22 ms·

Ex-Googler says she exposed company-wide pay inequality with spreadsheet

• jaseemabid 11y ago
  I don't normally do this, buts hard to not nitpick this time. Why would you split a story into 50 tweets? Its the hardest way to read content.
• gorgak 11y ago
  at some point i really hope the hacker community rejects google entirely. for me, especially as a musician, google is dead. after the NDA deal they did with the PRS, i am not permitted to know how much they pay out per stream for my tracks which they weren't mandated to control. they also built their entire platform (youtube) from illegal content. the illegal content came first, they then built a user base from this, which they used as currency to do deals with major record labels. wow. i intend to take this to court with a bunch of other musicians.
• SCAQTony 11y ago
  Her premise smells fishy: “one Sunday” at her previous company, she and some coworkers “were bored” and decided to put their salaries in a spreadsheet. As it spread through the company, thousands of employees added their salaries and it allegedly revealed “not great things regarding pay. ...” I find that extraordinarily hard to believe. If the salaries are accurate within that spreadsheet then I suspect something more sinister took place such as a blatant theft from HR. Friendships are lost over the subject of pay and I doubt that Google would be unaware of a spreadsheet such as hers circulating throughout the company reaching thousands of people without Google figuring it out. (I am also surprised still still has a job after bragging about this.)
  • chc 11y ago
    Did you actually read the tweets? According to her, people above her at Google knew about it, but they couldn't really do much about it.
  • nostrademons 11y ago
    Interesting things spread incredibly quickly through Google. I know of some petitions that had 1000+ signatures within a few hours after being posted. Everybody is on email constantly, and there are numerous other backchannels that can reach the whole company within a day.
    • aiiane 11y ago
      Confirming this.
  • aiiane 11y ago
    Believe it or not, it's illegal for companies in the US to prevent employees from discussing their salaries.
    • jessaustin 11y ago
      True statements you'll never hear from HR...
    • maloney 11y ago
      Some states are "at will" meaning they can fire you with no cause.
      • discardorama 11y ago
        "No cause" does not mean "any cause". They can't fire you in retaliation. They can't fire you for being male/female. They can't fire you for being black/white/brown/pink/etc.
        • xentronium 11y ago
          How do you distinguish "illegal reasons" from "bullshit reasons"? Genuinely curious.
          • brianwawok 11y ago
            IF you send an email and ask "Why was I fired" If they reply "Because you are brown" Instant lawsuit, lots of money. If they reply "For bad work perf", and it was really for poor work perf, they are fine. If they reply "For bad work perf", and it really was because you were brown, and you prove it, lawsuit. It is obviously hard to prove. One way may be to show "Look I had 12 performance reviews, on all 12 I got perfect. In fact I did better on my perf reviews than people who are green, so obviously there is a bias for green people and against brown people. Which as you see, the entire argument hinges around the exact reason you are fired. This is why when people are fired, it is safer from a legal standpoint to not give a reason. Even though that kind of sucks for self development. If you really were fired for being a jerk to coworkers... it may be nice to know that, so you can work on it at your next job.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• chrisbennet 11y ago
  That's pretty hard to believe. Next they'll be telling us that Google conspired with Apple and other large firms to suppress wages!
  • aceperry 11y ago
    LOL Sounds like the unfortunate result of PHBs who don't have any common sense or backbone to support their team. The fact that Erica's manager rejected the "peer bonuses" given to Erica suggests that her manager is really unfit to be a manager.
• thomaskcr 11y ago
  I think one of her tweets points towards a less malicious explanation for the problem, the one where she says "people asked for and got equitable pay". I'd like to see another column on a sheet like that basically asking "have you ever asked for a raise or just taken what was given?". My anecdata and limited experience is that women rarely ask for raises and men do -- even if you don't mean to have uneven pay, over time that will create that situation. It seems like other people have similar experience, I believe this is what prompted the no-negotiation policy at Reddit (which I think is a terrible policy for talent retention, if someone feels undervalued and comes to talk to you about it and your response is "no raises sorry" I'm not sure how you can possibly retain your higher performing employees).
• uncoder0 11y ago
  On Topic: This seems very shady on behalf of her manager... I've never heard of the peer bonuses or read the fine print of how they work so I can't comment beyond my feeling that what happened to Eric doesn't seem right at all. Off Topic: Is this style of prose common? I feel the proper medium for this post would be a blog rather than ~20 individual tweets.
  • radley 11y ago
    I don't think she meant to write a post; just shared thoughts over time with friends / followers.
