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All salaries of all companies of all roles should be public. This info being kept from job seekers unfairly tips the balance of power to the job provider when n

All salaries of all companies of all roles should be public. This info being kept from job seekers unfairly tips the balance of power to the job provider when negotiating salaries or even when deciding on which company to join.

tomrod 5y ago
I would be satisfied with distributional statistics per company by years experience and required educational, with job responsibilities coded in some coherent way (e.g. BLS). I really don't care if Barbara in accounting made more than Stan in Marketing. What I want to know is movements of the market. Currently the best source of this information is tech-based with biased incentives (levels.fyi, Glassdoor, in either direction) or recruiters, who have their own incentives. In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies.
- the_lonely_road 5y ago
  I am pretty sure Florida publishes all state employees names and salaries. I know for sure you can look at every University employees name and salary from the clerks to the professors with a few seconds of googling and assume the same is true for all the other state employees. This should be a federal requirement for all employers in my opinion.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  I would be happy with just knowing this, not so much what each person makes, but: title or level and min salary, median salary, and max salary for the roles in the company. Furthermore, each employee within a company should know what the salary bands are for their titles/roles. This should be common knowledge. I know and am honest with myself and my manager of my skills. If I know what min and max and median is on my team I can negotiate appropriately with how/where I fit in the team productivity-wise. I am not going to ask for the top end of my team for my title if I know I am not producing. Likewise do you want to lose talent to a competitor because they're making the bottom of the range but producing at the middle or near the top?
- rmah 5y ago
  In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies. I read stuff like this about salaries, budgets, contracts, etc. regarding various US federal/state/local governments quite often. In reality, almost all that info is already publicly available. Often in excruciating detail. For example: the salary of ever single NYC employee (cops, teachers, etc) https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york. Every California state employee salary (and pensions) https://transparentcalifornia.com/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/. Many state and local government employee salaries are collected by https://openpayrolls.com/ https://openpayrolls.com/. Federal gov contracts at https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/ https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/. Most states have similar sites for their contracts. The issue in government transparency in the US is not transparency per se. It's that few people bother to actually dig through the raw data or perform good analysis of it.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    I wasn't clear in my original post, apologies. I was referencing private employer data that is reported for unemployment insurance purposes.
Itsdijital 5y ago
Imagine trying to fairly buy/sell anything in an opaque market.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Virtually any market with slight differences in each product.
spenczar5 5y ago
For what it’s worth, this is true almost always for the largest employer in the US: government. That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington: https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.
- ggoo 5y ago
  Should have been a football coach...
  - pc86 5y ago
    I know this is a common refrain, but if you can build and run a successful sports organization at the university level you can potentially help bring in tens of millions of dollars to the school. It's very competitive, it's hard (in the sense that there's no playbook to do it the way you can grind leet code for a few months and walk into any junior or mid-level FAANG job), and like most people you're being paid less than the money you're bringing in.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      Do the sports programs bring in money for the university or for the sports teams?
  - nexuist 5y ago
    You can be. What's stopping you? Go out and start a competitive team that can win against other colleges that sink millions of dollars into their program. If that sounds like too much work, then, well, yeah.
denismenace 5y ago
Couldn't the same information be used by companies to signal each other and collude on price setting. For example they may start paying the same just based on a job class, which isn't a favorable outcome.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  No. Because companies are already doing this. At least for my employer they’ve told us that they talk to their “peers” in the industry to set prices for labor. So more a yes and a no. BUT if candidates were able to know what the bands are they could move wages to a more fair equilibrium. Here’s how I think it would play out. There are two scenarios. If radical transparency were to be enacted AND all companies share the numbers before hand putting all their equivalent roles at the same salary levels then not much would change since I think this is already happening at least in Europe and specifically in Berlin. But if companies started publishing this data over time say over months such that all information about salaries and compensation outside of wages was revealed in say 18 months (giving the market time to adjust I.e folks to leave to go to higher wage paying firms) then workers could readjust their wages to a more fair market rate. This is how I think things would play out — or so I hope when in reality it’ll likely just be the former case. People will fight for salary transparency and the firms will give it to them but they will have shared salary information already because a Python engineer is a Python engineer whether they’re at a mid level company or a FAANG company. And then nothing will change other than folks will likely all try to cluster around the top end of their now disclosed salary bands — more folks will get marginal raises I guess but it’s not the large shift or readjustment of entire sectors and employees I had hoped for.

