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I think it's better to share salaries anonymously with the level and company information. It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive

I think it's better to share salaries anonymously with the level and company information. It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I'm close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I'm at. I say this seeing younger folks quibble over a difference of few hundred dollars in compensation and worry they are getting underpaid compared to their peers. Note: Above is an example of highly paid individuals starting out so a few hundred dollar difference wouldn't matter.

HWR_14 5y ago
Strange, most people prefer more information to less. Employees knowing more leads to them better able to negotiate (not just arrive at higher numbers initially, but clearly know what skills they need to better negotiate the next time). Unless they're being treated unfairly, there's no downside. Those people who were paid a few hundred dollars less - why were they paid less?
Closi 5y ago
> It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I'm close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I'm at. 'Counterproductive' depends on your perspective - considering fundamentally everyone is working to get paid (no matter how much you love your job), a 'productivity' metric for a worker (not the company) could be amount of money earned per working hour (GDP per hour is a metric of productivity for the nation - so why shouldn't earnings per hour be a metric of personal productivity?!). Salary discussions informed with information can be highly 'productive' in that it is one of the best ways to increase your earnings per hour worked, with no change to the hours/effort you put in, if you are being paid less than people doing a similar role with similar skills/output. Assuming you are working a 40 hour week, a 10% pay bump because of an informed discussion is equal to working an extra 5 weeks across the year in terms of earning (and that's assuming you get paid overtime!). And if a 30 minute conversation is worth 180 hours of work (or potentially thousands of hours if you work there a long time), that's pretty productive in the scheme of things!
spenczar5 5y ago
As mentioned in another comment thread: we don’t need to speculate about the effects because millions of employees already share salaries with no anonymity in thousands of groups. That is, employees of the US or state governments. 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. What are the consequences of this? Is there vicious infighting, and sniping over raises? Uh, no. There is just simple compensation, and way less negotiation. When some job class needs a salary adjustment because the job market has changed, everyone benefits. It’s pretty great.
- tjader 5y ago
  But in government entities usually the immediate superiors have very little leeway to change your salary, so the employees know it's pointless to argue over differences in a salary that has very strong rules that very few people can influence. In private companies on the other hand there's usually a much larger margin for salary to be negotiated, which incentivizes the consequences you mentioned.
  - spenczar5 5y ago
    That is endogenous to publicizing salary data. If the data were public, you might make an argument that all engineers need to be paid more or that you need a promotion rather than lobbying your manager.
- KallDrexx 5y ago
  This may just be your personal feelings though. I know quite a few people who work for public schools and government entities throughout Florida who really really are uncomfortable with their salaries being public knowledge, and at least one has felt it has been used against them.
  - syshum 5y ago
    This is often the case in lower per capita income area's where you have a public sector worker demanding a pay increase (i.e higher taxes) but are making 65-70K, where the tax payer they are wanting more money from is making 40-50K, the tax payer tends to not believe the appeals to poverty of said public sector employee
the_arun 5y ago
Isn’t this how levels.fyi works?
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Yes. But their data is not coming from every employee out there. I believe their data are largely self-reported so perhaps biased toward the slice of people proud enough of their salary to report it? You also have to trust that they verify the salary reports somehow, which they say they do. I’d like to see an anonymized dump straight from one or more of the big payroll companies. I think I’d find that a little more believable.
  - dasil003 5y ago
    The other problem with levels.fyi is ambiguity around grant vesting, stacked refreshes and stock appreciation. Typically in an offer letter the dollar figure shown will be a 4-year grant, submitters are supposed to divide that number by 4 to give the annual comp, but I suspect some don't realize this and submit the full 4-year grant + annual salary. This is solved by verifying the offer letter, but that's only one form of verified salary. They also let you verify via W2, and with W2 you are seeing stock appreciation plus stacked refreshers, so this can be very hard to assess, especially with a decade-plus bull run in tech stocks. Naive observers looking at the data would be shocked how many of those 7-figure salaries actually came from $300-$400k total comp offers that benefitted from stock appreciation.
austincheney 5y ago
Why would you let that level of immaturity dictate any kind of business decision?
goodpoint 5y ago
> It's human nature to compare No, that's culture not nature.
- dpark 5y ago
  Can you cite a human culture where individuals do not compare their accomplishments/compensation/etc with others?
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Outside of the US and the HN bubble.
    - dpark 5y ago
      So no. People are competitive and compare themselves to others everywhere. If you think otherwise, then 1) share something real that supports your belief, and 2) consider that whatever bubble you’ve constructed for yourself is misleading you.
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        Please spare the strawman. Some societies are well known to be hypercompetitive, other are less, and same are profoundly egalitarian. This has been widely researched by anthropologists and there's plenty of literature on the topic. (oh and if you still insist on anecdata, I know plenty of people who consider distasteful to compare your wealth to your neighbors, both from Europe and from Asia)
        dpark 5y ago
        > Some societies are well known to be hypercompetitive, other are less, and same are profoundly egalitarian. This has been widely researched by anthropologists and there's plenty of literature on the topic. And yet you still can’t provide a single concrete example of a non competitive society. It has not gone unnoticed that you’re moving the goalposts and suddenly you’re comparing relative levels of competitiveness which is wholly different from your claim that it is not natural to be competitive. Don’t complain when someone knocks down the strawman you set up yourself. > I know plenty of people who consider distasteful to compare your wealth to your neighbors Nearly no one compares their wealth to their neighbors directly. This is bad taste even in the US. Asking someone their salary is generally considered quite taboo unless you’re in the process of negotiating a salary worth a new company. > both from Europe and from Asia This is interesting since I can find you endless threads online from Europeans asking if American engineers really make so much and why they make so much more. This sounds like comparison to me. I can also find endless articles discussing the rise of status symbols (iPhones, luxury cars) among the middle class in China and India as their wealth rises.
sgtnoodle 5y ago
That's what I saw working at Google, and it seemed to create a morale issue that didn't otherwise need to exist. Everyone I worked with that was unhappy with their relative compensation was getting a firehose of money either way.
matt-attack 5y ago
My boss recently confided that he, his boss, and I are all “within a Starbucks habit” of each other. For some reason I love that analogy.

