21 ms·

What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

330 points by awjr 11y ago

tempodox 11y ago
The article format is completely busted by Twitter's display rules and made unreadable. In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued. Those tweets belong to Twitter now and are good for nothing else but ferrying ads. I won't have my time wasted by trying to read that crap.
- imglorp 11y ago
  Why do people insist on using that medium for blogging? It would be better to tweet, "Guys, I updated my blog with a story about this thing (link)".
  - bubblesorting 11y ago
    Nope, /much/ better to light up my phone 30 times. ;)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - truebosko 11y ago
    Quick and easy articles. Your effort is compiling the tweets and inserting a lead.
    - tempodox 11y ago
      Yep, zero effort. And, accordingly, zero reward.
  - polarix 11y ago
    30 tweets makes 30 times the claim on attention of your followers, regardless of content. A single tweet is 30 times less likely to be read. This is a structural inefficiency of the twitter platform.
  - cmdrfred 11y ago
    I had no idea this was a trend. How could anyone ever think this is a good idea? You'd think the editors at wired would be able to copy and paste, surely that's easier than embedding 45 tweets.
    - tempodox 11y ago
      While this is technically true, you also need to adhere to Twitter's TOS if you're going to use their product.
      - Robin_Message 11y ago
        Or Wired could do some actual journalism and, I don't know, interview the original poster plus ask her ex-boss and Google for comments plus try and track down the mysterious other man?
      - cmdrfred 11y ago
        Journalists don't need to obey a TOS (at least in the US where it is specifically protected in the constitution "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"), watch the news sometime they don't get consent forms for all the people walking by in man on the streets segments. (Or a better example where news outlets published details from the snowden leaks) I guess if all you want to do is post a bunch of tweets and not write any context or additional information about it this is the way to do it, but if you actually want to be a journalist TOS means nothing.
- eli 11y ago
  That's nonsense. The person who wrote the tweets retains ownership, they have simply licensed Twitter to display them in a certain way with certain requirements.
  - tempodox 11y ago
    Slight variations in legal details don't make the article any more readable. Even the reasons why it can't be formatted otherwise stay exactly the same. The difference you're pointing out makes no difference at all.
    - eli 11y ago
      Totally disagree. The article is hard to read because the author is lazy, it has nothing to do with "Twitter's display rules." The author could have quoted the tweets or asked permission to reprint them in another format or used them as the source for original reporting instead of posting them verbatim. It's the difference between embedding the PDF of a legal ruling vs writing an article about what it means.
      - tempodox 11y ago
        I see your point now. I didn't get it at first.
- danielweber 11y ago
  > In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued Has anyone ever been sued for stringing 20 tweets together into plaintext?
  - tempodox 11y ago
    They probably wouldn't sue a private person for using tweets however they want in a private context. A publication with millions (just a guess) of readers is something quite different.
yc1010 11y ago
Can someone please tl.dr this First we had articles spread over dozens of pages for the laugh, now we have articles split into 160char segments, grrrrrr
- sokoloff 11y ago
  ts; dr...
- vdnkh 11y ago
  Author created a spreadsheet with her salary/few other salaries of coworkers on it, posts it to google internal social network, 5% of workers fill it out, people start asking for better salaries, managers mad, her peer bonuses (coworker endorsements that net you a small bonus) get denied, everyone mad, she left(?)
- joshcrowder 11y ago
  TL;DR - Erica Joy created a spreadsheet of salaries, it got shared internally at Google, apparently about 5% of total workforce filled it in. Google has some sort of Peer Bonus scheme, Erica got lots of them but management decided to deny pretty much all of them. She left google.
- corin_ 11y ago
  She created an internal spreadsheet allowing Googlers to add their salary information. Lots of people helped tweak the sheet adding data visualizations, comparisons, etc. Google management told her they didn't like it, she pointed out that you can't be fired for sharing salary information. Lots of colleagues were giving her "peer bonuses" for setting this up, but her manager kept blocking them, something which is apparently unheard of to the point that most people didn't know they could be blocked. By the time she left, 5% of staff were apparently using the sheet. Even more TLDR: Nothing particularly happened except that Google showed they dislike colleagues talking about salaries.
  - justwannasing 11y ago
    So no different than any other company and a big fuss about 5% usage.
gorgak 11y ago
this was already on HN two days ago.
thesch 11y ago
a thing bothered me yesterday and it's still bothering me today and so now i want to tell a story. One Sunday, some former coworkers & I were bored, talking about salaries on the internal social network instance. A spreadsheet was created. we put our salaries in the sheet, realized that it was created on a public to the world spreadsheet, so I copied it to internal. I then put a form on it and posted the link to the form and the spreadsheet on my internal social network account. It took off like wildfire. It got reshared all over the place. People started adding pivot tables that did spreadsheet magic that highlighted not great things re: pay. I did some general housekeeping stuff to the sheet (normalizing the gender field where it could be, exchange rate stuff, that sort of thing). More reshares. More people adding pay. It became a thing. I was invited to talk to my manager on Mon or Tues. Higher up people weren't happy. She wasn't happy. Why did I do it? "Don't you know what could happen?" Nothing. It's illegal to retaliate against employees for sharing salaries. "Wellll....". Meeting ended. Sheet kept going. People were thanking me for it. They were also sending me peer bonuses. here's how peer bonuses work @ former co: If you did something good, someone peer bonuses you, you get $150 net in your next paycheck. An important thing I learned during that time: peer bonuses are rewarded at managers discretion. My manager was rejecting all of them. Wasn't sure if this would be good for the company. Wanted to see what the outcome was. Mind you once a PB is rejected, that can't be undone. 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. A smattering of people knew what was going on. Backchannels being what they are at former co. (lol IRC #yallknowwhoyouare), it got around. Rejecting PBs was so unheard of, ppl didn't know it was possible. There was outrage when they found out. Shock that I wasn't talking abt it. Meanwhile, spreadsheet still going, getting spread around, pointed questions being thrown at mgmt about sharing salary ranges (hahah no). Most people agreed that it was A Good Thing. PBs kept rolling in. Rejections kept rolling out. One PB eventually got approved. Way after everything died down. Because the person worded it in a way that was vary vague. Any that were outright about the spreadsheet got rejected. 7 total in the end I think? Higher ups still pissed. Some I used to support as an exec tech would pointedly not interact w/ me anymore. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Before I left, about 5% of former co. had shared their salary on that sheet. People asked for & got equitable pay based on data in the sheet. The world didn't end. Everything didn't go up in flames because salaries got shared. But shit got better for some people. I explicitly gave ownership of the sheet to someone else before I left so it couldn't be taken over by mgmt when I was gone (can happen). I am thinking of this because of everyone celebrating the fact that Google put Ida B. Wells in the doodle yesterday. Ida B. Wells was great. She did stuff to affect change of such a magnitude that if I'm half the woman she was, I'm doing pretty good. I don't claim to come close, but from time to time, I do stuff that will make things better for people at the expense of the establishment. I'm a pretty big believer in justice and fairness and will fight for both if necessary. Fighting for justice & fairness INSIDE Google doesn't go over well. Salary sharing is only 1 example. Blogger porn. Real names. Many others. Shit WILL hit the fan if you tell a racist (a well documented racist) to go fuck themselves though. In defense of the racist, obvi. So sure. Rah rah, Google did an Ida B. Wells doodle. Guaranteed that if Ida Wells were alive & working at Google today, there'd be many private calendar meetings focused on "her future" there. tl;dr the sharing of one doodle does not a bastion of support for justice and civil disobedience make.
netrus 11y ago
Sooo ... it would be great to get a look on that sheet ;)
- jonlucc 11y ago
  There are already public versions such as glassdoor.com
amelius 11y ago
Google is a company that wants to have access to all the information in the world. But if somebody rightfully publishes some information that is sensitive to Google, look what happens...
- dmichulke 11y ago
  If you generalize, say X is a Y that wants to have all information int the world. But if somebody ... look what happens.... you'll find several solutions for Y='company' and many more for other Y in {'Secret Service', 'Tax Collection Agency', ...}
  - antimagic 11y ago
    Is your point that Google is behaving as badly as quite a few Three Letter Acronym government organisation? If it is, then yes I agree with you.
- theseatoms 11y ago
  Not even "sensitive" in a security or corporate strategy sense. Their bottom line is just sensitive to this information remaining private.
- bostonpete 11y ago
  In the reddit comment thread for this u/dickbutt_md had a lengthy comment that seemed to call into question some of the details of this story. His facts weren't first hand, but then again, sometimes a little distance can help with objectivity. In any event, I tend to take comments from possibly-disgruntled former employees with a pinch of salt.
  - _asummers 11y ago
    Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_happens_when_you_talk_about_salaries_at/ctap9sx https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_hap...
  - akilism 11y ago
FilterSweep 11y ago
Most employees at large companies are just cogs in a machine. At Google, they are lab rats.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
HN_bias 11y ago
ive just discovered HN has an awful neoliberal bias, and is full of cunty fucking capitalist money obsessed techs. its a real shame you have this ignorance amongst supposedly intelligent people. as a result i wont be using it again, and i suggest you look at articles about politically sensitive subjects and watch them being removed from the front page double quick time. the comment strategy makes sure that no alternative opinions will remain online. fuck hacker news.
