This article seems to basically say its already illegal to prohibit employees from discussing pay (NLRA 1935) and it is certainly illegal to pay someone less based on race or sex (Equal Pay Act, and others) but the solution to wage discrimination is pass more laws that make it illegal-er.
I have a hard time buying this argument. If you are an employer despicable enough to systematically be paying women less just for being women, I don't think another redundant law is going to change your behavior.
This seems like a feel good exercise. People still buy drugs? Pass another law that says trafficking drugs is super duper illegal. Another heinous murder? Make it extra illegal to murder someone. In fact, make it extra illegal to murder someone with a specific type of weapon.
This stuff doesn't seem to matter. Drug dealers know they face stiff penalties if caught. People who have decided to murder another human really don't care if the penalties are higher if they use a gun versus a tire iron. And, misogynist employers aren't going to be swayed by yet another law that says treat all people the same regardless of sex, for reals this time.
If you are an employer despicable enough to systematically be paying women less just for being women, I don't think another redundant law is going to change your behavior.
Women don't earn about 18% less than men (OECD median, 2008)[0] because a small minority of employers pay women almost nothing, but because the vast majority of employers pay women (or blacks, or handicapped people) slightly less. Just like laws that prohibit killing don't target psychopaths, laws that prohibit discrimination don't target the KKK; they (should) aim to change the societal norms that your average Joe McAverage conforms to. It's the distinction between institutionalized discrimination and the more intimate personal type.
18% number is bullshit debunked many times. When you control for occupation, working hours, etc between male and female - the difference in pay is only 2-3%
I have no idea what the right number is. But as the article points out, part of the issue is precisely that traditionally female jobs tend to pay less because they are traditionally female. Here's one apparent example of that in action:
"One of my lecturers at university once presented us with this thought exercise: why are doctors so highly paid, and so well-respected? Our answers were predictable. Because they save lives, their skills are extremely important, and it takes years and years of education to become one. All sound, logical reasons. But these traits that doctors possess are universal. So why is it, she asked, that doctors in Russia are so lowly paid? Making less than £7,500 a year, it is one of the lowest paid professions in Russia, and poorly respected at that. Why is this?"
The answer? It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that in Russia, doctors have been a traditionally female profession, unlike western Europe and the USA. The low pay and low status of medicine in Russia appears to be directly tied to its identity as a "women's career" there.
Hmm. It's a bit suspicious that communism/socialism isn't part of the argument here.
Seems pretty obvious to me that in a free market, doctors would always be highly paid as they take years to train and everyone, rich or poor, needs them. But in a non-free market where they can't demand their true price, who would want to be a doctor? I'd expect that is a much bigger factor towards it being low status than the fact that it's female dominated.
Russia hasn't been communist in that sense for decades. There are plenty of professions there that have become exceedingly wealthy in that time, but doctors have not. So to make your case, you'd need to demonstrate 1) that specific ongoing regulatory burdens in Russia have served to suppress physician pay, and 2) that the persistence of those particular burdens in Russia's era of deregulation is not linked to gender bias.
Your "seems pretty obvious to me" is <em>only</em> valid if you assume a priori that there are no distortions to the pure, free market outcome due to irrationality on the part of market participants. Systematic gender bias would be a clear example of irrationality (which I assume you'd agree with even if you didn't believe it were actually at work here). You may not mean it this way, but your phrasing sounds to me like you're assuming your conclusion.
Russia hasn't been communist for a while but almost all the doctors are still state employees. As for distortions, can you think of any other cases where the distortion is massive and the situation doesn't involve government subsidies?
Regardless, I'm not going to go digging around for evidence. My point is that the post above and the linked article did not even address the socialism aspect, which is a huge warning flag.
It's not a national study, no, and Utah has been cited as being one of the top 5 states in the gender pay gap so this is admittedly higher than many other states. It also states that this gap remains at about the same amount (66 to 72 cents per dollar) regardless of industry, education level, or personal choices (eg, raising children or being married).
I don't believe that study is well controlled. In fact, some of the claims are either contradictory or just don't make sense.
A 2009 study sponsored by the US Department of Labor, which analysed about 50 studies on the gender pay gap, concluded that "The differences in raw wages may be
almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.[1]
The 69% number is simply a census comparison of all men and women that work full time. It doesn't take into account position, education, experience, or even hours worked beyond 35hrs.
When it later talks about 'the gap' remaining after accounting for other variables. It means a smaller gap and it cites different studies. It just doesn't provide the 'after controlling for choices' value, only that one exists.
This article[1] links to various sources which cite different values. Of those, this report[2] (research funded by US Department of Labour) states in it's summary (page 35);
"Specifically, variables have been developed to represent career interruption among workers with specific gender, age, and number of children. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent."
My personal opinion is that there may be a slight gap, research that conservatively accounts for factors rather than assuming the difference is 100% gender-pay do tend to put it below 10%, however there just isn't enough hard evidence to account for all the variables which may cause such a gap, so finding an accurate value isn't possible. Each side of the debate will always find the most attractive figures to support their agenda, as can be seen by people quoting 20%+ raw wage gap analysis that doesn't account for difference in time worked etc, and others misreading statistics to say that it's lower than reported.
