7 ms·

So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. I'm almost certain my pay is different from my c

by donatj 6y ago

So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. I'm almost certain my pay is different from my colleagues, but I've bargained like hell to get it. When I was hired, every time we've been acquired. I'm no executive either, I'm just a developer with a proven history of give-a-damn. I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individuals, jobs where people with the same title can achieve vastly different amounts of value for the company, and especially for a company that values its employees.

loraa 6y ago
This is incredibly sexist.
frickinLasers 6y ago
As someone who is a strong worker but a bit of a pushover, and whose job description has nothing to do with haggling, I strongly disagree with this. The company benefits if all of their best workers can afford rent, and they gain little by paying effective bargainers a larger slice of the pie.
sokoloff 6y ago
I don’t see any reason to think that all engineers contribute the same amount of value (and therefore paying different amounts is entirely reasonable). Thought experiment: if you were going to form a startup and needed two other engineers, would you know across your history which ones to pick from and which ones to avoid?
- satyrnein 6y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with your first sentence. However, the thought experiment feels vulnerable to bias and other factors unrelated to performance, (just like the salary negotiation process you're comparing it to).
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    The thought experiment indeed highlights the same dynamics: it's not about whether there are effective differences in quality in people (and thus different "valuations"), but whether the noise in the system is larger than the signal.
- baddox 6y ago
  Perhaps I would be more comfortable hiring engineers I was friends with, or even worse, engineers with similar experiences and backgrounds to me. But hopefully I would deliberately try to recognize and adjust for those tendencies, and I certainly hope I wouldn’t choose who to hire based on how good the engineer was at negotiating.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > and therefore paying different amounts is entirely reasonable Then the engineers sharing their salaries with each other should also be reasonable. If anyone complains about the discrepancy, you can point out that the engineers being paid more are more talented. Extending off of your thought experiment. If you were going to form a startup, and you believed that pay discrepancies corresponded to value, wouldn't you want interviewees to be extremely open about their previous salaries and their salary comparisons within previous companies? That would make it even easier for you to find the engineers who were the most talented. We already ask interviewees where they've worked -- would you feel comfortable asking them "how much money did you make in comparison to your coworkers?" --- My feeling here is that companies want to hide salaries for the same reason my car mechanic would prefer me not to discuss my bill with any other customers. In an open market, discrepancies in knowledge about market rates favor the people with more knowledge; in this case, the companies. Companies are smart, not stupid; they understand how the market works. They're hiding salaries because that gives them an advantage when trying to drive down the price of engineers. Whether or not pay discrepancies can be justified is kind of a false conflict. Regardless of whether or not pay discrepancies are a good idea -- in a free market, the prices should be transparent so that companies are forced to compete on honest terms for employees. A generally applicable question that I've found applies to a number of situations beyond just this one: if a thing is good, then why do we need to hide it or force people to accept it?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    It is perfectly reasonable for coworkers to be discussing their salaries. I agree that money topics in general should be less taboo than they are currently. If I found out I made less than someone else, I’d first see if I agreed with that call and, if not, use that signal to figure out what change I should make (in performance/level of effort, in communication/publicity, or in company).
tyre 6y ago
sure, you bargained. But your job isn't to bargain for salary. That's not the value you provide to a company. And so the dumb part, the unfair part, about salary discrepancies is that it is divorced from performance. It is divorced from value. Which doesn't mean that you, on an individual level, shouldn't negotiate. But it does imply that salary negotiation generally leads to results that (very) (incredibly) (if at all) loosely correlate with what the job is. And all of this assumes that any two people walking into the same negotiations with the same skillset, exp, etc. will have the same experience. Which is, you know…not how it works.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  > your job isn't to bargain for salary This is a bit nonsensical. Nobody knows better than you what your time is worth because it is your time. You don't owe companies anything, including working for less than you are willing to take in payment.
  - je42 6y ago
    You shouldnt discount that a lot of people cannot just walk away from a job because the only got a 3% increase while they wanted 10%. You need to be confident that you can find another job that pays equally or better in order to be truely using the leverage. A lot of people don't have that security and cannot take that risk.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Key to any negotiation is understanding what your next best alternative is. If your current employer is far and away your best alternative, you have limited leverage. Likewise, if you’re far and away the company’s best alternative, you have increased leverage.
virtuous_signal 6y ago
When I was teaching college math classes, there were people who tried to argue for more partial credit after exams. Not to get into specifics but most of the requests came from the same demographic. If I as an instructor hadn't watched out for this and set a universal, and uniformly applied policy (and if I had an agreeable enough personality), then I would have consistently made the scores of this group higher. Would you say this is fair? Should math grades reflect whether someone has that "it doesn't hurt to ask"-attitude?
- donatj 6y ago
  Fortune favors the bold.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Therein lies the problem. Math is made by mathematicians, not by Karens whose mothers attend parties thrown by Ghislaine Maxwell. Sometimes you think that's what's behind the secular stagnation.
    - donatj 6y ago