- HN_bias 11y ago
  haha thanks for the upvote! hahaha. there are a few people who realise this.
- msutherl 11y ago
  What brings us all here is the very engine of neoliberalism.
- Anderkent 11y ago
  'Everyone with a different opinion than me is ignorant and stupid, and the downvotes I'm getting are surely because they want to maintain their bubble and not because I'm being rude.' You're an asshole and no one is sorry that you're gone.
- HugoDaniel 11y ago
  Embrace Extend Extinguish ah.. oops, wrong post i guess
- IanDrake 11y ago
  >capitalist money obsessed techs OK, that's me. I like to eat and have shelter and some nice stuff too. Just curious, what charitable organization built your computer and its parts? I bet it was built by capitalist swine.
dbg31415 11y ago
So... here's A problem with this. Are you verifying that the users are actually who they say they are when they share salaries? What if I were to go into the form and say that I was you, and that you made a billion dollars more than everyone else. Would that cause drama? This just seems like a horrible idea. Feelings will be hurt. Productivity will be lost. Someone will quit. Maybe someone will benefit, but it's almost certainly not good for your team or your company. People agree to work for salaries. They put down numbers like what they earned at their last job, or what they are looking for in the new job, and then employers make offers based on that. If someone agreed to work for a number, and is getting paid that... why make drama?
- monstruoso 11y ago
  These things are supposed to be anonymous.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  naive and oversimplified view... are you an employee or employer? I don't have issue negotiating salaries hard, but I personally know very bright people, who for various reasons failed at that, and once they learned other people's salaries (which happens eventually to most), they got extremely frustrated, felt strong injustice and some left. I have more sympathy for community-based approach rather than selfish everybody-for-themselves in this. and no, you don't just come with any number you would like to see to an interview. if you overshoot too much, you probably won't be hired, depends on recruiter and company.
  - dbg31415 11y ago
    Well I manage a team, I have direct reports. I can tell you that Sally and Steve and Joe all have the same job title, but Joe is a rockstar and earns more, and Steve is a slacker who got the job because he knew someone. So when the averages come out, and Sally gets pissed because she's not making what Joe is making... that's what causes drama. Pay really does, more often than not, reflect the individuals contributions. Why? Because as Joe's manager, I want to keep Joe. I know what market rate is for his position, and I do what I can to make sure he is paid above it. Steve... fuck that guy, let him make below average... he didn't deserve the job in the first place, and we'd all be better off if he quit. Anyway the fact that it's not by name (so you can compare yourself to another person) makes it worse in my mind. If you are just going to share the salary for your position, we'd need to make different positions for Steve, Sally, and Joe... It would be Title Blah, Rank Joe. Everyone is different. All names changed of course.
seqizz 11y ago
Don't be evil (with exceptions).
- x5n1 11y ago
  Be evil, pretend not to be. Google is evil and knows everything about everybody and shares it with various orgs including three letter orgs. The only thing positive about Google is the fact that it releases a lot of code out there for people to use. Other than that, Google is a corporate overlord.
HN_bias 11y ago
fuck you silicon valley money obsessed programmer. you are a traitor to hacker culture.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  I agree. Google should become a non-profit.
srj 11y ago
Managers evidently aren't supposed to approve more than one peer bonus for the same single act. I work at Google and hadn't heard of that policy before (then again, I'm not a manager) but it came up in an earlier thread.
bakhy 11y ago
i hope things like this serve as a wake up call to all young talents willing to sacrifice their lives for these companies, enamored with some idealized visions of what they are and do. a company is a company. an agent for making money, first and foremost. any positive change they bring is a side-effect, and due to their ever greater power they must constantly be policed, at least by releasing unpleasant information like this.
- staticelf 11y ago
  And in my opinion as a young talent, Google is highly overrated when it comes to creating good software. Sure they have some hits, but a lot of it also is kind of bad. To be regarded as the best of the best, I think they make pretty shitty software.
  - abrahamepton 11y ago
    I feel similarly about Facebook. I feel it with some justification, but I'm probably wrong. To do what they do at the scale they do it, for it to even work let alone work pretty much perfectly, pretty much all the time for pretty much everyone is a goddamn miracle. But there are so many little things about FB software (mostly the UI/UX) that annoy the shit out of me, so I get grumpy and think their software sucks. Having worked at Google, I think it's worth saying, their software is fucking astonishingly amazing. The magic tricks that go into the simplest things are mindboggling, and what's been built behind the scenes to enable it all is pretty incredible. Also, um, a lot of their software is far from shitty: Gmail, search, docs+spreadsheets, new photos, youtube to name a few. If you think any one of those are "pretty shitty", well...I dunno what to tell you.
    - veidr 11y ago
      Here's my list of things that you mentioned which aren't shitty: search
      - pennaMan 11y ago
        Can you name any other huge scale user facing software product that isn't shitty by your standards?
bronxcoder 11y ago
I hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue. It's really a negotiating problem. My coworker and I were hired together, same position, same experience, and offered the same salary. When I was offered the position, I asked for $15,000 more and they gave it to me. My coworker didn't ask for more and is therefore now making $15,000 less than me. After six months, I asked for a raise of $5,000. He never asked for a raise. So now he makes $20,000 less than me.
- techlibertarian 11y ago
  It has to be for them (people who believe there is a gender pay gap) to try and make any change. There are plenty of examples where pay is different regardless of gender: sports and entertainment would be two big ones. With sports, people are payed differently even if they fill the same position on a team. Why? They aren't the same. They bring different skillsets. It's the same with movies. The main character will make more than someone 20 spots down in the credits list. Someone with a well-known name will make even more. All of this wage difference that can occur across genders. But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table. Edit: To clarify, I have no issue with a company removing any pay difference between employees. I only have an issue with those who think paying people differently is inherently a problem.
  - lagadu 11y ago
    > But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table. Why? Different people bring different value. The same title can have wildly different roles, some positions with the same titles can be much harder to replace than others. For example: at my company my team has a very specialized role that is far outside the domains of all other developers (we're talking about a large multinational here, with thousands of employees). You bet your ass we make a decent chunk more than most other devs, replacing any one of us would cost a ton of money and require over a year of learning about our stuff; replacing one of the devs who works on our main product? In half a year you could get someone to full productivity. In other words: some employees are more expensive to replace than others, either shower them with €€€ or pay a much higher cost when they go work elsewhere.
deadmik3 11y ago
Was stringing together a couple dozen tweets really the best format to share a story like this? There is a lot that's left out. Once she vaguely mentions that another employee who was "involved" was still getting all of his peer bonuses (which may or may not have been PB's for his "involvement", we don't know), the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me. OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WANTS, as long as we don't actually have any details about it. Also, generally shit will hit the fan if you tell anyone to fuck off, especially if they're your manager. Again, we don't know that she told her manager to fuck off for being racist (??) because this is a terrible story told in a shitty format. But it's implied. Just like everything else in this "article". tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected.
- aaronem 11y ago
  Yes. Heaven forfend staff should behave in a way potentially inimical to the interests of management, instead of the other way around.
  - deadmik3 11y ago
    Staff works for management. While it's nice to have times where the management "works for" their employees, the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy.
    - aaronem 11y ago
      Staff being subordinate to management in an organizational sense is one thing. Staff members being forbidden even to approach anything, which might grow into a discussion of how and where management's interests are actively inimical to their own, is quite another. You're making the best arguments for unionization I've heard in the tech industry for quite a long time.
    - nathan_long 11y ago
      > the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy What? Workers sell their labor to a company for a price. The whole point of any transaction is to satisfy both parties. Sharing market information is something that both buyers and sellers do. Why do you think this should be unilateral?
mdesq 11y ago
These big tech companies only love "transparency" when it's other people's data they want to look through.
littletimmy 11y ago
It is important that things like this come out into the open. When the typical doe-eyed college senior steps into the real world and is tempted to drink Eric Schmidt's kool-aid about changing the world (and how the honor of working at Google offsets the lower wage), such disclosures will help him understand that Google is just another money-making corporation. No more, no less.
- seattle_spring 11y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by "offsetting the lower wage?" Isn't Google pretty well known as being one of the top paying tech companies?
dudul 11y ago
That may be shallow, but I can't take her seriously because of the medium she picked to convey her story. This is unreadable.
Aoyagi 11y ago
You've just given their analytics bunch of traffic from HN which looks like it came from Twitter. :P
deskamess 11y ago
