15 ms·

Workers are often told not to talk about pay. That's not legal

396 points by hhs 5y ago

pope_meat 5y ago
A friend of mine worked as an editor for a news paper. He was a new hire, and a woman who has been working as an editor at the same news paper for 9 years asked him what his salary offer was. It turned out she after 9 years was getting paid $3k less than what he was offered as a new hire.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  Similar situations arise constantly in the tech sector. If you stay with a company for a few years, you'll probably get surpassed in salary by new college grads depending on the market at the time. If you let it go too long before you bring it up, when you finally do, you'll get some BS about how they "can't" bump you up because they "can't" authorize that large of a salary bump. A purely BS, arbitrary, rule.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    If you find yourself in a situation like that and want to remedy it then get a competing offer. If you're making 80k and sit down with your manager to talk about the possibility of leaving for a 120k position that you're clearly qualified for then a lot of companies will respond with a counter offer. It sucks but you often need to turn your employment rate into a bidding war. Oh - just FYI - be prepared to jump ship if you do this. Some people are manipulative assholes that react strongly and quickly to any employees standing up for themselves - and other companies are legitimately failing and can't afford the pay bump. In either case you're better off at the new shop. Having an actual job offer to another shop should give you the confidence to risk your current position.
    - glouwbug 5y ago
      It's best to just go. Once you've accepted the counter offer you've already indicated to your superiors that you're ready to leave
      - wildrhythms 5y ago
        Use competing offers as leverage for as long as possible. You owe the company nothing.
        glouwbug 5y ago
        You could accept the counter offer and then be replaced by someone who's willing to work for less (you might even have to train them before you're dismissed). It's just easier to take the new gig and get paid more with a clean political slate
      - munk-a 5y ago
        It really depends - sometimes the team I'm working for is worth the hairiness of negotiating the pay raise - other times it's nothing to write home about and jumping ship is easier.
  - t-writescode 5y ago
    Then I guess you "can't" be bothered to keep working at that company. Pity.
- conductr 5y ago
  This is business as usual in all industries. Companies don’t value tenure and you’re often better off changing companies for promotion, salary increases, etc. To be honest, $3k sounds like a tiny variance. I frequently see 20-30k differences on middle management roles. Often 10%-30% differences. Getting several years of 3% increases can put you well behind the market. This is one of the reasons salary bands are so wide. Employers don’t want to bring current staff up to market but want the ability to hire top talent. Also, there’s a fair bit of budget exceptions that get made when a great candidate comes along (whether they’re great or not, TBD)
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    This is why switching jobs to a new employer is the single best way to get a salary increase. The chances that you will get an increase from an employer's pay schedule (or by active request) is far lower than simply applying somewhere else for the going rate, in the US.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Experience is valuable. Experience with what specifically your current employer does is not.
  - mfer 5y ago
    > Companies don’t value tenure This is very true. They value your ability to do a job. If you've been around a long time and aren't being valuable in your current job they often won't value you. But, if you are being useful in your current job they will value you. Tenure is not valued. Usefulness to the company is. Whether you're 20 or 60 this same thing applies. > you’re often better off changing companies for promotion, salary increases, etc. This depends. Companies often view their people as expenses. They often want to get the maximum they can out of someone at the least expense. There are exceptions to this but it's the rule. So, you need to learn to maximize the thing you value if you want that. Things like position and compensation. When being courted by a new company they will use these to pull you in. But, if you learn the system at your current employer you can use that system to your benefit as well. Your current company doesn't often see benefit from paying people more and promotions. In some cases, they're looking for the people motivated enough to seek them and not wait for them to be given. Especially at the higher levels. Of course, using your current companies system to your benefit means you want to stay there. > 10%-30% differences Hiring companies are looking for that number which will pull people away. Even from a job they like. What they initially offer is almost always lower than they are able to go. Just my 2 cents after many years in the systems.
- lliamander 5y ago
  Even as a man this has happened to me. In my case at least (and I think in many cases) is that the market price of labor changes, which requires employers to pay more for new hires, but they don't go back and adjust the salaries of existing employees.
  - soco 5y ago
    Which basically means they don't value experience in their own company. What better reason to say sayonara?
- ericmcer 5y ago
  There is a sort of stagnancy that can surround people who have been there for years though. For many devs, the first 3ish months you lack context to be super useful, then that first 2-4 years of hard work and enthusiasm are probably your peak productivity. It gets harder to maintain enthusiasm as the years go by, so some devs who are cruising with 5+ years might actually provide less long term value than a new hire.
  - wildrhythms 5y ago
    The 5+ year workers understand, and have experienced, that the promotion system is designed to extract the most value from the greenest thumbs. Tenure is rarely rewarded. Why work harder and harder for nothing?
- twistedpair 5y ago
  A friend screened a female candidate years ago. She was highly qualified, with serious experience. When asked what her salary expectations were, she said what she made, but confessed she doubted the prospective employer could possibly pay that. The reality was she was quite under paid. It's quite saddening that her prior employer seemed to have convinced her that such low pay was top of the industry mark.
- twistedpair 5y ago
  Given the ongoing inflation in the US is 5.4% so far this year, everyone has gotten their 5.4% cost of living increase for 2021, right?
rsj_hn 5y ago
As someone who has spent a most of my life working and was never told what to say or not say about his pay by his employer, my bullshit detector went into the redzone after reading the story that says 50% of employers tell workers not to discuss pay. Was I such an odd exception? So I dug deeper, and discovered this was an activism piece, not a scientific study, by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research - not a group well known for objectivity. They commissioned a poll but did not disclose the details of the poll such as the exact questions asked and the responses for each question, which is the basic minimum required to take a poll seriously. Instead, they published a glossy "brief" - https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pay-Secrecy-Policy-Brief-v4.pdf https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pay-Secrecy-Poli... - which claims 12% of employers prohibit discussing pay -- that's much more plausible than 50%. So how do you get to the headline 50%? Because that is how many people reported being "discouraged" -- but were they discouraged by their employer, by their peers, or by their own conscience? Here is where knowing the actual questions to the poll would be useful. Please do not listen to any reports of a poll when only the summary results are provided but the specific questions and breakdowns of the answers are not provided. Particularly when the poll is commissioned by a pressure group not known for objectivity. If you can afford to put together a big glossy "brief" then you have the bandwidth to host result text files that disclose what the questions were and the poll methodology. This is the minimum bar for credibility, an outfit like USA today used to be aware of this, and so is any think tank worth their salt. Thus my spidey senses detected there is a good chance this is an activism piece that is intentionally misleading to promote some "greater cause". A good approach is to look at what other stories the same author wrote, to see if there is a track record of spreading propaganda in the name of some moral cause or whether it's just shoddy work. And indeed the author is a crusading reporter, that is, one who focuses on moral causes and issues rather than news. Real news is messy. Sometimes it supports your beliefs and other times it doesn't. But a look at his articles (as well as their social media presence) reveals an activist who cannot be objective or professional. E.g. the "news" story about racism causing food deserts and creating food "injustice". I get that this is an issue that many on the left are passionate about. But it's not news. it's a cause. And when you start reporting your causes as news stories, then you lose credibility and also hurt your cause. Here the problem is the general compression: There is a process of learning the truth about a situation, coming to some conclusion about it, and then figuring out the appropriate course of action. These can be separated into information gathering, issue debate, and then solution advocacy, and are best done by different people with different skillsets. Everyone must do their part well, which means everyone must have integrity. The reporter must seek the truth of the facts, not whatever servers their agenda, and the think tank must have integrity and a commitment to look deeply into issues. Reporters are supposed to be uncovering hidden information. Not advocating well known issues like food deserts or that many people don't like to reveal their exact pay to their coworkers. Think tanks who employ PhDs are supposed to be thinking through solutions and advocating solutions. Not pretending to uncover "news". So when the reporter with a bachelors degree skips over the news gathering part and dives into synthesis or solution advocacy, you can be sure it is a poorly thought out synthesis or solution. Just as when the think tank tries to create "news", you can be sure the think tank's press release is not newsworthy and sacrifices were made to try to make it "news". It's not like we get a steady stream of new issues to put on a newspaper. Thus they both do a shoddy job because they lack professionalism and discipline, which unfortunately is the current state of both modern news as well as think tanks. Everyone wants a podium to stand on and shout about the injustice of the world, rather than, you know, being good at a job so that progress can be made. For example, with this type of misinformation we don't even know what the problem is. If the study had been done right and the actual questions posted, we could have had useful breakdowns of how big of a problem this really is, what industries it's concentrated in, and the methods used by employers. This could then provide real actionable intelligence. But it wouldn't grab headlines. So this is an interesting area that a think tank can do a real study in. But we don't know the results -- all that useful information was sacrificed in order to inflate the problem to make it "news worthy".