HWR_14 5y ago

Strange, most people prefer more information to less. Employees knowing more leads to them better able to negotiate (not just arrive at higher numbers initially, but clearly know what skills they need to better negotiate the next time). Unless they're being treated unfairly, there's no downside. Those people who were paid a few hundred dollars less - why were they paid less?

Closi 5y ago

> It's human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I'm close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I'm at. 'Counterproductive' depends on your perspective - considering fundamentally everyone is working to get paid (no matter how much you love your job), a 'productivity' metric for a worker (not the company) could be amount of money earned per working hour (GDP per hour is a metric of productivity for the nation - so why shouldn't earnings per hour be a metric of personal productivity?!). Salary discussions informed with information can be highly 'productive' in that it is one of the best ways to increase your earnings per hour worked, with no change to the hours/effort you put in, if you are being paid less than people doing a similar role with similar skills/output. Assuming you are working a 40 hour week, a 10% pay bump because of an informed discussion is equal to working an extra 5 weeks across the year in terms of earning (and that's assuming you get paid overtime!). And if a 30 minute conversation is worth 180 hours of work (or potentially thousands of hours if you work there a long time), that's pretty productive in the scheme of things!

spenczar5 5y ago

As mentioned in another comment thread: we don’t need to speculate about the effects because millions of employees already share salaries with no anonymity in thousands of groups. That is, employees of the US or state governments. 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. What are the consequences of this? Is there vicious infighting, and sniping over raises? Uh, no. There is just simple compensation, and way less negotiation. When some job class needs a salary adjustment because the job market has changed, everyone benefits. It’s pretty great.

