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> Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the

> Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the same when we're shopping for a job? Despite the question being rhethorical, the answer is everything that's wrong about this proposal: Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty. I've got people with the same job title with almost a magnitude of difference in actual output. Sure, on paper, they're "doing the same thing", but if someone forced me to shoehorn them into categories, that would mostly serve to punish top performes with little credentials and push them somewhere else. I feel strongly about this, mostly because it happened to myself: After being sold, the first company that employed me introduced a "completely fair and transparent" compensation scheme. After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately. I called a recruiter the next day and was out a few months after. Pay transparency is something that has upsides imho, but isn't a clear-cut win. It can turn out to be a net negative. Some further reading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-downside-of-full-pay-transparency-1502676360 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-downside-of-full-pay-transp...

naikrovek 5y ago
The "lazy PhD" bit there really undermines your entire point. Have you seen what it takes to get a PhD? I'm sure there are some who somehow skated through, but they are the exception, and not the rule. For the same reasons you cite, equal pay is important. Some employees are better than others, and this is very hard to qualify, and the effect is that those who have less skill at negotiation, are underpaid, completely independent of skill, while those who are better at negotiation are paid more, completely independent of skill. If skill is not going to be a factor in how people are paid, then pay for the role and not the person. Any given person can and will grow in their role, potentially earning more (but not getting paid more) than they did a month prior; even moreso if they don't have to stress about money all of the time, and can just have all of those concerns alleviated even a little by higher pay. Most people want to be better at their career, and are bogged down by the myriad of troubles that tight budgets generally cause. Remove these impediments for those who have reached a point in their career where they've earned the right to be without these troubles, and you will see your people take off, like how plants bloom when they haven't seen water in 10 days.
- Veen 5y ago
  > The "lazy PhD" bit there really undermines your entire point. Have you seen what it takes to get a PhD? It depends on the field, but however much effort it takes to get a PhD it's at best a weak proxy for how much value a particular employee provides to the business. > and you will see your people take off Yes, you'll see your best employees take off to an employer where they are paid better than their time-serving colleagues.
  - pm90 5y ago
    > PhD it's at best a weak proxy for how much value a particular employee provides to the business. Compensation is almost never based on what value employees provide to the business but what the market will pay for them. If PhDs get paid more it’s likely because the market is willing to pay more for people with those skills. Fwiw: I don’t have a PhD. But I do find the lazy PhD bit pretty tiring too.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      With PhD thing is the supply is relatively low. At least compared to number of Masters and Bachelors available. Thus just alone that they can cost more to hire. Demand is much more murky question however.
- endymi0n 5y ago
  > Have you seen what it takes to get a PhD? In the worst case, the extreme willingness and patience to waste years of your life on writing a thick paper that has a high chance of never being read by more than a handful of people and then pile on dust in the closet — and choosing that path over creating tangible real-world solutions in the same time. Not discounting the hard work that goes into a PhD thesis at the slightest and the fact that I know brilliant PhDs with game-changing papers that went on to excel in their jobs, this framing might still give a clue on why, after having hired over a hundred engineers and seeing them develop, I have yet to see a positive correlation between academic performance and job performance. Same goes for removing impediments. Having gone greater lengths to remove impediments for employees early in my career than any other manager I know, I can attest that even that doesn't motivate certain personality types to "flower". If anything, it motivates them to find more impediments. All the while the employees who just removed the first few impediments themselves are already crushing the next task. "Whoever wants something finds ways, whoever doesn't want something finds reasons." - Götz Werner
jgilias 5y ago
I also feel very strongly about this. Many moons ago I literally got paid half of what a friend of mine got paid for exactly the same position, responsibilities, and output, and yes, I can gauge the output, as it was a position for which this is quite rigidly defined. Just because he said a different amount than I that he was willing to work for during negotiations. From that point on I have consistently refused to 'name my amount'. Literally, I would say something like: "A company like yours must have a defined salary scale for the given position, why don't we start from there, and see how it aligns with my expectations?". If they push on, it goes something like: "So, are you saying that salaries at your organization are ad-hoc, and you're looking for the cheapest person who can fill the role?". In which case, I'm really not interested anymore.
- whatsapps2020 5y ago
  Another option is to study the market, interview at multiple places, and give a high but realistic amount. This way you will get ~highest possible offer
  - jgilias 5y ago
    The part of the discussion is not just about pay, it is also about company culture. I really don't want to work at a place willing to haggle and fill the position with the cheapest eligible person.
    - pm90 5y ago
      There are often good teams but they need to work with a compensation department/committee to get actual numbers. IMO it seems a bit early to judge the company culture just by an interaction with the recruiter. But maybe you consider that to be a part of company culture too. What I’ve noticed though is even fantastic engineering companies might crappy departments for other things.
      - jgilias 5y ago
        At a point when they ask me my salary expectations, I would expect to be talking to someone who has the authority to speak about salaries.
slg 5y ago
You are blaming pay transparency for a related but different policy of having a public compensation formula. Pay transparency does not require that every employee in a given role needs to be compensated the same. More productive employees can still be compensated more. The less productive employees can leave if they have a problem with that. Pay transparency is simply about empowering employees by giving them the same information that employers have.
dagw 5y ago
Despite the question being rhethorical Furthermore, in many situations they don't tell you what it costs. In many cases you have to 'interview' with a sales team whose whole job is to find out how much you are willing to pay before telling you a price.