4.8 to 7.1% is quite a bit more significant than your initial claim of 2 to 3%
edit - also, how do you claim to have any kind of confidence in the accuracy of your own estimate, while simultaneously arguing that reaching any sort of accurate value is impossible?
It was someone else who made that initial claim of 2%, however if you read the full summary of my second link, they admit to only accounting for factors they were able to measure. So additional factors they didn't account for, may have influence towards the divide (other than gender-pay), and may account for any number that could further reduce that 4.8-7.1%. I'm not saying it is as low as 2-3%, but its certainly possible.
It was someone else who made that initial claim of 2%
Sorry, complete failure to pay attention on my part.
Though as to your other point, unmeasured factors could push the figure either way, so if you allow the error bars to go as low as 2% purely on a hunch, then you should also consider that it could be up to 9.9%, if trying to work out any sort of reasonable policy.
Here are two blog posts with summaries and good links to various studies (I know these are bad sources, but they make the point and were easy to find).
The 77 cents on the dollar myth actively shifts attention away from the real issues with gender roles and western culture in favour of a simple outdated narrative that isn't going to help anyone.
It's a useful shibboleth though, the people using it are either well meaning but uninformed or interested more in attention/marketing than actual equality.
There's a case currently in front of the employment courts here in NZ which is confronting this directly. A group of aged-care nurses (working in retirement homes etc.) have made a claim to the employment court that (a) it's a female-dominated vocation, (b) it's lower paid than other similar vocations (by demands, skills, qualifications etc) and (c) that (a) and (b) are linked.
The case has made it through preliminary hearings and is now proceeding to a higher court; if they win a massive precedent will be set, allowing for claims of gender discrimination at the level of entire industries and vocations.
So whom should the nurses sue to recover their theoretical damages in that case?
If I decide to groom my dog myself, can I expect a lawsuit down the road for my non-consumption of professional dog grooming services if any dog groomer is a member of any minority class? After all, you can't be sure that I'm just a cheapskate who likes washing my dog; I might be racist/classist/sexist.
In case it's not clear, I view the decision to consume in a free market to be a free choice and not subject to judicial review.
A solution is to just make everyone's tax reports public. The worst that happens is you get tasteless websites ranking who earns and owns most in your area. Really, that's it. Norway tried it and it got a little too tasteless for our politicians, so now it's a government website thing where anyone you view can see that you've viewed them.
These are the tax statistics for 2013. The table at the bottom is the "top score". Position and name on the left with income, tax and wealth to the right, in that order.
> A solution is to just make everyone's tax reports public.
Hell no.
I don't want to be targeted be advertisers, penalised by insurers, and become a target for robbery because I have my personal information spread around for everyone to see.
There's a lot of personal shit on your tax return. Far more than is even apparent. It can also expose your side business to your employer which could cause issues.
I'm all for salary transparency, but tax returns are pretty private forms that contain an extremely high amount of PI, and can be data mined to expose even more implicit forms of PI.
Criminals and marketers already know how rich you are based on where you live. Published tax forms will have no effect on your probability of being robbed.
It argue tax forms are private, but that's what's at issue here. Many societies think this should be public information. It goes a long way towards preventing graft.
The fact is that most rich people live without showing off. They enjoy having the freedom to do in their lives what they want but they do not want other people kidnapping their children or blackmailing them. Or just people behaving different with them because of the money.
You know Bill Gates used to park his car like everybody else in MS, until it became impossible for him to park without having 1 or 2 people ask him for money(on the tens of thousand of dollars each time).
Or ask me. I am not Bill Gates, but for people in my environment I have "made it".
Just putting my name in my HN account will significantly change how people react to my comments.
I don't know what Norway's tax system is like, but there's too much detail in a US tax return. For one thing, it would tell my employer things about my family situation and spouse's employment, that might affect my bargaining power.
For another, since I run a small business, it would reveal my sales volume, which is probably the most important piece of information for someone trying to decide whether or not to compete with me.
Do you mean tax reports, or just the taxable income? At least in Finland only your taxable incomes after deductions are public information, which a decent compromise between transparency and privacy.
Wow. How does that mesh with your infamous "Janteloven"? (a common piece of North European culture where people tend to despise others who visibly do better than average - not just money btw)
In Canada, all public sector employees making more than $100,000 have their names and salaries published by the Government. But they don't adjust for inflation. In another decade or two, literally all public employees will have their salaries published.
In the US, all public sector employees have their salaries/income reported regardless of how much they make. My wife is a nurse at a public university hospital and has her salary published for anyone to see.
As a woman, I'll repeat: paying women less for being women is not despicable.
That doesn't mean it's good. It's bad. But it's normal and there are a lot of social forces at work. Good, well-meaning people have all sorts of logical reasons to pay women or minorities or handicapped people less. You don't have to be evil to participate in a sucky system. We all do, even the virtuous ones. So, open your eyes and work to change things.
