6 ms·

I’m opposed to disclosure laws that would be prone to expose the income of individual people. If Alice is the only SWEPR5 at a company, that proposal publishes

I’m opposed to disclosure laws that would be prone to expose the income of individual people. If Alice is the only SWEPR5 at a company, that proposal publishes her salary. If Bob is clearly the best SWEPR4, Cathy the middle, and Dave just barely got promoted to that level, their salaries are also individually published. I don’t object to good faith ranges being required in job listings, but I oppose anything that would tend to publish an individual’s data that they should be able to keep private. (That’s before even getting to the fact that salary is nowhere near the full compensation picture.)

jachee 3y ago
Management is the only one who benefits when labor doesn’t openly share salary information. Let the information flow. Knowledge is power.
- eastbound 3y ago
  No. With full public information, bad employees benefit from being able to ask for more, good employees just flee elsewhere. Because it’s impossible to reason someone on their skills. Full information is hell on Earth.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Management’s job is to get rid of bad employees. Good employees do not have unlimited places to “flee” to. And full information is when markets allocate resources most efficiently.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      Information asymmetry is a natural thing. It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them. If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        > Information asymmetry is a natural thing. What does this mean? Why does natural even matter? Humans changed a lot of things that are “natural” to better their lives. >It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them. Temporarily embarassed billionaires. Aka you like to think you are the 1% who can out negotiate an employer because you are so in demand. 99% of people will be at a disadvantage no matter what. Also, https://theworknumber.com/ https://theworknumber.com/ > If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power. What is the purpose of a “knowledge” broker, if the thing they are brokering is already available to everyone?
        WrongAssumption 3y ago
        No he’s right. It used to be in my state that prospective employers could ask for salary history with proof. If you are leaving a place because of bad pay or just that you want to make more money the discussion was always tethered around your previous pay. A few years ago my state made it illegal to ask for that information, and can now only ask our salary expectations. It’s now tethered around what you want to make. This led to a HUGE increase in my comp.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        > If you are leaving a place because of bad pay or just that you want to make more money the discussion was always tethered around your previous pay. The employer wanted you to think that, but it was actually tethered around your other job offers and your willingness to say no. If you have access to information for what other employers are paying, and are potential other options for your employment, the employer will know you know this. More importantly, you will not have to waste your valuable time figuring out what other employers are paying, so you have to do less work to figure out the market. The employer most likely already knows the market, that is part of their daily duties, and know that applicants have to do a lot of work to figure out the market. Hence trying to use people’s previous pay to lowball them, since they know that people only know that.
        3y ago
  - Devasta 3y ago
    So you would rather have your own compensation package be lower if it ensures that your coworkers packages are also low?
    - oblio 3y ago
      You'd be surprised and I can't find the study anymore, but this is a very frequent thing.
  - asoneth 3y ago
    This is the opposite of my experience with salary transparency both as an employee and a manager. It tended to made unproductive employees leave when they realized that the company did not consider them as critical as they imagined themselves to be which saved a ton of effort because we rarely needed to resort to PIPs or firing. It also made it clearer to productive employees how much their work was valued.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  And job seekers. They don’t want potential employers knowing how much they made.
  - Lanolderen 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure they know what you made if you worked at a large company anyway. For small ones they can probably guess better than the job seeker can. Excluding insider info because it goes both ways.
    - sgarland 3y ago
      I was quite surprised when a recruiter correctly guessed my total comp at a medium-sized, private company, with little info on levels.fyi He got within a few thousand dollars. Respect, you’re good at your job. Also to his credit, I still got a hefty pay bump.
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      They can guess based off ranges. They dont have a list with your name and exact salary. In fact it’s explicitly illegal for them to ask in many states so this would circumvent that law.
      - Lanolderen 3y ago
        My line of thought is that while I can look at Glassdoor or whatever so can they. But they can also get a department to do what I'll be doing 40hrs/week. Maybe I can ask a friend at that company but there's nothing really stopping my interviewer from asking his friend at my (ex)company the same thing.
  - Someone1234 3y ago