For some reason I was under the impression the spreadsheet was set up to detect gender/ethnicity based inequality in salaries. Not sure where I got that impression as the tweets do not mention it explicitly other than suggesting that some people asked and got increases. At the end of the day, this is what I am curious about - was there inequality in pay, and if so, what was the difference.
- danielweber 11y ago
  The use of the sheet was orthogonal to discovering her peer bonuses weren't being approved.
  - deskamess 11y ago
    True... but the peer bonus aspect seems to have overtaken, for me, a more interesting metric (pay inequality amount from spreadsheet data).
zyb09 11y ago
To be honest, what exactly did she want to accomplish with this? Where I live people are very hesitant of sharing their salary and doing something like this would be considered very rude. All it can possibly lead to is drama about salaries. Drama about why some people getting payed more then others. Should Google now start paying each and everyone exactly the same until everyone is happy? No of course not, it's no secret companies have different salaries for different employees. What matters is that YOU feel ok with what you're getting payed, not what others are earning.
- tashoecraft 11y ago
  The reason people are very hesitant about sharing their salary is because we have constructed a culture where it is taboo to share what you make. That we have these ideals about how terrible things could be if you knew what others were making in comparison to you. Her manager talked to her saying "Don't you know what could happen?". Well management couldn't fire her for that, but could make her work life less then ideal. Possibly holding back bonuses out of spite? Worse job assignments? The huge job salary scandal that Google was a part of kinda shows hows they can't be trusted to be honest about salaries and supportive of their workers. You feeling ok with what you are getting paid is not what matters. What matters is getting fair market value for your worth. Many people make less then what they are worth because they either don't know how much they are worth, or are even too afraid to argue for what they feel they are worth. Companies exploit this and use salary negotiations as a way to hire employees for the absolute least amount possible. We applaud companies for making record breaking profits, but we don’t applaud them for decreasing their profits a bit in favor of increasing all their employees spending power.
- nkassis 11y ago
  The issue is your employer has all the information on this. You are negotiating salaries at a disadvantage. I find the idea that sharing salaries will cause drama highly suspect. Causing some to go and ask for equivalent pay is probably a good thing, managers don't have to go out and give you raises all the time, it's usually on you to push for it. With this information you can have a better idea of what to ask for and make negotiation more efficient.
something123 11y ago
The problem I see sharing salaries is that people tend to overestimate how good they are. So inevitably everyone will have salary envy and no one will be happy. It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous
- vog 11y ago
  > It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous This information is usually already expressed in the titles/roles the employees get. I don't see how publishing salaries would make any significant change to this. Also, you are assuming that salaries do express the value for the company, which is to be doubted, according to the story at hand.
- skarap 11y ago
  > The problem I see sharing salaries is that people tend to overestimate how good they are. Absolutely. Gather 10 people from a company in a single room and I really doubt they will be able to agree on it. Especially when it's not even about how good they are, but how much value they provide. I have seen this issue in a team of 3 people I managed, it's hard to imagine what it will look like with 100+ people.
okamiueru 11y ago
Isn't the reason why Erica Joy no longer works at google highly relevant? If she did this during a contract termination notice period requested by google, the reason for the termination might have something to do with whomever had any say in denying the peer bonuses. Which seems to be the whole point of the article, as the rest is pure speculation. She did however mention that one bonus passed through, arguing it was too vague to be given because of the spread sheet. Hm.
danielweber 11y ago
> Salary sharing is only 1 example. Blogger porn. Real names. Many others. I can't tell from context whether she was supporting or stopping "blogger porn" and/or "real names."
- cbr 11y ago
  "blogger porn" and "real names" refer to two cases where Google made an unpopular decision internally and then later reversed itself: https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#%21category-topic/blogger/jAep2mLabQY https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#%21category-topic/... I take "fighting for justice & fairness" to indicate that she approved of the reversals.
Anderkent 11y ago
So here's a devils advocacy for not having transparency around money: On average everyone thinks they're above average (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority#References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority#Reference...) Two people of equal value and skill will both think they're better than the other person, and thus deserve higher compensation. How do you reconcile that with salary transparency? Seems like you'll be making more people unhappy. Would wages turn into status goods, where both of those people continuously ask for raises because in their view they're underpaid, and eventually get denied, which will probably offend them and cause them to leave? Secondly, does this actually solve any problems that simple backchannels between employees don't? People already talk about salary at lunch breaks or over coffee; the advantage is that those are private conversations between friends, rather than your salary being broadcasted to everyone for them to judge. What problem does this actually solve?
- jaawn 11y ago
  This is a good point, especially regarding what would happen at a company immediately after going from opaque to transparent on salaries. However, the resolution is pretty simple. Employees can either accept the justification given by management or not. If they are disgruntled about it, they can try their luck at a different employer, or use the information to learn how they can get a raise. This last point is one of the benefits for employees—they learn what would get them more money at their current employer. Example: person 1 makes 15% more than person 2, and now both are aware of it. Person 2 is upset and talks to their manager. They find out the reason is because person 1 has additional education/certification and a couple years more experience. Now person 2 knows they can pursue the extra education/certification and use it as leverage to get a raise, when prior to the transparency they would have had no idea and possibly gone awhile longer making less money.
- exelius 11y ago
  The company I work for tries to do this by giving you a "salary ratio" of you to everyone in your peer group (i.e. if your salary ratio is 1.06, you make 1.06x the mean salary within your band). By all accounts (verified with private conversations) they go out of their way to ensure women are compensated equally to men, so that's not an issue, but I wouldn't say it's really all that transparent. I don't know what my "peer group" is defined as, and I don't know if the number they give me is total bullshit. It's really hard to provide salary transparency unless you have a spreadsheet with all the variables that go into creating it -- considered a closely guarded secret at most companies. The irony of all of this is that if you provided this to people, they would likely either agree with the formula or have constructive ideas for change.
sergiotapia 11y ago
Other side of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_happens_when_you_talk_about_salaries_at/ctap9sx https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_hap... Either way both are completely unverifiable. Take both with a huge fistful of salt until both parties are interviewed and quoted and research is done into what happened.
- caskance 11y ago
  No they aren't. Plenty of people here know someone who works at Google.
  - EStudley 11y ago
    And those stories are.. also completely unverifiable?
    - caskance 11y ago
      I guess, if you're willing to stretch the definition of unverifiable far enough that it becomes completely meaningless.
      - vog 11y ago
        Indeed. Well, rigorous proof is possible within mathematics[1]. However, applying that measure to verifying reality is nonsense. Even within maths, rigorous proofs require decoupling of the abstract proposition (what you prove) from reality (your assumptions). [1] and "theoretical X" for X in {"computer science", "physics", "chemistry", ...}, which all are essentially math as well.
    - vog 11y ago
      If you don't accept multiple insider information as verification, what would you accept?
      - FilterSweep 11y ago
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
I am struggling with the response to this. My questions are 1. Does the spreadsheet really cover 5% or so of google employees? If so it has pretty decent statistical validity despite selection bias etc? 2. Is the spreadsheet accurate, or at least will the reporting differences cancel out? 3. Assuming the above two are correct, and it seems fair to say yes, then whether she used Twitter, or is grinding an ace is totally irrelevant - Google has a fair pay problem, and really needs to deal with it. On a personal note, a company is not a market. Class's theory of the firm says it eschews market discipline to achieve more efficient allocation of hard to judge resources. and as such I do not believe that saying "negotiate better" is a valid option for a company of this size. It's bad for everyone but the good negotiators.
dataker 11y ago
>"Don't you know what could happen?" >Nothing. It's illegal to retaliate against employees for sharing salaries. This answer in fantastic and I wish more technical people learned with this. As a programmer, some managers assume(often rightly so) that you have no clue about laws, finance and business in general.
- deadmik3 11y ago
  I think this shows how selfish her goals really were. As if her manager asking "Don't you know what could happen?" implied that bad things could happen to only her. Why would she assume they were saying she would be retaliated against (or that anyone would be retaliated against)? What about the other 5% of the company this affected?
  - angelbob 11y ago
    Retaliation is illegal against them, too.
    - deadmik3 11y ago
      The point is the manager might not have even been implying any retaliation. Can you think of other possible meanings behind the manager's question?
      - ryanmonroe 11y ago
        I can't . Can you?
      - vehementi 11y ago
        Yeah I didn't even at first take it to mean "the company can retaliate". I assumed the manager was referring to unrest & animosity at people undeservedly making more money than others.
        eropple 11y ago
