5 ms·
Should You Tell the World How Much Money You Make?
- EGreg 7y agoAbsolutely yes
- malux85 7y agoAbsolutely not.
- eastendguy 7y agoAnd yet most of us "buy stuff" to show the world roughly how much money we make.
- czbond 7y agoYou are absolutely right. I am incredibly thrifty, and it took me YEARS to figure this out.
- EGreg 7y agoWhy not
- e40 7y agoThis information will only be used against you. Ego is the only reason for you to do it.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoLack of price transparency hurts the person with less negotiating power in a transaction. Most people are not VIPs who can demand compensation, so the employer benefits by knowing more about the market since they are constantly hiring vs someone who only looks for employment once a year, if not once every few years. Additionally, lack of price transparency hurts the market as a whole, since prices are how the market conveys information as to where supply is needed. Restricting this supply is good for those benefiting from the extra profit, but not for society overall.
- fock 7y agoor maybe the spirit of a free and open society, where everyone is subject to objective evaluation and performance of his/her own work instead of opaque decisions in HR?
- segmondy 7y agoWhy don't you tell us how much you make? People get killed in some places for $100. $1000 is enough to kidnapped in some places. Besides if people know how much you make, you will get custom pricing. Do you know there are countries that have 2 menus, one for foreigners and one for locals? Because they foreigners make much money so are charged higher prices?
- max76 7y ago> Do you know there are countries that have 2 menus, one for foreigners and one for locals? It's very nice that they keep special menus written in English. Well wroth the extra cost, which is cheaper than eating out in LA anyway.
- r3bl 7y agoWell it's a good thing that this article talks about sharing salary info between colleagues, and makes no arguments for "telling the world" other than in the clickbaity title. That's why it ends with a question mark, so that it makes the title not-technically-incorrect (author is "just asking a question"), while driving the engagements that have nothing to do with its content.
- malux85 7y agoBlackmail. Begging relatives. Begging friends. Unending charity contact. Unending "I've got a business idea" (but really no idea, I'm just a dreamer) requests. Repair shops / high end retail shops other shops up prices when you go there. Meeting people is harder because many people alter their behaviour radically when they know you're wealthy and become very disingenuous.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoDon't really see how any of this doesn't apply to the world today. The rough range of your salary is pretty discernible by your job title in the vast majority of cases. If you're a Senior VP at Amazon for the past 5 years the world already knows you're loaded.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- czbond 7y agoAre sites likes Glassdoor (for most companies), Linkedin jobs (with salary ranges), and tech (levelsfyi, etc) already doing this in an anonymous way?
- Zaheer 7y agoYup, we recently added salary ranges on levels.fyi as well. Would love feedback on presentation format and other other graphs folks would find useful: https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html
- ergothus 7y agoI worked in a state govt office in Virginia some years ago and the local paper did a FOIA request for everyone's salaries in the state...and published an online database of the upper 50%. http://data.richmond.com/salaries/ http://data.richmond.com/salaries/ My coworkers, by-and-large, were furious. I found it really helpful. I found out where I was relative to my peers (I was only behind by a few hundred bucks/year - we were all basically equal if we had the same title, except for one guy that had abused the state 10% raise when switching departments). One guy in our DBA/Ops team discovered he was getting a relatively paltry amount while his peers were all getting 6 digits (which was all on the bosses - his peers were also bothered by this). One or two people had very questionably high salaries and were suddenly held by others to be delivering at that level. Mostly, though, it calmed people down about salary differences. Honestly, it was awkward for some people, but honestly I think the benefits outweighed the costs, at least within the office. Much of my coworkers' outrage was about people OUTSIDE the office finding their salaries, such as friends, family, neighbors, people wanting money, etc.
- bluedino 7y agoDoes years of service factor in to government pay?
- ergothus 7y agoNot in Virginia State govt service. It impacted PTO, but not base pay.
- Consultant32452 7y agoI prefer the way my current employer handles it. They publish a service where you can search by your job title and region. It tells you what the max and min for current employees. I don't care to know what any particular person makes, but I like knowing where I am in the range.
- chucksmash 7y agoThat's a great way to handle it, especially if the job titles are at least somewhat stratified. Don't think it'd be that useful at a "we don't do seniority rituals, everybody is a software engineer" type place, where you just see you're in a band from $60k-$480k. If the bucket is large, distribution information would be more useful.