  • facepalm 11y ago
    "Fuck you! Now give me my bonus". Why should somebody who you call an asshole in public be obliged to give you a goodwill bonus?
    • Manishearth 11y ago
      This entire set of tweets is talking of an incident that did not happen recently. There's no record of her calling her manager an asshole in public while she was working there.
      • facepalm 11y ago
        Well by exposing your manager you are essentially calling her an asshole (lets assume the manager is female, why not).
        • deleted 11y ago
          [deleted]
        • aiiane 11y ago
          Perhaps you are not aware of the fact that the person tweeting no longer works at that company anyway, having changed employers a while ago.
• drcross 11y ago
  Maybe you guys who have a "it's not about the money attitude" won't join me on this but I wouldn't want someone with two thirds of my skill getting the same salary as me. Different people do different jobs to different levels. Bringing ethnicity and gender into this debate is the boogie man which is supposed to make you sit upright but with such affirmative action in the workplace these days employers are the same. Better workers should get better paid.
  • lk145 11y ago
    That is precisely the point. People with similar qualifications should have similar salaries. The "not great" trends implies salaries were correlated with something other than merit and qualifications.
    • calbear81 11y ago
      That's not true. There is a market for labor that is constantly in flux based on supply and demand. Let's say that you were hired when there was excess supply and limited demand, you might have settled for a reasonably middle-of-the-curve salary. Fast forward to today where it's much harder to hire and all of a sudden, fresh grads can command salaries that might be equal to what someone with 2-3 years of experience was previously offered. In addition, if you are hurting for someone in order to hit a deadline, it might just make sense to pay unreasonably as long as the numbers still work out.
      • jsprogrammer 11y ago
        >Fast forward to today where it's much harder to hire and all of a sudden, fresh grads can command salaries that might be equal to what someone with 2-3 years of experience was previously offered. Perhaps -- and existing salaries should be adjusted to reflect that.
        • cpeterso 11y ago
          Exactly. If companies don't adjust existing salaries to reflect that, then they are basically telling their employees to quit because the best way to get a "raise" is to switch companies.
• egonschiele 11y ago
  Is there a link to the spreadsheet? I think open salaries are important, and that would be really interesting data.
  • aiiane 11y ago
    No. It's not available externally.
    • jsprogrammer 11y ago
      As in, google does not make it available? Or, no copy has made it out?
      • aiiane 11y ago
        As in https://twitter.com/coryaltheide/status/622165475502362624 https://twitter.com/coryaltheide/status/622165475502362624
      • jsmthrowaway 11y ago
        As in, Google has an entirely internal set of applications that mirror the externally-available ones, including G+, and there is no technical way for you to see it without an employee threatening their LDAP to give it to you. Given that journalists from Fusion have already started basically harassing Google sources to get them to release it, the chances of this sheet making it out are near zero because there will be additional scrutiny on the logs. (I use the term 'journalist' loosely, because once both Googlers declined an interview the reporters in question decided to awkwardly badger the primary sources[0][1].) [0]: https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/622136985465950208 https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/622136985465950208 [1]: https://twitter.com/coryaltheide/status/622165475502362624 https://twitter.com/coryaltheide/status/622165475502362624
• marcell 11y ago
  Yes, I remember this spreadsheet. It listed pay by SWE (software engineer) level and geography. Google has ~10 levels for SWE's. Most people are either SWE II, SWE II, or Senior SWE, and about 10% are higher than Senior SWE. In the Bay Area, IIRC, pay is in the $110k range for SWE II (base), around $140k for SWE III, and around $170k for senior. There is additional bonus (15%) and stock (can be 15-30% of base, depending on circumstances), and health insurance. Within level it varies by +/- $10k in base, and there are proportionally fewer women at Senior SWE and higher levels.
  • gohrt 11y ago
    The data in the OP shows that the variation is far higher than you exist.
    • bagels 11y ago
      I don't see any data listed, did I miss it?
      • georgemcbay 11y ago
        I didn't either, though it may very well be there. Twitter is a horrid medium for this sort of story and I really wish the teller had done a more traditional blog post, though ultimately I'm glad she told the story publicly at all rather than not tell it.
      • ryanr1230 11y ago
        From what I've read I thought she was careful to keep all the information internal to the company, which seems to strengthen her case that she didn't really do anything wrong.
    • DannyBee 11y ago
      Variation in self-reporting? Well I never!
  • hobo_mark 11y ago
    What's left after-tax in the Bay Area for this kind of salaries?