blululu 5y ago
One thing that is frequently overlooked in discussions of publicizing salaries is that there is also a strong social stigma to flaunting wealth or talking about affluence. Personally I think that this is a good thing since it encourages humility and a sense of equality. I realize that there is a clear market case for publishing salary information, but I also think that we should be considerate of why people generally frown upon such conversations in interpersonal contexts (anonymous listings like levels.fyi are different).
- hhs 5y ago
  Indeed, towards the end of the piece, the author acknowledges this: "Of course, many workers don’t withhold their salaries out of respect for their supervisors’ wishes but because it can be deeply awkward. “We have a culture that discourages it,” Pardo said. “People don’t want to talk about money. It’s like talking about religion and politics. It’s uncomfortable.” As a result, many may be unaware of what the person in the other cubicle or on the other end of the Zoom call earns. While employer review websites like Glassdoor offer a window into company pay, UNC’s Hirsch pointed out this data is often incomplete and certainly not uploaded for all companies."
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    To what extent was this cultural stigma created by companies who wanted to discourage their workers from discussing pay, though? It seems more like an effect than a cause to me.
    - blululu 5y ago
      I think that this is a much older sentiment than modern corporations. For one thing the aversion to discussing wealth is more potent in contexts where the information is less related to market forces - people are more open to information about salaries when it is related to their line of work. Saying how much money you make in public (even among friends) is seen as a jerk thing to do. Instead people will say things like 'the starting salary in my field is...', or 'a senior level employee doing this makes around...' - a actual number for them personally is seldom offered (nor should it be outside of very intimate contexts (family). From an informal observation this prohibition is common across Protestant societies, though I think it also shows up around the globe. Talking about money publicly is seen as vulgar and viewing people in terms of money is seen as demeaning to their fundamental worth. You can find religious antecedents to such sentiments from thousands of years ago, so it is unlikely that these were promulgated by corporate interests.
legerdemain 5y ago
At my previous company, we didn't stop anyone from discussing pay. That's obviously illegal. What we did instead is make sure that everyone, including new college hires, understood that talking about pay almost always leads to interpersonal friction, resentment, conflict, lower work productivity, and slower progress of our company toward an IPO. In short, talking about pay would actively damage their bottom line, which is in not something in anyone's best interest. It's not a threat if you just explain how the real world works and that actions have consequences.
- yupper32 5y ago
  Is this satire? Talking about salaries have always resulted in better or equal pay for everyone involved (except the higher ups, like you) in my experience, and the experience of everyone I know. Your post sounds like companies claiming that unions would actually hurt you. If you're underpaying people in order to get to an IPO, people deserve to be aware of that and know the risks involved.
  - usui 5y ago
    I'm not sure why you are interpreting the parent's comment as similar to "claiming that unions would actually hurt you". It's just a post talking about how management in companies works around the illegality of telling employees not to talk to about pay. It's in the first sentence. It's not like the parent comment is defending the practice, just how it's done in practice to discourage employees. Yes, groups of employees that don't band together believe that it will hurt their own bottom line if they talk about pay.
    - yupper32 5y ago
      Are you saying that the poster is saying that they lie to their employees? I'm honestly not sure what you're saying.
  - mfogikds 5y ago
    "Talking about salaries have always resulted in better or equal pay for everyone involved" What is the exact source on this? I highly doubt every company in existence has the budget to pay everyone "better or equal"
comeonseriously 5y ago
No, but good luck proving that's why[0] you were fired. [0] Discussing your salary.
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  Worker protections have no teeth in the US. It's to the point where factory management can literally be caught on camera saying they fired a worker for trying to organize a union (see American Factory) and the company gets nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Nothing is 'illegal' if it's not enforced.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    That hasn't been my experience. In two different companies I worked at (none of them companies I ran myself), the company settled quickly over claims, at least one of which was candidly pretty frivolous. It's annoying to have to find and retain an attorney to get this done, but my expectation is that if you had an attorney bring a credible claim, you'd likely get some degree of satisfaction.
    - effingwewt 5y ago
      That's nice, but for another point of anecdata I've seen more companies flagrantly break laws, than ones who follow them, especially when it's in the best interest of the company. Most workers cannot afford to take their employers to court, and the businesses know this and take advantage of it every single day.
    - lovich 5y ago
      Does the situation in the United States seem to back up this anecdote? Do we see companies fail or suffer extreme setbacks from workers exercising their rights across the land? Or do we see companies growing at massive rates while employee compensation has stagnated?
      - pessimizer 5y ago
farmerstan 5y ago
I’m in my 50s. When I was younger, no one talked about pay ever. It was never ever broached. These days, all my younger coworkers openly discuss pay. I really like the openness today. It’s shared in a way that you’re trying to help your coworker, like “dude you’re totally underpaid I made $20k more than that! Go ask for a raise or find a new job!” It’s a different sense of camaraderie that people share these days instead of the zero-sum game from when I was younger.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  I'm also in my 50s and recall when it was completely taboo. Except I worked at a startup a few years back where I was told going in that we were all making the exact same pay from engineers to CTO. We all knew it was below-market pay, but it was supposedly so the company could bootstrap. One day I was having a conversation with a Russian co-worker (on an H1-B, I think) and I said something along the lines of "we're all making $XK/month which is about 25% below market, but hopefully we'll get some funding and that will change soon...". The look on his face told me that something was wrong. "You're making $Xk/month?!" he said. "Yeah, you are too, right... right?" "No, he replied, $2K/month less." I was really surprised because this guy was doing pretty much all of our hardware development and he was pretty brilliant. Shortly after he went to the CEO and (rightly) demanded parity.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    At my first US startup the CTO told me that all engineers are making the same slightly below market salaries and receiving same options. A few months later I found that most actually made almost twice and had way more options. I fix this quickly but i still don’t understand how people seem to think that it’s ok to blatantly to somebody
    - mikestew 5y ago
      It doesn't even have to be a hand-to-mouth startup to blatantly lie to folks, it can be a multi-billion-dollar multi-national corporation. For instance, when I was a manager at Microsoft I had more than one newly-hired report tell me that their onboard training said there was no stack ranking, which we all now know wasn't even remotely true in the early 2000s. (New hires would mention this, because one of the first things I'd tell new hires on my team was how stack ranking worked, amongst other parts of the performance review process.)
coredog64 5y ago
I really like how this was handled at Boeing. Every year, the local SPEEA rep would post an anonymous graph showing compensation compared to experience. The org was large enough that you couldn’t pinpoint everyone, but you could easily see where you stood WRT your peers.
- jofer 5y ago
