salaries are, I would still be stuck in Eastern Europe happy to write code for $7/hour. The biggest capitalist victory has been convincing people that sharing salary information is impolite. It benefits "the ruling class" in several ways. First it prevents people from realizing they're underpaid and encouraging each other to get better rates. Second it encourages people to spend money on luxury and luxury-ish goods as a way to signal their welloffness to each other. Because at the end of the day, everyone is still curious about this info and almost everyone likes to feel like they're even just a little better off than those around them. It soothes the ego.
- stale2002 9y agoWould you be OK with anonymized salaries, published only by companies above a certain size?
- jdavis703 9y agoCertain visas such as the E3 publicly disclose what the salary is for a given position. Workers in the federal government also have a public record of their salary.
- softwarefounder 9y ago"No thank you...My salary is private." Only on HN, would the same crowd that ferociously defends data privacy, decide to play devil's advocate on this comment. (Regarding the thread under the parent post)
- conanbatt 9y agoThe prize is so tempting. Wage increases galore.
- tathougies 9y agoSome American culture is really weird.
- dang 9y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments like this.
- conanbatt 9y agoIts easy to make an argument that salary is not private. The employer knows it and the state knows it. Trying to gauge the value of this privacy to you, what % of your wage would you be willing to pay for keep it private, or get to make it public?
- xupybd 9y agoYour salary is, but if anonymised data it need not reveal your salary.