fridek 11y ago
Not that it matters and it was already said elsewhere, but peer bonus can be awarded only once for one thing. And it makes sense in a 50k+ company, where some social interaction happens and a single person can become peer-bonus-celebrity easily. It's not a good thing to incentivize :) Also if I were a manager sifting through some kind of peer bonus app I'd too be tempted to mark all as rejected after a while. There was a book recently, Work rules! by Laszlo Bock who happens to be a head of people operations. He describes exactly those inequality patterns. It's nothing unusual, some of it is accepted (some people earn more for their higher value) and some not (woman not asking for a raise so easily). Seriously, just go and read a book, not some stream of contextless tweets gathered together.
- eitally 11y ago
  I just finished Work Rules! and was going to say the same thing. There's a whole chapter in there explaining why it's smart not to pay everyone exactly the same.
murbard2 11y ago
What happens is that your spreadsheet won't be properly adjusted for all factors, people will look for bias, claim discrimination, and get a big bully to fine your company (and look caring and compassionate while doing it)
- jaawn 11y ago
  If a manager and company have any justification for pay differences that are not due to protected classes, then they have nothing to fear. If they do pay people differently because of protected classes, they may run into trouble, but I think that's okay. If most companies were transparent, employees would be a lot more knowledgeable about what leads to more pay. I think we would see more negotiation and engagement and healthier conversations about money. People would be upset at first, but once we start collectively understanding the legitimate reasons for pay discrepancies, and we eliminate the illegitimate ones, I think most people would be happier.
  - murbard2 11y ago
    Of course they have nothing to fear, because these prosecutions never serve a political agenda, the judicial system has displayed a commitment to integrity, people don't assume the accused are automatically guilty, and trials are so cost efficient that people only settle when they've done something wrong.
    - jaawn 11y ago
      Even political agendas and sensationalist trials need some leg to stand on to be successful. If you hire honestly and set pay honestly and fairly, with recorded justifications, it is unlikely that your company would suffer any negative repercussions of pay transparency. However, this doesn't mean "absolutely no company anywhere will run into legal trouble due to this" There are always exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions. The existence of an exception or outlier does not disprove what generally holds true for everyone else.
      - 11y ago
dharma1 11y ago
link to the spreadsheet?
marknutter 11y ago
She shouldn't have been reprimanded for creating the spreadsheet. Upper management is always terrified of information they don't control.
jaawn 11y ago
It is unfortunate that a large amount of the discussion is being distracted by the stringing-together-tweets thing. Yes, it was lame to do that, but isn't it more worthwhile to talk about the content? I think most of us probably work at a company that discourages salary transparency (most people do in general). I think we could have a more valuable discussion about how our experiences compare/contrast to the content of the tweets, and save the "omg a bunch of tweets are not an article!" comments for when someone writes a blog post about that and shares it on HN.
emirozer 11y ago
Wouldn't it be better to __try__ to create a global movement within the industry for employees to feed accurate data to glassdoor? Sidenote: Most of the people around here knows glassdoor but i have worked with a lot of people who never heard of it..
chasing 11y ago
This is not journalism. Do not treat it as such. Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. They need to reach out to Google and ask a few questions. Otherwise, this information is just a shade better than useless. There's a lot of detail missing in these tweets. There's a lot of handwaving where the audience is essentially invited to fill in the blanks with whatever stereotypes -- good or bad -- they feel like. It irritates me immensely that this story is now out there and getting to be a Big Deal -- and there's no actual journalism to attempt to get to the bottom of it. How time consuming could it possibly be to send a few e-mails, hop on the phone, or go dig up someone you know who works at Google and might shed some light on this? Maybe Erica Joy is right. Maybe there's a huge problem at Google regarding sharing salaries. Maybe something illegal or, at least, immoral/hypocritical is going on. Or maybe Erica Joy is misunderstanding something about how Google works. About how peer bonuses work, for example. Or maybe some combination of both. But unless we want to go dig up that information on our own, we just don't know. Good job, Wired.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Certainly it's damning if it's an accurate depiction but I agree with you that just using Storify on a bunch of tweets isn't really anything like "journalism."
  - cpncrunch 11y ago
    I'm not sure how it's damning except against Erica herself. She strongly implies racism is involved, but it sounds like she just doesn't understand the PB system. (The fact that her white friend got multiple PBs for the same thing seems more like his manager also didn't understand how it works).
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      Well what she's insinuating is that she was retaliated against for sharing salary information, which is against the law. I'm not sure how you intuit from the information available that she "doesn't understand the PB system."
nicboobees 11y ago
Nothing good comes from knowing other peoples salary. Only jealousy, resentment, unhappiness, and greed.
- eropple 11y ago
  Or an actual understanding of market position and--in the case of less privileged folks--a way to smoke out systemic bias. You know--things that any worker should want to know.
  - nicboobees 11y ago
    Maybe it's different here. In the UK it's considered vulgar to discuss money or how much you earn.
    - eropple 11y ago
      Have you paused to consider who would benefit from instilling that idea in you? Because it's not you who benefits.
      - nicboobees 11y ago
        It certainly is me who benefits. In 2 previous jobs, I found out what others at the company were making. OK, they were managers, but still, it just made me pissed off. It didn't make me happy by any means. As others note, people tend to generally think they're above average. Can you not see that exploding their delusion might not be such a great idea? Some of them have to be below average. A team who doesn't share salary info, can all be happy that they're all above average. If they start sharing salary, half will be below average and probably pretty pissed off. The people who benefit, are people who are generally happy as they are. Would you like to know how much money your neighbours have? Why should it matter?
  - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
    Wow, this has got to be the best comment I've ever read. Really deep bro.
fleitz 11y ago
Where is the data? Or at least a summation of it? What was the discrepancy? Was it adjusted for experience?
icedchai 11y ago
This is nice and all, but where is a link to the actual spreadsheet?
paulhauggis 11y ago
This is exactly what happens: jealousy and people thinking that they somehow deserve the money more than the person making more...blaming of on "sexism"
throwaway345r 11y ago
Collecting evidence is the right way to approach situations like this. However, when the position is so politically entrenched, extra care _must_ be taken so that opponents cannot dismiss the data due to poor collection practices. Unfortunately, that care was not taken in this case, and of course, you see opponents dismissing the data. The worst part is that this effort may actually prevent proper data collection in the future: "remember what happened last time we did that?"
aswdeffr 11y ago
Googler here on a throwaway. I personally know Erica and followed her career. it is quite frankly bizarre to see her biting back against Google given the opportunities she was given. Erica was a tech stop employee, which is Google's help desk. in terms of technical ability, hiring standards for tech stop are lower than for SRE, where she ended up. every non-erica tech stopper, including me, who wants to transfer into the technical side of the org is required to pass a full suite of interviews, same as an outside candidate. it would be obvious from examining her submit history that Erica is not really meeting this bar. and yet a door was opened into SRE somehow. she stayed a few months in SRE, underperformed, and spent a lot of time ranting on internal platforms. again, this is verifiable because commits at Google are public. she chose to join a team of about 50% women working under a female director, so I have a hard time believing discrimination is the major factor here. now she is gone and believes she was wronged and is telling everyone so. the similarities to michaelochurch are strong.
- omouse 11y ago
  >she stayed a few months in SRE, underperformed If that's the case it looks like she wasn't aware of it; especially if you're suggesting a door was opened for her maybe there's some more transparency that's needed in the process. >the similarities to michaelochurch are strong. IIRC he was wronged and he got an apology for it: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/my-name-is-cleared/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/my-name-is-c... Aside from Erica and her situation do you feel the salary sharing was a good thing? Did it negatively impact Google?
  - aswdeffr 11y ago
    Nobody really believes michaelochurch received an apology from upper management. the lawsuit potential alone means that even if there was such an apology it would never be in email. he really actually seems to be crazy. I personally really appreciated the spreadsheet because I am anti-capitalist, but I find Erica's version of the facts to be distorted in a self-serving way. I find it hard to believe this would meaningfully impact her career.
vinceyuan 11y ago
It's very common that people with similar skills have different salary, especially in a big company. Big companies have the rules in salary increase rate for the current employees, but are willing to pay more to hire new employees from other companies. For example, A's salary is $5000 and yearly increase rate is 5%. Two years later, A's classmate B is hired. B's salary is $6000. A's salary is $5512.5. Similar thing happened to me. Luckily I got an exceptional salary increase years later. But eventually I left that company after 6-year service.
sctb 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9906107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9906107
- carrotleads 11y ago
  yeah was searching for that as well.. this thread doesn't appear in the HN list and even search didn't throw it up.. Wonder if there is a special type of Shadow banning submissions on HN