  Yeah, that's actually a key thing I miss from my previous bigcorp job many years ago. Pay was tied to numerical career grades. Everyone's numerical career grade was public information. Salary ranges (fairly broad and overlapping for each grade) for each were published each cycle. While there was a ton of griping along the lines "seriously, X got promoted to 23!? They just suck up!", it was at least consistent across disciplines and clearly tied listed job responsibilities to a pay range to make justifications for a promotion easier. I know it's a very common system, but my current company doesn't have that, and I quite miss it. We somewhat do via titles. E.g. I know the 25 year old engineers who have the title "principle staff engineer" despite not being trusted to do anything directly are absurdly overpaid, but it's really murky and not consistent. E.g. If your title says "software engineer" you're on a completely different scale than someone who's title says "data engineer". And if you have actual experience in the field, you'll be considered a "scientist" or a "technician" instead of an "engineer" depending on the exact role you're hired into. At any rate, it's really, really, really unclear how anything relates, and going from a "staff X" position to a "junior Y" position is often a pay raise.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Boeing is also large enough to pay people reasonable salaries seeing as they're the largest contractor of the DoD.
chrisBob 5y ago
At my last job, all salaries were public record, and some dude even put together a website (https://umsalary.info https://umsalary.info) to make searching easier. Want to know what some internal career change might look like? Just take a look. Want to see what career path got someone else to where they are? Take a look. Want to know if you are being underpaid/discriminated against? Click on the job title next to your name and see where you stand compared to all employees with the same role. At a place where Diversity Equity and Inclusion is a stated goal I think this works well. I also know that people don't always get paid the same amount, and (as I often explain to my six-year-old) fair doesn't mean the everything has to be equal, but it is very useful to know where you stand. At my new job, the information on Levels seemed accurate based on my offer, and I was very happy with it.
- vibien 5y ago
  One thing that surprised me is that the highest salaried employees seem to be in Athletics ( https://umsalary.info/numbers.php https://umsalary.info/numbers.php ). Is it something specific to that particular university or a normal thing in the US universities?
  - mmoche 5y ago
    Extremely typical. There are cases where the highest paid employee in an entire _state_ is an athletics coach at a state university.
    - oneweekwonder 5y ago
      I was flabbergasted to learn Nick Saban from University of Alabama makes $9.3 million annually(2019)[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Saban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Saban
      - listenallyall 5y ago
        too much or too little?
spaetzleesser 5y ago
A simple rule for negotiations is that whoever has more information has an advantage. That means if workers don’t know the exact pay scales they are almost by definition at a disadvantage while the company has the full info. To the people who think they negotiated really well and want this to be kept from their coworkers I say that a lot of you have been lied to and you are making what everybody else makes or even less. I still remember a guy proudly telling me about his great contract and his face when I told him that I made almost twice as him.
- milesvp 5y ago
  This sort of illustrates why I dislike talking about salary. This person went from super happy with his life to unhappy, and nothing is any different in his life. I understand that this unhappiness is part of what drives income equality, so I’m glad more people are having these conversations, but I was once in a job for a number of years, where for several reasons I just needed to weather the storm, and I certainly didn’t need to know what my coworkers were making at the time.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    This is why I don't discuss pay with anyone. I don't want them to feel bad, and I certainly don't want to feel bad myself.
    - danaris 5y ago
      And this is how companies keep you in the dark, and maintain the information asymmetry that gives them the upper hand in negotiations.
    - eptcyka 5y ago
      Don't tie your self-worth to your income.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    The more information you have the better a position you'll be in - always. If you have an extremely stressful event in your life then making sure that finances isn't also a stressor is important for your mental health and, by extension, your physical health. A perfectly valid way to react to being underpaid is to say "the job security is worth this difference in salary while I sort out this other problem in my life" - but in that case it's you that's making the choice that the difference is acceptable. Everyone staying mum on salary only causes companies to be able to get away with exploiting introverts and people with low self-confidence. If salaries are public it isn't a super rare case where friendly coworkers will help to build you up to asking for that promotion.
standardUser 5y ago
Millennials certainly seem more willing to openly discuss salaries, which is a promising trend. I've also noticed that people in NY are much more eager to discuss specific salary numbers than people in SF.
- tathisit 5y ago
  How many of those millenials were earning minimum wage?
- dml2135 5y ago
  As a New Yorker, that's interesting. Just curious -- do you find people in NY are also more willing to discuss what they pay in rent?
  - standardUser 5y ago
    Rent was a hot topic in SF in recent years because costs skyrocketed, so it was actually talked about a lot. I live in NY now and I haven't noticed people talking about rent as much. But I can give you a ballpark figure (if not an exact figure) of how much most of my friends here earn, even though I have never once asked!
- analog31 5y ago
  On the east coast you're nobody if you're not rich. On the west coast you're nobody if you're not trying to get rich.
jackconsidine 5y ago
In freelance networks I've worked in this is par for the course. I understand the rationale- they'd like their network to be more valuable by being the gatekeeper on everything- but it's extremely off-putting to hear you're never allowed to mention rates. In general, I mistrust services and systems that derive value from opacity.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
First thing a union does when they enter a workplace is talk about what everyone is paid. My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much you got paid. There's only 1 reason, they are underpaying someone. They propose that it's to my benefit because they can then pay me more. Then a coworker got a better job and told everyone how much he was being paid. This angered lots of people because they were being paid much less and did much more. What blows my mind. Minimum wage is $15/hr and they were getting $24/hr as senior sysadmins with tons of experience. Soon as they decided to get a new job, they got a nice raise near instantly and they were gone. Yet their time was billed out above $100/hr. It was literally the greed of our employer who kept their wages low begging for someone to offer more money and steal them. Such a high risk for minimal benefit in greed.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  > My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much you got paid. If you're in the US, I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
  - sleepysysadmin 5y ago
    >If you're in the US, I'm pretty sure that's illegal? Not in the US, but you know whats funny. The timeline of this job was outgoing government who passed the law making it illegal. Then a very short period of time, the incoming government deleted all the previous government's labour laws. So in fact during that time, it was in fact illegal. Though in context, nobody was punished. We were 2 senior staff down already. They had no opportunity to punish anyone. It's back to legal today. Your employer can have such a rule.
zuhayeer 5y ago
That’s why we created https://levels.fyi https://levels.fyi to collectively help people understand compensation and leveling across companies. While individually sharing data points is great, our goal is to help bring all this information completely into the public sphere so even people that don’t have a network or are starting their first tech job have a resource to ensure they’re not getting lowballed. I do believe anonymous pay transparency is very different from full individual pay transparency too. Anonymously contributing even partially can mitigate a lot of the social stigma around attaching your real identity to compensation figures. That said, it’s still always a good idea to discuss these things with friends!
- mabbo 5y ago
  Hey just wanted to say thanks. Levels.fyi really helped me out when I was negotiating and considering offers recently.
  - zuhayeer 5y ago
    Glad to hear it!
- Gortal278 5y ago
  I was able to really negotiate a meaningful increase in compensation the last time I interviewed around based on the insight from levels.fyi. Thanks!
JohnFen 5y ago
My company was purchased a few years ago and everyone had to sign new contracts. The contracts included language prohibiting people from discussing their compensation with others. Someone pointed out that this was just straight-up prohibited, so the contracts were rewritten to remove the clause. The funny thing is that nobody that I know of has shared, or wants to share, information about their compensation. They just wanted the option to do so should they choose.
KronisLV 5y ago
I actually recently did a blog post in which i talked pretty openly about my pay, earnings, savings and how purchasing power parity fits into all of that (or doesn't): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings That said, it always feels a bit shameful to talk about how much you earn, in part due to social conditioning, because of which you correlate how much you earn with your worth. No one wants to be told that their work is worth 10-20x times less than that of someone else (even if knowing that is also useful), which is a revelation that stares me in the face after comparing my salary with that of people abroad. Oh well, i don't see why openness would be a bad thing, apart from me deciding to be open about this stuff, potential employers deciding that they can underpay me because of these figures, which would put me at a disadvantage compared to the other people who wouldn't talk about that stuff - a problem, that's there in the first place because everyone's salaries aren't public to begin with. It feels like some sort of a catch 22.