tomrod 5y ago

I would be satisfied with distributional statistics per company by years experience and required educational, with job responsibilities coded in some coherent way (e.g. BLS). I really don't care if Barbara in accounting made more than Stan in Marketing. What I want to know is movements of the market. Currently the best source of this information is tech-based with biased incentives (levels.fyi, Glassdoor, in either direction) or recruiters, who have their own incentives. In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies.

the_lonely_road 5y ago
I am pretty sure Florida publishes all state employees names and salaries. I know for sure you can look at every University employees name and salary from the clerks to the professors with a few seconds of googling and assume the same is true for all the other state employees. This should be a federal requirement for all employers in my opinion.
gigatexal 5y ago
I would be happy with just knowing this, not so much what each person makes, but: title or level and min salary, median salary, and max salary for the roles in the company. Furthermore, each employee within a company should know what the salary bands are for their titles/roles. This should be common knowledge. I know and am honest with myself and my manager of my skills. If I know what min and max and median is on my team I can negotiate appropriately with how/where I fit in the team productivity-wise. I am not going to ask for the top end of my team for my title if I know I am not producing. Likewise do you want to lose talent to a competitor because they're making the bottom of the range but producing at the middle or near the top?
rmah 5y ago
In the US, State and Federal agencies could share this data feasibly, if not for certain policies. I read stuff like this about salaries, budgets, contracts, etc. regarding various US federal/state/local governments quite often. In reality, almost all that info is already publicly available. Often in excruciating detail. For example: the salary of ever single NYC employee (cops, teachers, etc) https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/city-of-new-york. Every California state employee salary (and pensions) https://transparentcalifornia.com/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/. Many state and local government employee salaries are collected by https://openpayrolls.com/ https://openpayrolls.com/. Federal gov contracts at https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/ https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/. Most states have similar sites for their contracts. The issue in government transparency in the US is not transparency per se. It's that few people bother to actually dig through the raw data or perform good analysis of it.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I wasn't clear in my original post, apologies. I was referencing private employer data that is reported for unemployment insurance purposes.

Itsdijital 5y ago

Imagine trying to fairly buy/sell anything in an opaque market.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Virtually any market with slight differences in each product.

spenczar5 5y ago

For what it’s worth, this is true almost always for the largest employer in the US: government. That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington: https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.

ggoo 5y ago
Should have been a football coach...
- pc86 5y ago
  I know this is a common refrain, but if you can build and run a successful sports organization at the university level you can potentially help bring in tens of millions of dollars to the school. It's very competitive, it's hard (in the sense that there's no playbook to do it the way you can grind leet code for a few months and walk into any junior or mid-level FAANG job), and like most people you're being paid less than the money you're bringing in.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Do the sports programs bring in money for the university or for the sports teams?
- nexuist 5y ago
  You can be. What's stopping you? Go out and start a competitive team that can win against other colleges that sink millions of dollars into their program. If that sounds like too much work, then, well, yeah.

denismenace 5y ago

Couldn't the same information be used by companies to signal each other and collude on price setting. For example they may start paying the same just based on a job class, which isn't a favorable outcome.

gigatexal 5y ago
No. Because companies are already doing this. At least for my employer they’ve told us that they talk to their “peers” in the industry to set prices for labor. So more a yes and a no. BUT if candidates were able to know what the bands are they could move wages to a more fair equilibrium. Here’s how I think it would play out. There are two scenarios. If radical transparency were to be enacted AND all companies share the numbers before hand putting all their equivalent roles at the same salary levels then not much would change since I think this is already happening at least in Europe and specifically in Berlin. But if companies started publishing this data over time say over months such that all information about salaries and compensation outside of wages was revealed in say 18 months (giving the market time to adjust I.e folks to leave to go to higher wage paying firms) then workers could readjust their wages to a more fair market rate. This is how I think things would play out — or so I hope when in reality it’ll likely just be the former case. People will fight for salary transparency and the firms will give it to them but they will have shared salary information already because a Python engineer is a Python engineer whether they’re at a mid level company or a FAANG company. And then nothing will change other than folks will likely all try to cluster around the top end of their now disclosed salary bands — more folks will get marginal raises I guess but it’s not the large shift or readjustment of entire sectors and employees I had hoped for.