330 points by awjr 11y ago

The article format is completely busted by Twitter's display rules and made unreadable. In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued. Those tweets belong to Twitter now and are good for nothing else but ferrying ads. I won't have my time wasted by trying to read that crap.

imglorp 11y ago
Why do people insist on using that medium for blogging? It would be better to tweet, "Guys, I updated my blog with a story about this thing (link)".
- bubblesorting 11y ago
  Nope, /much/ better to light up my phone 30 times. ;)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- truebosko 11y ago
  Quick and easy articles. Your effort is compiling the tweets and inserting a lead.
  - tempodox 11y ago
    Yep, zero effort. And, accordingly, zero reward.
- polarix 11y ago
  30 tweets makes 30 times the claim on attention of your followers, regardless of content. A single tweet is 30 times less likely to be read. This is a structural inefficiency of the twitter platform.
- cmdrfred 11y ago
  I had no idea this was a trend. How could anyone ever think this is a good idea? You'd think the editors at wired would be able to copy and paste, surely that's easier than embedding 45 tweets.
  - tempodox 11y ago
    While this is technically true, you also need to adhere to Twitter's TOS if you're going to use their product.
    - Robin_Message 11y ago
      Or Wired could do some actual journalism and, I don't know, interview the original poster plus ask her ex-boss and Google for comments plus try and track down the mysterious other man?
    - cmdrfred 11y ago
      Journalists don't need to obey a TOS (at least in the US where it is specifically protected in the constitution "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"), watch the news sometime they don't get consent forms for all the people walking by in man on the streets segments. (Or a better example where news outlets published details from the snowden leaks) I guess if all you want to do is post a bunch of tweets and not write any context or additional information about it this is the way to do it, but if you actually want to be a journalist TOS means nothing.
eli 11y ago
That's nonsense. The person who wrote the tweets retains ownership, they have simply licensed Twitter to display them in a certain way with certain requirements.
- tempodox 11y ago
  Slight variations in legal details don't make the article any more readable. Even the reasons why it can't be formatted otherwise stay exactly the same. The difference you're pointing out makes no difference at all.
  - eli 11y ago
    Totally disagree. The article is hard to read because the author is lazy, it has nothing to do with "Twitter's display rules." The author could have quoted the tweets or asked permission to reprint them in another format or used them as the source for original reporting instead of posting them verbatim. It's the difference between embedding the PDF of a legal ruling vs writing an article about what it means.
    - tempodox 11y ago
      I see your point now. I didn't get it at first.
danielweber 11y ago
> In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued Has anyone ever been sued for stringing 20 tweets together into plaintext?
- tempodox 11y ago
  They probably wouldn't sue a private person for using tweets however they want in a private context. A publication with millions (just a guess) of readers is something quite different.

yc1010 11y ago

Can someone please tl.dr this First we had articles spread over dozens of pages for the laugh, now we have articles split into 160char segments, grrrrrr

sokoloff 11y ago
ts; dr...
vdnkh 11y ago
Author created a spreadsheet with her salary/few other salaries of coworkers on it, posts it to google internal social network, 5% of workers fill it out, people start asking for better salaries, managers mad, her peer bonuses (coworker endorsements that net you a small bonus) get denied, everyone mad, she left(?)
joshcrowder 11y ago
TL;DR - Erica Joy created a spreadsheet of salaries, it got shared internally at Google, apparently about 5% of total workforce filled it in. Google has some sort of Peer Bonus scheme, Erica got lots of them but management decided to deny pretty much all of them. She left google.
corin_ 11y ago
She created an internal spreadsheet allowing Googlers to add their salary information. Lots of people helped tweak the sheet adding data visualizations, comparisons, etc. Google management told her they didn't like it, she pointed out that you can't be fired for sharing salary information. Lots of colleagues were giving her "peer bonuses" for setting this up, but her manager kept blocking them, something which is apparently unheard of to the point that most people didn't know they could be blocked. By the time she left, 5% of staff were apparently using the sheet. Even more TLDR: Nothing particularly happened except that Google showed they dislike colleagues talking about salaries.
- justwannasing 11y ago
  So no different than any other company and a big fuss about 5% usage.

gorgak 11y ago

this was already on HN two days ago.

thesch 11y ago

a thing bothered me yesterday and it's still bothering me today and so now i want to tell a story. One Sunday, some former coworkers & I were bored, talking about salaries on the internal social network instance. A spreadsheet was created. we put our salaries in the sheet, realized that it was created on a public to the world spreadsheet, so I copied it to internal. I then put a form on it and posted the link to the form and the spreadsheet on my internal social network account. It took off like wildfire. It got reshared all over the place. People started adding pivot tables that did spreadsheet magic that highlighted not great things re: pay. I did some general housekeeping stuff to the sheet (normalizing the gender field where it could be, exchange rate stuff, that sort of thing). More reshares. More people adding pay. It became a thing. I was invited to talk to my manager on Mon or Tues. Higher up people weren't happy. She wasn't happy. Why did I do it? "Don't you know what could happen?" Nothing. It's illegal to retaliate against employees for sharing salaries. "Wellll....". Meeting ended. Sheet kept going. People were thanking me for it. They were also sending me peer bonuses. here's how peer bonuses work @ former co: If you did something good, someone peer bonuses you, you get $150 net in your next paycheck. An important thing I learned during that time: peer bonuses are rewarded at managers discretion. My manager was rejecting all of them. Wasn't sure if this would be good for the company. Wanted to see what the outcome was. Mind you once a PB is rejected, that can't be undone. 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. A smattering of people knew what was going on. Backchannels being what they are at former co. (lol IRC #yallknowwhoyouare), it got around. Rejecting PBs was so unheard of, ppl didn't know it was possible. There was outrage when they found out. Shock that I wasn't talking abt it. Meanwhile, spreadsheet still going, getting spread around, pointed questions being thrown at mgmt about sharing salary ranges (hahah no). Most people agreed that it was A Good Thing. PBs kept rolling in. Rejections kept rolling out. One PB eventually got approved. Way after everything died down. Because the person worded it in a way that was vary vague. Any that were outright about the spreadsheet got rejected. 7 total in the end I think? Higher ups still pissed. Some I used to support as an exec tech would pointedly not interact w/ me anymore. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Before I left, about 5% of former co. had shared their salary on that sheet. People asked for & got equitable pay based on data in the sheet. The world didn't end. Everything didn't go up in flames because salaries got shared. But shit got better for some people. I explicitly gave ownership of the sheet to someone else before I left so it couldn't be taken over by mgmt when I was gone (can happen). I am thinking of this because of everyone celebrating the fact that Google put Ida B. Wells in the doodle yesterday. Ida B. Wells was great. She did stuff to affect change of such a magnitude that if I'm half the woman she was, I'm doing pretty good. I don't claim to come close, but from time to time, I do stuff that will make things better for people at the expense of the establishment. I'm a pretty big believer in justice and fairness and will fight for both if necessary. Fighting for justice & fairness INSIDE Google doesn't go over well. Salary sharing is only 1 example. Blogger porn. Real names. Many others. Shit WILL hit the fan if you tell a racist (a well documented racist) to go fuck themselves though. In defense of the racist, obvi. So sure. Rah rah, Google did an Ida B. Wells doodle. Guaranteed that if Ida Wells were alive & working at Google today, there'd be many private calendar meetings focused on "her future" there. tl;dr the sharing of one doodle does not a bastion of support for justice and civil disobedience make.

netrus 11y ago

Sooo ... it would be great to get a look on that sheet ;)

jonlucc 11y ago
There are already public versions such as glassdoor.com

amelius 11y ago

Google is a company that wants to have access to all the information in the world. But if somebody rightfully publishes some information that is sensitive to Google, look what happens...

dmichulke 11y ago
If you generalize, say X is a Y that wants to have all information int the world. But if somebody ... look what happens.... you'll find several solutions for Y='company' and many more for other Y in {'Secret Service', 'Tax Collection Agency', ...}
- antimagic 11y ago
  Is your point that Google is behaving as badly as quite a few Three Letter Acronym government organisation? If it is, then yes I agree with you.
theseatoms 11y ago
Not even "sensitive" in a security or corporate strategy sense. Their bottom line is just sensitive to this information remaining private.
bostonpete 11y ago
In the reddit comment thread for this u/dickbutt_md had a lengthy comment that seemed to call into question some of the details of this story. His facts weren't first hand, but then again, sometimes a little distance can help with objectivity. In any event, I tend to take comments from possibly-disgruntled former employees with a pinch of salt.
- _asummers 11y ago
  Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_happens_when_you_talk_about_salaries_at/ctap9sx https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_hap...
- akilism 11y ago

FilterSweep 11y ago

Most employees at large companies are just cogs in a machine. At Google, they are lab rats.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

HN_bias 11y ago

ive just discovered HN has an awful neoliberal bias, and is full of cunty fucking capitalist money obsessed techs. its a real shame you have this ignorance amongst supposedly intelligent people. as a result i wont be using it again, and i suggest you look at articles about politically sensitive subjects and watch them being removed from the front page double quick time. the comment strategy makes sure that no alternative opinions will remain online. fuck hacker news.

