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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 t

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
- dubcanada 5y ago
  In some countries you can look up anyones salary, Nordic countries for example. Do you feel their entire society is harmed and uncomfortable? Your whole argue is basically it might make a few people uncomfortable for a generation. While completely ignoring any benefits for future generations.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - KallDrexx 5y ago
    Nordic countries also have a different culture and values than we do (not better, not worse, but different). This is normal that subjects that are taboo in one area are not taboo in another area, and things that work for one culture may not necessarily work out for our culture. There's a very specific culture in the US that favors income opaqueness, and it's not necessarily employer based. My sister in law is very uncomfortable having us know that she makes 70k a year for whatever reason. I know real life stories of people who make 150k in low cost of living area and people around them treating them like they can afford to pay for their dinner when they hang out because they make so much more then them. We live in a society that has MUCH more pay inequality than a lot of other 1st world countries and we are a society that heavily values income and wealth over other social signals, and because of that money has become a sore subject. Then you add the job situations where if you make a lot more than other people (maybe you literally deserve it because of the value you bring to the company) it can be an uncomfortable situation if peers find out because now the company has to justify why person X is worth more than Y without insulting them, risking a lawsuit, or making them leave. To be clear, I am vastly for pay transparency for many reasons (especially minority and gender equality) but let's not pretend like it can just be airlifted into America's culture just because it works in other countries.
robertlagrant 5y ago
This implies that a "job class" has relatively similar value output across job titles. That may be the case in universities (or rather, the high performers are more differentiated on directorships/board memberships in private companies, not disclosed on that web page) but in tech two people with the same job title can contribute wildly different value to a company. You can just invent a billion different job titles, but you could also just figure out what each person is happy to accept a job for and bump their salaries by the saving you make on not employing people to create and maintain and negotiate salary bands.
pc86 5y ago
The root cause is an open argument but I think one of the causes is that you get a demonstrably lower quality of employee because the pay can't be negotiated, and it's pegged so far below market it's insulting. The salary you mentioned is half that of the median developer salary in the US. If you can get into FAANG as a new grad you're looking at 1.5-2x the median. I'm not super familiar with UW's scaling system but I have to go to what appears to be the top level (ES10?) to get anything approaching a reasonable salary, and it's still less than entry level FAANG. I used to contract for state government. They used contractors for all the "real development" because the developers on state payroll making $40k/yr were wholly unqualified to write any code. So they paid a contracting firm $80/hr to get someone making $100k/yr to come in and do it while the state employees managed the project and supervised the contractors. If the government could just negotiate individual salaries for developers, they could pay them twice as much, fire the contractors, and get the work done for roughly the same quality, and cheaper.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  So, my previous role was as a PE in AWS. I made a high multiple of my current salary, yes. I think the quality of people around me at UW is mostly just different. Domain expertise is much deeper - the image processing experts really know their stuff! While fundamental systems and devops stuff is pretty absent from anyone’s skillsets. I don’t think you can really simply say that the talent quality is better or worse - it’s different. I work at UW because I prefer the content of the work over my past at AWS. It turns out there are lots of people like me, who agree that $120k is plenty, and who made a very cushy pile of cash in the past at FAANG.
  - mentat 5y ago
    It's plenty for people who already have a pile of cash. That seems a bit problematic right?
    - xref 5y ago
      Depends on your lifestyle but for the bulk of Americans $120k is extremely cushy, at nearly 4x the median salary of $35k
jstummbillig 5y ago
Interesting. In most European countries, as an employee of the state, you are (generally) paid by role/tenure. This is not the case in WA?
- omginternets 5y ago
  It used to be the case until the 1980's, whereupon there was a deliberate shift away from quantifying the value of a role and towards quantifying the value of a candidate. Somewhat counterintuitively, this was a deliberate measure to reduce exposure to discrimination lawsuits. The reasoning was that you could always argue that candidates were unequal in their experience/competence/etc., hence the observed wage differences within a single role. To be clear, there are upsides to this arrangement as well, namely: the ability to negotiate one's salary.
syshum 5y ago
This style of pay leads to Tenure based pay, not performance bases pay. Which some people like, and will excel in such an environment, however also can lead to other problems. I prefer performance based pay, vs tenure. If a engineer is turning out project after project, completing task after task why should they be paid less simply because they were hired 3 years ago, where Dave down the hall has been there 30 years but has 1/2 the output making significantly more because of tenure