• bigdipper 11y ago
  We did a similar thing at Microsost a few years ago. We discovered that it was not just the gender, but also your race mattered. A lot of us (south East Asians) were paid a lot less at the same engineering levels and there was a disparity in the bonus payouts too. The data was not insignificant, and we got to a statistically significant size really quick at some engineering levels (senior and principal).
  • codeonfire 11y ago
    Did you break it down by citizen, green card, guest worker visa?
  • caractacus 11y ago
    You may have reached what you thought was a statistically significant size but unless you were selecting perfectly randomly - which I doubt you could in such an exercise - then it could not be called truly significant.
    • bigdipper 11y ago
      Data was from random volunteers, and at that moment in time over 10% of the U.S. employee base. I say size was statistically significant not quality of data because there were senior engineers who had been with the company for 15+ years and would skew the datasets. We had lots of demographic data too. Can you guess which race and gender won?
      • darawk 11y ago
        There is no such thing as a random volunteer.
        • natrius 11y ago
          True, but there are ways to mitigate that. YouGov tries to create a representative sample out of a batch of volunteers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouGov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouGov
• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  The issue with pay was always a thorny one for me at Google. Not what they paid me, I thought that was fine, but that there was so much enforced secrecy around it. The entire goal, as far as I could ascertain, of that secrecy was to keep people who had been mislead about how they were being paid, from being able to prove or disprove that Google was actually paying people what it said they were paying people. And what had been presented as a really performance driven, no discrimination, reward metrics, was perceived to be yet another 'management beauty contest' where managers could swing bonus dollars toward people they liked (regardless of their performance) and away from people they didn't care about. And to be clear, I was ok with that, it's how a lot of bonus systems are set up, but it bothered me that it was presented as something else. And while I didn't start a spreadsheet, I did get advised by HR that my questions were not helpful :-). It was suggested that if it bothered me that much maybe I didn't really want to be working there, I thought about that and agreed with that conclusion.
  • nullrouted 11y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with the other things you said. But there are a few reasons I believe companies want to keep salary information private: 1. They want to get top talent at a cheap price, this is understandable because lets face it all of us want to get the best deal they can. 2. They want to avoid a hostile work environment where people are pissed off because they don't feel Jeff in sales should earn so much. Those are the only two reasons I can think of that can be legitimate.
    • RodericDay 11y ago
      I can't put my finger on it, but the way you parse this situation seems like you're trying as hard as possible to underplay its importance. "Lets face it all of us want to get the best deal"- it's like you're trying to empathize with "the company", and not think too hard about the people it's screwing over. Promoting salary secrecy at the expense of your workers' justified welfare is called exploitation.
      • nostrademons 11y ago
• nullrouted 11y ago
  I have a serious question and please don't crucify me but can this partly be because women aren't as confrontational as men and won't argue for a higher salary when hired (since we know thats when you get your good base salary)? I remember when my girlfriend got hired at her current tech company and I begged her to make sure they put her stock and bonuses in writing but she refused because she didn't want to piss the company off and lets say the deal went bad for her. Obviously this is an anecdote about one situation but I wonder could this be one of the reasons? Companies want to pay you as little as possible to get your talent, it is up to you to negotiate for a better salary and if that isn't happening then I'm not sure what you do? I believe for equal pay for equal work totally but I'm wondering if one of the reasons we don't see that is the salary negotiation process. Please share your thoughts.
  • unimpressive 11y ago
    You're certainly not the first person to think of this, you need to be careful with that though or you get wage suppression and price fixing for work: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-bans-salary-negotiations/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-ban...
    • geofft 11y ago
      There are other solutions for this, of course. Collective bargaining comes to mind: if I negotiate a 10% increase in wages just because I'm good at negotiating (not because I'm objectively a 1.1x programmer in a way my union agrees with), it's a 10% increase for everyone.
      • RodericDay 11y ago
        There's also another solution: salary transparency. If you believe in markets, you'd agree that a critical element of them working properly is an abundance of information.
    • nullrouted 11y ago
      Umm...why do I need to be careful of the thought? I questioned if it was a reason for the disparity, not that I agreed with it. Secondly, your article seems to mention Ellen agreed with my question
• geofft 11y ago
  This is just a recopying of the tweets without any additional story. Better URLs may be the first tweet in the stream https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/622079372367781888 https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/622079372367781888 or the Storify with her consent: https://storify.com/_danilo/ericajoy-s-salary-transparency-experiment-at-googl https://storify.com/_danilo/ericajoy-s-salary-transparency-e... Per HN guidelines on linking to the original source, I think this should be changed to one of these. The subject of the story / author of the tweets also has problems with this particular reporting: https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/622198075453353984 https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/622198075453353984 (What's the legality of writing a news article that is primarily a bunch of tweets -- long enough to be copyrightable -- from someone else, without a copyright license, and without significant independent commentary? What's the ethics of posting it without their approval?)