HN_bias 11y ago
haha thanks for the upvote! hahaha. there are a few people who realise this.
msutherl 11y ago
What brings us all here is the very engine of neoliberalism.
Anderkent 11y ago
'Everyone with a different opinion than me is ignorant and stupid, and the downvotes I'm getting are surely because they want to maintain their bubble and not because I'm being rude.' You're an asshole and no one is sorry that you're gone.
HugoDaniel 11y ago
Embrace Extend Extinguish ah.. oops, wrong post i guess
IanDrake 11y ago
>capitalist money obsessed techs OK, that's me. I like to eat and have shelter and some nice stuff too. Just curious, what charitable organization built your computer and its parts? I bet it was built by capitalist swine.

dbg31415 11y ago

So... here's A problem with this. Are you verifying that the users are actually who they say they are when they share salaries? What if I were to go into the form and say that I was you, and that you made a billion dollars more than everyone else. Would that cause drama? This just seems like a horrible idea. Feelings will be hurt. Productivity will be lost. Someone will quit. Maybe someone will benefit, but it's almost certainly not good for your team or your company. People agree to work for salaries. They put down numbers like what they earned at their last job, or what they are looking for in the new job, and then employers make offers based on that. If someone agreed to work for a number, and is getting paid that... why make drama?

monstruoso 11y ago
These things are supposed to be anonymous.
saiya-jin 11y ago
naive and oversimplified view... are you an employee or employer? I don't have issue negotiating salaries hard, but I personally know very bright people, who for various reasons failed at that, and once they learned other people's salaries (which happens eventually to most), they got extremely frustrated, felt strong injustice and some left. I have more sympathy for community-based approach rather than selfish everybody-for-themselves in this. and no, you don't just come with any number you would like to see to an interview. if you overshoot too much, you probably won't be hired, depends on recruiter and company.
- dbg31415 11y ago
  Well I manage a team, I have direct reports. I can tell you that Sally and Steve and Joe all have the same job title, but Joe is a rockstar and earns more, and Steve is a slacker who got the job because he knew someone. So when the averages come out, and Sally gets pissed because she's not making what Joe is making... that's what causes drama. Pay really does, more often than not, reflect the individuals contributions. Why? Because as Joe's manager, I want to keep Joe. I know what market rate is for his position, and I do what I can to make sure he is paid above it. Steve... fuck that guy, let him make below average... he didn't deserve the job in the first place, and we'd all be better off if he quit. Anyway the fact that it's not by name (so you can compare yourself to another person) makes it worse in my mind. If you are just going to share the salary for your position, we'd need to make different positions for Steve, Sally, and Joe... It would be Title Blah, Rank Joe. Everyone is different. All names changed of course.

seqizz 11y ago

Don't be evil (with exceptions).

x5n1 11y ago
Be evil, pretend not to be. Google is evil and knows everything about everybody and shares it with various orgs including three letter orgs. The only thing positive about Google is the fact that it releases a lot of code out there for people to use. Other than that, Google is a corporate overlord.

HN_bias 11y ago

fuck you silicon valley money obsessed programmer. you are a traitor to hacker culture.

littletimmy 11y ago
I agree. Google should become a non-profit.

srj 11y ago

Managers evidently aren't supposed to approve more than one peer bonus for the same single act. I work at Google and hadn't heard of that policy before (then again, I'm not a manager) but it came up in an earlier thread.

bakhy 11y ago

i hope things like this serve as a wake up call to all young talents willing to sacrifice their lives for these companies, enamored with some idealized visions of what they are and do. a company is a company. an agent for making money, first and foremost. any positive change they bring is a side-effect, and due to their ever greater power they must constantly be policed, at least by releasing unpleasant information like this.

staticelf 11y ago
And in my opinion as a young talent, Google is highly overrated when it comes to creating good software. Sure they have some hits, but a lot of it also is kind of bad. To be regarded as the best of the best, I think they make pretty shitty software.
- abrahamepton 11y ago
  I feel similarly about Facebook. I feel it with some justification, but I'm probably wrong. To do what they do at the scale they do it, for it to even work let alone work pretty much perfectly, pretty much all the time for pretty much everyone is a goddamn miracle. But there are so many little things about FB software (mostly the UI/UX) that annoy the shit out of me, so I get grumpy and think their software sucks. Having worked at Google, I think it's worth saying, their software is fucking astonishingly amazing. The magic tricks that go into the simplest things are mindboggling, and what's been built behind the scenes to enable it all is pretty incredible. Also, um, a lot of their software is far from shitty: Gmail, search, docs+spreadsheets, new photos, youtube to name a few. If you think any one of those are "pretty shitty", well...I dunno what to tell you.
  - veidr 11y ago
    Here's my list of things that you mentioned which aren't shitty: search
    - pennaMan 11y ago
      Can you name any other huge scale user facing software product that isn't shitty by your standards?

bronxcoder 11y ago

I hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue. It's really a negotiating problem. My coworker and I were hired together, same position, same experience, and offered the same salary. When I was offered the position, I asked for $15,000 more and they gave it to me. My coworker didn't ask for more and is therefore now making $15,000 less than me. After six months, I asked for a raise of $5,000. He never asked for a raise. So now he makes $20,000 less than me.

techlibertarian 11y ago
It has to be for them (people who believe there is a gender pay gap) to try and make any change. There are plenty of examples where pay is different regardless of gender: sports and entertainment would be two big ones. With sports, people are payed differently even if they fill the same position on a team. Why? They aren't the same. They bring different skillsets. It's the same with movies. The main character will make more than someone 20 spots down in the credits list. Someone with a well-known name will make even more. All of this wage difference that can occur across genders. But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table. Edit: To clarify, I have no issue with a company removing any pay difference between employees. I only have an issue with those who think paying people differently is inherently a problem.
- lagadu 11y ago
  > But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table. Why? Different people bring different value. The same title can have wildly different roles, some positions with the same titles can be much harder to replace than others. For example: at my company my team has a very specialized role that is far outside the domains of all other developers (we're talking about a large multinational here, with thousands of employees). You bet your ass we make a decent chunk more than most other devs, replacing any one of us would cost a ton of money and require over a year of learning about our stuff; replacing one of the devs who works on our main product? In half a year you could get someone to full productivity. In other words: some employees are more expensive to replace than others, either shower them with €€€ or pay a much higher cost when they go work elsewhere.

deadmik3 11y ago

Was stringing together a couple dozen tweets really the best format to share a story like this? There is a lot that's left out. Once she vaguely mentions that another employee who was "involved" was still getting all of his peer bonuses (which may or may not have been PB's for his "involvement", we don't know), the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me. OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WANTS, as long as we don't actually have any details about it. Also, generally shit will hit the fan if you tell anyone to fuck off, especially if they're your manager. Again, we don't know that she told her manager to fuck off for being racist (??) because this is a terrible story told in a shitty format. But it's implied. Just like everything else in this "article". tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected.

aaronem 11y ago
Yes. Heaven forfend staff should behave in a way potentially inimical to the interests of management, instead of the other way around.
- deadmik3 11y ago
  Staff works for management. While it's nice to have times where the management "works for" their employees, the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy.
  - aaronem 11y ago
    Staff being subordinate to management in an organizational sense is one thing. Staff members being forbidden even to approach anything, which might grow into a discussion of how and where management's interests are actively inimical to their own, is quite another. You're making the best arguments for unionization I've heard in the tech industry for quite a long time.
  - nathan_long 11y ago
    > the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy What? Workers sell their labor to a company for a price. The whole point of any transaction is to satisfy both parties. Sharing market information is something that both buyers and sellers do. Why do you think this should be unilateral?

mdesq 11y ago

These big tech companies only love "transparency" when it's other people's data they want to look through.

littletimmy 11y ago

It is important that things like this come out into the open. When the typical doe-eyed college senior steps into the real world and is tempted to drink Eric Schmidt's kool-aid about changing the world (and how the honor of working at Google offsets the lower wage), such disclosures will help him understand that Google is just another money-making corporation. No more, no less.

seattle_spring 11y ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "offsetting the lower wage?" Isn't Google pretty well known as being one of the top paying tech companies?

dudul 11y ago

That may be shallow, but I can't take her seriously because of the medium she picked to convey her story. This is unreadable.