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Performance based pay seems great in theory, but in reality is not so simple. For one, how do you measure performance? Whatever system you come up with to measure it, you will have people trying to game the system to make themselves appear more valuable than they are.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    I'm sure there are other things that factor into it, but I'd suspect that people who have worked with you for a long time (1 year+ close contact) would get a very clear idea of your competence and reliability. The hard part is expecting people close to you to be honest to management.
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      I also don’t know how accurately we can rate our colleagues productivity… it is hard to separate out how you feel about the person on a personal level.
- brnt 5y ago
  Because those categories are not so neatly separated as you think they are. Most work is done in teams, and some enable others to churn out project after project by takingn care of the maintenance, meetings, documentation, etc. It's hard to say who did more, but it's also hard to say someone in the team has more output than others. Are the wheels of the car more productive than the frame? I agree with those that say this is a discussion not worth ones time. I can always go to another team, or go at it myself, if the pay isn't what I want.
amelius 5y ago
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market)
pokot0 5y ago
Rather funny that if you order by salaries, the top ones are by far the sports coach. That's the peak (or close to) of human existence I guess. While it's expected in capitalism, I find it sad that tax dollars go into those salaries (don't start the "they make more revenue than their salaries" thing. Government is not a business)
- karaterobot 5y ago
  We don't generally set salaries by the employee's proximity to the peak of human existence: find me an economic system that does and I'd learn about it. In this case, like it or not, the football program brings a lot of value to the University in terms of notoriety and money.
  - pokot0 5y ago
    Yes, and I find it sad. It's a personal opinion, I understand that. "panem et circenses" I guess. For context is a typical north american phenomenon and not common everywhere.
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  >(don't start the "they make more revenue than their salaries" thing. Government is not a business) Governments may not be, but universities most definitely are. Unless/until we move over to a system of 100% tax-funded universities sports teams are an important source of revenue for them.
  - dpark 5y ago
    I thought so too but apparently only a select few universities have profitable sports programs. For most universities it’s a cost.
    - Cederfjard 5y ago
      Isn’t it basically PR to attract students, who in turn will pay very expensive tuition (often backed by student loans, and guaranteed by the government to boot, meaning it can be cranked up really high)?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
peytoncasper 5y ago
Genuinely curious, how is the US Federal Government and Universities a good example of transparency increasing pay bands? If anything, those are some of the most repressed wages in the economy…
cortesoft 5y ago
This seems to combine two different things... public salary data and fixed salary bands. You can have each of those things without the other. For example, pro athletes all make different amounts of money, individually negotiated, but the amounts are public.
lr4444lr 5y ago
Totally incomparable. Almost all of those roles are on non-negotiable payscales set by the agencies, with very tight working hours. And as for infighting and jealousy, it is very existent: not over money, but often promotions given out due to patronage, seniority ranking for choosing work duties, people abusing probationary procedures to retaliate against others... public service has plenty of misery for people on the wrong end of things, and it's a major factor for why unions are still strong there. Public service salaries are public because it's public money. That's it. Don't glorify it.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  I don’t really understand your comment. The original concern was that if workers in a private company knew each other’s salaries, there would be particular problems. I am claiming that those haven’t appeared in my experience with public salaries. You have named many problems with working in public service. That doesn’t seem really relevant, though; I certainly am under no illusions that this is a perfect environment, just that salary transparency is not disastrous.
  - lr4444lr 5y ago
    I'm saying salary transparency problems don't appear in the public sector because there is no social basis for them to appear. And as a corollary, that even when this aspect of possible inter-employee strife is removed, that people in those work environments still find ways of warring against one another. So why would you think adding an additional anxiety-inducing way for people to relatively rank one another in the private sector would lead to anything positive?
sokoloff 5y ago
Are the salaries formulaic or table-lookup in that case? If everyone got paid the exact same amount, there’s no penalty to publishing the salary number (that everyone already knows). The problems start to drift in when salaries are individually determined (hopefully based on contributions to the company).