malwrar 5y ago
I want to talk about pay, and make choices based on what I know about other people's pay. I've attempted to do this several times with friends, but for a lot of people pay is just too intimate a number to discuss objectively. In one case, we discovered that one friend was getting paid $30k less per year than I was, which seemed mostly to be related to the fact his parents convinced him that no one was actually getting the insane tech salaries people talk about here and thus he didn't negotiate. Maybe he took that information with him to his employer and successfully negotiated up, maybe he didn't. I don't know because he started treating me differently and eventually stopped talking to me altogether. It's not like job title maps to the actual work anyways. Some companies only expect SWEs to work various parts of a huge monolith that magically gets deployed somewhere. Some companies only expect SWEs to own every single part of the process for getting an application from a whiteboard to prod. Some companies have different expectations depending on your org. Some companies vary these expectations based on what they sense they can get individuals to do. That's not even discussing the idea that people can be better (and thus take less time) than others even if they are doing the "same" task. How is pay a useful number in that context? I'm just soured on the whole idea, I don't see how a system based on this kind of radical transparency doesn't result in either completely leveled salaries or pay reflecting (and enforcing) social hierarchies. I just see people using different social tools based on group perceptions more than the modicum of individual agency I have when I'm able to advocate for my specific contribution's value during negotiations.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  The problem is that you don't know the value of your contribution - unless you're in accounting or the CFO. At least with knowledge of what other people make, you can know the ratio of relative contributions to compensation. Without that, you know nothing. You'll be making the case that your performance deserves a 20% raise, and they'll negotiate you down to a 10% raise. Meanwhile everyone else is making twice as much as you. Your estimate of 20% was not based on your value it was an estimate that you made of what sounded reasonable, and what you thought you might be able to get away with. That's easily nullified by the boss always playing hardball, and always giving the impression that they're paying you as much as you possibly can. How can you possibly know how much you should be paid if you both don't know how much other people are paid, and you don't have access to the books?
bityard 5y ago
Cost/benefit analysis says there is nothing for me to gain by discussing my salary with my co-workers and only potential downsides. Everyone wants to be paid more than they are of course and I'm no exception, but overall I feel like I am being paid pretty close to what I am worth. After accounting for the fact that I work for company with a decent culture, don't take part in an on-call rotation and pretty much get to pick my hours outside of scheduled meetings. I know what the market rate is in my area for my skills and experience, and I negotiate my pay (and raises) with my employer according to that data. What _would_ hurt me (or at least my image) is if someone who does similar work to me went to their manager and said, "hey manager, bityard says he makes $x more than me, please give me a raise." Now maybe the manager is a completely reasonable guy and agrees completely. But it's a small company and maybe that particular manager isn't so reasonable. Now I'm the bad guy in that manager's eyes for "bragging" about my take-home pay and making him do the work to convince _his_ managers to approve the raise and justify the increased operating costs, passing along my name discreetly to them as well. Or maybe the raise is denied, and the guy quits. Then I'm the bad guy. Or the raise is denied and the guy is fired for something unrelated. It all gets murky and resentful real quick. Further, if you ask someone at work what their pay is, how do you know they are telling the truth? I can think of several reasons people might lie about what they make by shifting the number in either direction. At the end of the day, going to your boss and saying you and the other employees compared salaries is frankly a pretty lazy (and likely ineffective) way to ask for a raise. The _right_ way to ask for a raise is to do your own research on market rates, and then _prove_ to your employer why you deserve the going rate (or higher) based on your work performance and other relevant factors. As it always has been.
- tyingq 5y ago
  > nothing for me to gain by discussing my salary with my co-workers and only potential downsides That sort of makes sense from a social consequences standpoint. But, if the data is open, the only real solution for employers is to correct upwards. They aren't going to lower the salary of high salary outliers. It seems like it would raise the water level for everyone. It's also useful as a way to know you should ask for a raise. You don't have to necessarily mention it when asking.
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
One neat little tip. If you work for a large employer that has h1bs, you can see their starting salary: https://h1bdata.info/index.php https://h1bdata.info/index.php This assumes of course, that they pay those employees fairly. At my company, we do, so it's a useful source of salary info when negotiating salary.
- ttmb 5y ago
  These numbers do not seem to correspond to actual salaries. If I look up my company I can see multiple entries for job titles that I have specific knowledge of, and the quoted salary is much much lower than anyone's base salary has ever been.
rpmisms 5y ago
Even if you want to maintain an old-style decorum about keeping salaries private, reaching out to people leaving the company is a great way to get an idea of your coworkers' pay.
new_guy 5y ago
In another life I worked in a warehouse, eventually I was promoted to Warehouse Manager, one of the first things I did was to try and get everyone a pay raise. And there was a lady worked in the warehouse who was basically waiting till she could retire, and she'd worked there longer than I'd been alive and she was on an absolute pittance, we literally got guys in off the street (from an agency) and paid them twice what she was on. She accepted it, and because not talking about salary's was encouraged no-one knew, I don't think even the directors knew how little she was on. But when I brought it up and encourage everyone to talk about pay, she realised, and I got her a raise. Treat your workers like people and respect them. Look after them and they'll look after your business, I don't understand why so many businesses seem to struggle with understanding that.
Osiris 5y ago
I am starting work at a DAO (distributed autonomous organization). Governance is done with a token and all votes are on the block chain. "Departments" ask the token holders for a budget and must get buy-in to get their proposal approved. Everything is public because there is no legal entity to hold anything private. All payments to any address's are visible on the chain and can be easily traced. As an engineering group we recently sat down to discuss what budget we would like to request which required us to specify how much each person would be receiving from the treasury each month we found that everyone preferred the transparency of knowing how much each person or position was making and people felt that their pay was more fair when they knew that it meant how it matched up with other engineers.
steveBK123 5y ago
I think that telling your workers not to discuss pay is BS. I also think publicly posting pay is BS as well. They are opposite ends of the spectrum of extreme secrecy to extreme openness. I have a few friends in the industry that candidly discuss compensation, and it's great to understand where one stands/what is achievable. Besides pay for performance, experience and seniority.. Compensation is very path dependent. PersonX stayed in a job paying low raises for 10 years keeping their head down until they got cut, then took the first job they could find. PersonY actively manages their career, moves every 5-7 years, moving proactively when a new firm entices them with better pay.. not when they are desperate to get out of current role / in between jobs. Of course if these two people land in the same firm in a similar role, they are going to come in at different salaries. It's more than just negotiation. PersonY may value themselves, in terms of compensation, more than PersonX because the path they've taken them has lead to higher salary. They therefore require an even higher salary to be enticed to move.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
The right way to respond if any member of management at your company tells you not to discuss pay or working conditions with your coworkers is "Can I get that in writing?" Full stop.
Cogito 5y ago
I was surprised to find out that these contract provisions are legal in Australia. I'm not sure if there has been much discussion on the topic here, but it's something I would definitely like to see changed. At least there is no provision in the contract that I can't talk about provisions in the contract...
akrymski 5y ago
Information assymetry definitely skews things in employer's favour. Is there any reason the government doesn't require public salary disclosure? They already do this for stock trading for example, via NBBO. Yet the two largest asset classes: salaries and real estate are entirely in the shadows, traded over the counter as if it's a meat market.
jamietanna 5y ago
I've started posting my salary history, prompted by the situation with Apple and a lot of friends on the job market - had some mixed feedback, but positive from my peers at least https://www.jvt.me/posts/2021/09/09/public-salary-history/ https://www.jvt.me/posts/2021/09/09/public-salary-history/