Aoyagi 11y ago

You've just given their analytics bunch of traffic from HN which looks like it came from Twitter. :P

deskamess 11y ago

For some reason I was under the impression the spreadsheet was set up to detect gender/ethnicity based inequality in salaries. Not sure where I got that impression as the tweets do not mention it explicitly other than suggesting that some people asked and got increases. At the end of the day, this is what I am curious about - was there inequality in pay, and if so, what was the difference.

danielweber 11y ago
The use of the sheet was orthogonal to discovering her peer bonuses weren't being approved.
- deskamess 11y ago
  True... but the peer bonus aspect seems to have overtaken, for me, a more interesting metric (pay inequality amount from spreadsheet data).

zyb09 11y ago

To be honest, what exactly did she want to accomplish with this? Where I live people are very hesitant of sharing their salary and doing something like this would be considered very rude. All it can possibly lead to is drama about salaries. Drama about why some people getting payed more then others. Should Google now start paying each and everyone exactly the same until everyone is happy? No of course not, it's no secret companies have different salaries for different employees. What matters is that YOU feel ok with what you're getting payed, not what others are earning.

tashoecraft 11y ago
The reason people are very hesitant about sharing their salary is because we have constructed a culture where it is taboo to share what you make. That we have these ideals about how terrible things could be if you knew what others were making in comparison to you. Her manager talked to her saying "Don't you know what could happen?". Well management couldn't fire her for that, but could make her work life less then ideal. Possibly holding back bonuses out of spite? Worse job assignments? The huge job salary scandal that Google was a part of kinda shows hows they can't be trusted to be honest about salaries and supportive of their workers. You feeling ok with what you are getting paid is not what matters. What matters is getting fair market value for your worth. Many people make less then what they are worth because they either don't know how much they are worth, or are even too afraid to argue for what they feel they are worth. Companies exploit this and use salary negotiations as a way to hire employees for the absolute least amount possible. We applaud companies for making record breaking profits, but we don’t applaud them for decreasing their profits a bit in favor of increasing all their employees spending power.
nkassis 11y ago
The issue is your employer has all the information on this. You are negotiating salaries at a disadvantage. I find the idea that sharing salaries will cause drama highly suspect. Causing some to go and ask for equivalent pay is probably a good thing, managers don't have to go out and give you raises all the time, it's usually on you to push for it. With this information you can have a better idea of what to ask for and make negotiation more efficient.

something123 11y ago

The problem I see sharing salaries is that people tend to overestimate how good they are. So inevitably everyone will have salary envy and no one will be happy. It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous

vog 11y ago
> It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous This information is usually already expressed in the titles/roles the employees get. I don't see how publishing salaries would make any significant change to this. Also, you are assuming that salaries do express the value for the company, which is to be doubted, according to the story at hand.
skarap 11y ago
> The problem I see sharing salaries is that people tend to overestimate how good they are. Absolutely. Gather 10 people from a company in a single room and I really doubt they will be able to agree on it. Especially when it's not even about how good they are, but how much value they provide. I have seen this issue in a team of 3 people I managed, it's hard to imagine what it will look like with 100+ people.

okamiueru 11y ago

Isn't the reason why Erica Joy no longer works at google highly relevant? If she did this during a contract termination notice period requested by google, the reason for the termination might have something to do with whomever had any say in denying the peer bonuses. Which seems to be the whole point of the article, as the rest is pure speculation. She did however mention that one bonus passed through, arguing it was too vague to be given because of the spread sheet. Hm.

danielweber 11y ago

> Salary sharing is only 1 example. Blogger porn. Real names. Many others. I can't tell from context whether she was supporting or stopping "blogger porn" and/or "real names."

cbr 11y ago
"blogger porn" and "real names" refer to two cases where Google made an unpopular decision internally and then later reversed itself: https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#%21category-topic/blogger/jAep2mLabQY https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#%21category-topic/... I take "fighting for justice & fairness" to indicate that she approved of the reversals.

Anderkent 11y ago

So here's a devils advocacy for not having transparency around money: On average everyone thinks they're above average (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority#References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority#Reference...) Two people of equal value and skill will both think they're better than the other person, and thus deserve higher compensation. How do you reconcile that with salary transparency? Seems like you'll be making more people unhappy. Would wages turn into status goods, where both of those people continuously ask for raises because in their view they're underpaid, and eventually get denied, which will probably offend them and cause them to leave? Secondly, does this actually solve any problems that simple backchannels between employees don't? People already talk about salary at lunch breaks or over coffee; the advantage is that those are private conversations between friends, rather than your salary being broadcasted to everyone for them to judge. What problem does this actually solve?

jaawn 11y ago
This is a good point, especially regarding what would happen at a company immediately after going from opaque to transparent on salaries. However, the resolution is pretty simple. Employees can either accept the justification given by management or not. If they are disgruntled about it, they can try their luck at a different employer, or use the information to learn how they can get a raise. This last point is one of the benefits for employees—they learn what would get them more money at their current employer. Example: person 1 makes 15% more than person 2, and now both are aware of it. Person 2 is upset and talks to their manager. They find out the reason is because person 1 has additional education/certification and a couple years more experience. Now person 2 knows they can pursue the extra education/certification and use it as leverage to get a raise, when prior to the transparency they would have had no idea and possibly gone awhile longer making less money.
exelius 11y ago
The company I work for tries to do this by giving you a "salary ratio" of you to everyone in your peer group (i.e. if your salary ratio is 1.06, you make 1.06x the mean salary within your band). By all accounts (verified with private conversations) they go out of their way to ensure women are compensated equally to men, so that's not an issue, but I wouldn't say it's really all that transparent. I don't know what my "peer group" is defined as, and I don't know if the number they give me is total bullshit. It's really hard to provide salary transparency unless you have a spreadsheet with all the variables that go into creating it -- considered a closely guarded secret at most companies. The irony of all of this is that if you provided this to people, they would likely either agree with the formula or have constructive ideas for change.

sergiotapia 11y ago

Other side of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_happens_when_you_talk_about_salaries_at/ctap9sx https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_hap... Either way both are completely unverifiable. Take both with a huge fistful of salt until both parties are interviewed and quoted and research is done into what happened.

caskance 11y ago
No they aren't. Plenty of people here know someone who works at Google.
- EStudley 11y ago
  And those stories are.. also completely unverifiable?
  - caskance 11y ago
    I guess, if you're willing to stretch the definition of unverifiable far enough that it becomes completely meaningless.
    - vog 11y ago
      Indeed. Well, rigorous proof is possible within mathematics[1]. However, applying that measure to verifying reality is nonsense. Even within maths, rigorous proofs require decoupling of the abstract proposition (what you prove) from reality (your assumptions). [1] and "theoretical X" for X in {"computer science", "physics", "chemistry", ...}, which all are essentially math as well.
  - vog 11y ago
    If you don't accept multiple insider information as verification, what would you accept?
    - FilterSweep 11y ago

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

I am struggling with the response to this. My questions are 1. Does the spreadsheet really cover 5% or so of google employees? If so it has pretty decent statistical validity despite selection bias etc? 2. Is the spreadsheet accurate, or at least will the reporting differences cancel out? 3. Assuming the above two are correct, and it seems fair to say yes, then whether she used Twitter, or is grinding an ace is totally irrelevant - Google has a fair pay problem, and really needs to deal with it. On a personal note, a company is not a market. Class's theory of the firm says it eschews market discipline to achieve more efficient allocation of hard to judge resources. and as such I do not believe that saying "negotiate better" is a valid option for a company of this size. It's bad for everyone but the good negotiators.

dataker 11y ago

>"Don't you know what could happen?" >Nothing. It's illegal to retaliate against employees for sharing salaries. This answer in fantastic and I wish more technical people learned with this. As a programmer, some managers assume(often rightly so) that you have no clue about laws, finance and business in general.