As long as we frame bias as something only despicable people have, we will not be able to change anything. After all, we're not despicable, so we can't be biased! Yay. False. Bias is something good people are still steeped in. It's how humans operate.
Transparency in pay is a way in which good people can be confronted by their bias. In any one situation, you can argue that a woman deserves less (rationally and justly -- just change the rules for evaluation so she loses [1]). If via transparency and use of data you notice that women are consistently paid less, and that your evaluation criteria keep changing, you can realize your implicit bias and change your actions.
Work that involves in-person meetings with customers who are known to not like minorities. (If they're paid on commission, this will happen even without the employer actively deciding anything.)
If that particular minority is strongly correlated to cultural values that clash strongly with the organizational culture. (And said values clash would likely result in slower career progression even if the minority status is deliberately ignored.)
There exist conceivable situations where minority (or other protected) status could actually directly affect job performance, or be correlated to something that affects job performance.
Lets say you're hiring a freelancer and you take bids. The lowest bid is from a member of a historically disadvantaged minority, and the reason their bid is lower is because as a member of that group discrimination makes it harder for them to find work. A good, well-meaning person might still accept the bid.
I think many, men and women, are still biased against women because they believe they are catty and dramatic or are afraid of increased legal issues (lawsuits). These are obviously not reality either and it too sucks.
Maternity leave means that women effectively cost more than men for the same amount of work, in the long run and on average. This can be mitigated by laws, but cannot be eliminated without addressing the underlying social issues. And no, mandatory paternity leave doesn't eliminate it, as there are more single mothers than single fathers.
The logic is simple. Companies survive by making a profit. In order to do so, they attempt to cut costs for a given amount of work done. Currently, females on average end up spending more time on paid leave. Hence, there ends up being a bias.
And I'm not sure if it is one that can be fixed through legislation. Attempts in that vein tend to be counterproductive at best. It's more of a social issue.
If maternity and paternity leave is leave without pay (unless one elects or has to use available accrued paid time off) then it shouldn't matter. Except having to plan around a short term vacancy can be an undesirable problem for a manager or company No matter the position goes vacant for that period of time or if a temp worker is hired to fill it, you will have a loss in productivity.
If maternity and paternity leave is without pay it's still advantageous for the company to hire men over women, as they will have to hire temps more often on average for maternity leave with a women over a man.
And temps generally are worse productivity-wise than an experienced worker.
How do you objectively measure the productivity of a programmer?
Or of a secretary / office assistant / whatever they're called these days (the person who's job is to make life easier for other people, so that said other people can get more of their own work done)?
If it was possible to objectively measure productivity, there wouldn't be any of these huge arguments about pay fairness.
You assume that, innate talents being equal, women are equal to men in terms of productivity. I mean, this is the stated intention of the Feminist movement in a nutshell, yes?
And then you take a look at the other stats (as I mentioned, females take more leave. And females are more likely to have a child and stop working [1]. And there are the liability issues, ironically caused by the Feminist movement.)
And so - equal productivity, but less hours for the amount of money you pay. It's a simple calculation, with the result that, if the above assumptions are true, women should, from an economic point of view, be paid less than men on average.
At which point, if you are still arguing that wage should be equal from economic terms, you've gone beyond saying women are equal to men and saying that women are better then men - and that is an entirely different ball of wax.
Given that employees only stay for a couple years on average anyway these days, you're far more likely to lose either a male or female employee to a job switch than to lose a female employee to maternity leave. It's a highly overestimated risk. Not to mention extremely unfair to women who don't have kids.
Given that employees only stay for a couple years on average anyway these days
All 8 people on my team have been around longer than that. I've been there 8 years, and the other senior person has been around slightly longer. Our boss has been with the company for I think 17+ years. (And our old boss, who took the other half when the team got split in a reorg, has been with the company for 30+ years.)
.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm says: """The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.6 years in January 2014, unchanged from January 2012"""
"""In January 2014, median employee tenure (the point at which half of all workers had more tenure and half had less tenure) for men was 4.7 years, unchanged from January 2012. For women, median tenure in January 2014 was 4.5 years, about unchanged from January 2012. Among men, 30 percent of wage and salary workers had 10 years or more of tenure with their current employer, compared with 28 percent for women. (See tables 1 and 3.)"""
If maternity leave really is a large cost, then the reason not to pay them less is because we all have a stake in the healthy propagation of the species. Women bare the children, but that doesn't mean they ought to bare the entire burden of it.
Yes, I agree with you. I made the assumption that the state would likely end up collecting through payrolls or something like that. Perhaps a tax credit to businesses for employees losing hours to parenting and a tax increase on the other employees.
If women stopped getting pregnant then maternity would cease to be a societal cost, however the economy might get a little screwed as the human race dies off.
Parents are your most productive employees. They are the only ones who are making more employees.