396 points by hhs 5y ago

A friend of mine worked as an editor for a news paper. He was a new hire, and a woman who has been working as an editor at the same news paper for 9 years asked him what his salary offer was. It turned out she after 9 years was getting paid $3k less than what he was offered as a new hire.

comeonseriously 5y ago
Similar situations arise constantly in the tech sector. If you stay with a company for a few years, you'll probably get surpassed in salary by new college grads depending on the market at the time. If you let it go too long before you bring it up, when you finally do, you'll get some BS about how they "can't" bump you up because they "can't" authorize that large of a salary bump. A purely BS, arbitrary, rule.
- munk-a 5y ago
  If you find yourself in a situation like that and want to remedy it then get a competing offer. If you're making 80k and sit down with your manager to talk about the possibility of leaving for a 120k position that you're clearly qualified for then a lot of companies will respond with a counter offer. It sucks but you often need to turn your employment rate into a bidding war. Oh - just FYI - be prepared to jump ship if you do this. Some people are manipulative assholes that react strongly and quickly to any employees standing up for themselves - and other companies are legitimately failing and can't afford the pay bump. In either case you're better off at the new shop. Having an actual job offer to another shop should give you the confidence to risk your current position.
  - glouwbug 5y ago
    It's best to just go. Once you've accepted the counter offer you've already indicated to your superiors that you're ready to leave
    - wildrhythms 5y ago
      Use competing offers as leverage for as long as possible. You owe the company nothing.
      - glouwbug 5y ago
        You could accept the counter offer and then be replaced by someone who's willing to work for less (you might even have to train them before you're dismissed). It's just easier to take the new gig and get paid more with a clean political slate
    - munk-a 5y ago
      It really depends - sometimes the team I'm working for is worth the hairiness of negotiating the pay raise - other times it's nothing to write home about and jumping ship is easier.
- t-writescode 5y ago
  Then I guess you "can't" be bothered to keep working at that company. Pity.
conductr 5y ago
This is business as usual in all industries. Companies don’t value tenure and you’re often better off changing companies for promotion, salary increases, etc. To be honest, $3k sounds like a tiny variance. I frequently see 20-30k differences on middle management roles. Often 10%-30% differences. Getting several years of 3% increases can put you well behind the market. This is one of the reasons salary bands are so wide. Employers don’t want to bring current staff up to market but want the ability to hire top talent. Also, there’s a fair bit of budget exceptions that get made when a great candidate comes along (whether they’re great or not, TBD)
- Supermancho 5y ago
  This is why switching jobs to a new employer is the single best way to get a salary increase. The chances that you will get an increase from an employer's pay schedule (or by active request) is far lower than simply applying somewhere else for the going rate, in the US.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Experience is valuable. Experience with what specifically your current employer does is not.
- mfer 5y ago
  > Companies don’t value tenure This is very true. They value your ability to do a job. If you've been around a long time and aren't being valuable in your current job they often won't value you. But, if you are being useful in your current job they will value you. Tenure is not valued. Usefulness to the company is. Whether you're 20 or 60 this same thing applies. > you’re often better off changing companies for promotion, salary increases, etc. This depends. Companies often view their people as expenses. They often want to get the maximum they can out of someone at the least expense. There are exceptions to this but it's the rule. So, you need to learn to maximize the thing you value if you want that. Things like position and compensation. When being courted by a new company they will use these to pull you in. But, if you learn the system at your current employer you can use that system to your benefit as well. Your current company doesn't often see benefit from paying people more and promotions. In some cases, they're looking for the people motivated enough to seek them and not wait for them to be given. Especially at the higher levels. Of course, using your current companies system to your benefit means you want to stay there. > 10%-30% differences Hiring companies are looking for that number which will pull people away. Even from a job they like. What they initially offer is almost always lower than they are able to go. Just my 2 cents after many years in the systems.
lliamander 5y ago
Even as a man this has happened to me. In my case at least (and I think in many cases) is that the market price of labor changes, which requires employers to pay more for new hires, but they don't go back and adjust the salaries of existing employees.
- soco 5y ago
  Which basically means they don't value experience in their own company. What better reason to say sayonara?
ericmcer 5y ago
There is a sort of stagnancy that can surround people who have been there for years though. For many devs, the first 3ish months you lack context to be super useful, then that first 2-4 years of hard work and enthusiasm are probably your peak productivity. It gets harder to maintain enthusiasm as the years go by, so some devs who are cruising with 5+ years might actually provide less long term value than a new hire.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  The 5+ year workers understand, and have experienced, that the promotion system is designed to extract the most value from the greenest thumbs. Tenure is rarely rewarded. Why work harder and harder for nothing?
twistedpair 5y ago
A friend screened a female candidate years ago. She was highly qualified, with serious experience. When asked what her salary expectations were, she said what she made, but confessed she doubted the prospective employer could possibly pay that. The reality was she was quite under paid. It's quite saddening that her prior employer seemed to have convinced her that such low pay was top of the industry mark.
twistedpair 5y ago
Given the ongoing inflation in the US is 5.4% so far this year, everyone has gotten their 5.4% cost of living increase for 2021, right?

rsj_hn 5y ago

As someone who has spent a most of my life working and was never told what to say or not say about his pay by his employer, my bullshit detector went into the redzone after reading the story that says 50% of employers tell workers not to discuss pay. Was I such an odd exception? So I dug deeper, and discovered this was an activism piece, not a scientific study, by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research - not a group well known for objectivity. They commissioned a poll but did not disclose the details of the poll such as the exact questions asked and the responses for each question, which is the basic minimum required to take a poll seriously. Instead, they published a glossy "brief" - https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pay-Secrecy-Policy-Brief-v4.pdf https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pay-Secrecy-Poli... - which claims 12% of employers prohibit discussing pay -- that's much more plausible than 50%. So how do you get to the headline 50%? Because that is how many people reported being "discouraged" -- but were they discouraged by their employer, by their peers, or by their own conscience? Here is where knowing the actual questions to the poll would be useful. Please do not listen to any reports of a poll when only the summary results are provided but the specific questions and breakdowns of the answers are not provided. Particularly when the poll is commissioned by a pressure group not known for objectivity. If you can afford to put together a big glossy "brief" then you have the bandwidth to host result text files that disclose what the questions were and the poll methodology. This is the minimum bar for credibility, an outfit like USA today used to be aware of this, and so is any think tank worth their salt. Thus my spidey senses detected there is a good chance this is an activism piece that is intentionally misleading to promote some "greater cause". A good approach is to look at what other stories the same author wrote, to see if there is a track record of spreading propaganda in the name of some moral cause or whether it's just shoddy work. And indeed the author is a crusading reporter, that is, one who focuses on moral causes and issues rather than news. Real news is messy. Sometimes it supports your beliefs and other times it doesn't. But a look at his articles (as well as their social media presence) reveals an activist who cannot be objective or professional. E.g. the "news" story about racism causing food deserts and creating food "injustice". I get that this is an issue that many on the left are passionate about. But it's not news. it's a cause. And when you start reporting your causes as news stories, then you lose credibility and also hurt your cause. Here the problem is the general compression: There is a process of learning the truth about a situation, coming to some conclusion about it, and then figuring out the appropriate course of action. These can be separated into information gathering, issue debate, and then solution advocacy, and are best done by different people with different skillsets. Everyone must do their part well, which means everyone must have integrity. The reporter must seek the truth of the facts, not whatever servers their agenda, and the think tank must have integrity and a commitment to look deeply into issues. Reporters are supposed to be uncovering hidden information. Not advocating well known issues like food deserts or that many people don't like to reveal their exact pay to their coworkers. Think tanks who employ PhDs are supposed to be thinking through solutions and advocating solutions. Not pretending to uncover "news". So when the reporter with a bachelors degree skips over the news gathering part and dives into synthesis or solution advocacy, you can be sure it is a poorly thought out synthesis or solution. Just as when the think tank tries to create "news", you can be sure the think tank's press release is not newsworthy and sacrifices were made to try to make it "news". It's not like we get a steady stream of new issues to put on a newspaper. Thus they both do a shoddy job because they lack professionalism and discipline, which unfortunately is the current state of both modern news as well as think tanks. Everyone wants a podium to stand on and shout about the injustice of the world, rather than, you know, being good at a job so that progress can be made. For example, with this type of misinformation we don't even know what the problem is. If the study had been done right and the actual questions posted, we could have had useful breakdowns of how big of a problem this really is, what industries it's concentrated in, and the methods used by employers. This could then provide real actionable intelligence. But it wouldn't grab headlines. So this is an interesting area that a think tank can do a real study in. But we don't know the results -- all that useful information was sacrificed in order to inflate the problem to make it "news worthy".