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
dubcanada 5y ago
In some countries you can look up anyones salary, Nordic countries for example. Do you feel their entire society is harmed and uncomfortable? Your whole argue is basically it might make a few people uncomfortable for a generation. While completely ignoring any benefits for future generations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- KallDrexx 5y ago
  Nordic countries also have a different culture and values than we do (not better, not worse, but different). This is normal that subjects that are taboo in one area are not taboo in another area, and things that work for one culture may not necessarily work out for our culture. There's a very specific culture in the US that favors income opaqueness, and it's not necessarily employer based. My sister in law is very uncomfortable having us know that she makes 70k a year for whatever reason. I know real life stories of people who make 150k in low cost of living area and people around them treating them like they can afford to pay for their dinner when they hang out because they make so much more then them. We live in a society that has MUCH more pay inequality than a lot of other 1st world countries and we are a society that heavily values income and wealth over other social signals, and because of that money has become a sore subject. Then you add the job situations where if you make a lot more than other people (maybe you literally deserve it because of the value you bring to the company) it can be an uncomfortable situation if peers find out because now the company has to justify why person X is worth more than Y without insulting them, risking a lawsuit, or making them leave. To be clear, I am vastly for pay transparency for many reasons (especially minority and gender equality) but let's not pretend like it can just be airlifted into America's culture just because it works in other countries.

robertlagrant 5y ago

This implies that a "job class" has relatively similar value output across job titles. That may be the case in universities (or rather, the high performers are more differentiated on directorships/board memberships in private companies, not disclosed on that web page) but in tech two people with the same job title can contribute wildly different value to a company. You can just invent a billion different job titles, but you could also just figure out what each person is happy to accept a job for and bump their salaries by the saving you make on not employing people to create and maintain and negotiate salary bands.

pc86 5y ago

The root cause is an open argument but I think one of the causes is that you get a demonstrably lower quality of employee because the pay can't be negotiated, and it's pegged so far below market it's insulting. The salary you mentioned is half that of the median developer salary in the US. If you can get into FAANG as a new grad you're looking at 1.5-2x the median. I'm not super familiar with UW's scaling system but I have to go to what appears to be the top level (ES10?) to get anything approaching a reasonable salary, and it's still less than entry level FAANG. I used to contract for state government. They used contractors for all the "real development" because the developers on state payroll making $40k/yr were wholly unqualified to write any code. So they paid a contracting firm $80/hr to get someone making $100k/yr to come in and do it while the state employees managed the project and supervised the contractors. If the government could just negotiate individual salaries for developers, they could pay them twice as much, fire the contractors, and get the work done for roughly the same quality, and cheaper.

spenczar5 5y ago
So, my previous role was as a PE in AWS. I made a high multiple of my current salary, yes. I think the quality of people around me at UW is mostly just different. Domain expertise is much deeper - the image processing experts really know their stuff! While fundamental systems and devops stuff is pretty absent from anyone’s skillsets. I don’t think you can really simply say that the talent quality is better or worse - it’s different. I work at UW because I prefer the content of the work over my past at AWS. It turns out there are lots of people like me, who agree that $120k is plenty, and who made a very cushy pile of cash in the past at FAANG.
- mentat 5y ago
  It's plenty for people who already have a pile of cash. That seems a bit problematic right?
  - xref 5y ago
    Depends on your lifestyle but for the bulk of Americans $120k is extremely cushy, at nearly 4x the median salary of $35k

jstummbillig 5y ago

Interesting. In most European countries, as an employee of the state, you are (generally) paid by role/tenure. This is not the case in WA?

omginternets 5y ago
It used to be the case until the 1980's, whereupon there was a deliberate shift away from quantifying the value of a role and towards quantifying the value of a candidate. Somewhat counterintuitively, this was a deliberate measure to reduce exposure to discrimination lawsuits. The reasoning was that you could always argue that candidates were unequal in their experience/competence/etc., hence the observed wage differences within a single role. To be clear, there are upsides to this arrangement as well, namely: the ability to negotiate one's salary.

