7 ms·

Sharing salaries has become a theme here on HN. I'm curious: Why Now? Who is pushing these stories, and who benefits from Open Salaries?

• jemfinch 11y ago
  Employees benefit from open salaries. Employers already know all their employees' salaries.
  • _benedict 11y ago
    Employees may benefit from open salaries, but it is not at all clear they benefit from fixed compensation. By removing any option to bargain, wages can be kept suppressed by appeal to the system that defines them; collective action would be needed to negotiate a rise to everyone's salaries, and this is unappetizing to most. Currently, good negotiators can help to steadily float the compensation of all employees by raising the compensation percentiles across the board (good negotiators are likely spread across companies that compensate at different levels of the spectrum, based on field, ability etc), which are typically used by companies when calculating their opening offers to candidates. So, open salaries are a good thing because they increase the number of good negotiators. Fixed salaries are not, because it eliminates all negotiators.
• shmerl 11y ago
  It's better to ask who doesn't benefit from opens salaries and why is it supposed to be a taboo to begin with?
• edgyswingset 11y ago
  Speaking from the perspective of a recent college graduate: Seeing ranges via Glassdoor has been very helpful in understanding what I'm worth. Of course that data is not going to be completely accurate, but it's a baseline that I find helpful. Although Glassdoor is great, it's not a silver bullet. I want to see an even more open culture about compensation moving forward.
  • infinite8s 11y ago
    Glassdoor is also a lower-bound...
• joelrunyon 11y ago
  It seems to be a trend over the last 2 years. Not sure why, but it could be in reaction against the anti-employee practices google/apple & co were engaged in: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/judge-oks-415-million-no-poaching-payout-to-apple-google-employees/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/judge-oks-415-mil...
• rayiner 11y ago
  > who benefits from Open Salaries? Almost everyone? Except slick talkers and employers.
  • dman 11y ago
    This assumes that you live in a low crime environment. Otherwise the increased transparency could easily be used by criminal elements for targeted crimes.
    • skolor 11y ago
      If it's shared in a corporate environment or anonymously, it shouldn't. I generally expect most of the people I work with the be in a +/- 10% band for my "peers", and +10-50% for my immediate management level, which my understanding is pretty accurate from the numbers I've seen.
      • plonh 11y ago
        On the US West Coast, variance is far more than that, unless you circularly define "peers" as people who negotiated the same level/pay as you.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • pconner 11y ago
      You could have just internally open salaries
      • dman 11y ago
        Once you have a widely available list expecting it to stay private is optimistic imo.
    • harryh 11y ago
      The value of the stuff in your house is almost certainly in the same band as everyone else on the block.
• MarkPNeyer 11y ago
  > who benefits from Open Salaries anyone negotiating for salary. you get paid for what you can negotiate, and when you don't have a lot of information to act on, it's hard to negotiate well.
• tolmasky 11y ago
  I don't know about recently, but this has always been an obvious way to keep salaries low. If you restrict the information people have, then of course you can screw some of them over. Its in corporation's best interest to create taboos around salary so you feel more ashamed of being ripped off than angry for being ripped off. This has already played itself out with price tags. Back when buying things was a personal negotiation process, it was possible to rip some people off while you had to work to get a good deal. This of course continues today with cars. However, its incredibly hard to charge people different prices at a grocery store when all prices are public. So too it would be very difficult to underpay someone if salaries were public.
  • morgante 11y ago
    The flip side of that is that it's possible for some employees to get very high salaries which companies wouldn't be willing to offer if all salaries are public.
    • tolmasky 11y ago
      When I worked for a big company, there were people I was absolutely OK with making a big salary. Some people were just absolute superstars and everyone knew they were awesome for the team. Of course, I have no idea what they made. What would actually be harder however is to give underserving people larger salaries. This already happens in a fuzzy way now right: most everyone understands that their boss makes more money. We don't know exactly how much of course, but its "understood". If we transitioned to a place where people who are doing amazing work also make more money, I think there'd be no problem at all.
      • morgante 11y ago
        The problem is that performance is much fuzzier than salary data. If you're not working directly with someone and if you don't have a great handle on what business metrics are, it can be very hard to understand why they're producing so much more value than you. This effect can be even more distorted when people start irrationally factoring in years of experience. If salaries were public, you'd definitely start to see people who have put in their 10 years gripe about newcomers earning way more than them (often justifiably). It also penalizes good negotiators, which might be a socially positive thing but I certainly wouldn't like it.
• Lazare 11y ago
  > Who is pushing these stories HN readers. > who benefits from Open Salaries? Employees.
• geofft 11y ago
  I can see a world in which open salaries benefit both employers in aggregate and employees in aggregate. (Intuitively, this shouldn't be surprising; more information leads to a more efficient market.) Open salaries have the effect of making it easier for people to ask for numbers close to the mean, and harder to ask for numbers far from them. Obviously this benefits employees currently making lower numbers. But also, if there are companies paying their "10x" programmers huge salaries because they're worried about them jumping ship, open salary data from other companies helps push back on that, which saves the company money (that could be used to fund paying everyone else more). Companies that don't do heavy amounts of recruiting don't have a good sense of what competitive salaries are, because they aren't regularly getting indirect information from candidates who negotiate. Open salary info helps these companies pay closer to the true competitive salary, which prevents them from losing good candidates without risking overspending. This is definitely good for the company, but it's also good for employees who have a fairer choice of jobs at fairer salaries. Closed salaries are a great way to maintain the status quo. There is some Prisoners' Dilemma-ish behavior where one company opening salaries alone probably gets them a particularly bad result in the short term, so the clever thing to do is to exert social pressure for everyone to cooperate.
• Nadya 11y ago
  The same group of people trying to drag us all to the lowest common demonitator. The same people who don't want parents reading to their children because it gives that child an advantage over children who's parents don't have time to read to the child. [0] [0] http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/parents-reading-to-kids-blasted-as-unfair/ http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/parents-reading-to-kids-blasted-a...
  • dragonwriter 11y ago
    > The same people who don't want parents reading to their children because it gives that child an advantage over children who's parents don't have time to read to the child. Er, the WND article you cite to support the existence of such people greatly distorts the ABC source article [0] it cites, where the quote it takes out of context is not supporting an argument that parents shouldn't read to the their children as it presents it (and, in fact, is a joke -- a "quip", in the words of the source -- made by the speaker before being followed by: "We should accept that lots of stuff that goes on in healthy families—and that our theory defends—will confer unfair advantage".) The philosopher isn't arguing against parents reading to their children, he's discussing work he and a colleague are doing to construct a principled philosophical theory in favor of the family, including the particular activity that WND wants to miscast the article as presenting him as opposed to. Its always a good idea to have some skepticism when reviewing a news report, and to follow through and check sources (especially when they are linked so it is nearly zero-effort to do so.) Perhaps particularly with a site with as strong an ideological bent as WND posting something that fits so neatly into an ideological stereotype as that article. [0] http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/new-family-values/6437058 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszon...
    • Nadya 11y ago
      I seem to have been misunderstood due to the bluntness of my reply. But even your article admits that these people exist in the opening paragraphs. >So many disputes in our liberal democratic society hinge on the tension between inequality and fairness: between groups, between sexes, between individuals, and increasingly between families. The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time My bad for selecting a shitty source - I pay absolutely no attention to the political slants of different news agencies - but my point stands: people are making these arguments. They will argue for "equality" by dragging anyone above them down to their level: the LCD. I can easily see how my parent post could be misconstrued as arguing Swift is making this argument. My argument is that he is investigating this issue largely because people exist that are making these arguments.