  • gohrt 11y ago
    Twitter has a license to republish your tweets -- that's why the service exists, and why people use it.
  • dang 11y ago
    Good point. We changed the URL from http://fusion.net/story/168986/ex-googler-says-she-got-in-trouble-for-exposing-company-wide-pay-inequality/ http://fusion.net/story/168986/ex-googler-says-she-got-in-tr....
• cperciva 11y ago
  I shudder at the data reliability issues of a self-selecting sample of individuals being asked to self-report salaries. There may well be real pay inequity issues -- in fact, my default presumption is that such problems exist anywhere that there has not been a systematic effort to avoid them -- but unless there's far more to this spreadsheet than the article describes, I don't see how it can reasonably be taken to have any large-scale significance.
  • geofft 11y ago
    I think there's as much a story in the managerial response to the spreadsheet as in the spreadsheet itself. If there really was not a problem (or not a statistically-significant one, or not a statistically-significantly worse-than-industry-norms one), it seems like there would have been better ways to respond. Even "HR did the stats, you can't see them, but our data implies less wage gap than your data" would be worth something. And regardless of whether we can infer anything about the true pay inequity from the sample, the response by management described here is just totally awful, and strongly implies behavior that is illegal in the US. You're not allowed to penalize an employee for discussing wages simply because their discussion is factually inaccurate or statistically unsound.
    • cperciva 11y ago
      Oh, I agree that the managerial response (particularly with her getting flooded by bonuses which her manager vetoed) was idiotic. That doesn't take away from my concerns about how people may be analysing and using the anecdata though. If someone came to me and said "I did a self-selecting self-reporting survey of salaries, and it says I'm underpaid", I think I'd be more likely to fire them for incompetence than to give them a raise.
      • anu_gupta 11y ago
        An astonishing attitude. Perhaps, if you ever end up managing people, you'll hopefully take a step back and contemplate investigating whether there was, in fact, a valid concern.
      • 11y ago
• brobdingnagian 11y ago
  Release the spreadsheet.
  • discardorama 11y ago
    Why? It's an internal company matter. Why is it our business to see who makes what?
    • nostrademons 11y ago
      It's also a personal matter. While it's illegal to prevent an employee from sharing his or her own salary, I believe it's also illegal to share someone else's salary without their consent.
      • cldellow 11y ago
        Could you point out which laws you think might make it a crime? I'm genuinely curious. If I tell a peer some sensitive information, and they share it...isn't that on me for choosing the wrong person to trust with that information?
        • nostrademons 11y ago
          That was the reason Google gave for firing Randy Wigginton for leaking the 2010 company-wide raise in the wake of the collapse of the wage cartel [1]. "You can share your own salary, but you can't share other peoples'." It's possible that this was mistaken and this was just Google covering its ass when getting rid of a troublesome employee, but that's where the information came from. [1] http://gawker.com/5696695/google-fired-an-apple-legend-for-leaking-internal-memo http://gawker.com/5696695/google-fired-an-apple-legend-for-l...
      • rosser 11y ago
        Are you suggesting that someone posting their own salary on a spreadsheet, one which they know is being broadly distributed within the company, might somehow not have consented to having it shared further?
• alexqgb 11y ago
  "All the world's information, organized." "You mean like this?" "Holy crap, no."
  • thaumasiotes 11y ago
    http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2012/01/17/ask-your-doctor/ http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2012/01/17/ask-your-doctor/
• anongler000 11y ago
  (ex googler here who has gotten, given, and approved peer bonuses) A lot of confusion here is coming from how the peer bonuses are awarded so I'll give a brief explanation. You can nominate someone for any reason you like but you provide a justification, their manager sees it and decides if they should approve it or not (almost all are approved). Now the important point is the rules state you can't receive more than one peer bonus for a single thing that you do. It's almost surely the case that 1.) her manager knew that and the other manager didn't or 2.) she had so many pending when her manager saw it that they thought to ask someone what the rules were. For #2 imagine you are her manager and you see 20 people queued up nominating the same person for the same thing, you are responsible for enforcing the rules (in this case giving your report Google's money, it's in the manager's best interest to _approve_ it since their report will be happier) so you don't want to make a mistake and ask around, then someone tells you 'sorry one bonus per thing they do' and you have to deny all of the rest. I couldn't applaud her more for the salary spreadsheet she put together (it took serious courage) and the really healthy dialog that it brought (I was glued to it when it came out), but the peer bonus part of the story is almost surely not malicious on her manager's part and I hope she hears that somehow. It'd be really sad for everyone involved if this is just a misunderstanding (the peer bonus part at least).