ssss11 5y ago
I’d say the same of companies - the same role at two similar companies can be drastically different pay and there’s usually a good reason (which the candidate won’t know) - culture, complexity, bureaucracy, hours, workload, etc.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
> I've got people with the same job title with almost a magnitude of difference in actual output. Sure, on paper, they're "doing the same thing", but if someone forced me to shoehorn them into categories, that would mostly serve to punish top performes with little credentials and push them somewhere else. Why is transparency a problem here? The person doing orders of magnitude more work is probably only getting paid 10% more. Transparency could possibly make this better for both the workers and the employers, or it could make them worse for both - better for one and worse for the other - better for one and no difference for the other - or no difference for either. There's lots of possibilities. But It doesn't seem like there's reason to believe transparency is surely bad.
- gkop 5y ago
  The full comment you are replying to does not disagree with your comment, so your comment appears a non sequitur.
- zepto 5y ago
  > Transparency could possibly make this better for both the workers and the employers, How exactly? I don’t see any obvious path to this.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    I'm not saying this is the case - but it is possible to imagine a world in which transparency leads to higher pay for more productive employees - which causes them to become even more productive for even more pay. Imagine you're a business and your employees bake pies. Imagine the costs are fixed beside the pie. Imagine the pie costs $1 in ingredients. Imagine the average worker bakes 10 pies per hour, and your marginal profit per pie is $9, and you pay workers $10 per hour. That is the labor cost and supplies for a pie costs $8. Each worker, generates $80 in revenue per hour after inputs and wages. However, you have one worker that bakes 30 pies per hour for $20 per hour. This worker is happy to earn double the average worker. And you, as a business owner, are very happy to make $300-30-20 = $250 per hour in revenue after inputs and wages (3x). However, If the worker is aware of how much more s/he makes - it is possible to imagine the worker becomes even more productive. Maybe the worker can bake 45 pies for $30 per hour (3x). You're paying more per hour per pie, but you're making much more profit per hour = $450 - 45 - 30 = $375 (4.5x).
seiferteric 5y ago
Yes and is yet another attempt to frame individuals as replaceable cogs in a machine. Each person will have widely different set of skills and experience that will affect their job performance regardless of job title. It is impossible to prove that people "are doing the same job" and will just discourage top performers.
brundolf 5y ago
> I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately I don't see anything in the OP about gating pay-tiers behind arbitrary requirements like having a PhD? Why would a company be forced to do that under this kind of law? You can establish tiers with publicized compensation and still hire the best person for each job; those are independent axes.
Dig1t 5y ago
I agree with this, I've been doing the job search thing for the last 3 months and I've spoken with a few companies that have this equality based pay model (DuckDuckGo is a good example), where everyone with the same job title makes exactly the same amount. The pay offered by these places is lower than what I have been able to get at places without the policy, and they have been unwilling to make any exceptions. This one-size-fits-all pay bracket thing really sucks IMO. Also basing pay off of YoE or education level also strike me as old, stodgy ways of paying your workers, like something IBM would do. You're worth exactly what you can convince someone to pay you, nothing more or less than that.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  I think they should show pay minimums, not absolutes. The real issue isn't that Janet in Accounting makes $10k/yr more than you do, its that new hires for your same job make $10k/yr more than you.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  I think those are two different issues though. You can have pay transparency without enforcing strict pay levels per role. The natural outcome is just that thise who make less than their coworkers will feel undervalued and look for other jobs, which is probably not a big problem.
  - planet-and-halo 5y ago
    The problem in doing that is you generate metric tons of resentment and politicking among people in the same role. If my title is the same as someone else's but I'm making 20% less than they are, even if I can bring myself to admit to myself that they're better at the job, I'm still going to feel we're "doing the same job" and I'm getting screwed. Those people don't immediately and quietly just look for a new job. They complain and moan and poison the well and generally destroy the social atmosphere of the company. Studies of workplace motivation and performance often find that one of the worst things you can do is get everyone obsessing about salary all of the time instead of focusing on the work. (Notably, this isn't just bad for the company, it's bad for the workers' quality of life.) I think it's fair to say that sometimes companies are trying to screw the workers, but I also think some of the norms around discretion on this topic were an informal evolved mechanism to dampen the natural status competition people fall into and get them to work more as a unit focused on a goal. While I appreciate the aim behind transparency laws, I'd prefer it if certain things like choosing to talk about salary were protected. Publishing all of the salaries by default seems like a blunt mechanism and strikes me as very libertarian or Marxist thinking where you're either assuming a) a free and transparent market always produces the best result, or b) people fall into broad "classes" in which all individuals share the same interests and will work together. I generally think both of those modes of thought are simplistic and, despite some underlying truth, fail to account for many important complications and unintended side effects.
gamesbrainiac 5y ago
> Despite the question being rhethorical, the answer is everything that's wrong about this proposal: Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty. And you can indeed choose those things over higher pay. This does not prevent people from choosing something they love doing for less money; it just makes the opportunity cost more plain. I see nothing wrong with this. At all.
themolecularman 5y ago
> I feel strongly about this, mostly because it happened to myself: After being sold, the first company that employed me introduced a "completely fair and transparent" compensation scheme. After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately. I also am a tech worker with no tech degree (no math, CS, eng, etc). Pay transparency would be run by administrators inside businesses that would likely implement something as you describe: "So-and-so just graduated cum laude from X with a degree in Y therefore they're at pay band Z." It will be horrible for people who had to self-educate.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  It doesn't matter. The degrees are just signifiers to denote a class of people you aren't in. If it weren't for the titles you would be excluded on some other grounds. I mean, there are modern professions still using medieval terms for this (esquire?)