- max76 7y agoKnowing other people's salaries gives you a stronger negotiating position. Other people knowing your salary gives you a weaker negotiating position. Should you tell the world how much money you make? Are you altruistic?
- joe_the_user 7y agoEmployees at a workplace knowing each others' salaries puts them in a better position in bargaining with management but it also makes it harder for management to selectively give certain employees higher salaries - because the employees are talented or because the management happens to want to keep said (maybe talented) employees or because management just like certain employees or because management just wants bargain each employee down to minimum management thinks they'll take. So the question is what situation would someone think better serves their interests? Of course, whether one person describing their salary would evoke reciprocity or not is a question, whether another person would tell the truth is a question.
- kradroy 7y agoI'm normally fine with employees sharing their salary info. Since I'm a manager of individual contributors I can't do much myself in granting compensation changes. I can make recommendations, but I'm not the final approver. That being said - if an employee were to come to me and say "I want $X because so-and-so (or 'others on the team') are making that much", I would deny their request outright. That's a childish way to ask for a raise. It doesn't highlight what you're bringing to the team; only what you want to take from it.
- notJim 7y agoIt doesn't have to be zero-sum.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoThere are lots of comments to this effect in the NYTimes article, but large swaths of the population already have their salary data public: many (most?) public sector workers' salary is public knowledge, oftentimes searchable on a website, military pay grades are public, highly paid executives report most of their compensation in SEC docs, etc. Thus, I don't really buy the myriad of reasons presented here for why this is such a bad idea.
- ip26 7y agoPerhaps the strongest argument against is basically that if you're the only one telling, you are at a disadvantage. It's a prisoner's dilemma. By comparison, in the public sector & military, everyone's is public, and on top of that there is no salary negotiation.
- azhenley 7y agoIt isn’t true that all public sector salaries are nonnegotiable. State university salaries are public and negotiable.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> By comparison, in the public sector & military, everyone's is public, and on top of that there is no salary negotiation. There is some salary negotiation in the public sector, especially at the executive level; now, even those positions that are negotiable may often (but not always) have narrower constraints than a private employer would have in practice, but not all positions in public service have strict salary bands with objective rules for placement within the bands.
- astura 7y ago... there is salary negotiation in the public sector ... And even if every pay grade was fixed, a salary negotiation can take the form of "I deserve to be moved to a higher pay grade because XYZ." People don't get promoted on a fixed schedule.
- jvalencia 7y agoIt seems to me like there's a potentially privacy sensitive way to share the information. For any role with more than N employees, the mean and standard deviation are published: simple, equitable, and private.
- waterside81 7y agoThe government of Ontario releases the salaries of all public employees every year if they make over 100k. So called sunshine list https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure
- username223 7y agoIsn't this true for all provinces? A friend of mine is a government medical researcher in Alberta, so he makes good money, but is hardly what I would call "rich," at least not in the SV sense. Still, his salary is posted online. I think this goes overboard: a min/mean/median/max for each job title would be good enough to know where I stand in a salary negotiation. I also like Ms. Zaloom's idea from the article to share salaries among close friends and family.
- skinner_ 7y agoI bet there are lots of public employees making 99k.
- arcticbull 7y agoThere's already a huge database of your coworkers' salaries, assuming you work with any H-1B visa holders (https://h1bsalary.online https://h1bsalary.online). I seem to recall the government had a portal you can search by name too.
- blhack 7y agoIt depends on who you’re telling. People treat you differently when they find out how much money you make, both on the upper and lower ends.
- Havoc 7y agoWithin the office...most people know/can guess each other's fairly accurately. I stopped talking to family about it though. Different countries and CoL means my raises end up being more than their total package. So discussing that leads to nothing wholesome. Instead I try to silently absorb more of the family costs than proportionate.
- Hoasi 7y agoIt's not as easy a question as it sounds. Sharing this information within a company usually means trouble. So it doesn't look like a good idea to share it with society at large. At the same time, honesty and transparency is the best policy... Privacy, security, and psychological issues are at stake when it comes to money. > the gig economy has made salary comparing a near necessity for many. Obviously, most freelancers would love if this information was public. If rates are public, you know where you are standing and where to start if you want to provide a service. That is not exactly the same as telling how much money one makes—one can only infer so much. Despite this, most freelancers are still secretive about their rate—as if this was always an advantage.