  • ectoplasm 11y ago
    It looks like a major part of the problem she had with the PB rejections was some kind of hypocrisy or inconsistency which she attributed to racism, especially with all that Ida B. Wells stuff: > Meanwhile, one of the other people involved, a white dude (good friend I won't name, he can name himself if he wants), was also getting PBs. > His weren't getting rejected. I told him mine were. He was pissed. Wanted to tell everyone what was happening. I declined. Personally I think 7 x $150 is such a trivial amount of money that it was a mistake to say anything about it at all, certainly not worth losing one's job over.
    • plicense 11y ago
      Lol, coming to think of it, 7x$150 is my monthly pay!
• marvel_boy 11y ago
  Summing up. Haters gonna hate. Even at "Don´t be evil" GOOGLE.
• yAnonymous 11y ago
  Creating a spreadsheet to collect salary information isn't really something that deserves a bonus.
  • balazsdavid987 11y ago
    Why do you think that she was expecting the bonus for that reason? I can't see the connection.
    • balazsdavid987 11y ago
      Can somebody tell me why my comment is being down-voted so much? The parent comment was a rude one and I just asked for an explanation.
• bsaul 11y ago
  I wonder if anyone that's ever ran a team of people would complain about salary secrecy. I mean there are so many occasions for employees to be pissed of at or jealous from each others, you know bringing money into it is the worst idea. Plus, the biggest screw up you can get with your salary is if you don't compare it with offers from different companies. Not inside it.
  • Bahamut 11y ago
    I ran a frontend team and I didn't like salary secrecy. I am a big believer in having people earn what they deserve, and if they gathered the knowledge that they are underpaid or if I have that knowledge, I went to bat for them. I've no doubt that most companies in the Bay Area abuse salary secrecy - startups are often so concerned about runway that they hedge on treating their employees right.
• Fede_V 11y ago
  For the company, there's an obvious upside in maintaining secrecy. But, for people working there, what exactly do they gain by keeping their wages secret? Google pays very generously, but it seems to me like workers have everything to gain from a more transparent process. Sure, a few people who are incredibly good at managing upwards might lose out, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
• superplussed 11y ago
  Stories like this put me more in favor of going with a Buffer-style transparent salary policy [1] with my startup. Whether to open it up to the public or not is a separate issue, but having it be transparent internally just seems to make so much sense. [1] https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries/ https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buff...
  • dsl 11y ago
    Have you thought about the fact that your employees may not want their salaries to be public? Sure it is trendy and feel good and omg transparency, but it seems a bit douchey to me. Nevermind the fact you're opening up a whole can of worms for any of your employees that might be going through a divorce, fighting for custody in family court, the target of a scam artist, robbery target, trying to negotiate splitting rent with a friend, etc. You don't know peoples current or future personal situations, and they probably don't want to come to you and have to explain when it does become a problem.
    • woah 11y ago
      Could you provide examples where an open salary would affect any of the things you mentioned? I'm curious.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    • wingerlang 11y ago
      Couldn't all of this be solved by having the numbers open but only internal to the company?
• Keats 11y ago
  If only there was a medium allowing more than 140 characters at a time.
  • kethinov 11y ago
    Good lord I know. It was like reading a short story via telegram. "once upon a time STOP i got bored at work STOP so i made a spreadsheet STOP ..."
    • joshrotenberg 11y ago
      Or hearing a story from someone who just ran up to you and is out of breath.
• grondilu 11y ago
  > "just because, for example, one employee negotiated harder than the other" Isn't that a perfectly valid reason, though?
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• DavidWanjiru 11y ago
  I think the primary problem is the inability to measure performance, and thus have empirical values for what someone actually brings to the table. In sectors where measurement is comparatively easier, such as in sports, you can have players earning orders of magnitude more than their teammates for doing arguably the same job. Sports have their issues too, but I doubt you'll hear Yaya Sanogo at Arsenal FC in London complain about all this money that his teammate Alexis Sanchez is being paid yet both are attacking players. Geoffrey Colvin of Fortune magazine once wrote about this some years back, you could probably find it with a bit of google.