  - degreeta 5y ago
    I've been seeing this posted in a few threads and in my experience it's plain wrong. When I'm interviewing candidates I don't care about the degree at all. RCNTX: Either you interview and make hiring decisions, and the behavior you're describing is in fact your own, or you have never actually hired anyone and are speculating. Which is it?
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  Who's to say they're not doing that already and just not telling you? At least this way there's no denying the company one's working for doesn't value them more than they value empty credentials. You can find another employer who doesn't play those games.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  So once you see that (WHICH IS WHAT IS ALREADY GOING ON) then you can shop somewhere else. Its really weird to see this offered as a negative of transparency, when it is an example of transparency working.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
Your employer doesn't want you to discuss pay with your fellow workers, because if you did you would realize how badly you are being ripped off. This is why in many countries pay transparency is protected by law. The Wall Street Journal will naturally tell you otherwise, because they are your enemy.
- booleandilemma 5y ago
  Can confirm. We once found out a lazy developer was getting paid almost twice what me and others on my team were, for who knows what reason. It made everyone feel like shit.
  - masterof0 5y ago
    That's pretty much your fault, you go to your manager and negotiate better compensation, or leave. That have happened to me as well, and I left, never looked back. If you have 7 kids, 2 mortgages, etc... and can't afford to leave, then, maybe, that's why your employer is paying you less, because they have leverage on you. My aim is not to feel bad about somebody else's salary being higher than mine, I always aim to get as much as possible. Also,it seems the "lazy" developer, is not that lazy, as he/she/{x} at least can negotiate better compensation.
  - danaris 5y ago
    The reasonable response to that is not "so we shouldn't let anyone find out what other people are making." It's "so we should go to management, demand to know why this crappy employee is making more, and if they don't have a very good answer and won't remedy the situation, consider leaving to some place where they reward excellence."
    - scaryclam 5y ago
      Devils advocate: why does it matter? Does them making more than you affect you in any way except emotionally? Are management going to say "Oh! Thanks for pointing it out, here you go, have a portion of their salary!", or are they just going to stop paying that employee as much?
ballenf 5y ago
We also need performance review transparency if we're going to share pay. Doing the same job title is not the same as doing the same job.
eikenberry 5y ago
Seems like one upside for tech workers is that this could finally inspire more companies to create decent tech tracks. It seems that many of the problems people have with transparency are related to people doing different/more/less work but who have the same job title when maybe they shouldn't. If 2 people contribute different orders of magnitude to a company they probably shouldn't have the same title. Different titles could then exist in different pay brackets (with different progression tracks, etc).
lamontcg 5y ago
> After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately. I called a recruiter the next day and was out a few months after. So it worked. Company valued PhD's most over anything else, and now you had that information and made an informed choice. They made theirs.
hammock 5y ago
>Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the same when we're shopping for a job? That's backwards. The employer is shopping for the candidate, not the other way around. You are the product and they are the one handing over whatever your price is in cash. That's why they ask how much you cost ("what's your salary expectation?") It's the product, the candidate, that typically dodges this transparency.
sangnoir 5y ago
> Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty. Devils advocate- isn't this a bit like arguing peanut butter shouldn't be uniformly priced, but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown: soil acidity, use of pesticides, as well as farmers grit and dedication? A jar is a jar, and ideally, a job is a job. An employee can either do the job, and be paid what it says on the can, or they cannot do the job and have to be transitioned out. Sure, jars come in different sizes and brands, but we should stop pretending each job is bespoke when employee organizations function on the basis of them being similar, empirically workers are replaceable. My biggest problem is information asymmetry: even if I were to accept your argument at face value (that important attributes are hard to gauge); the employee has much less knowledge on how much they ought to be paid for their skill-level, but the employer will have that information up the wazoo (both internally, and through industry surveys and back-channels)
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  If peanut butter was $200k a jar and not $2 a jar, then I would imagine there would be a lot of talk about the soil and pesticides.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    Hand-assembled hypercars can go for much more than $200k, but are not priced according to the years of experience, grit, or expertise of the craftsmen who sew the leather seats or molded the carbon-fiber elements. One doesn't have to haggle with Koenigsegg over the provenance of their steel.
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      Such cars are all roughly interchangeable between themselves (& sometimes between competitors), hence an average price. In certain fields, employees are not similarly interchangeable for a given position.
P_I_Staker 5y ago
It sounds like just a bad deal. You don't have to do it based on credentials. The flip side is maybe you WERE being overpaid, able to trick your way to some kind of advantage, and got caught. It does make it more challenging to reward top performers, who might be better off just sitting back
stefan_ 5y ago
You seem to have exactly the wrong takeaway? The business introducing pay transparency was a boon for you! It told you they won't pay you fairly, and so you left to get the raise you deserved. Would you rather be lied to in manager 1-on-1s how you just need to work more collaboratively to get that promotion? What a scam!
samdunham 5y ago
Bad analogy. This would be more akin to businesses telling consumers exactly how much a product costs to produce. And even that isn't a perfect analogy. Bottom line, my salary is the business of me, the company I work for, and my wife. No one else needs to know how much (or little) I make.
P_I_Staker 5y ago
It sounds like just a bad deal. You don't have to do it based on credentials. The flip side is maybe you WERE being overpaid, able to trick your way to some kind of advantage, and got caught. It does make it more challenging to reward top performers, who might be better off just sitting back and taking it easy, since number of years dictate pay... this is a problem anyway in my industry. People do notice if you're especially lazy or ambitious, but it often all looks the same, and doesn't matter unless you have eyes on management. I do agree about being too focused on