If the state pays then the companies are paying anyway, and it is still a spread cost as long as anti-discrimination law is being enforced. The continued existence of the species through childbirth is something that organizations should really factor into their budgets. Is not exactly a difficult cost to foresee as people have been doing it for quite a while now.
>If the state pays then the companies are paying anyway
Yes, but it's better for the state to pay it so that because if companies pay maternity leaves completely, the cost is not distributed evenly.
>The continued existence of the species through childbirth is something that organizations should really factor into their budgets.
I disagree, that should be the responsibility of the state and individual families.
>Is not exactly a difficult cost to foresee as people have been doing it for quite a while now.
It's a cost that is easy to foresee if your company is large. If the company consists of 1-2 employees, the company can go bankrupt from the costs. I've talked to an entrepreneur whose company actually did go bankrupt from maternity leave costs.
I take it that this entrepreneur thought that group insurance wasn't worth bothering with.
edit - I am not against the state picking up the tab, by the way. I just think it is one of those costs that could be paid either way and I have limited sympathy for employers who complain that they couldn't possibly be expected to plan for the eventuality that some of their employees might become parents.
Eh, way in the future though. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. Each individual company is better off discriminating, but ultimately it causes a depletion in resources (i.e. employees) long-term.
Companies regularly last long enough to try and employ the children of their initial employees. 20 years is only getting into medium-scale planning in large amounts of industries.
Women are not objectively less productive workers. Men die earlier--insurance companies have figured this out so why don't companies pay them less as a result? They're going to die sooner, that's a significant risk to the company, they should be paid less than women. Men are more likely to engage in risky behavior, more likely to have anger management issues, more likely to provoke harrassment cases, all reasons to pay them less because they impose a higher risk on the company.
But for some reason you want to conveniently ignore all these facts and instead point to maternity leave and say that's why we should pay women less? Think again.
But further, if your weren't trolling, the answer to your question is that even if the assumption were true, to pay them less would be sociopathic. That's why it's wrong. Again, think.
If disabled people are actually, objectively, less productive workers, a drain on society, why is it wrong for societies to euthanize them?
Men die earlier, yes. You have a point there. [2][3] says that ~90999/100000 males survive to age 60 and ~94194/100000 females survive to age 60. That's a difference of ~3195/100000, or ~3.2%.
However, the question becomes if men retire earlier.
And the answer is no. [1] Women retire earlier than men on average (at least in Canada. Don't have stats handy for anywhere else, unfortunately). And that's measured in years, more than compensating for the above.
Regarding disabled people, a simple answer is that society as a whole would be against it, as there is enough of a chance of any individual person becoming disabled that it is in their best interest to not allow such a law.
And making an argument from an economic as opposed to a moralistic point of view does not make one a sociopath. As you may not have noticed, I never mentioned my moral point of view on the matter, as it's irrelevant.
Men at all age levels have higher insurance rates than women. This means they are riskier employees than women and if the reason women are being paid less is purely economic then the situation ought to be reversed and men should be paid less because of the higher risk. So clearly the reason is not economic but is a systemic bias.
Yes, making an argument involving decisions that affect the life chances of human beings and hiding behind "economic theory" is sociopathic.
>Men at all age levels have higher insurance rates than women. This means they are riskier employees than women and if the reason women are being paid less is purely economic then the situation ought to be reversed and men should be paid less because of the higher risk.
That assumes that only insurance-based risk affects economics.
This is less of an issue now than it used to be; most companies offer Paternity leave for the same amount of time these days. This amortizes the cost across all employees.
Maybe to some extent, but not fully:
- Not every birth has an active father involved.
- The physical effects of pregnancy will will likely require the mother to take more time off.
- Not all men will want to take extended paternity leave. You can try to force them, but that has its own issues, and makes single men more attractive employees.
Mandating that companies pay employees not to work puts them in an awkward position where they're incentivized to discriminate. If government wants to encourage people to have kids, then government should pay parents directly.
Yep. Even though I had support from my employer, I took less paternity leave at the time of birth than I thought I would. Many parents find they want a break from the baby after the first few weeks, and enjoy returning to work.
Men take less paternity leave on average than women take maternity leave.
Not to mention that in the case of single births, you'll end up with the women taking maternity leave while the men don't. And with marriage stats the way they are...
Which means that it's still advantageous for the company to hire men over women. Amortizing costs doesn't magically make the cost go away, it just hides it.
Depends on locale. In Quebec, men pretty much always take their paternity leave (at least 3 weeks, up to 5) and most of the maternity leave can be transferred to the father (up to 25-32 weeks, leaving the mother the minimum of 15-18 weeks) as well. That last part is uncommon but it does happen when the mother is the couple's highest earner (say a partner in a legal firm or a doctor) since the mat leave benefits are capped.
Incorrect. Yes, Quebec has less of a split than elsewhere in Canada. However it's 97% of females take paid leave versus 72% of males, and 48.4 weeks paid leave on average versus 5.5 weeks. That's not exactly on par. And I don't know in what universe 76% is considered "pretty much always".
