4 ms·
To me the key takeaway is that google systematically underpays both men and women.
by oarabbus_ 8y ago
To me the key takeaway is that google systematically underpays both men and women.
- slg 8y agoI don't even think there is enough information to say that. We have no idea how many people at Google are overpaid. Without more salary transparency, any company that pays market rates is going to have some employees that are underpaid and some that are overpaid.
- kgwgk 8y agoThe takeaway is that compensations are not perfectly aligned with whatever model was used in the study. Which is expected because compensations were not set using that model, so they won’t be exactly the same. And at that point, if the model is calibrated for everage compensation to be the same, it’s obvious that some people will get compensations below the prediction of the model and some people will get compensations above the prediction of the model.
- oarabbus_ 8y ago> And at that point, if the model is calibrated for everage compensation to be the same, it’s obvious that some people will get compensations below the prediction of the model and some people will get compensations above the prediction of the model. This is true of most models (in practice - any model which models salary in the real world) yet not every company is being accused of these payment discrimination lawsuits.
- lstodd 8y ago> yet not every company is being accused maybe because attacking them is not worth it?
- lazyasciiart 8y agoHow many companies have this data available to someone who might sue them?
- AimForTheBushes 8y agoFinally, equality!
- sjg007 8y agoYou can actually see this in Google's H1B filings. It doesn't list gender but the range for the same titles is crazy.
- carapace 8y agoOh yes... > In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/ https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...
- spamcamel 8y agoI don't work at Google, but my SO and many friends do. I will bitch slap anyone over there complaining about being underpaid. Most people can only dream of the compensation packages they give out. Nobody at Google is "underpaid", maybe just less extremely well compensated than others.
- smsm42 8y agoOr, in other words, some people are better negotiators than other. Since there's no objective measure of how much Google must pay anybody, the only benchmark would be comparing to peers doing substantially similar jobs. Fortunately, Google is big enough so that there would be substantially similar jobs to compare. Unfortunately, while jobs may be the same, negotiating skills of the applicants (and whatever HR workers they negotiated with) vary. And if somebody gets a better deal, that automatically makes everybody holding the same job underpaid. BTW, in the same vein the article could be titled "Google finds it is overpaying many men (or women)" - since unless everybody has the same salary, half of the workforce would be paid less than median - thus being underpaid - and half would be paid more - thus being overpaid. Well, there could be lucky ones being paid exactly the median, but they are too boring to write an article about them.