      In this specific example, I very much see the point of a Math class for those not actively pursuing a heavily mathematics-embedded career is just the exposure to ideas. Being a stickler for total competency does nothing to encourage exposure; I'd almost argue there's room to grade the two groups on separate scales. Do I remember the formulas or operations from my higher levels math classes? Largely no. Do I think they were a worthwhile endeavor? Absolutely, I was profoundly affected. The long-term value of classes for those who largely won't use the skill in the future is the mind opening exposure, not the competency we test for.
  - baddox 6y ago
    “Fortune” means “luck.” The whole point of advocating against arbitrary causes for salary differences is that one’s livelihood shouldn’t depend on luck.
- 6y ago
woodruffw 6y ago
> I'm almost certain my pay is different from my colleagues, but I've bargained like hell to get it. When I was hired, every time we've been acquired. I'm no executive either, I'm just a developer with a proven history of give-a-damn. Whether or not pay discrepancies can be fair, this doesn't sound like a case of them being fair. What happens to your (hypothetical) colleague who gives just as much of a damn as you do, but doesn't feel comfortable hitting the appropriate negotiation notes to get their due? Similarly: given that companies are liable to offer a lower initial rate to women and minorities, how do we account for the fact that they might negotiate just as hard as you and still end up behind?
- scottLobster 6y ago
  I'd argue your first example is actually fair. Someone who has trouble negotiating in professional circles is going to have issues far beyond the workplace, if nothing else they're going to get repeatably screwed buying a car, and they should work on that. Why shouldn't the more aggressive, more strategic people earn more on average? I'd argue they give more of a damn by definition. The ability to project social force is a positive trait if used well, and can directly benefit the work if turned in that direction. By contrast I agree with your second example as systemic discrimination is something sharing salaries can directly help with. I had a female co-worker who was the same level of engineer I was at our company, had more experience and a Master's degree (to my Bachelor's), and was making 10k less a year than I was. Now I'm not sure if that was due to her being a woman or being rather conflict-avoidant (or both), but seeing the difference certainly made her push for a promotion that she eventually got.
  - woodruffw 6y ago
    > Why shouldn't the more aggressive, more strategic people earn more on average? I'd argue they give more of a damn by definition. The ability to project social force is a positive trait if used well, and can directly benefit the work if turned in that direction. One potential reason: being aggressive and strategic, as qualities, are orthogonal to one's skills. They're just as good signals for being an abusive manager or manipulator as they are for "giving a damn." We've also gone and conflated "aggressive during salary negotiations" with "(positively) aggressive in one's job." It's not clear to me that these are the same things, particularly in the context of economic need and privation: I'm more likely to be aggressive and confident in my job once I know that I can afford groceries and rent. The "I" there is me, personally. In sum: the qualities that make someone a good negotiator in the context of obtaining a job are not necessarily positive qualities within the context of the job itself. Conflating the two eliminates an entire cohort of qualified people who may possess those traits but lack the systemic comfort to risk demonstrating them.
Thorrez 6y ago
>but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. There are multiple definitions of fair. One definition is people are paid proportional to how well they do their job. With that definition, bargaining for something else is actually unfair.
puranjay 6y ago
What if you were as competent as your better paid colleague but were just in a situation that limited your bargaining power at the time of hiring? Say you just had a baby or you're suffering from a disease and depend on your employer's insurance? You can't afford to not have the job, while your better paid colleague could walk away. Every negotiation favors the person who can afford to walk away from the deal. In a salary negotiation, this puts healthy, young, and single people at an advantage. It penalizes people with disabilities, disease or dependants - the most vulnerable groups. That's where the demand for open and fair compensation comes from.
raxxorrax 6y ago
I get more money than colleagues working in production, but I don't think the discrepancy should be too high. Without them the software I develop is worth nothing. Everyone is replaceable. True that it is much harder to find a new dev or manager, but they still exist. I believe thinking a bit outside the box is a good idea, doesn't mean you have to start a workers union. And while it might not be fitting to single out Blizzard as a company here, I think this "compensation" is taking the piss out of employees.
timavr 6y ago
The problem with that approach as in any negotiation that in order to be successful, you need to put your job on the line every time you go to negotiate to have the maximum leverage. It is all fine and dandy if you win every time, but if you go and they don't budge and your stay, your leverage is basically gone. People early in their careers have flexibility of moving around, but if you have mortgage, kids, family or need to take care of your parents, this strategy carries a lot of external costs. For games speficaly it is nealry impossible to negotiate meaningfully because every postion is budgeted ahead of time, including salary increases. By that I mean if someone asks for 5% increase, they are basically negotiating against spreadsheet, not human across from them. The best one can do is to hit just under the cut-off line. On top of that, employee providing different "value" to the company is just a myth, because if someone was literally providing value to multi billion company they would be paid millions. For most people their value is just replacement market value. If people want a meaninful compensation in games, they have to be an executive or creating new revenue stream for the company.
dayjobpork 6y ago
How do you know they actually pay you more?
pdr2020 6y ago
I used to believe this too. You've acquired/developed negotiation skills, you should reap their rewards, etc. But then I consider, I've seen many individuals who are such strong engineers AND communicators, and deliver amazing work. Yet, I was constantly paid higher than them, simply because of my more aggressive/arrogant attitude. Time has given me a different view. There ARE pay discrepancies that shouldn't exist, but do simply because of lack of information. And companies fuel the idea that it's something we need to protect, from our fellow colleagues because we worked/earned those pay discrepancies. But in the end, it's the company that benefits the most from those discrepancies. Not me and not you.