• mrgriscom 11y ago
  The title of this post seems a little inflammatory. The main story is the borderline-illegal heat she got from management for providing a forum to share salaries, and the difference in treatment regarding the peer bonuses, which may or may not have been "technically correct" according to internal Google rules. The only comment relevant to the post title I could find was "pivot tables that did spreadsheet magic that highlighted not great things re: pay", and to go from that to "exposed company-wide pay inequity" seems like a bit of a leap. Absent any further details about what those things are, how is this not just speculation?
  • aiiane 11y ago
    Speculation is exactly what it is.
  • wutbrodo 11y ago
    She's apparently never heard of sampling bias either. 5% of the company, self-selected? "Exposing company-wide inequity" is a dramatic leap. I was at Google at the time the sheet spread and I treated it as more of a curiosity than anything else (though I do think it was a cool idea).
    • mrgriscom 11y ago
      Eh, I'm sympathetic to the argument, when you literally have nothing else to go on. Uniform sampling is often a dream in sociology.
      • wutbrodo 11y ago
        Oh I agree. As I said, I found it rather cool. But perhaps when you have literally nothing else to go on, that's a signal that you shouldn't be using phrases as dramatic as "company-wide inequity".
• tytso 11y ago
  The following Planet Money story is worth listening to; there are some real challenges and downsides with making all salaries public. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/02/327289264/episode-550-when-salaries-arent-secret http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/02/327289264/episo...
  • zenpaul 11y ago
    Great episode. Big takeaway for me was that salary transparency generally benefits the employee more than the employer.
    • fixermark 11y ago
      That makes very reasonable sense. ... and in a country with an every-increasing rich/poor gap, benefits that skew towards employee over employer would probably be an improvement over the status quo.
    • esturk 11y ago
      That's exactly how sports league handle the issue and there's very little grudge between the players. Everyone know what everyone is paid and how much endorsements they get. Perfect symmetric information. This is largely attributed to the sports union for the pro leagues such as NFPA, NBPA, etc. Collective bargaining is hated by the owners.
• kzhahou 11y ago
  GOOD managers can only dream about such a strong opportunity to champion their reports.
• akhilcacharya 11y ago
  Don't Googlers openly state that they pay unequally?
• golemotron 11y ago
  I saw an article about Google about six months ago that said that people in the same position could be paid wildly different amounts based on the company's assessment of their contribution and the cost to replace them. The first thing I thought was that this is a good way to compensate people. Second thought was that it would cause much gnashing of teeth to anyone who decides to look at equal pay for equal work based on job title and seniority. Does anyone have that article?
• davidf18 11y ago
  While the spreadsheet might show differences in pay related to certain factors such as gender and age, it doesn't really reflect the most important quality which is how well they produce (e.g., some people code better than others). Is this piece of info somehow encoded in the spreadsheet? Of course, merit doesn't matter in countries like (the old) Soviet Union. But I only want to work for companies and with people that compensate on the basis of merit and not some otherwise external factor.
• forrestthewoods 11y ago
  More and more I feel that income for all workers should be public information. Sweden does that and so far their world hasn't ended.
• overpaidgoogler 11y ago
  A lot of people here are saying that if job titles/pay grades are public (which they are not completely) then so should pay be. The problem with this is that promotions are already very political. People can and do get very angry when other people get promoted before them. Non public pay and bonuses give management some wiggle room to reward people privately. There is always some question about whether management or popular opinion is fairer. On this I will just say that more extroverted people will tend to favor popular opinion while more introverted people will tend to favor management.
• drumdance 11y ago
  I've long thought all salaries should be disclosed, especially for public companies. Look at professional sports leagues and Hollywood. Free agency changed everything in sports, and Hollywood's studio system collapsed when stars realized how much power they had. It would take some adjustment, but I believe full disclosure would level out some of the inequality. As it stands the CEO captures the lion's share of value created by the whole enterprise.
• issaria 11y ago
  Oh god, stop gossip and you don't need to whine.
  • issaria 11y ago
    For those who downvoted, when do you remember you on "One Sunday, some former coworkers & I were bored, talking about salaries ..."
