It’s complicated. Keeping salaries secret no doubt makes it more tenable to pay people who sit next to one another vastly different amounts. In a knowledge wor

It’s complicated. Keeping salaries secret no doubt makes it more tenable to pay people who sit next to one another vastly different amounts. In a knowledge worker job where some people are way more productive than others, plus the same person’s productivity is highly variable over time, it’s probably good to pay people very different amounts of money over time, and also to have a complicated system of stock/bonus/promotions to incentivize better performance. But companies aren’t just trying to maximize performance, they are also trying to minimize pay. It’s a lot easier to give someone a 20% raise if the starting salary is 50% lower. Some people are underpaid because they don’t know how much they are worth, especially people from backgrounds where nobody makes this much money. Some people are overpaid because they are friends with the boss. If a company is capable of paying $200k on average, salary transparency may make it harder for them to recruit people who are worth $500k. I’m paid a lot more than any company with a salary transparency calculator I’ve seen pays someone with my job title and experience. So I’m not going to try to work for those companies. I get the impression they are underpaying their employees, but their salary transparency allows them to recruit people who used to be even more underpaid.