    Too late. Experian already buys and sells your salary information, and potential employers pay them to see it. I believe the product is "Employment Insight" but it could be one of their others. I've literally seen the salaries flow from payroll straight onto their servers.
OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
Why would it matter if Alice was the only one or not? Disclosure laws inherently expose the income of everyone
- sokoloff 3y ago
  If there are 100 SWEPR5s in the proposal above, Alice's nosy co-worker or neighbor only learns the range of Alice's salary. If Alice is the only one, they learn the precise value.
  - Mechanical9 3y ago
    I think the question is more why should an individual's salary be private? Personally, I think money is power, and I want to know about power disparities to better protect myself. But I understand there are factors to consider.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      By all means please tell us your salary in a public hn comment then. Nobody is stopping you
      - drchickensalad 3y ago
        220k base 350k stock
        ekianjo 3y ago
        Thanks. Which company and What position?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Upthread proposer asked "is there any disadvantage[?]" I listed one (or two, if you count "this won't accomplish much because of the equity comp portion"). Philosophically, whether an individual's ought to be private is an interesting but distinct question. This proposal has the disadvantage that it makes disclosures about individual people who might not want that disclosure made and which are not being made today.
quickthrower2 3y ago
I get more accurate date about Alice but levels.fyi already gave me a good ballpark
flangola7 3y ago
[dead]
candiddevmike 3y ago
Did you know there are some countries where you can look up anyone's income?
- hasperdi 3y ago
  Norway is one
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Norway is the only one. And you can't look up salary, just their total income, which could include say renting out a vacation home or whatever.
    - edpichler 3y ago
      The only one? Source?
    - irrational 3y ago
      I thought Sweden did the same thing?
    - varjag 3y ago
      Total taxable income, which depending on your family/health/debt situation can be different from the same base income.
  - postexitus 3y ago
    Finland is another.
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Incidentally, Norway appears among the countries with the lowest perception of corruption in the world: #4 among 180 countries (0). It would be interesting to look if there is any correlation with other countries where income records are publicly available. 0: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank
solardev 3y ago
Why does that matter? They should all be able to know each other's salaries.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  What’s your salary?
  - solardev 3y ago
    40 euros/hour right now. Last job was USD $98k/year. Before that it was $65k. Before that it was $42k. I was part of a team that led a salary transparency initiative at a previous job, and it eventually led to the creation of a union there, but not until after I left for unrelated reasons. I don't get this weird paranoia about salary privacy. Opening it up helped everyone negotiate.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Sorry for replying to myself, but I wanted to share a couple more anecdotes about pay. One, at my current job, I offered my employer a sliding scale of 25 to 50 euros an hour, depending on what they paid their other median staff and what they thought the kind of work I'd be doing is worth (primarily dev support with a bit of documentation and coding). They chose the higher end of the scale. I greatly appreciated this, because it would be enough to help me go back to school without getting another part time job. Sliding scales are a tool I've used several times in the past, and I like them because it favors mutual respect and relationship building rather than profit maximization for either side. I'm also grateful for the other professionals who've offered this to me in the past (lawyers and mental health professionals), and wanted to do the same. Another anecdote: I once got a freelance gig by meeting another developer in a bar. They connected me to their employer, who offered to pay me $195/hr to make some WordPress templates. I thought this was ridiculously overpriced. I immediately negotiated it DOWN, but the person who introduced me was adamant that I not go too low because it might deflate their wages too. I wanted to charge $30 to $50 for this work, which was about market rate at the time. We ended up settling for $90/hr, which was still a ridiculous amount of money for adjusting CSS pixels in WordPress. Their client went bankrupt not long after (couldn't guess why lol). The whole experience left me feeling so disgusted I went to work for a nonprofit shortly thereafter. I earned 3x less there, worked much harder being a full stack dev and a sys admin on the side, among other things, but I had a phenomenal team and was 10x happier. That was the job that led to the salary transparency initiative, where we discovered the nonprofit was cyclically exploiting young women new to their careers after their master's degrees, burning them out, and replacing them. On average they made less than $40k, sometimes much less, to my $65k as a dev. There was no real upward mobility there, while the CEO made more than half a million dollars and wasn't even in the same state much of the time. It really revealed unfair pay gaps and helped fuel the movement towards unionization. As one of the highest paid self reported staff there, I felt it was part of my community duty to help my colleagues earn what they're worth. All in all that was probably my