syshum 5y ago

This style of pay leads to Tenure based pay, not performance bases pay. Which some people like, and will excel in such an environment, however also can lead to other problems. I prefer performance based pay, vs tenure. If a engineer is turning out project after project, completing task after task why should they be paid less simply because they were hired 3 years ago, where Dave down the hall has been there 30 years but has 1/2 the output making significantly more because of tenure

cortesoft 5y ago
Performance based pay seems great in theory, but in reality is not so simple. For one, how do you measure performance? Whatever system you come up with to measure it, you will have people trying to game the system to make themselves appear more valuable than they are.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  I'm sure there are other things that factor into it, but I'd suspect that people who have worked with you for a long time (1 year+ close contact) would get a very clear idea of your competence and reliability. The hard part is expecting people close to you to be honest to management.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    I also don’t know how accurately we can rate our colleagues productivity… it is hard to separate out how you feel about the person on a personal level.
brnt 5y ago
Because those categories are not so neatly separated as you think they are. Most work is done in teams, and some enable others to churn out project after project by takingn care of the maintenance, meetings, documentation, etc. It's hard to say who did more, but it's also hard to say someone in the team has more output than others. Are the wheels of the car more productive than the frame? I agree with those that say this is a discussion not worth ones time. I can always go to another team, or go at it myself, if the pay isn't what I want.

amelius 5y ago

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market)

pokot0 5y ago

Rather funny that if you order by salaries, the top ones are by far the sports coach. That's the peak (or close to) of human existence I guess. While it's expected in capitalism, I find it sad that tax dollars go into those salaries (don't start the "they make more revenue than their salaries" thing. Government is not a business)

karaterobot 5y ago
We don't generally set salaries by the employee's proximity to the peak of human existence: find me an economic system that does and I'd learn about it. In this case, like it or not, the football program brings a lot of value to the University in terms of notoriety and money.
- pokot0 5y ago
  Yes, and I find it sad. It's a personal opinion, I understand that. "panem et circenses" I guess. For context is a typical north american phenomenon and not common everywhere.
HideousKojima 5y ago
>(don't start the "they make more revenue than their salaries" thing. Government is not a business) Governments may not be, but universities most definitely are. Unless/until we move over to a system of 100% tax-funded universities sports teams are an important source of revenue for them.
- dpark 5y ago
  I thought so too but apparently only a select few universities have profitable sports programs. For most universities it’s a cost.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    Isn’t it basically PR to attract students, who in turn will pay very expensive tuition (often backed by student loans, and guaranteed by the government to boot, meaning it can be cranked up really high)?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

peytoncasper 5y ago

Genuinely curious, how is the US Federal Government and Universities a good example of transparency increasing pay bands? If anything, those are some of the most repressed wages in the economy…

cortesoft 5y ago

This seems to combine two different things... public salary data and fixed salary bands. You can have each of those things without the other. For example, pro athletes all make different amounts of money, individually negotiated, but the amounts are public.

lr4444lr 5y ago

Totally incomparable. Almost all of those roles are on non-negotiable payscales set by the agencies, with very tight working hours. And as for infighting and jealousy, it is very existent: not over money, but often promotions given out due to patronage, seniority ranking for choosing work duties, people abusing probationary procedures to retaliate against others... public service has plenty of misery for people on the wrong end of things, and it's a major factor for why unions are still strong there. Public service salaries are public because it's public money. That's it. Don't glorify it.

spenczar5 5y ago
I don’t really understand your comment. The original concern was that if workers in a private company knew each other’s salaries, there would be particular problems. I am claiming that those haven’t appeared in my experience with public salaries. You have named many problems with working in public service. That doesn’t seem really relevant, though; I certainly am under no illusions that this is a perfect environment, just that salary transparency is not disastrous.
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  I'm saying salary transparency problems don't appear in the public sector because there is no social basis for them to appear. And as a corollary, that even when this aspect of possible inter-employee strife is removed, that people in those work environments still find ways of warring against one another. So why would you think adding an additional anxiety-inducing way for people to relatively rank one another in the private sector would lead to anything positive?

sokoloff 5y ago

Are the salaries formulaic or table-lookup in that case? If everyone got paid the exact same amount, there’s no penalty to publishing the salary number (that everyone already knows). The problems start to drift in when salaries are individually determined (hopefully based on contributions to the company).