tshaddox 5y ago
Isn't it also pretty hard to know the quality, reliability, etc. of most products you buy, and thus how satisfied you will be with that product?
P_I_Staker 5y ago
It sounds like just a bad deal. You don't have to do it based on credentials. They could have grandfathered in everyone, a subset of top performers, or made it based on role; the role USUALLY hires grads, but not always. You see this in manufacturing where machine operators occasionally work as engineers. The flip side is maybe you WERE being overpaid, able to trick your way to some kind of advantage, and got caught. It does make it more challenging to reward top performers, who might be better off just sitting back and taking it easy, since number of years dictate pay... this is a problem anyway in my industry. People do notice if you're especially lazy or ambitious, but it often all looks the same, and doesn't matter unless you have eyes on management. You wind up being a necessary evil almost no matter what. I do agree about being too focused on credentials. I could see how this system could do this, but it doesn't have to be that way.
honkycat 5y ago
I was the first engineering hire at a start up. I built the start-up from greenfield to multi-million dollar revenue and 50+ employees. I was doing ALL of the DevOps and security work, while also contributing to back-end development. I knew the system in and out and was working my ASS off. When the time for yearly reviews came, I was excited to get a big raise ( to bring me in line with the median for my job title ), and a pat on the back. Instead they announced some "point-based pay scale" and told me I was technically already over-paid for my position. No raise, no promotion. The thing is, the point system was based on reviews from my peers. Who all did their own back-end and front-end work and were never really collaborating with me. I was just loudly as possible running things on the back-end and trying to keep my users happy. ALL of us ended up around the middle of the chart "with expectations we will move up." "Oh, you built the company? Well uh... you're still just a senior engineer." A week later I had accepted an offer making +50% and they were out one of their foundational engineers. Most of the other devs followed suit. So the pennies they saved lost them pounds of engineers they now had to recruit and re-hire for. What a bonehead move. So I definitely hear you here: basing pay off of arbitrary points allocated by your peers instead of actually measuring performance is bad in my experience.
- jjav 5y ago
  > "Oh, you built the company? Well uh... you're still just a senior engineer." This is a key message. Unless you have a contract that says something else in writing, don't expect anything else from sacrificing at an early startup.
  - honkycat 5y ago
    Absolutely. I will never work that hard again unless it is for myself.
lhorie 5y ago
Another way to interpret this is to look at the relationship between power/influence and relative benefit of transparency. If the highest performers are incentivized to keep their pay secret to avoid getting placed into common denominator buckets, surely that will translate into systems that favor pay secrecy. So if we look at pay secrecy as a "natural" phenomenon given workplace dynamics, one then needs to ask what one stands to gain from disturbing those dynamics. Anecdotally, the argument I hear is that this causes high performers to leave, causing the company to lose competitiveness. If so, it seems kinda counterproductive to pursue the goal of pay equality, since this entails that there's no incentive to increase company competitiveness (e.g. "eh, someone else can do the work, it's not my job" mentality), but the subsequent lower bottom line gets distributed evenly, meaning that any individual gains are constrained to some local maximum. That... doesn't sound like an appealing conclusion. I'd love to hear different takes on why pay transparency might make sense, in a global environment where other companies are naturally incentivized to tie hustling to pay secrecy.
twobitshifter 5y ago
You could go the other way as well, without knowing the limits to your future compensation, you were still hanging on to your position. You had expectations of a bigger pay day but it sounds like that was not formally offered to you. When you knew your true pay and future pay you were able to move up to a better compensated position. To me that sounds like things working correctly. Companies will suffer when employees look around and see what their neighbors at other businesses are making and what they could be making elsewhere. But employees will benefit. In many Asian cultures everyone knows what everyone else makes. In many cases it shakes out that the most deserving end up being the highest paid. Companies can’t benefit from employees keeping their pay from one another. There’s probably a game theory explanation as to how western and eastern cultures could both land on these two different states.
AussieWog93 5y ago
> > Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the same when we're shopping for a job? I think even the rhetorical question is flawed. Retailers will always display prices, but almost never give you enough information to calculate the actual cost of owning the asset (ie, depreciation). Will the product break after 2 years of typical use or 20? Can it be serviced? How much does the service cost? How much will the service extend the life of the product by? What is the resale value of the product? How often do I need to replace consumables? What is the running cost of the product (to be fair, large appliances do display this and cars will advertise mileage data)? If anything, being transparent in terms of purchase price but failing to provide a whole picture of the economics of owning a product has lead to a reduction in the durability of consumer goods. I know my business (online video games store) has started selling lower quality products in response to consumer demand.
analog31 5y ago
Maybe job titles are equally to blame. At the very least, disrupting the current system would force a re thinking of how titles are awarded.
walshemj 5y ago
Ah so your employer admits it descriminates against those from atypical backgrounds that's disability, race and quite likely sex discrimination. "I am shocked shocked" I tell you"
quantified 5y ago
Do you pay orders of magnitude differently for the order of magnitude difference in performance? If so, the salary range that you publish for a role will simply get wider. I think this will turn into a trivial game: every offered job positon will have a comp range of $1 to $1mm annually and between 0 and 5mm RSUs. And sold as pay equity. Knowing who the overpaid slackers in an org are will help adjust the culture.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Isn't that the whole point of levels? You're an X and they're an X, but if they're going to get paid 50% more, then make them a Level 6 X and you a level 5 X. Then you post that level sixes get paid $XXX,XXX-$XXX,XXX while level fives only get some other amount and then internally people will push for transparency around what the promotion criteria are. I would expect (in the long run) to end up with the exact same pay and just more transparency.