favorite job ever, and I would've stayed forever if I could've. After that I went to work for a Fortune 1000 for profit company who was dabbling in renewables. My salary went up by 50%. And through a less formal salary transparency effort (as in casual lunchtime chats), I learned that I made more than people who'd been there longer and were better coders. I just happened to enter at a better time (during covid). This helped them negotiate for better pay later on. Anyway, this is all just to share different scenarios that can happen when people are forthright about their pay. For context, I consider myself maybe a slightly above average frontend developer in the USA. I have twenty years of on and off experience, but often more off than on, and no formal CS schooling. Tech was never really my passion (renewables is), but it helps pay the bills. I grew up in a more collectivist society, consider myself a leftist economically, and favor small egalitarian and cooperative workplaces rather than the typical American model of cutthroat capitalism that primarily pits workers against each other, and against management, in favor of unseen anonymous shareholders or owners. I want to be paid a fair, livable wage in exchange for hard work. I want others around me to be able to do the same. I don't want to be paid an exploitative wage that's either too low or too high. Too low and I'm starving. Too high and my employer is fueling a bubble that skyrockets costs of living and destroys communities. I don't want a gilded society with the ultra rich and the servant classes. Would much prefer a community where people all made enough to get by and could float between careers that they're good at or needed (teachers, vet techs, medical assistants, nonprofits, career civil servants), etc. Salary transparency helps with all of that. The only people secrecy helps are those who are either overpaid for their work or who own labor and want it to race to the bottom. I would much rather we move towards something like government GS pay scales with clearly defined levels and requirements. Anyway, thanks for reading.
figmert 3y ago
Why shouldn't Dave and Cathy know what Bob is earning? They're the same level, they should earn the same.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  While I support all efforts at increasing information transparency, I disagree that prices need to be the same. It is possible that humans are sufficiently different in the quality of the labor they are selling that a buyer might price them differently. For example, I am willing to pay a higher price for someone has 10 years of experience and is less likely to make mistakes or other desirable qualifies more than someone who has 0 years of experience, even though they are doing the same work.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Isn’t difference in experience one aspect that is represented by different levels? In other words, it’s not the same work if experience vastly differs.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      It could be, but I do not see why it has to be. And “vastly” is a nebulous term, maybe an employer wants to classify “levels” more or less broadly, and wants to reward within “levels”, I don’t know, I just don’t see a need to prescribe a very specific system of employee management.
  - BrkAway21 3y ago
    The problem with your example is that you are making the assumption that someone with 10 years of experience is less likely to make mistakes in practice than the person with 0 years of experience. I've seen several examples over my career where the technically "more experienced" individual is not truly the better suited for the job. You won't know that until you hire them and, in my opinion, is a good reason for why you should pay someone based on the job (so long as they qualify for it). It doesn't mean that everyone needs to make exactly the same amount, because I think there is an argument to be made for someone who has more tenure at a company to retain them and for their role-specific experience. But that shouldn't be a >5% difference. Also, I don't see how people can't see that this is precisely the logic that contributes to women generally getting paid less for doing the same job. Anecdotally, I joined a company and had about 7 years of experience. My "peers" in performing exactly the same duties as me had probably about 25 years of experience. I was responsible for the 2nd largest revenue generating P&L that generated the highest profit margin (which I actually turned around from losing money in 6 months). I found out I was getting paid $70k less than "my peers." Are you going to tell me that despite performing the exact same job and actually performing it objectively "better" that I should have made less money? This is the kind of stuff that routinely happens to women.
wdb 3y ago
Transparency also helps to find out that you the foreigner gets paid less
cma 3y ago
It's already the case for H1Bs.
quietbritishjim 3y ago
> If Bob is clearly the best SWEPR4, Cathy the middle, and Dave just barely got promoted to that level ... I think you're making a big presumption that the "clearly the best" gets the most income! (Although the more usual argument against transparency proposals is that everyone thinks they're "clealry the best" so all except the highest paid would be annoyed.)
pc86 3y ago
Salary is about 90% of the compensation picture for almost everyone in the US. If you add in things like 401(k) matching and employee-paid insurance premiums, you've got about 99% of the picture covered (in addition to having something far too complex to publish on any individual level). The vast majority of companies offer no stock, no or minimal/token bonuses, and no perks with any real financial value.