by donatj 6y ago

loraa 6y ago

This is incredibly sexist.

frickinLasers 6y ago

As someone who is a strong worker but a bit of a pushover, and whose job description has nothing to do with haggling, I strongly disagree with this. The company benefits if all of their best workers can afford rent, and they gain little by paying effective bargainers a larger slice of the pie.

sokoloff 6y ago

I don’t see any reason to think that all engineers contribute the same amount of value (and therefore paying different amounts is entirely reasonable). Thought experiment: if you were going to form a startup and needed two other engineers, would you know across your history which ones to pick from and which ones to avoid?

satyrnein 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with your first sentence. However, the thought experiment feels vulnerable to bias and other factors unrelated to performance, (just like the salary negotiation process you're comparing it to).
- ithkuil 6y ago
  The thought experiment indeed highlights the same dynamics: it's not about whether there are effective differences in quality in people (and thus different "valuations"), but whether the noise in the system is larger than the signal.
baddox 6y ago
Perhaps I would be more comfortable hiring engineers I was friends with, or even worse, engineers with similar experiences and backgrounds to me. But hopefully I would deliberately try to recognize and adjust for those tendencies, and I certainly hope I wouldn’t choose who to hire based on how good the engineer was at negotiating.
danShumway 6y ago
> and therefore paying different amounts is entirely reasonable Then the engineers sharing their salaries with each other should also be reasonable. If anyone complains about the discrepancy, you can point out that the engineers being paid more are more talented. Extending off of your thought experiment. If you were going to form a startup, and you believed that pay discrepancies corresponded to value, wouldn't you want interviewees to be extremely open about their previous salaries and their salary comparisons within previous companies? That would make it even easier for you to find the engineers who were the most talented. We already ask interviewees where they've worked -- would you feel comfortable asking them "how much money did you make in comparison to your coworkers?" --- My feeling here is that companies want to hide salaries for the same reason my car mechanic would prefer me not to discuss my bill with any other customers. In an open market, discrepancies in knowledge about market rates favor the people with more knowledge; in this case, the companies. Companies are smart, not stupid; they understand how the market works. They're hiding salaries because that gives them an advantage when trying to drive down the price of engineers. Whether or not pay discrepancies can be justified is kind of a false conflict. Regardless of whether or not pay discrepancies are a good idea -- in a free market, the prices should be transparent so that companies are forced to compete on honest terms for employees. A generally applicable question that I've found applies to a number of situations beyond just this one: if a thing is good, then why do we need to hide it or force people to accept it?
- sokoloff 6y ago
  It is perfectly reasonable for coworkers to be discussing their salaries. I agree that money topics in general should be less taboo than they are currently. If I found out I made less than someone else, I’d first see if I agreed with that call and, if not, use that signal to figure out what change I should make (in performance/level of effort, in communication/publicity, or in company).