And it doesn't even cover the case when the mother and father split before birth.
> And I'm not sure if it is one that can be fixed through legislation
Well, one think the government could do is to cover pay during sick leave, parental leave and child care leave (i.e. when children are sick). This would also benefit startups/new businesses, where employees being sick/pregnant is not just statistics, but can make or break a business.
As having an experienced worker go MIA for months is bad for a company in terms of productivity, and substantially more women take maternity leave than men take paternity leave.
A temp worker is seldom as good at their job as an experienced worker.
Personally, I don't think government should cover things like sick leave, but that is another matter entirely. (In general, the larger the system, the less incentive for any one person in the system to keep the system as a whole running smoothly.)
In the lifetime of a woman, how many maternity leaves does she take? On average it would be twice and very few women I know have taken more than 8 weeks. The way you put makes it sound like women take 6 months+ time off and everyone else has to pay for it.
The way I put it makes it sound like women take 6+ months time off because, oddly enough, women take 6+ months time off. The average in Canada is 39.6 weeks paid leave. Note that that figure is for children aged 1-3, how many weeks paid leave did their mothers take. The average per women will be higher.
The plural of anecdote is not data, and you are no exception.
It is very likely. My wife is a very well respected Engineer in her field and when she was asked to come out of retirement, she retired to start a farm and enjoy the outdoors, they called her back and made what I thought was a very low offer. She was going to accept it because to her it was a work from home gig and was near what she used to make. I said no and helped her negotiate an additional 30% in her rate that she would have simply left on the table because she didn't feel comfortable asking for more.*
*Yes, anecdotal evidence but I hear it from her and her female engineering friends a lot. To the point I've offered to help any of them negotiate their contracts in the future.
I agree with squozzer, you should consider expanding your activities beyond folks who know you personally.
I really like my work and I work a lot. I have worked in early-mid stage startup and now am working with a pre-series A stage startup. I have never shied away from asking for more responsibilities or climbing up the management chain. I am generally known as the more assertive person in the organization. But when it comes to compensation, I cannot bring it up. Not sure if it has to do with being a female.
It would be ideal if there was a 'go to' person who can push me more in negotiating for better compensation.
You may have found a calling. I hope you consider expanding the scope of your activities beyond your wife's friends. What would make it worth your while?
> I hear it from her and her female engineering friends a lot.
Well, the two variables your subjects have in common is being engineers as well as being female. Personally (being a male engineer), I'd say being a bad negotiator has just as much to do with being an engineer as being a woman (except if women engineers are even worse negotiators than I am).
Its even more than that. Our cultural biases lead us to perceive the same traits (e.g. assertive) differently. Assertive males are perceived as confident ans positively while assertive females are perceived as bitchty and negatively.
Just sharing your compensation with your co workers goes a long way toward solving this problem. But it is a social more to not share this information.
There's a very rational economic reason why some people are paid less than others for the same job. Leverage. Since WWII, women entered the work force in large numbers _because they were willing to work for less than their male counterparts._ So what was an opportunity for women once has become discrimination. Rightfully so. But it's important to remember how we actually got here. Equality of opportunity often translates into inequalities of outcome for reasons that are neither good nor efficient. So, yeah, sometimes the law can tip the scales to fix this. And that is not a bad thing.
One of the strongest benefits of salary transparency is the equalizing effect on salaries for women and minorities (and nerds who have trouble aggressively negotiating their salary!)
You can also join an engineering union. They can usually tell you what salary is common for your CV. Some may also negotiate on your behalf. All offer legal counsel. Depends on where you live, of course.
> If you are an employer despicable enough to systematically be paying women less just for being women, I don't think another redundant law is going to change your behavior.
It might if your employees start suing you and costing you money.
Is it that women get underpaid or is there more to it?
Women and men should also tell every woman they know to negotiate their pay. The first offer is not something anyone has to take, and while this may be self evident here, it isnt everywhere.
Women engineers should be encouraged to learn how to negotiate salary themselves, or from a mentor. They should also be encouraged to view salary negotiation as a positive part of their soft skills, rather than a necessary evil.
I think it is women in all fields. I was talking to a lady friend about a job offer she got and advised she negotiate her salary. From her response it sounded as if I was trying to get her to loose the opportunity.
It really is true, because you can say anything you want (or nothing) about the reasons why you did it, and get away with it. You have to be a total moron not to get away with it.
This is terrible and unjustifiable, but that is how it is.
This is entirely a matter of what the law says, and in a discussion about adapting laws, it is a very weak argument.
If the law says you cannot lie about your reasons and that you must have them, then there is a means to enforce it. I mean, I could say I didn't rob a bank and get away with it due to lax laws and inadequate technology, but that doesn't mean it is impossible to protect banks from robbery. It means you reform the processes.
For instance, if employers went through independently regulated agencies to conduct hiring/firing/pay, then they wouldn't be able to make decisions like that and get away with it.