naikrovek 5y ago

The "lazy PhD" bit there really undermines your entire point. Have you seen what it takes to get a PhD? I'm sure there are some who somehow skated through, but they are the exception, and not the rule. For the same reasons you cite, equal pay is important. Some employees are better than others, and this is very hard to qualify, and the effect is that those who have less skill at negotiation, are underpaid, completely independent of skill, while those who are better at negotiation are paid more, completely independent of skill. If skill is not going to be a factor in how people are paid, then pay for the role and not the person. Any given person can and will grow in their role, potentially earning more (but not getting paid more) than they did a month prior; even moreso if they don't have to stress about money all of the time, and can just have all of those concerns alleviated even a little by higher pay. Most people want to be better at their career, and are bogged down by the myriad of troubles that tight budgets generally cause. Remove these impediments for those who have reached a point in their career where they've earned the right to be without these troubles, and you will see your people take off, like how plants bloom when they haven't seen water in 10 days.

Veen 5y ago
> The "lazy PhD" bit there really undermines your entire point. Have you seen what it takes to get a PhD? It depends on the field, but however much effort it takes to get a PhD it's at best a weak proxy for how much value a particular employee provides to the business. > and you will see your people take off Yes, you'll see your best employees take off to an employer where they are paid better than their time-serving colleagues.
- pm90 5y ago
  > PhD it's at best a weak proxy for how much value a particular employee provides to the business. Compensation is almost never based on what value employees provide to the business but what the market will pay for them. If PhDs get paid more it’s likely because the market is willing to pay more for people with those skills. Fwiw: I don’t have a PhD. But I do find the lazy PhD bit pretty tiring too.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    With PhD thing is the supply is relatively low. At least compared to number of Masters and Bachelors available. Thus just alone that they can cost more to hire. Demand is much more murky question however.
endymi0n 5y ago
> Have you seen what it takes to get a PhD? In the worst case, the extreme willingness and patience to waste years of your life on writing a thick paper that has a high chance of never being read by more than a handful of people and then pile on dust in the closet — and choosing that path over creating tangible real-world solutions in the same time. Not discounting the hard work that goes into a PhD thesis at the slightest and the fact that I know brilliant PhDs with game-changing papers that went on to excel in their jobs, this framing might still give a clue on why, after having hired over a hundred engineers and seeing them develop, I have yet to see a positive correlation between academic performance and job performance. Same goes for removing impediments. Having gone greater lengths to remove impediments for employees early in my career than any other manager I know, I can attest that even that doesn't motivate certain personality types to "flower". If anything, it motivates them to find more impediments. All the while the employees who just removed the first few impediments themselves are already crushing the next task. "Whoever wants something finds ways, whoever doesn't want something finds reasons." - Götz Werner

jgilias 5y ago

I also feel very strongly about this. Many moons ago I literally got paid half of what a friend of mine got paid for exactly the same position, responsibilities, and output, and yes, I can gauge the output, as it was a position for which this is quite rigidly defined. Just because he said a different amount than I that he was willing to work for during negotiations. From that point on I have consistently refused to 'name my amount'. Literally, I would say something like: "A company like yours must have a defined salary scale for the given position, why don't we start from there, and see how it aligns with my expectations?". If they push on, it goes something like: "So, are you saying that salaries at your organization are ad-hoc, and you're looking for the cheapest person who can fill the role?". In which case, I'm really not interested anymore.

whatsapps2020 5y ago
Another option is to study the market, interview at multiple places, and give a high but realistic amount. This way you will get ~highest possible offer
- jgilias 5y ago
  The part of the discussion is not just about pay, it is also about company culture. I really don't want to work at a place willing to haggle and fill the position with the cheapest eligible person.
  - pm90 5y ago
    There are often good teams but they need to work with a compensation department/committee to get actual numbers. IMO it seems a bit early to judge the company culture just by an interaction with the recruiter. But maybe you consider that to be a part of company culture too. What I’ve noticed though is even fantastic engineering companies might crappy departments for other things.
    - jgilias 5y ago
      At a point when they ask me my salary expectations, I would expect to be talking to someone who has the authority to speak about salaries.

slg 5y ago

You are blaming pay transparency for a related but different policy of having a public compensation formula. Pay transparency does not require that every employee in a given role needs to be compensated the same. More productive employees can still be compensated more. The less productive employees can leave if they have a problem with that. Pay transparency is simply about empowering employees by giving them the same information that employers have.

dagw 5y ago

Despite the question being rhethorical Furthermore, in many situations they don't tell you what it costs. In many cases you have to 'interview' with a sales team whose whole job is to find out how much you are willing to pay before telling you a price.

ssss11 5y ago

I’d say the same of companies - the same role at two similar companies can be drastically different pay and there’s usually a good reason (which the candidate won’t know) - culture, complexity, bureaucracy, hours, workload, etc.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