tyre 6y ago

sure, you bargained. But your job isn't to bargain for salary. That's not the value you provide to a company. And so the dumb part, the unfair part, about salary discrepancies is that it is divorced from performance. It is divorced from value. Which doesn't mean that you, on an individual level, shouldn't negotiate. But it does imply that salary negotiation generally leads to results that (very) (incredibly) (if at all) loosely correlate with what the job is. And all of this assumes that any two people walking into the same negotiations with the same skillset, exp, etc. will have the same experience. Which is, you know…not how it works.

zdragnar 6y ago
> your job isn't to bargain for salary This is a bit nonsensical. Nobody knows better than you what your time is worth because it is your time. You don't owe companies anything, including working for less than you are willing to take in payment.
- je42 6y ago
  You shouldnt discount that a lot of people cannot just walk away from a job because the only got a 3% increase while they wanted 10%. You need to be confident that you can find another job that pays equally or better in order to be truely using the leverage. A lot of people don't have that security and cannot take that risk.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Key to any negotiation is understanding what your next best alternative is. If your current employer is far and away your best alternative, you have limited leverage. Likewise, if you’re far and away the company’s best alternative, you have increased leverage.

virtuous_signal 6y ago

When I was teaching college math classes, there were people who tried to argue for more partial credit after exams. Not to get into specifics but most of the requests came from the same demographic. If I as an instructor hadn't watched out for this and set a universal, and uniformly applied policy (and if I had an agreeable enough personality), then I would have consistently made the scores of this group higher. Would you say this is fair? Should math grades reflect whether someone has that "it doesn't hurt to ask"-attitude?

donatj 6y ago
Fortune favors the bold.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Therein lies the problem. Math is made by mathematicians, not by Karens whose mothers attend parties thrown by Ghislaine Maxwell. Sometimes you think that's what's behind the secular stagnation.
  - donatj 6y ago
    In this specific example, I very much see the point of a Math class for those not actively pursuing a heavily mathematics-embedded career is just the exposure to ideas. Being a stickler for total competency does nothing to encourage exposure; I'd almost argue there's room to grade the two groups on separate scales. Do I remember the formulas or operations from my higher levels math classes? Largely no. Do I think they were a worthwhile endeavor? Absolutely, I was profoundly affected. The long-term value of classes for those who largely won't use the skill in the future is the mind opening exposure, not the competency we test for.
- baddox 6y ago
  “Fortune” means “luck.” The whole point of advocating against arbitrary causes for salary differences is that one’s livelihood shouldn’t depend on luck.
6y ago

woodruffw 6y ago

> I'm almost certain my pay is different from my colleagues, but I've bargained like hell to get it. When I was hired, every time we've been acquired. I'm no executive either, I'm just a developer with a proven history of give-a-damn. Whether or not pay discrepancies can be fair, this doesn't sound like a case of them being fair. What happens to your (hypothetical) colleague who gives just as much of a damn as you do, but doesn't feel comfortable hitting the appropriate negotiation notes to get their due? Similarly: given that companies are liable to offer a lower initial rate to women and minorities, how do we account for the fact that they might negotiate just as hard as you and still end up behind?