I'd love the processes to be reformed. But the fact remains that the law has no way to know your reasons for firing or not hiring someone as long as you tell them something vaguely plausible. You'd have to be an idiot.
Didn't everyone work this issue out when they first entered the work force?
Soon after I got my first job out of college my employer told me it was "not a good idea to talk about your compensation" with my co-workers. You know how they say "consider the source" when you get information? Why would my employer not want me to share my compensation with my co-workers? _Because it benefits them_ if their workforce is oblivious about who is getting paid what. Make no mistake: sharing compensation information freely among your colleagues is, to most employers, the thin edge of a long wedge towards organized labor.
Personally, I would do it more often if people weren't so freaked out about it. So the bosses have waged a good campaign: it's a social norm.
If you know the salary of the people you're directly working with, things can get awkward. One alternative is to discuss salary with people who are sufficiently distant from your daily work but are expected to be making the same amount as you. For large companies, this would be people in different divisions who have the same title and years of experience. For small companies, you will probably need to talk to people in other companies.
In my first job out of college, I knew the range of salaries people were earning for entry level software positions because I had discussed this with friends. I negotiated a 10% raise to my first company's starting salary because I used my friends' salaries as a benchmark.
If you know the salary of the people you're directly working with, things can get awkward. One alternative is to discuss salary with people who are sufficiently distant from your daily work
What about things like everyone writing down how much they make and putting it in a hat? Everyone gets all the numbers and how they compare with everyone else, but doesn't know which other number goes with which person.
Honest question: Why is it awkward? I think if people dig down deep and think about the answer to this question, there is no reason for this. Because nobody is ever paid what they're "worth."
Assume for a moment that you don't need the money. Would you show up for your job tomorrow if they stopped paying you? If the answer is "no", I sincerely hope you are looking for a job that the answer could be "yes". If you aren't, then I assert you are in the process of tacit self-immolation.
> Would you show up for your job tomorrow if they stopped paying you? If the answer is "no", I sincerely hope you are looking for a job that the answer could be "yes". If you aren't, then I assert you are in the process of tacit self-immolation.
I haven't yet found a job that pays me to sit around and read a lot, or spend time with my girlfriend, or take long walks in the woods to think, or any of the other things I would actually do whether I got paid or not.
Let me know if you know where I can find one. It's not that I don't enjoy my work. I just don't enjoy it enough to do on any kind of regular basis without getting paid. Maybe one day I'll somehow come into money and never have to work again, but otherwise I'll be spending the rest of my life in self-immolation.
I guess I should feel a little envious of people that enjoy their job so much they'd do it without getting paid, but most of the time I can't muster it up. Most work most people do just seems so dreary to me.
We have a framing issue. (vo·ca·tion: late Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin vocatio(n-), from vocare "to call.") I like to read, take long walks, talk to my spouse in an unplanned, sporadic way because by their very nature, those things are not really "vocations". This is about what CALLS you to work, not about what's necessarily pleasurable or a pastime.
No, I understand that. What I'm saying is that I have no "calling" and do not expect to ever have a calling. I do development work because it makes me money, I am very good at it, and solving solvable problems feels nice, but if you dropped 10 million in my lap I doubt I would ever touch a line of code again.
Barring the vicissitudes of fortune, I'd spend the rest of my life relaxing, spending time with people I like, going about reading the same kinds of books I do now, perhaps traveling a bit, and perhaps if I was really bored I'd sit down and write a book of insights unlikely to be interesting or original. I wouldn't feel called to do anything.
Heck, if someone offered me 10k more to do some other non-development job and it wasn't more strenuous and didn't require more time out of my day, I'd do that. If they paid me to go to school and learn something I know next-to-nothing about like, I don't know, biochemistry, that'd be fine and I'd be just as happy.
I look around me and I really don't think most other people have a calling either. Maybe I'm wrong. They work because they have to get by, not because they love their work. The HN community (and therefore I assume much of SV in general) seems to me to extraordinary in that regard. Of course there are other people, professions, and communities with a disproportionate amount of those who feel they're called to their profession. But overall I think it's the exception rather than the rule.
So if I said I'd pay you x more amount than what you're currently making, to don a rubber smock and pack pickles for a living for the rest of your life, is it just a question of what x is?
Yes, absolutely. Indeed I was slightly happier back when I was doing menial physical labor, since it left my mind free to think, and when I got home, I was physically tired but not mentally exhausted like I am from days of coding binges and context switches.
But since X is probably about ~25k (which is what I'm shooting for as a developer anyway within the next 5 years), and I already make more than the average pickle-packer, I don't think that's going to happen. :)
Thanks for that clarification. Yeah I could never do it. Having a job like that would kill my spirit no matter how much money I made. It would be the ultimate "take the blue pill" decision I could make.
The concept of a vocation is a fairly recent invention, mostly arising out of the Protestant brand of Christianity. Work has been disdained throughout most of history [1]. Therefore, I would say that liking your work or finding your calling are not things that everyone can even do or has to do. The idea of a vocation strikes me more as intellectual rationalizations arising in tandem with the current economic mode of life.