> I've got people with the same job title with almost a magnitude of difference in actual output. Sure, on paper, they're "doing the same thing", but if someone forced me to shoehorn them into categories, that would mostly serve to punish top performes with little credentials and push them somewhere else. Why is transparency a problem here? The person doing orders of magnitude more work is probably only getting paid 10% more. Transparency could possibly make this better for both the workers and the employers, or it could make them worse for both - better for one and worse for the other - better for one and no difference for the other - or no difference for either. There's lots of possibilities. But It doesn't seem like there's reason to believe transparency is surely bad.

gkop 5y ago
The full comment you are replying to does not disagree with your comment, so your comment appears a non sequitur.
zepto 5y ago
> Transparency could possibly make this better for both the workers and the employers, How exactly? I don’t see any obvious path to this.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  I'm not saying this is the case - but it is possible to imagine a world in which transparency leads to higher pay for more productive employees - which causes them to become even more productive for even more pay. Imagine you're a business and your employees bake pies. Imagine the costs are fixed beside the pie. Imagine the pie costs $1 in ingredients. Imagine the average worker bakes 10 pies per hour, and your marginal profit per pie is $9, and you pay workers $10 per hour. That is the labor cost and supplies for a pie costs $8. Each worker, generates $80 in revenue per hour after inputs and wages. However, you have one worker that bakes 30 pies per hour for $20 per hour. This worker is happy to earn double the average worker. And you, as a business owner, are very happy to make $300-30-20 = $250 per hour in revenue after inputs and wages (3x). However, If the worker is aware of how much more s/he makes - it is possible to imagine the worker becomes even more productive. Maybe the worker can bake 45 pies for $30 per hour (3x). You're paying more per hour per pie, but you're making much more profit per hour = $450 - 45 - 30 = $375 (4.5x).

seiferteric 5y ago

Yes and is yet another attempt to frame individuals as replaceable cogs in a machine. Each person will have widely different set of skills and experience that will affect their job performance regardless of job title. It is impossible to prove that people "are doing the same job" and will just discourage top performers.

brundolf 5y ago

> I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately I don't see anything in the OP about gating pay-tiers behind arbitrary requirements like having a PhD? Why would a company be forced to do that under this kind of law? You can establish tiers with publicized compensation and still hire the best person for each job; those are independent axes.

Dig1t 5y ago

I agree with this, I've been doing the job search thing for the last 3 months and I've spoken with a few companies that have this equality based pay model (DuckDuckGo is a good example), where everyone with the same job title makes exactly the same amount. The pay offered by these places is lower than what I have been able to get at places without the policy, and they have been unwilling to make any exceptions. This one-size-fits-all pay bracket thing really sucks IMO. Also basing pay off of YoE or education level also strike me as old, stodgy ways of paying your workers, like something IBM would do. You're worth exactly what you can convince someone to pay you, nothing more or less than that.

BizarroLand 5y ago
I think they should show pay minimums, not absolutes. The real issue isn't that Janet in Accounting makes $10k/yr more than you do, its that new hires for your same job make $10k/yr more than you.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
I think those are two different issues though. You can have pay transparency without enforcing strict pay levels per role. The natural outcome is just that thise who make less than their coworkers will feel undervalued and look for other jobs, which is probably not a big problem.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  The problem in doing that is you generate metric tons of resentment and politicking among people in the same role. If my title is the same as someone else's but I'm making 20% less than they are, even if I can bring myself to admit to myself that they're better at the job, I'm still going to feel we're "doing the same job" and I'm getting screwed. Those people don't immediately and quietly just look for a new job. They complain and moan and poison the well and generally destroy the social atmosphere of the company. Studies of workplace motivation and performance often find that one of the worst things you can do is get everyone obsessing about salary all of the time instead of focusing on the work. (Notably, this isn't just bad for the company, it's bad for the workers' quality of life.) I think it's fair to say that sometimes companies are trying to screw the workers, but I also think some of the norms around discretion on this topic were an informal evolved mechanism to dampen the natural status competition people fall into and get them to work more as a unit focused on a goal. While I appreciate the aim behind transparency laws, I'd prefer it if certain things like choosing to talk about salary were protected. Publishing all of the salaries by default seems like a blunt mechanism and strikes me as very libertarian or Marxist thinking where you're either assuming a) a free and transparent market always produces the best result, or b) people fall into broad "classes" in which all individuals share the same interests and will work together. I generally think both of those modes of thought are simplistic and, despite some underlying truth, fail to account for many important complications and unintended side effects.

gamesbrainiac 5y ago

> Despite the question being rhethorical, the answer is everything that's wrong about this proposal: Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty. And you can indeed choose those things over higher pay. This does not prevent people from choosing something they love doing for less money; it just makes the opportunity cost more plain. I see nothing wrong with this. At all.

themolecularman 5y ago

> I feel strongly about this, mostly because it happened to myself: After being sold, the first company that employed me introduced a "completely fair and transparent" compensation scheme. After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately. I also am a tech worker with no tech degree (no math, CS, eng, etc). Pay transparency would be run by administrators inside businesses that would likely implement something as you describe: "So-and-so just graduated cum laude from X with a degree in Y therefore they're at pay band Z." It will be horrible for people who had to self-educate.