deadmik3 11y ago
I think this shows how selfish her goals really were. As if her manager asking "Don't you know what could happen?" implied that bad things could happen to only her. Why would she assume they were saying she would be retaliated against (or that anyone would be retaliated against)? What about the other 5% of the company this affected?
- angelbob 11y ago
  Retaliation is illegal against them, too.
  - deadmik3 11y ago
    The point is the manager might not have even been implying any retaliation. Can you think of other possible meanings behind the manager's question?
    - ryanmonroe 11y ago
      I can't . Can you?
    - vehementi 11y ago
      Yeah I didn't even at first take it to mean "the company can retaliate". I assumed the manager was referring to unrest & animosity at people undeservedly making more money than others.
      - eropple 11y ago

fridek 11y ago

Not that it matters and it was already said elsewhere, but peer bonus can be awarded only once for one thing. And it makes sense in a 50k+ company, where some social interaction happens and a single person can become peer-bonus-celebrity easily. It's not a good thing to incentivize :) Also if I were a manager sifting through some kind of peer bonus app I'd too be tempted to mark all as rejected after a while. There was a book recently, Work rules! by Laszlo Bock who happens to be a head of people operations. He describes exactly those inequality patterns. It's nothing unusual, some of it is accepted (some people earn more for their higher value) and some not (woman not asking for a raise so easily). Seriously, just go and read a book, not some stream of contextless tweets gathered together.

eitally 11y ago
I just finished Work Rules! and was going to say the same thing. There's a whole chapter in there explaining why it's smart not to pay everyone exactly the same.

murbard2 11y ago

What happens is that your spreadsheet won't be properly adjusted for all factors, people will look for bias, claim discrimination, and get a big bully to fine your company (and look caring and compassionate while doing it)

jaawn 11y ago
If a manager and company have any justification for pay differences that are not due to protected classes, then they have nothing to fear. If they do pay people differently because of protected classes, they may run into trouble, but I think that's okay. If most companies were transparent, employees would be a lot more knowledgeable about what leads to more pay. I think we would see more negotiation and engagement and healthier conversations about money. People would be upset at first, but once we start collectively understanding the legitimate reasons for pay discrepancies, and we eliminate the illegitimate ones, I think most people would be happier.
- murbard2 11y ago
  Of course they have nothing to fear, because these prosecutions never serve a political agenda, the judicial system has displayed a commitment to integrity, people don't assume the accused are automatically guilty, and trials are so cost efficient that people only settle when they've done something wrong.
  - jaawn 11y ago
    Even political agendas and sensationalist trials need some leg to stand on to be successful. If you hire honestly and set pay honestly and fairly, with recorded justifications, it is unlikely that your company would suffer any negative repercussions of pay transparency. However, this doesn't mean "absolutely no company anywhere will run into legal trouble due to this" There are always exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions. The existence of an exception or outlier does not disprove what generally holds true for everyone else.
    - 11y ago

dharma1 11y ago

link to the spreadsheet?

marknutter 11y ago

She shouldn't have been reprimanded for creating the spreadsheet. Upper management is always terrified of information they don't control.

jaawn 11y ago

It is unfortunate that a large amount of the discussion is being distracted by the stringing-together-tweets thing. Yes, it was lame to do that, but isn't it more worthwhile to talk about the content? I think most of us probably work at a company that discourages salary transparency (most people do in general). I think we could have a more valuable discussion about how our experiences compare/contrast to the content of the tweets, and save the "omg a bunch of tweets are not an article!" comments for when someone writes a blog post about that and shares it on HN.

emirozer 11y ago

Wouldn't it be better to __try__ to create a global movement within the industry for employees to feed accurate data to glassdoor? Sidenote: Most of the people around here knows glassdoor but i have worked with a lot of people who never heard of it..

chasing 11y ago

This is not journalism. Do not treat it as such. Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. They need to reach out to Google and ask a few questions. Otherwise, this information is just a shade better than useless. There's a lot of detail missing in these tweets. There's a lot of handwaving where the audience is essentially invited to fill in the blanks with whatever stereotypes -- good or bad -- they feel like. It irritates me immensely that this story is now out there and getting to be a Big Deal -- and there's no actual journalism to attempt to get to the bottom of it. How time consuming could it possibly be to send a few e-mails, hop on the phone, or go dig up someone you know who works at Google and might shed some light on this? Maybe Erica Joy is right. Maybe there's a huge problem at Google regarding sharing salaries. Maybe something illegal or, at least, immoral/hypocritical is going on. Or maybe Erica Joy is misunderstanding something about how Google works. About how peer bonuses work, for example. Or maybe some combination of both. But unless we want to go dig up that information on our own, we just don't know. Good job, Wired.

emodendroket 11y ago
Certainly it's damning if it's an accurate depiction but I agree with you that just using Storify on a bunch of tweets isn't really anything like "journalism."
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  I'm not sure how it's damning except against Erica herself. She strongly implies racism is involved, but it sounds like she just doesn't understand the PB system. (The fact that her white friend got multiple PBs for the same thing seems more like his manager also didn't understand how it works).
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Well what she's insinuating is that she was retaliated against for sharing salary information, which is against the law. I'm not sure how you intuit from the information available that she "doesn't understand the PB system."

nicboobees 11y ago

Nothing good comes from knowing other peoples salary. Only jealousy, resentment, unhappiness, and greed.

eropple 11y ago
Or an actual understanding of market position and--in the case of less privileged folks--a way to smoke out systemic bias. You know--things that any worker should want to know.
- nicboobees 11y ago
  Maybe it's different here. In the UK it's considered vulgar to discuss money or how much you earn.
  - eropple 11y ago
    Have you paused to consider who would benefit from instilling that idea in you? Because it's not you who benefits.
    - nicboobees 11y ago
      It certainly is me who benefits. In 2 previous jobs, I found out what others at the company were making. OK, they were managers, but still, it just made me pissed off. It didn't make me happy by any means. As others note, people tend to generally think they're above average. Can you not see that exploding their delusion might not be such a great idea? Some of them have to be below average. A team who doesn't share salary info, can all be happy that they're all above average. If they start sharing salary, half will be below average and probably pretty pissed off. The people who benefit, are people who are generally happy as they are. Would you like to know how much money your neighbours have? Why should it matter?
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  Wow, this has got to be the best comment I've ever read. Really deep bro.

fleitz 11y ago

Where is the data? Or at least a summation of it? What was the discrepancy? Was it adjusted for experience?

icedchai 11y ago

This is nice and all, but where is a link to the actual spreadsheet?

paulhauggis 11y ago

This is exactly what happens: jealousy and people thinking that they somehow deserve the money more than the person making more...blaming of on "sexism"

throwaway345r 11y ago

Collecting evidence is the right way to approach situations like this. However, when the position is so politically entrenched, extra care _must_ be taken so that opponents cannot dismiss the data due to poor collection practices. Unfortunately, that care was not taken in this case, and of course, you see opponents dismissing the data. The worst part is that this effort may actually prevent proper data collection in the future: "remember what happened last time we did that?"

aswdeffr 11y ago

Googler here on a throwaway. I personally know Erica and followed her career. it is quite frankly bizarre to see her biting back against Google given the opportunities she was given. Erica was a tech stop employee, which is Google's help desk. in terms of technical ability, hiring standards for tech stop are lower than for SRE, where she ended up. every non-erica tech stopper, including me, who wants to transfer into the technical side of the org is required to pass a full suite of interviews, same as an outside candidate. it would be obvious from examining her submit history that Erica is not really meeting this bar. and yet a door was opened into SRE somehow. she stayed a few months in SRE, underperformed, and spent a lot of time ranting on internal platforms. again, this is verifiable because commits at Google are public. she chose to join a team of about 50% women working under a female director, so I have a hard time believing discrimination is the major factor here. now she is gone and believes she was wronged and is telling everyone so. the similarities to michaelochurch are strong.

omouse 11y ago
>she stayed a few months in SRE, underperformed If that's the case it looks like she wasn't aware of it; especially if you're suggesting a door was opened for her maybe there's some more transparency that's needed in the process. >the similarities to michaelochurch are strong. IIRC he was wronged and he got an apology for it: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/my-name-is-cleared/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/my-name-is-c... Aside from Erica and her situation do you feel the salary sharing was a good thing? Did it negatively impact Google?
- aswdeffr 11y ago
  Nobody really believes michaelochurch received an apology from upper management. the lawsuit potential alone means that even if there was such an apology it would never be in email. he really actually seems to be crazy. I personally really appreciated the spreadsheet because I am anti-capitalist, but I find Erica's version of the facts to be distorted in a self-serving way. I find it hard to believe this would meaningfully impact her career.

vinceyuan 11y ago

It's very common that people with similar skills have different salary, especially in a big company. Big companies have the rules in salary increase rate for the current employees, but are willing to pay more to hire new employees from other companies. For example, A's salary is $5000 and yearly increase rate is 5%. Two years later, A's classmate B is hired. B's salary is $6000. A's salary is $5512.5. Similar thing happened to me. Luckily I got an exceptional salary increase years later. But eventually I left that company after 6-year service.

sctb 11y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9906107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9906107

carrotleads 11y ago
yeah was searching for that as well.. this thread doesn't appear in the HN list and even search didn't throw it up.. Wonder if there is a special type of Shadow banning submissions on HN