blululu 5y ago

One thing that is frequently overlooked in discussions of publicizing salaries is that there is also a strong social stigma to flaunting wealth or talking about affluence. Personally I think that this is a good thing since it encourages humility and a sense of equality. I realize that there is a clear market case for publishing salary information, but I also think that we should be considerate of why people generally frown upon such conversations in interpersonal contexts (anonymous listings like levels.fyi are different).

hhs 5y ago
Indeed, towards the end of the piece, the author acknowledges this: "Of course, many workers don’t withhold their salaries out of respect for their supervisors’ wishes but because it can be deeply awkward. “We have a culture that discourages it,” Pardo said. “People don’t want to talk about money. It’s like talking about religion and politics. It’s uncomfortable.” As a result, many may be unaware of what the person in the other cubicle or on the other end of the Zoom call earns. While employer review websites like Glassdoor offer a window into company pay, UNC’s Hirsch pointed out this data is often incomplete and certainly not uploaded for all companies."
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  To what extent was this cultural stigma created by companies who wanted to discourage their workers from discussing pay, though? It seems more like an effect than a cause to me.
  - blululu 5y ago
    I think that this is a much older sentiment than modern corporations. For one thing the aversion to discussing wealth is more potent in contexts where the information is less related to market forces - people are more open to information about salaries when it is related to their line of work. Saying how much money you make in public (even among friends) is seen as a jerk thing to do. Instead people will say things like 'the starting salary in my field is...', or 'a senior level employee doing this makes around...' - a actual number for them personally is seldom offered (nor should it be outside of very intimate contexts (family). From an informal observation this prohibition is common across Protestant societies, though I think it also shows up around the globe. Talking about money publicly is seen as vulgar and viewing people in terms of money is seen as demeaning to their fundamental worth. You can find religious antecedents to such sentiments from thousands of years ago, so it is unlikely that these were promulgated by corporate interests.

legerdemain 5y ago

At my previous company, we didn't stop anyone from discussing pay. That's obviously illegal. What we did instead is make sure that everyone, including new college hires, understood that talking about pay almost always leads to interpersonal friction, resentment, conflict, lower work productivity, and slower progress of our company toward an IPO. In short, talking about pay would actively damage their bottom line, which is in not something in anyone's best interest. It's not a threat if you just explain how the real world works and that actions have consequences.

yupper32 5y ago
Is this satire? Talking about salaries have always resulted in better or equal pay for everyone involved (except the higher ups, like you) in my experience, and the experience of everyone I know. Your post sounds like companies claiming that unions would actually hurt you. If you're underpaying people in order to get to an IPO, people deserve to be aware of that and know the risks involved.
- usui 5y ago
  I'm not sure why you are interpreting the parent's comment as similar to "claiming that unions would actually hurt you". It's just a post talking about how management in companies works around the illegality of telling employees not to talk to about pay. It's in the first sentence. It's not like the parent comment is defending the practice, just how it's done in practice to discourage employees. Yes, groups of employees that don't band together believe that it will hurt their own bottom line if they talk about pay.
  - yupper32 5y ago
    Are you saying that the poster is saying that they lie to their employees? I'm honestly not sure what you're saying.
- mfogikds 5y ago
  "Talking about salaries have always resulted in better or equal pay for everyone involved" What is the exact source on this? I highly doubt every company in existence has the budget to pay everyone "better or equal"

comeonseriously 5y ago

No, but good luck proving that's why[0] you were fired. [0] Discussing your salary.

wing-_-nuts 5y ago
Worker protections have no teeth in the US. It's to the point where factory management can literally be caught on camera saying they fired a worker for trying to organize a union (see American Factory) and the company gets nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Nothing is 'illegal' if it's not enforced.
- tptacek 5y ago
  That hasn't been my experience. In two different companies I worked at (none of them companies I ran myself), the company settled quickly over claims, at least one of which was candidly pretty frivolous. It's annoying to have to find and retain an attorney to get this done, but my expectation is that if you had an attorney bring a credible claim, you'd likely get some degree of satisfaction.
  - effingwewt 5y ago
    That's nice, but for another point of anecdata I've seen more companies flagrantly break laws, than ones who follow them, especially when it's in the best interest of the company. Most workers cannot afford to take their employers to court, and the businesses know this and take advantage of it every single day.
  - lovich 5y ago
    Does the situation in the United States seem to back up this anecdote? Do we see companies fail or suffer extreme setbacks from workers exercising their rights across the land? Or do we see companies growing at massive rates while employee compensation has stagnated?
    - pessimizer 5y ago

farmerstan 5y ago

I’m in my 50s. When I was younger, no one talked about pay ever. It was never ever broached. These days, all my younger coworkers openly discuss pay. I really like the openness today. It’s shared in a way that you’re trying to help your coworker, like “dude you’re totally underpaid I made $20k more than that! Go ask for a raise or find a new job!” It’s a different sense of camaraderie that people share these days instead of the zero-sum game from when I was younger.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
I'm also in my 50s and recall when it was completely taboo. Except I worked at a startup a few years back where I was told going in that we were all making the exact same pay from engineers to CTO. We all knew it was below-market pay, but it was supposedly so the company could bootstrap. One day I was having a conversation with a Russian co-worker (on an H1-B, I think) and I said something along the lines of "we're all making $XK/month which is about 25% below market, but hopefully we'll get some funding and that will change soon...". The look on his face told me that something was wrong. "You're making $Xk/month?!" he said. "Yeah, you are too, right... right?" "No, he replied, $2K/month less." I was really surprised because this guy was doing pretty much all of our hardware development and he was pretty brilliant. Shortly after he went to the CEO and (rightly) demanded parity.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  At my first US startup the CTO told me that all engineers are making the same slightly below market salaries and receiving same options. A few months later I found that most actually made almost twice and had way more options. I fix this quickly but i still don’t understand how people seem to think that it’s ok to blatantly to somebody
  - mikestew 5y ago
    It doesn't even have to be a hand-to-mouth startup to blatantly lie to folks, it can be a multi-billion-dollar multi-national corporation. For instance, when I was a manager at Microsoft I had more than one newly-hired report tell me that their onboard training said there was no stack ranking, which we all now know wasn't even remotely true in the early 2000s. (New hires would mention this, because one of the first things I'd tell new hires on my team was how stack ranking worked, amongst other parts of the performance review process.)

coredog64 5y ago

I really like how this was handled at Boeing. Every year, the local SPEEA rep would post an anonymous graph showing compensation compared to experience. The org was large enough that you couldn’t pinpoint everyone, but you could easily see where you stood WRT your peers.