RNCTX 5y ago
It doesn't matter. The degrees are just signifiers to denote a class of people you aren't in. If it weren't for the titles you would be excluded on some other grounds. I mean, there are modern professions still using medieval terms for this (esquire?)
- degreeta 5y ago
  I've been seeing this posted in a few threads and in my experience it's plain wrong. When I'm interviewing candidates I don't care about the degree at all. RCNTX: Either you interview and make hiring decisions, and the behavior you're describing is in fact your own, or you have never actually hired anyone and are speculating. Which is it?
KittenInABox 5y ago
Who's to say they're not doing that already and just not telling you? At least this way there's no denying the company one's working for doesn't value them more than they value empty credentials. You can find another employer who doesn't play those games.
lamontcg 5y ago
So once you see that (WHICH IS WHAT IS ALREADY GOING ON) then you can shop somewhere else. Its really weird to see this offered as a negative of transparency, when it is an example of transparency working.

thescriptkiddie 5y ago

Your employer doesn't want you to discuss pay with your fellow workers, because if you did you would realize how badly you are being ripped off. This is why in many countries pay transparency is protected by law. The Wall Street Journal will naturally tell you otherwise, because they are your enemy.

booleandilemma 5y ago
Can confirm. We once found out a lazy developer was getting paid almost twice what me and others on my team were, for who knows what reason. It made everyone feel like shit.
- masterof0 5y ago
  That's pretty much your fault, you go to your manager and negotiate better compensation, or leave. That have happened to me as well, and I left, never looked back. If you have 7 kids, 2 mortgages, etc... and can't afford to leave, then, maybe, that's why your employer is paying you less, because they have leverage on you. My aim is not to feel bad about somebody else's salary being higher than mine, I always aim to get as much as possible. Also,it seems the "lazy" developer, is not that lazy, as he/she/{x} at least can negotiate better compensation.
- danaris 5y ago
  The reasonable response to that is not "so we shouldn't let anyone find out what other people are making." It's "so we should go to management, demand to know why this crappy employee is making more, and if they don't have a very good answer and won't remedy the situation, consider leaving to some place where they reward excellence."
  - scaryclam 5y ago
    Devils advocate: why does it matter? Does them making more than you affect you in any way except emotionally? Are management going to say "Oh! Thanks for pointing it out, here you go, have a portion of their salary!", or are they just going to stop paying that employee as much?

ballenf 5y ago

We also need performance review transparency if we're going to share pay. Doing the same job title is not the same as doing the same job.

eikenberry 5y ago

Seems like one upside for tech workers is that this could finally inspire more companies to create decent tech tracks. It seems that many of the problems people have with transparency are related to people doing different/more/less work but who have the same job title when maybe they shouldn't. If 2 people contribute different orders of magnitude to a company they probably shouldn't have the same title. Different titles could then exist in different pay brackets (with different progression tracks, etc).

lamontcg 5y ago

> After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I'd have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately. I called a recruiter the next day and was out a few months after. So it worked. Company valued PhD's most over anything else, and now you had that information and made an informed choice. They made theirs.

hammock 5y ago

>Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the same when we're shopping for a job? That's backwards. The employer is shopping for the candidate, not the other way around. You are the product and they are the one handing over whatever your price is in cash. That's why they ask how much you cost ("what's your salary expectation?") It's the product, the candidate, that typically dodges this transparency.

sangnoir 5y ago

> Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty. Devils advocate- isn't this a bit like arguing peanut butter shouldn't be uniformly priced, but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown: soil acidity, use of pesticides, as well as farmers grit and dedication? A jar is a jar, and ideally, a job is a job. An employee can either do the job, and be paid what it says on the can, or they cannot do the job and have to be transitioned out. Sure, jars come in different sizes and brands, but we should stop pretending each job is bespoke when employee organizations function on the basis of them being similar, empirically workers are replaceable. My biggest problem is information asymmetry: even if I were to accept your argument at face value (that important attributes are hard to gauge); the employee has much less knowledge on how much they ought to be paid for their skill-level, but the employer will have that information up the wazoo (both internally, and through industry surveys and back-channels)

jay_kyburz 5y ago
If peanut butter was $200k a jar and not $2 a jar, then I would imagine there would be a lot of talk about the soil and pesticides.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  Hand-assembled hypercars can go for much more than $200k, but are not priced according to the years of experience, grit, or expertise of the craftsmen who sew the leather seats or molded the carbon-fiber elements. One doesn't have to haggle with Koenigsegg over the provenance of their steel.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    Such cars are all roughly interchangeable between themselves (& sometimes between competitors), hence an average price. In certain fields, employees are not similarly interchangeable for a given position.

P_I_Staker 5y ago

stefan_ 5y ago

You seem to have exactly the wrong takeaway? The business introducing pay transparency was a boon for you! It told you they won't pay you fairly, and so you left to get the raise you deserved. Would you rather be lied to in manager 1-on-1s how you just need to work more collaboratively to get that promotion? What a scam!

samdunham 5y ago

Bad analogy. This would be more akin to businesses telling consumers exactly how much a product costs to produce. And even that isn't a perfect analogy. Bottom line, my salary is the business of me, the company I work for, and my wife. No one else needs to know how much (or little) I make.

P_I_Staker 5y ago

It sounds like just a bad deal. You don't have to do it based on credentials. The flip side is maybe you WERE being overpaid, able to trick your way to some kind of advantage, and got caught. It does make it more challenging to reward top performers, who might be better off just sitting back and taking it easy, since number of years dictate pay... this is a problem anyway in my industry. People do notice if you're especially lazy or ambitious, but it often all looks the same, and doesn't matter unless you have eyes on management. I do agree about being too focused on

tshaddox 5y ago

Isn't it also pretty hard to know the quality, reliability, etc. of most products you buy, and thus how satisfied you will be with that product?