tjader 5y ago
But in government entities usually the immediate superiors have very little leeway to change your salary, so the employees know it's pointless to argue over differences in a salary that has very strong rules that very few people can influence. In private companies on the other hand there's usually a much larger margin for salary to be negotiated, which incentivizes the consequences you mentioned.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  That is endogenous to publicizing salary data. If the data were public, you might make an argument that all engineers need to be paid more or that you need a promotion rather than lobbying your manager.
KallDrexx 5y ago
This may just be your personal feelings though. I know quite a few people who work for public schools and government entities throughout Florida who really really are uncomfortable with their salaries being public knowledge, and at least one has felt it has been used against them.
- syshum 5y ago
  This is often the case in lower per capita income area's where you have a public sector worker demanding a pay increase (i.e higher taxes) but are making 65-70K, where the tax payer they are wanting more money from is making 40-50K, the tax payer tends to not believe the appeals to poverty of said public sector employee

the_arun 5y ago

Isn’t this how levels.fyi works?

ryandrake 5y ago
Yes. But their data is not coming from every employee out there. I believe their data are largely self-reported so perhaps biased toward the slice of people proud enough of their salary to report it? You also have to trust that they verify the salary reports somehow, which they say they do. I’d like to see an anonymized dump straight from one or more of the big payroll companies. I think I’d find that a little more believable.
- dasil003 5y ago
  The other problem with levels.fyi is ambiguity around grant vesting, stacked refreshes and stock appreciation. Typically in an offer letter the dollar figure shown will be a 4-year grant, submitters are supposed to divide that number by 4 to give the annual comp, but I suspect some don't realize this and submit the full 4-year grant + annual salary. This is solved by verifying the offer letter, but that's only one form of verified salary. They also let you verify via W2, and with W2 you are seeing stock appreciation plus stacked refreshers, so this can be very hard to assess, especially with a decade-plus bull run in tech stocks. Naive observers looking at the data would be shocked how many of those 7-figure salaries actually came from $300-$400k total comp offers that benefitted from stock appreciation.

austincheney 5y ago

Why would you let that level of immaturity dictate any kind of business decision?

goodpoint 5y ago

> It's human nature to compare No, that's culture not nature.

dpark 5y ago
Can you cite a human culture where individuals do not compare their accomplishments/compensation/etc with others?
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Outside of the US and the HN bubble.
  - dpark 5y ago
    So no. People are competitive and compare themselves to others everywhere. If you think otherwise, then 1) share something real that supports your belief, and 2) consider that whatever bubble you’ve constructed for yourself is misleading you.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      Please spare the strawman. Some societies are well known to be hypercompetitive, other are less, and same are profoundly egalitarian. This has been widely researched by anthropologists and there's plenty of literature on the topic. (oh and if you still insist on anecdata, I know plenty of people who consider distasteful to compare your wealth to your neighbors, both from Europe and from Asia)
      - dpark 5y ago
        > Some societies are well known to be hypercompetitive, other are less, and same are profoundly egalitarian. This has been widely researched by anthropologists and there's plenty of literature on the topic. And yet you still can’t provide a single concrete example of a non competitive society. It has not gone unnoticed that you’re moving the goalposts and suddenly you’re comparing relative levels of competitiveness which is wholly different from your claim that it is not natural to be competitive. Don’t complain when someone knocks down the strawman you set up yourself. > I know plenty of people who consider distasteful to compare your wealth to your neighbors Nearly no one compares their wealth to their neighbors directly. This is bad taste even in the US. Asking someone their salary is generally considered quite taboo unless you’re in the process of negotiating a salary worth a new company. > both from Europe and from Asia This is interesting since I can find you endless threads online from Europeans asking if American engineers really make so much and why they make so much more. This sounds like comparison to me. I can also find endless articles discussing the rise of status symbols (iPhones, luxury cars) among the middle class in China and India as their wealth rises.

sgtnoodle 5y ago

That's what I saw working at Google, and it seemed to create a morale issue that didn't otherwise need to exist. Everyone I worked with that was unhappy with their relative compensation was getting a firehose of money either way.

matt-attack 5y ago

My boss recently confided that he, his boss, and I are all “within a Starbucks habit” of each other. For some reason I love that analogy.