• deelowe 11y ago
  I guess I'm going to out myself a bit here, but I feel the need to clarify a few things. Full disclosure. I'm a people manager in TI and have been for a long time. First off, I knew Erica a few years ago when she worked in our local office. She's a wonderful person and I hate that she's had such bad experiences. I don't know the full details, but I do know that one of the orgs she was in went through a lot of stuff early on. These are the typical startup is becoming a big company type of issues. They ended up letting people go, reorging the team, getting new managers, letting others go, etc... It was a major shake-up. I wonder how this impacted her. I know she transferred around the time all of this was happening (as did a lot of people in that team) and she became very outspoken. Her interpretation of what happened seems to indicate that she thought she was targeted. I don't know if this is the case, but I wonder if it was more of a team wide issue at the time than something specific with her. Also, it didn't help that we didn't have a regional HR person at the time, so whatever Erica was going through at the time was probably left unrecognized as she had no one to talk to about it. The company was growing fast and satellite offices were more of an afterthought at the time. Keep in mind the context. Google went from a couple thousand to like 60k employees in just a few years. There were growing pains all over the place and we certainly felt it in the remote offices. Especially when it came things like HR, benefits, etc... I saw the salary spreadsheet. On the surface it seemed alarming. Especially to people who made assumptions about pay at Google. Here's some context. Again, I don't know any details about what's going on with Erica's department. This is just what I see on my end of things (I'm not in SRE, but am under the same VP). First off, location is a big factor due to needing to be competitive in a particular region. Secondly, performance impacts both raises and the rate you come in at after promotion. People with good ratings tend to get better base pay. Yearly bonuses get a performance multiplier as well. Managers can see all of these factors (base pay, proposed adjustment for raises and promotions, multipler, etc...) We get insight into this during our salary planning process which happens twice a year for promotions and once a year for non-promo. The constants that are used for base pay are all decided based on a formula and in my experience it's completely fair and consistent. The formula literally takes a base pay for a particular job ladder, level, and region and then adds an adjustment for performance. Bonus is calculated as a flat % against pay + a multiplier for annual performance. There is no bias in this as it's all done via software. As a manager, I can do some small adjustments here and there, but it's usually at most a percentage or maybe two. It would be very difficult for me to directly influence someone's pay by say 10% or so. I don't think managers or bias in performance management is the primary cause for pay dependencies. Slight, yes, but not huge differences. So how do people end up with such huge pay differences? Well, a few ways. 1) Google's job ladders and pay scales were kind of screwed up for a while. In one case I remember, people were adjusted by over 10% (up) in a given year, because the company realized they had the market rate set incorrectly. Google generally doesn't adjust salaries down, so if you got lucky early on and came in at a high salary, it sticks until something changes it (e.g. promo). There were a lot of people who got "lucky" as job ladders and market rates were refined over time. Keep in mind that Google went through all this during the great recession. There are a lot of factors here. In general, pay varied a lot early on. There are a lot of people in SRE who still have these inconsistencies reflected in their base pay. 2) Hiring negotiations. We all know this is an issue. Some people are very good at this and can get a huge difference of pay coming in. I won't go into details here as I feel it's probably a bit confidential, but I do see big differences in pay due to the negotiation skills of the person getting hired. Note that Google has tried to fix this lately by not negotiating base pay as much, but it still happens and was a bigger issue historically. In general, the higher the level, the more this is an issue. 3) Ladder/job transfers. Again, Google doesn't like to adjust people's pay down, so if someone transfers from one job type to another, they may come in making significantly more than what is typical for the new job. There are some rules in place to prevent this, but they aren't stringent enough to completely eliminate it as extremely tight rules would make transfers nearly impossible. Note that Google encourages transfers across ladders and teams. 4) Tenure (raises). If someone stays in a position for a long time and consistently performs well, but doesn't get promoted, they may see their pay go up more (within the range for their ladder) as they get raises year over year. That said, I don't see this very much as usually someone who performs consistently well will get promoted, but there are some cases like when an individual refuses to put themselves up for promotion or they are at the top of their job ladder and can't get promoted. And of course, there's a lot of other things that could be possible for people who've been with the company more than 5 or 6 years. In the early post IPO days, there was a lot of chaos. There were jobs without ladders, weird things with contractor conversions, very little consistently across eng teams, etc... It was a bit wild west like. HR was a bit of a mess back then too. Again, since pay doesn't usually get adjusted down, you'll see these inconsistencies and on the surface, they'll look odd. Typically, if you dig a little deeper though, there's a good reason. Alright, so back to the spreadsheet. Ah... the infamous spreadsheet. This just seems like it has bad news written all over it. Here's how this thing came to be. An email went out and