That's very interesting. I suspect folks like Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tze, Socrates, Murasaki Shikibu and their ilk knew what a "calling" was long before there was a word for it.
I agree with GP - that's quite anachronistic. I can't speak for Murasaki Shikibu, since I haven't read her, but I think the idea is quite discordant with the published thoughts of the others you mention. Socrates, for example, might have believed he personally had a specific purpose in the world, but he would have understood that in a very different way than our conception of a vocation.
Really. Vocation is analogous with the notion of 'personally having a specific purpose in the world', according to the dictionary's first definition of the word.
> I haven't yet found a job that pays me to sit around and read a lot [...]
Then I contend that you haven't found a place of employment that values you as an individual and just views you as a cog in a giant machine -- in which case: leave as soon as you can! If possible, start your own business.
(Btw, there are places that value individuals, but they are alas few and far between :(. )
I don't understand what you mean. A business has to produce output that others are willing to pay for. Sitting around reading and spending time with a girlfriend are not things most other people will pay you for. It's easy to value a person as an individual - it's quite another thing to take money out of your pocket and give to everyone you 'value' because they are individuals.
Oh, sorry. I'm from a tradition where "read a lot" means expanding your mind. (I'm assuming you're not reading pointless romance novels, and such.) My response was predicated on the idea that your employer was not valuing intellectual/cultural education.
(If that doesn't apply, then I'm doubly sorry.)
EDIT: I now realize this comment may sound ridiculously smug, but I'm not sure what to do about that. I do realize that I am privileged (by location of birth, etc.), FWIW.
I am presently reading the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What employers can you think of who would pay me to read that? And when I finish, and I next want to re-read Nietzsche are they going to pay me for that too? What about when I need a break from serious reading and spend a few weeks reading sci-fi or fantasy? These things are simply not of value to any employer I know, and I don't see why they would want to or should pay me for it.
FWIW, many thinktanks and research consultancies pay you to sit around and read a lot, and occasionally even take long walks in the woods to think. There are often pretty steep barriers to entry - they usually recruit out of the Ivy League or top liberal arts colleges, and it usually helps to know someone there if you want to get in - but those jobs do exist.
They also require you to think and read about whatever their focus is. There are probably few think tanks that match up to everyone's favorite reading materials. There's no getting around the fact that 99.999% of us will have to be paid daily to do something we wouldn't choose to spend the same amount of free time on.
I'm a programmer, at work and in my free time, and I reasonably enjoy things I work on. Still, if I had enough money, I would quit practically whichever job there exists on this planet and go work on my own projects (possibly except if I was working for SpaceX or CERN). I would work on open source projects that strive to create a better world, such as Rust, I would study and work on creating AI or at least "smart" systems that could enable humanity to live better by automating agriculture, waste management, electricity generation, ... Unfortunately, any of these things is a multi-year, high-stakes project that I'm in no position to undertake given my current net worth, hence I'm a wage-worker.
Honestly I think it is a bit sad that you cannot imagine that a person would prefer to do something other than work, and that the alternative must be to find other work to do. I have other things that I enjoy that are not my job, such as my family and my hobbies. Maybe look into one day finding something you enjoy outside of work.
That's a good point. I guess I feel like most people, given infinite money, would still find something of value to others to do.
I'm biased as I like coding. Even if I didn't need money I'd still code my own projects.
In other words you get 20 million dollars. You quit your job, buy a house, travel the world, but eventually you'll get bored and start doing something. Writing a novel, volunteering, teaching, something that helps others. It's that something that's more than likely something you could get paid for.
I'm open to the idea that maybe many people would just do nothing of value to anyone else. I suppose looking at retired people might be a good pool of data. How many of them are doing nothing of value to anyone but themselves and their family and how many are happy and what's the correlation between the two.
It's not so much about 'worth' but fairness. How would you react if you discovered a coworker doing the same (or inferior) work got paid twice as much as you? You might be getting paid a good above-market wage, but most in that position would become jealous and jaded over time. I don't see any way around that.
I've given up on the social nicety of not discussing pay, especially at my previous employer, but generally as well. I usually lead in with something like "I tend to ask the rude question, and don't answer if you don't want to, but what does that position pay?" So far, I've never had anyone not answer and most of the time it's led to further interesting discussion.
I work for more than a decade now and I still am unsure about what rule to follow. Here are a few things that I have seen happening:
I once believed in transparency about that. I told my salary to a friend I just helped to get hired in the company where I already had a few years of experience. Upon hearing my higher salary, he immediately went to my boss to ask for a raise.
Due to an incredible incompetence of the HR department, I once saw the salary of a lot of different people in the 30 people company I was part of. I was not shocked by the 2-3x that a senior developer was making compared to me. I was shocked to see that our CEO had the highest salary (5x to 6x) for the job he did. That was actually one of the element that made me consider resignation and freelancing.