jachee 3y ago

Management is the only one who benefits when labor doesn’t openly share salary information. Let the information flow. Knowledge is power.

eastbound 3y ago
No. With full public information, bad employees benefit from being able to ask for more, good employees just flee elsewhere. Because it’s impossible to reason someone on their skills. Full information is hell on Earth.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Management’s job is to get rid of bad employees. Good employees do not have unlimited places to “flee” to. And full information is when markets allocate resources most efficiently.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Information asymmetry is a natural thing. It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them. If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      > Information asymmetry is a natural thing. What does this mean? Why does natural even matter? Humans changed a lot of things that are “natural” to better their lives. >It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them. Temporarily embarassed billionaires. Aka you like to think you are the 1% who can out negotiate an employer because you are so in demand. 99% of people will be at a disadvantage no matter what. Also, https://theworknumber.com/ https://theworknumber.com/ > If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power. What is the purpose of a “knowledge” broker, if the thing they are brokering is already available to everyone?
      - WrongAssumption 3y ago
        No he’s right. It used to be in my state that prospective employers could ask for salary history with proof. If you are leaving a place because of bad pay or just that you want to make more money the discussion was always tethered around your previous pay. A few years ago my state made it illegal to ask for that information, and can now only ask our salary expectations. It’s now tethered around what you want to make. This led to a HUGE increase in my comp.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        > If you are leaving a place because of bad pay or just that you want to make more money the discussion was always tethered around your previous pay. The employer wanted you to think that, but it was actually tethered around your other job offers and your willingness to say no. If you have access to information for what other employers are paying, and are potential other options for your employment, the employer will know you know this. More importantly, you will not have to waste your valuable time figuring out what other employers are paying, so you have to do less work to figure out the market. The employer most likely already knows the market, that is part of their daily duties, and know that applicants have to do a lot of work to figure out the market. Hence trying to use people’s previous pay to lowball them, since they know that people only know that.
        3y ago
- Devasta 3y ago
  So you would rather have your own compensation package be lower if it ensures that your coworkers packages are also low?
  - oblio 3y ago
    You'd be surprised and I can't find the study anymore, but this is a very frequent thing.
- asoneth 3y ago
  This is the opposite of my experience with salary transparency both as an employee and a manager. It tended to made unproductive employees leave when they realized that the company did not consider them as critical as they imagined themselves to be which saved a ton of effort because we rarely needed to resort to PIPs or firing. It also made it clearer to productive employees how much their work was valued.
nonethewiser 3y ago
And job seekers. They don’t want potential employers knowing how much they made.
- Lanolderen 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure they know what you made if you worked at a large company anyway. For small ones they can probably guess better than the job seeker can. Excluding insider info because it goes both ways.
  - sgarland 3y ago
    I was quite surprised when a recruiter correctly guessed my total comp at a medium-sized, private company, with little info on levels.fyi He got within a few thousand dollars. Respect, you’re good at your job. Also to his credit, I still got a hefty pay bump.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    They can guess based off ranges. They dont have a list with your name and exact salary. In fact it’s explicitly illegal for them to ask in many states so this would circumvent that law.
    - Lanolderen 3y ago
      My line of thought is that while I can look at Glassdoor or whatever so can they. But they can also get a department to do what I'll be doing 40hrs/week. Maybe I can ask a friend at that company but there's nothing really stopping my interviewer from asking his friend at my (ex)company the same thing.
- Someone1234 3y ago
  Too late. Experian already buys and sells your salary information, and potential employers pay them to see it. I believe the product is "Employment Insight" but it could be one of their others. I've literally seen the salaries flow from payroll straight onto their servers.

OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago

Why would it matter if Alice was the only one or not? Disclosure laws inherently expose the income of everyone

sokoloff 3y ago
If there are 100 SWEPR5s in the proposal above, Alice's nosy co-worker or neighbor only learns the range of Alice's salary. If Alice is the only one, they learn the precise value.
- Mechanical9 3y ago
  I think the question is more why should an individual's salary be private? Personally, I think money is power, and I want to know about power disparities to better protect myself. But I understand there are factors to consider.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    By all means please tell us your salary in a public hn comment then. Nobody is stopping you
    - drchickensalad 3y ago
      220k base 350k stock
      - ekianjo 3y ago
        Thanks. Which company and What position?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Upthread proposer asked "is there any disadvantage[?]" I listed one (or two, if you count "this won't accomplish much because of the equity comp portion"). Philosophically, whether an individual's ought to be private is an interesting but distinct question. This proposal has the disadvantage that it makes disclosures about individual people who might not want that disclosure made and which are not being made today.

quickthrower2 3y ago

I get more accurate date about Alice but levels.fyi already gave me a good ballpark

flangola7 3y ago

[dead]

candiddevmike 3y ago

Did you know there are some countries where you can look up anyone's income?

hasperdi 3y ago
Norway is one
- ta1243 3y ago
  Norway is the only one. And you can't look up salary, just their total income, which could include say renting out a vacation home or whatever.
  - edpichler 3y ago
    The only one? Source?
  - irrational 3y ago
    I thought Sweden did the same thing?
  - varjag 3y ago
    Total taxable income, which depending on your family/health/debt situation can be different from the same base income.
- postexitus 3y ago
  Finland is another.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Incidentally, Norway appears among the countries with the lowest perception of corruption in the world: #4 among 180 countries (0). It would be interesting to look if there is any correlation with other countries where income records are publicly available. 0: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank

solardev 3y ago

Why does that matter? They should all be able to know each other's salaries.

nonethewiser 3y ago
What’s your salary?
- solardev 3y ago
  40 euros/hour right now. Last job was USD $98k/year. Before that it was $65k. Before that it was $42k. I was part of a team that led a salary transparency initiative at a previous job, and it eventually led to the creation of a union there, but not until after I left for unrelated reasons. I don't get this weird paranoia about salary privacy. Opening it up helped everyone negotiate.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Sorry for replying to myself, but I wanted to share a couple more anecdotes about pay. One, at my current job, I offered my employer a sliding scale of 25 to 50 euros an hour, depending on what they paid their other median staff and what they thought the kind of work I'd be doing is worth (primarily dev support with a bit of documentation and coding). They chose the higher end of the scale. I greatly appreciated this, because it would be enough to help me go back to school without getting another part time job. Sliding scales are a tool I've used several times in the past, and I like them because it favors mutual respect and relationship building rather than profit maximization for either side. I'm also grateful for the other professionals who've offered this to me in the past (lawyers and mental health professionals), and wanted to do the same. Another anecdote: I once got a freelance gig by meeting another developer in a bar. They connected me to their employer, who offered to pay me $195/hr to make some WordPress templates. I thought this was ridiculously overpriced. I immediately negotiated it DOWN, but the person who introduced me was adamant that I not go too low because it might deflate their wages too. I wanted to charge $30 to $50 for this work, which was about market rate at the time. We ended up settling for $90/hr, which was still a ridiculous amount of money for adjusting CSS pixels in WordPress. Their client went bankrupt not long after (couldn't guess why lol). The whole experience left me feeling so disgusted I went to work for a nonprofit shortly thereafter. I earned 3x less there, worked much harder being a full stack dev and a sys admin on the side, among other things, but I had a phenomenal team and was 10x happier. That was the job that led to the salary transparency initiative, where we discovered the nonprofit was cyclically exploiting young women new to their careers after their master's degrees, burning them out, and replacing them. On average they made less than $40k, sometimes much less, to my $65k as a dev. There was no real upward mobility there, while the CEO made more than half a million dollars and wasn't even in the same state much of the time. It really revealed unfair pay gaps and helped fuel the movement towards unionization. As one of the highest paid self reported staff there, I felt it was part of my community duty to help my colleagues earn what they're worth. All in all that was probably my favorite job ever, and I would've stayed forever if I could've. After that I went to work for a Fortune 1000 for profit company who was dabbling in renewables. My salary went up by 50%. And through a less formal salary transparency effort (as in casual lunchtime chats), I learned that I made more than people who'd been there longer and were better coders. I just happened to enter at a better time (during covid). This helped them negotiate for better pay later on. Anyway, this is all just to share different scenarios that can happen when people are forthright about their pay. For context, I consider myself maybe a slightly above average frontend developer in the USA. I have twenty years of on and off experience, but often more off than on, and no formal CS schooling. Tech was never really my passion (renewables is), but it helps pay the bills. I grew up in a more collectivist society, consider myself a leftist economically, and favor small egalitarian and cooperative workplaces rather than the typical American model of cutthroat capitalism that primarily pits workers against each other, and against management, in favor of unseen anonymous shareholders or owners. I want to be paid a fair, livable wage in exchange for hard work. I want others around me to be able to do the same. I don't want to be paid an exploitative wage that's either too low or too high. Too low and I'm starving. Too high and my employer is fueling a bubble that skyrockets costs of living and destroys communities. I don't want a gilded society with the ultra rich and the servant classes. Would much prefer a community where people all made enough to get by and could float between careers that they're good at or needed (teachers, vet techs, medical assistants, nonprofits, career civil servants), etc. Salary transparency helps with all of that. The only people secrecy helps are those who are either overpaid for their work or who own labor and want it to race to the bottom. I would much rather we move towards something like government GS pay scales with clearly defined levels and requirements. Anyway, thanks for reading.