P_I_Staker 5y ago

It sounds like just a bad deal. You don't have to do it based on credentials. They could have grandfathered in everyone, a subset of top performers, or made it based on role; the role USUALLY hires grads, but not always. You see this in manufacturing where machine operators occasionally work as engineers. The flip side is maybe you WERE being overpaid, able to trick your way to some kind of advantage, and got caught. It does make it more challenging to reward top performers, who might be better off just sitting back and taking it easy, since number of years dictate pay... this is a problem anyway in my industry. People do notice if you're especially lazy or ambitious, but it often all looks the same, and doesn't matter unless you have eyes on management. You wind up being a necessary evil almost no matter what. I do agree about being too focused on credentials. I could see how this system could do this, but it doesn't have to be that way.

honkycat 5y ago

I was the first engineering hire at a start up. I built the start-up from greenfield to multi-million dollar revenue and 50+ employees. I was doing ALL of the DevOps and security work, while also contributing to back-end development. I knew the system in and out and was working my ASS off. When the time for yearly reviews came, I was excited to get a big raise ( to bring me in line with the median for my job title ), and a pat on the back. Instead they announced some "point-based pay scale" and told me I was technically already over-paid for my position. No raise, no promotion. The thing is, the point system was based on reviews from my peers. Who all did their own back-end and front-end work and were never really collaborating with me. I was just loudly as possible running things on the back-end and trying to keep my users happy. ALL of us ended up around the middle of the chart "with expectations we will move up." "Oh, you built the company? Well uh... you're still just a senior engineer." A week later I had accepted an offer making +50% and they were out one of their foundational engineers. Most of the other devs followed suit. So the pennies they saved lost them pounds of engineers they now had to recruit and re-hire for. What a bonehead move. So I definitely hear you here: basing pay off of arbitrary points allocated by your peers instead of actually measuring performance is bad in my experience.

jjav 5y ago
> "Oh, you built the company? Well uh... you're still just a senior engineer." This is a key message. Unless you have a contract that says something else in writing, don't expect anything else from sacrificing at an early startup.
- honkycat 5y ago
  Absolutely. I will never work that hard again unless it is for myself.

lhorie 5y ago

Another way to interpret this is to look at the relationship between power/influence and relative benefit of transparency. If the highest performers are incentivized to keep their pay secret to avoid getting placed into common denominator buckets, surely that will translate into systems that favor pay secrecy. So if we look at pay secrecy as a "natural" phenomenon given workplace dynamics, one then needs to ask what one stands to gain from disturbing those dynamics. Anecdotally, the argument I hear is that this causes high performers to leave, causing the company to lose competitiveness. If so, it seems kinda counterproductive to pursue the goal of pay equality, since this entails that there's no incentive to increase company competitiveness (e.g. "eh, someone else can do the work, it's not my job" mentality), but the subsequent lower bottom line gets distributed evenly, meaning that any individual gains are constrained to some local maximum. That... doesn't sound like an appealing conclusion. I'd love to hear different takes on why pay transparency might make sense, in a global environment where other companies are naturally incentivized to tie hustling to pay secrecy.

twobitshifter 5y ago

You could go the other way as well, without knowing the limits to your future compensation, you were still hanging on to your position. You had expectations of a bigger pay day but it sounds like that was not formally offered to you. When you knew your true pay and future pay you were able to move up to a better compensated position. To me that sounds like things working correctly. Companies will suffer when employees look around and see what their neighbors at other businesses are making and what they could be making elsewhere. But employees will benefit. In many Asian cultures everyone knows what everyone else makes. In many cases it shakes out that the most deserving end up being the highest paid. Companies can’t benefit from employees keeping their pay from one another. There’s probably a game theory explanation as to how western and eastern cultures could both land on these two different states.

AussieWog93 5y ago

> > Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the same when we're shopping for a job? I think even the rhetorical question is flawed. Retailers will always display prices, but almost never give you enough information to calculate the actual cost of owning the asset (ie, depreciation). Will the product break after 2 years of typical use or 20? Can it be serviced? How much does the service cost? How much will the service extend the life of the product by? What is the resale value of the product? How often do I need to replace consumables? What is the running cost of the product (to be fair, large appliances do display this and cars will advertise mileage data)? If anything, being transparent in terms of purchase price but failing to provide a whole picture of the economics of owning a product has lead to a reduction in the durability of consumer goods. I know my business (online video games store) has started selling lower quality products in response to consumer demand.

analog31 5y ago

Maybe job titles are equally to blame. At the very least, disrupting the current system would force a re thinking of how titles are awarded.

walshemj 5y ago

Ah so your employer admits it descriminates against those from atypical backgrounds that's disability, race and quite likely sex discrimination. "I am shocked shocked" I tell you"

quantified 5y ago

Do you pay orders of magnitude differently for the order of magnitude difference in performance? If so, the salary range that you publish for a role will simply get wider. I think this will turn into a trivial game: every offered job positon will have a comp range of $1 to $1mm annually and between 0 and 5mm RSUs. And sold as pay equity. Knowing who the overpaid slackers in an org are will help adjust the culture.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Isn't that the whole point of levels? You're an X and they're an X, but if they're going to get paid 50% more, then make them a Level 6 X and you a level 5 X. Then you post that level sixes get paid $XXX,XXX-$XXX,XXX while level fives only get some other amount and then internally people will push for transparency around what the promotion criteria are. I would expect (in the long run) to end up with the exact same pay and just more transparency.