basically said "hey, put your pay into this sheet." Now, please note that the person who sent it had been pretty vocal previously about bias, unfairness, etc. I'm pretty sure there might be some selection bias in this methodology... Also, Google spreadsheets tracks revision history, so nothing was anonymous. When I looked it over, I didn't really see anything alarming to be honest. There certainly inconsistencies, but they seemed to be linked to the issues I mentioned above. The biggest factor seemed to be location. Note that this spreadsheet was shared PUBLICALLY for a while. The whole way this was done wasn't that great. I don't take issue with the concept, but I personally found the way this was conducted a bit unprofessional. An anonymized survey would have been much better. Finally, let's talk about bonuses (outside of annual bonus). There are ways for people to give bonuses to others at Google for deeds they deem to be outside of normal work duties. Typically these are things like assisting with something that's not part of one's job ladder, helping with volunteer projects, or having significant impact on a large project. The amount of review these bonuses receive depends on the dollar amount. Peer bonuses are a relatively small fixed amount. Anyone can award them to anyone else and they only require manager approval. By design there is little guidance and oversight. How these get awarded is EXTREMELY inconsistent, but so far the company seems to be somewhat ok with this given that they are a very small amount. My policy (and the general guidance) is that they should be for small efforts that are outside the scope of the individual's job ladder. These are like 1-2 day things here and there. Not large project contributions and not for things that someone is consistently doing. If the individual is performing something consistently, then we are expected to reflect that in the persons performance reviews so that it gets factored into their yearly bonus and annual pay increase. Hopefully the reason for this makes sense (hint: it's better for the individual). Finally, I also don't think I would have approved peer bonuses for what was done with this spreadsheet. Not because of the fact that these individuals collected people's pay, but because their methods were very poor. I'm pretty sure all it did was anger or confuse people. Why not collect the data anonymously, rope in an analytics team, do an analysis, control for bias etc.. and then present at a CFR or even all hands? I find it hard to believe that anyone would push back on this at Google.
• kuni-toko-tachi 11y ago
  If you don't like what you are being paid, QUIT. I sure as hell wouldn't want someone like this working with me. Immature and highly unprofessional.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• belovedeagle 11y ago
  Interesting that she doesn't just come out and say that Google was paying women less? I wonder why not?
• SmokyBourbon 11y ago
  It's shameful to allow this story on Hacker News but to delete any threads about the inner workings of Reddit.
• anagor 11y ago
  Since when does a socialists got into a private high tech sectors? Since when do people have to be paid the same? Each and everyone is unique in their abilities and the value they bring to the employers, so should be their salary.
• curiousjorge 11y ago
  Where is the spreadsheet?
  • Twirrim 11y ago
    It's internal, as she clearly stated in the thread.
• yarou 11y ago
  Most corporations operate essentially like a cult. You are expected to drink the Kool-Aid and tow the party line. Pay inequality is just another symptom of a systemic problem we have in the tech industry. Labor is fundamentally not respected, nor is it justly compensated at the fair market value.
• TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
  Its almost like Hacker News wants me to feel good about not getting a job offer at Google. Thanks guys, I really appreciate it. But as a side note, how many tech companies really have salary transparency. I suspect its none. Facebook doesn't. Twitter doesn't. Microsoft doesn't. Uber doesn't. Amazon doesn't. Hell, even my less than 50 person startup doesn't. Nobody does. Not saying Google didn't fuck up here by retaliating--they are assholes for that (side note, why is Google so full of frat assholes these days?). But still, this seems like standard procedure.
• LGBT_2000 11y ago
  This is fucking horrible. If there was so much as an ounce of truth to all the noise Google has been making about "diversity" over the past couple years, they had better have one hell of an answer for all this very, very soon. And if they don't, well that also is one hell of an answer, although an extremely discouraging one for any of us concerned with fairness and equality in the tech space. Erica: sharing your experiences the way you did was extremely brave. I can only imagine what you must be going through having already braved such a minefield of abuse in what ought to be a progressive and accepting work environment. Keep fighting the good fight.
  • cpncrunch 11y ago
    What has this got to do with diversity?
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      • dang 11y ago
        That's not cool here. Please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• happywolf 11y ago
  After reading through a lot of the comments and the tweets, I have a burning question: "where is the spreadsheet?", if one is willing to divulge the salary, I believe he/she doesn't mind this figure to be seen by the public. Or, we can redact the name (if any) and just leave the salary, position, and gender. I am seeing a lot of arguments when the most important item, the spreadsheet, is nowhere be seen. Did I miss anything?
• tweeter 11y ago
  On the one hand, salary should be between the employer and employee; a private contract. On the other hand, there needs to be a way to protect individuals from the oversights, (intentional or otherwise) of powerful organizations. At the moment it seems the only way to enforce that is to share this information that so many feel should be private. If there were a better way... what would it be?