figmert 3y ago

Why shouldn't Dave and Cathy know what Bob is earning? They're the same level, they should earn the same.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
While I support all efforts at increasing information transparency, I disagree that prices need to be the same. It is possible that humans are sufficiently different in the quality of the labor they are selling that a buyer might price them differently. For example, I am willing to pay a higher price for someone has 10 years of experience and is less likely to make mistakes or other desirable qualifies more than someone who has 0 years of experience, even though they are doing the same work.
- layer8 3y ago
  Isn’t difference in experience one aspect that is represented by different levels? In other words, it’s not the same work if experience vastly differs.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    It could be, but I do not see why it has to be. And “vastly” is a nebulous term, maybe an employer wants to classify “levels” more or less broadly, and wants to reward within “levels”, I don’t know, I just don’t see a need to prescribe a very specific system of employee management.
- BrkAway21 3y ago
  The problem with your example is that you are making the assumption that someone with 10 years of experience is less likely to make mistakes in practice than the person with 0 years of experience. I've seen several examples over my career where the technically "more experienced" individual is not truly the better suited for the job. You won't know that until you hire them and, in my opinion, is a good reason for why you should pay someone based on the job (so long as they qualify for it). It doesn't mean that everyone needs to make exactly the same amount, because I think there is an argument to be made for someone who has more tenure at a company to retain them and for their role-specific experience. But that shouldn't be a >5% difference. Also, I don't see how people can't see that this is precisely the logic that contributes to women generally getting paid less for doing the same job. Anecdotally, I joined a company and had about 7 years of experience. My "peers" in performing exactly the same duties as me had probably about 25 years of experience. I was responsible for the 2nd largest revenue generating P&L that generated the highest profit margin (which I actually turned around from losing money in 6 months). I found out I was getting paid $70k less than "my peers." Are you going to tell me that despite performing the exact same job and actually performing it objectively "better" that I should have made less money? This is the kind of stuff that routinely happens to women.

wdb 3y ago

Transparency also helps to find out that you the foreigner gets paid less

cma 3y ago

It's already the case for H1Bs.

quietbritishjim 3y ago

> If Bob is clearly the best SWEPR4, Cathy the middle, and Dave just barely got promoted to that level ... I think you're making a big presumption that the "clearly the best" gets the most income! (Although the more usual argument against transparency proposals is that everyone thinks they're "clealry the best" so all except the highest paid would be annoyed.)

pc86 3y ago

Salary is about 90% of the compensation picture for almost everyone in the US. If you add in things like 401(k) matching and employee-paid insurance premiums, you've got about 99% of the picture covered (in addition to having something far too complex to publish on any individual level). The vast majority of companies offer no stock, no or minimal/token bonuses, and no perks with any real financial value.