jofer 5y ago
Yeah, that's actually a key thing I miss from my previous bigcorp job many years ago. Pay was tied to numerical career grades. Everyone's numerical career grade was public information. Salary ranges (fairly broad and overlapping for each grade) for each were published each cycle. While there was a ton of griping along the lines "seriously, X got promoted to 23!? They just suck up!", it was at least consistent across disciplines and clearly tied listed job responsibilities to a pay range to make justifications for a promotion easier. I know it's a very common system, but my current company doesn't have that, and I quite miss it. We somewhat do via titles. E.g. I know the 25 year old engineers who have the title "principle staff engineer" despite not being trusted to do anything directly are absurdly overpaid, but it's really murky and not consistent. E.g. If your title says "software engineer" you're on a completely different scale than someone who's title says "data engineer". And if you have actual experience in the field, you'll be considered a "scientist" or a "technician" instead of an "engineer" depending on the exact role you're hired into. At any rate, it's really, really, really unclear how anything relates, and going from a "staff X" position to a "junior Y" position is often a pay raise.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Boeing is also large enough to pay people reasonable salaries seeing as they're the largest contractor of the DoD.

chrisBob 5y ago

At my last job, all salaries were public record, and some dude even put together a website (https://umsalary.info https://umsalary.info) to make searching easier. Want to know what some internal career change might look like? Just take a look. Want to see what career path got someone else to where they are? Take a look. Want to know if you are being underpaid/discriminated against? Click on the job title next to your name and see where you stand compared to all employees with the same role. At a place where Diversity Equity and Inclusion is a stated goal I think this works well. I also know that people don't always get paid the same amount, and (as I often explain to my six-year-old) fair doesn't mean the everything has to be equal, but it is very useful to know where you stand. At my new job, the information on Levels seemed accurate based on my offer, and I was very happy with it.

vibien 5y ago
One thing that surprised me is that the highest salaried employees seem to be in Athletics ( https://umsalary.info/numbers.php https://umsalary.info/numbers.php ). Is it something specific to that particular university or a normal thing in the US universities?
- mmoche 5y ago
  Extremely typical. There are cases where the highest paid employee in an entire _state_ is an athletics coach at a state university.
  - oneweekwonder 5y ago
    I was flabbergasted to learn Nick Saban from University of Alabama makes $9.3 million annually(2019)[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Saban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Saban
    - listenallyall 5y ago
      too much or too little?

spaetzleesser 5y ago

A simple rule for negotiations is that whoever has more information has an advantage. That means if workers don’t know the exact pay scales they are almost by definition at a disadvantage while the company has the full info. To the people who think they negotiated really well and want this to be kept from their coworkers I say that a lot of you have been lied to and you are making what everybody else makes or even less. I still remember a guy proudly telling me about his great contract and his face when I told him that I made almost twice as him.

milesvp 5y ago
This sort of illustrates why I dislike talking about salary. This person went from super happy with his life to unhappy, and nothing is any different in his life. I understand that this unhappiness is part of what drives income equality, so I’m glad more people are having these conversations, but I was once in a job for a number of years, where for several reasons I just needed to weather the storm, and I certainly didn’t need to know what my coworkers were making at the time.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  This is why I don't discuss pay with anyone. I don't want them to feel bad, and I certainly don't want to feel bad myself.
  - danaris 5y ago
    And this is how companies keep you in the dark, and maintain the information asymmetry that gives them the upper hand in negotiations.
  - eptcyka 5y ago
    Don't tie your self-worth to your income.
- munk-a 5y ago
  The more information you have the better a position you'll be in - always. If you have an extremely stressful event in your life then making sure that finances isn't also a stressor is important for your mental health and, by extension, your physical health. A perfectly valid way to react to being underpaid is to say "the job security is worth this difference in salary while I sort out this other problem in my life" - but in that case it's you that's making the choice that the difference is acceptable. Everyone staying mum on salary only causes companies to be able to get away with exploiting introverts and people with low self-confidence. If salaries are public it isn't a super rare case where friendly coworkers will help to build you up to asking for that promotion.

standardUser 5y ago

Millennials certainly seem more willing to openly discuss salaries, which is a promising trend. I've also noticed that people in NY are much more eager to discuss specific salary numbers than people in SF.

tathisit 5y ago
How many of those millenials were earning minimum wage?
dml2135 5y ago
As a New Yorker, that's interesting. Just curious -- do you find people in NY are also more willing to discuss what they pay in rent?
- standardUser 5y ago
  Rent was a hot topic in SF in recent years because costs skyrocketed, so it was actually talked about a lot. I live in NY now and I haven't noticed people talking about rent as much. But I can give you a ballpark figure (if not an exact figure) of how much most of my friends here earn, even though I have never once asked!
analog31 5y ago
On the east coast you're nobody if you're not rich. On the west coast you're nobody if you're not trying to get rich.

jackconsidine 5y ago

In freelance networks I've worked in this is par for the course. I understand the rationale- they'd like their network to be more valuable by being the gatekeeper on everything- but it's extremely off-putting to hear you're never allowed to mention rates. In general, I mistrust services and systems that derive value from opacity.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

First thing a union does when they enter a workplace is talk about what everyone is paid. My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much you got paid. There's only 1 reason, they are underpaying someone. They propose that it's to my benefit because they can then pay me more. Then a coworker got a better job and told everyone how much he was being paid. This angered lots of people because they were being paid much less and did much more. What blows my mind. Minimum wage is $15/hr and they were getting $24/hr as senior sysadmins with tons of experience. Soon as they decided to get a new job, they got a nice raise near instantly and they were gone. Yet their time was billed out above $100/hr. It was literally the greed of our employer who kept their wages low begging for someone to offer more money and steal them. Such a high risk for minimal benefit in greed.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> My last job had very strict rules against sharing how much you got paid. If you're in the US, I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >If you're in the US, I'm pretty sure that's illegal? Not in the US, but you know whats funny. The timeline of this job was outgoing government who passed the law making it illegal. Then a very short period of time, the incoming government deleted all the previous government's labour laws. So in fact during that time, it was in fact illegal. Though in context, nobody was punished. We were 2 senior staff down already. They had no opportunity to punish anyone. It's back to legal today. Your employer can have such a rule.

zuhayeer 5y ago

That’s why we created https://levels.fyi https://levels.fyi to collectively help people understand compensation and leveling across companies. While individually sharing data points is great, our goal is to help bring all this information completely into the public sphere so even people that don’t have a network or are starting their first tech job have a resource to ensure they’re not getting lowballed. I do believe anonymous pay transparency is very different from full individual pay transparency too. Anonymously contributing even partially can mitigate a lot of the social stigma around attaching your real identity to compensation figures. That said, it’s still always a good idea to discuss these things with friends!

mabbo 5y ago
Hey just wanted to say thanks. Levels.fyi really helped me out when I was negotiating and considering offers recently.
- zuhayeer 5y ago
  Glad to hear it!
Gortal278 5y ago
I was able to really negotiate a meaningful increase in compensation the last time I interviewed around based on the insight from levels.fyi. Thanks!

JohnFen 5y ago

My company was purchased a few years ago and everyone had to sign new contracts. The contracts included language prohibiting people from discussing their compensation with others. Someone pointed out that this was just straight-up prohibited, so the contracts were rewritten to remove the clause. The funny thing is that nobody that I know of has shared, or wants to share, information about their compensation. They just wanted the option to do so should they choose.