scottLobster 6y ago
I'd argue your first example is actually fair. Someone who has trouble negotiating in professional circles is going to have issues far beyond the workplace, if nothing else they're going to get repeatably screwed buying a car, and they should work on that. Why shouldn't the more aggressive, more strategic people earn more on average? I'd argue they give more of a damn by definition. The ability to project social force is a positive trait if used well, and can directly benefit the work if turned in that direction. By contrast I agree with your second example as systemic discrimination is something sharing salaries can directly help with. I had a female co-worker who was the same level of engineer I was at our company, had more experience and a Master's degree (to my Bachelor's), and was making 10k less a year than I was. Now I'm not sure if that was due to her being a woman or being rather conflict-avoidant (or both), but seeing the difference certainly made her push for a promotion that she eventually got.
- woodruffw 6y ago
  > Why shouldn't the more aggressive, more strategic people earn more on average? I'd argue they give more of a damn by definition. The ability to project social force is a positive trait if used well, and can directly benefit the work if turned in that direction. One potential reason: being aggressive and strategic, as qualities, are orthogonal to one's skills. They're just as good signals for being an abusive manager or manipulator as they are for "giving a damn." We've also gone and conflated "aggressive during salary negotiations" with "(positively) aggressive in one's job." It's not clear to me that these are the same things, particularly in the context of economic need and privation: I'm more likely to be aggressive and confident in my job once I know that I can afford groceries and rent. The "I" there is me, personally. In sum: the qualities that make someone a good negotiator in the context of obtaining a job are not necessarily positive qualities within the context of the job itself. Conflating the two eliminates an entire cohort of qualified people who may possess those traits but lack the systemic comfort to risk demonstrating them.

Thorrez 6y ago

>but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. There are multiple definitions of fair. One definition is people are paid proportional to how well they do their job. With that definition, bargaining for something else is actually unfair.

puranjay 6y ago

What if you were as competent as your better paid colleague but were just in a situation that limited your bargaining power at the time of hiring? Say you just had a baby or you're suffering from a disease and depend on your employer's insurance? You can't afford to not have the job, while your better paid colleague could walk away. Every negotiation favors the person who can afford to walk away from the deal. In a salary negotiation, this puts healthy, young, and single people at an advantage. It penalizes people with disabilities, disease or dependants - the most vulnerable groups. That's where the demand for open and fair compensation comes from.

raxxorrax 6y ago

I get more money than colleagues working in production, but I don't think the discrepancy should be too high. Without them the software I develop is worth nothing. Everyone is replaceable. True that it is much harder to find a new dev or manager, but they still exist. I believe thinking a bit outside the box is a good idea, doesn't mean you have to start a workers union. And while it might not be fitting to single out Blizzard as a company here, I think this "compensation" is taking the piss out of employees.

timavr 6y ago

The problem with that approach as in any negotiation that in order to be successful, you need to put your job on the line every time you go to negotiate to have the maximum leverage. It is all fine and dandy if you win every time, but if you go and they don't budge and your stay, your leverage is basically gone. People early in their careers have flexibility of moving around, but if you have mortgage, kids, family or need to take care of your parents, this strategy carries a lot of external costs. For games speficaly it is nealry impossible to negotiate meaningfully because every postion is budgeted ahead of time, including salary increases. By that I mean if someone asks for 5% increase, they are basically negotiating against spreadsheet, not human across from them. The best one can do is to hit just under the cut-off line. On top of that, employee providing different "value" to the company is just a myth, because if someone was literally providing value to multi billion company they would be paid millions. For most people their value is just replacement market value. If people want a meaninful compensation in games, they have to be an executive or creating new revenue stream for the company.

dayjobpork 6y ago

How do you know they actually pay you more?

pdr2020 6y ago

I used to believe this too. You've acquired/developed negotiation skills, you should reap their rewards, etc. But then I consider, I've seen many individuals who are such strong engineers AND communicators, and deliver amazing work. Yet, I was constantly paid higher than them, simply because of my more aggressive/arrogant attitude. Time has given me a different view. There ARE pay discrepancies that shouldn't exist, but do simply because of lack of information. And companies fuel the idea that it's something we need to protect, from our fellow colleagues because we worked/earned those pay discrepancies. But in the end, it's the company that benefits the most from those discrepancies. Not me and not you.