- zwkrt 7y agoI think the reasons it causes trouble in the workplace and more generally are exactly why it should be shared with everyone. Sharing salaries/wages is only an issue if the wages themselves cannot be justified. The issue is that very few people's wages CAN be justified (either in terms of scalar dollar amount or in relation to the value one produces), and sharing incomes just shines light on the ugly reality that income disparity is mostly senseless. I think a lot of societal problems would be solved if we all had a sign over our head showing stats about how much we make and how we spend that money.
- 2sk21 7y agoThis is a real eye-opener - tech salaries seem ridiculously high compared to what most people make.
- dahart 7y ago> There is no law that stops employees from sharing salary information, but myths persist at many workplaces that sharing is forbidden This is failing to address the scenario where not sharing salary is company policy and/or part of the employment agreement or contract. If my personal experience is any indicator, I would speculate that this is quite common at large companies. And, I don't know, having other people share their salary information is good for me, but sharing mine can certainly be used against me in a variety of subtle ways. People are consciously and unconsciously judgemental by nature. Sometimes I have a relatively good deal and I know it, so sometimes I don't want to share salary because I know it would only make other people feel bad. Sometimes I don't want to know that someone makes more than me because it would make me feel bad, when ultimately it doesn't matter. I am genuinely interested in the idea of sharing, but I really want some stronger reasons of why it's to my actual personal benefit today to share that information, assuming my employment agreement allows it. I didn't see any in this article.
- astura 7y agoIt's against the law to prevent employees from disclosing and discussing salary. The The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protects employees rights to discuss conditions of employment, which, obviously includes salary. https://www.nlrb.gov/resources/faq/nlrb#t38n3180 https://www.nlrb.gov/resources/faq/nlrb#t38n3180 Adults can absolutely handle fair pay discrepancies without "feeling bad," and if they can't then they are so immature that I doubt they'd otherwise make a good employee. It works plenty fine in many industries where salary is public information and even in whole countries where salary is public.
- dahart 7y agoIndeed, but I've seen & had plenty of contracts that state what they want and then at the end have a clause disclaiming anything that conflicts with existing laws. It's then the onus of the employee to figure out their actual rights. BTW I realize I may have some of my experience with contract work mixed into my fallible memory. But, that's another reasonable point here, more people are turning into independent contractors, and they're not subject to employee rights protection, it's perfectly legal to have a compensation non-disclosure in a work-for-hire contract. > Adults can absolutely handle fair pay discrepancies without "feeling bad," and if they can't then they are so immature that I doubt they'd otherwise make a good employee. I think this might be too dismissive and perhaps over-simplified. Everybody, including "adults" wants fairness in their life. Most people don't know what actually constitutes the range of "fair" pay even within their own company, and there are often situations - it is very common - where someone is paid more or less than others not due to experience or skill but due to circumstances, timings, negotiating power, specialized company requirements, and a variety of other things. Still, even if sharing didn't cause me any large problems, why is it in my interest to share?
- xfitm3 7y agoYou should talk to colleagues about salaries, but avoid telling friends, family, and the general public.
- Zaheer 7y agohttps://www.Levels.fyi https://www.Levels.fyi started very similar to the 'Ask a Manager' survey in the article. We had a Google Form / Spreadsheet to collect salaries in tech. In fact, they still underpin our UI today. We've had folks mention that our data is more accurate than Glassdoor, etc. We're working on several features to ensure our data continues to remain accurate, fresh and easy to analyze. Ping me at my email in profile if you have feedback!
- verttii 7y agoHere in Finland all personal tax records are public so we don't even need to contemplate on this question.
- pavlov 7y agoIn Nordic countries, everyone's tax return bottom line is public information. You can look up your neighbour or co-worker or the average celebrity if you want to know how much income and capital gains they reported. Societies haven't yet collapsed from unbridled jealousy. Meanwhile in America the topic is taboo. Apparently you can get five years of jail for leaking someone's tax information — in the same country where personal information privacy barely exists otherwise. Strange.
- JohnFen 7y agoI'm not going to tell the world how much I make. That seems foolish. I don't mind sharing it with family, friends, and coworkers, though.