KronisLV 5y ago

I actually recently did a blog post in which i talked pretty openly about my pay, earnings, savings and how purchasing power parity fits into all of that (or doesn't): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings That said, it always feels a bit shameful to talk about how much you earn, in part due to social conditioning, because of which you correlate how much you earn with your worth. No one wants to be told that their work is worth 10-20x times less than that of someone else (even if knowing that is also useful), which is a revelation that stares me in the face after comparing my salary with that of people abroad. Oh well, i don't see why openness would be a bad thing, apart from me deciding to be open about this stuff, potential employers deciding that they can underpay me because of these figures, which would put me at a disadvantage compared to the other people who wouldn't talk about that stuff - a problem, that's there in the first place because everyone's salaries aren't public to begin with. It feels like some sort of a catch 22.

malwrar 5y ago

I want to talk about pay, and make choices based on what I know about other people's pay. I've attempted to do this several times with friends, but for a lot of people pay is just too intimate a number to discuss objectively. In one case, we discovered that one friend was getting paid $30k less per year than I was, which seemed mostly to be related to the fact his parents convinced him that no one was actually getting the insane tech salaries people talk about here and thus he didn't negotiate. Maybe he took that information with him to his employer and successfully negotiated up, maybe he didn't. I don't know because he started treating me differently and eventually stopped talking to me altogether. It's not like job title maps to the actual work anyways. Some companies only expect SWEs to work various parts of a huge monolith that magically gets deployed somewhere. Some companies only expect SWEs to own every single part of the process for getting an application from a whiteboard to prod. Some companies have different expectations depending on your org. Some companies vary these expectations based on what they sense they can get individuals to do. That's not even discussing the idea that people can be better (and thus take less time) than others even if they are doing the "same" task. How is pay a useful number in that context? I'm just soured on the whole idea, I don't see how a system based on this kind of radical transparency doesn't result in either completely leveled salaries or pay reflecting (and enforcing) social hierarchies. I just see people using different social tools based on group perceptions more than the modicum of individual agency I have when I'm able to advocate for my specific contribution's value during negotiations.

pessimizer 5y ago
The problem is that you don't know the value of your contribution - unless you're in accounting or the CFO. At least with knowledge of what other people make, you can know the ratio of relative contributions to compensation. Without that, you know nothing. You'll be making the case that your performance deserves a 20% raise, and they'll negotiate you down to a 10% raise. Meanwhile everyone else is making twice as much as you. Your estimate of 20% was not based on your value it was an estimate that you made of what sounded reasonable, and what you thought you might be able to get away with. That's easily nullified by the boss always playing hardball, and always giving the impression that they're paying you as much as you possibly can. How can you possibly know how much you should be paid if you both don't know how much other people are paid, and you don't have access to the books?

bityard 5y ago

Cost/benefit analysis says there is nothing for me to gain by discussing my salary with my co-workers and only potential downsides. Everyone wants to be paid more than they are of course and I'm no exception, but overall I feel like I am being paid pretty close to what I am worth. After accounting for the fact that I work for company with a decent culture, don't take part in an on-call rotation and pretty much get to pick my hours outside of scheduled meetings. I know what the market rate is in my area for my skills and experience, and I negotiate my pay (and raises) with my employer according to that data. What _would_ hurt me (or at least my image) is if someone who does similar work to me went to their manager and said, "hey manager, bityard says he makes $x more than me, please give me a raise." Now maybe the manager is a completely reasonable guy and agrees completely. But it's a small company and maybe that particular manager isn't so reasonable. Now I'm the bad guy in that manager's eyes for "bragging" about my take-home pay and making him do the work to convince _his_ managers to approve the raise and justify the increased operating costs, passing along my name discreetly to them as well. Or maybe the raise is denied, and the guy quits. Then I'm the bad guy. Or the raise is denied and the guy is fired for something unrelated. It all gets murky and resentful real quick. Further, if you ask someone at work what their pay is, how do you know they are telling the truth? I can think of several reasons people might lie about what they make by shifting the number in either direction. At the end of the day, going to your boss and saying you and the other employees compared salaries is frankly a pretty lazy (and likely ineffective) way to ask for a raise. The _right_ way to ask for a raise is to do your own research on market rates, and then _prove_ to your employer why you deserve the going rate (or higher) based on your work performance and other relevant factors. As it always has been.

tyingq 5y ago
> nothing for me to gain by discussing my salary with my co-workers and only potential downsides That sort of makes sense from a social consequences standpoint. But, if the data is open, the only real solution for employers is to correct upwards. They aren't going to lower the salary of high salary outliers. It seems like it would raise the water level for everyone. It's also useful as a way to know you should ask for a raise. You don't have to necessarily mention it when asking.

wing-_-nuts 5y ago

One neat little tip. If you work for a large employer that has h1bs, you can see their starting salary: https://h1bdata.info/index.php https://h1bdata.info/index.php This assumes of course, that they pay those employees fairly. At my company, we do, so it's a useful source of salary info when negotiating salary.

ttmb 5y ago
These numbers do not seem to correspond to actual salaries. If I look up my company I can see multiple entries for job titles that I have specific knowledge of, and the quoted salary is much much lower than anyone's base salary has ever been.

rpmisms 5y ago

Even if you want to maintain an old-style decorum about keeping salaries private, reaching out to people leaving the company is a great way to get an idea of your coworkers' pay.

new_guy 5y ago

In another life I worked in a warehouse, eventually I was promoted to Warehouse Manager, one of the first things I did was to try and get everyone a pay raise. And there was a lady worked in the warehouse who was basically waiting till she could retire, and she'd worked there longer than I'd been alive and she was on an absolute pittance, we literally got guys in off the street (from an agency) and paid them twice what she was on. She accepted it, and because not talking about salary's was encouraged no-one knew, I don't think even the directors knew how little she was on. But when I brought it up and encourage everyone to talk about pay, she realised, and I got her a raise. Treat your workers like people and respect them. Look after them and they'll look after your business, I don't understand why so many businesses seem to struggle with understanding that.

Osiris 5y ago

I am starting work at a DAO (distributed autonomous organization). Governance is done with a token and all votes are on the block chain. "Departments" ask the token holders for a budget and must get buy-in to get their proposal approved. Everything is public because there is no legal entity to hold anything private. All payments to any address's are visible on the chain and can be easily traced. As an engineering group we recently sat down to discuss what budget we would like to request which required us to specify how much each person would be receiving from the treasury each month we found that everyone preferred the transparency of knowing how much each person or position was making and people felt that their pay was more fair when they knew that it meant how it matched up with other engineers.

steveBK123 5y ago

I think that telling your workers not to discuss pay is BS. I also think publicly posting pay is BS as well. They are opposite ends of the spectrum of extreme secrecy to extreme openness. I have a few friends in the industry that candidly discuss compensation, and it's great to understand where one stands/what is achievable. Besides pay for performance, experience and seniority.. Compensation is very path dependent. PersonX stayed in a job paying low raises for 10 years keeping their head down until they got cut, then took the first job they could find. PersonY actively manages their career, moves every 5-7 years, moving proactively when a new firm entices them with better pay.. not when they are desperate to get out of current role / in between jobs. Of course if these two people land in the same firm in a similar role, they are going to come in at different salaries. It's more than just negotiation. PersonY may value themselves, in terms of compensation, more than PersonX because the path they've taken them has lead to higher salary. They therefore require an even higher salary to be enticed to move.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

The right way to respond if any member of management at your company tells you not to discuss pay or working conditions with your coworkers is "Can I get that in writing?" Full stop.

Cogito 5y ago

I was surprised to find out that these contract provisions are legal in Australia. I'm not sure if there has been much discussion on the topic here, but it's something I would definitely like to see changed. At least there is no provision in the contract that I can't talk about provisions in the contract...

akrymski 5y ago

Information assymetry definitely skews things in employer's favour. Is there any reason the government doesn't require public salary disclosure? They already do this for stock trading for example, via NBBO. Yet the two largest asset classes: salaries and real estate are entirely in the shadows, traded over the counter as if it's a meat market.

jamietanna 5y ago

I've started posting my salary history, prompted by the situation with Apple and a lot of friends on the job market - had some mixed feedback, but positive from my peers at least https://www.jvt.me/posts/2021/09/09/public-salary-history/ https://www.jvt.me/posts/2021/09/09/public-salary-history/