> 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, e

> 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!