I think that one of the thing that hiding salaries causes is that it makes it impossible to talk about the cashflow of the company without people being able to compute if they are below or above average (and when the CEO earns the double everyone earns, the average will be pretty high) but it makes it harder for employees to understand what clients are important, what resources are available for a project, and so on.
> I was shocked to see that our CEO had the highest salary (5x to 6x) for the job he did.
At my previous employer, the CEO was doing roughly 20x the average entry level salary. There's a reason why companies don't want employees talking about salaries: because most people would be outraged to hear just how much some do.
I'm in a very similar situation - I have been working for many years, and seen both extremes of salary transparency, but am still unsure about the best approach.
I started out in a very small but rapidly expanding software company, where the founders encouraged everyone (including themselves) to be very open about salaries. This didn't work too badly because most employees were recent graduates and no-one was earning much money. However it did generate some dischord when it became apparent that those from less prestigious universities were getting paid slightly less.
A few years later I was working in a very large corporation, where (like you), HR hadn't secured their data very well, and I got to see details of many thousands of salaries and bonuses, including those of some of the highest paid people in the UK at the time. Without going into too much detail, the remuneration disparities were staggering. I think it is fair to say that it was the sort of company that was prepared to pay as much as necessary and as little as possible. If the scale of inconsistencies were widely known, I would imagine it would have created a fairly toxic working environment.
So in the end it might come down to company size and culture. I can't imagine why a small coffee shop, like in the original article, would want to keep it so secret though.
Generally, agreed, at least the first time. I was being paid.. $17/hr and being billed out at $100/hr. I moved to a company starting at $22/hr, being billed out at $150-$175/hr.
The 'hourly' was just a breakdown of salaried - sometimes worked more than 40hrs, never paid for it. And I also get that people aren't 100% billable, you have to build in downtime to the salary, etc. I get it. But I do know in one year I billed out about 1600 hours at at least $150/hr - asked for a $10k raise, and was denied. So I left.
In some situations since then I appreciate the 'team' model a bit more - that's what I was pitched in my 'no raise' reply. "We're a team, etc" But in this particular project, I was doing 95% of the work. I trained my replacements during my notice, and a month later the client moved over to me anyway, because I literally was the project.
Note to agency companies - don't ever let one large project become the sole domain of one employee. For various reasons, this is not good business.
Well... it was decent, but it was mostly maintenance at that point. Actually, we rebuilt the system in a different platform that was much easier to build and easier to maintain, so within a year there was far less work to do. Worked myself out of a gig, but had a happy client...
That used to bug me. Now I see it as I'm willing to accept less because I don't have to deal with all the business, networking, advertizing, schmoozing, negotiating, etc. Stuff I have no interest in doing.
In other words, yea, I could make 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x more but I'd have way more stress and doing all kinds of stuff I really hate doing. Sometimes it bugs me but then I think am I really willing to put in all that extra effort doing stuff don't want to do and almost always the answer is "no"
What do I gain by sharing my salary with others? What does it cost me? For me, there are moral answers, economical ones as well as hedonistic ones to these questions.
But I know this:
Information is king and it helps to be flexible (abillity to move for a job, ability to start there quickly, ability to be out of a job for weeks/months ...).
I try to do this: advise colleagues that I think should earn more, what to do, what expectations are ok, without destroying team morale and my (selfish) status (knowing that I earn top).
Sometimes CEO/CTO/COO salaries are distorted (e.g. artificially high or low), depending on if they are a significant shareholder and if they are getting dividends or capital gains from stock.
In my opinion salary information should not be kept a secret except on personal request. Openness in pay, responsibilities and performance[0] leads to a far healthier company in my opinion and experience. That is not to say you stick the salary information out in the open in a database for all to check at will but during [pay] reviews I feel it is important to be able to see how much you earn compared to your direct colleagues. This is also good for a company as it means they actively working towards equality.
[0] This is obviously quite difficult because performance can be very tricky to measure fairly and can cause problems in comparisons to other positions. The same is true of performance related bonuses which I am fine with keeping private.
I wonder if the data could be displayed anonymously, i.e. "your salary is 80th percentile in your department" or something like that. It would give you the information without disclosing how much each individual makes.
> i.e. "your salary is 80th percentile in your department" or something like that.
Too little information: There could be 90 people paid peanuts and 10 people paid lavishly, and even in the same "department" some jobs might be radically different.
On a recent contract I took, the end client told me what they were paying for my services -- about 6x what I was getting paid. They were pretty annoyed, and I was threatened with legal action for discussing financial matters with an end client. I haven't heard from either side since December, so I'm guessing that contract is pretty much dead.
I live in a country when employees are more protected, and my client told me: I'm ready to pay more so you get a higher salary.
I didn't get a higher salary and left a few weeks later, anyways service at BigCo (230000 names in the phone book) was not my thing, I blew everybody away in the IT department by showing them SVN (it was before git), they were commissioning the development of a custom versioning system.
How is this unusual? You worked for a contracting/consulting firm directly?
The running rate for IT (not programming) work is $150/hr east-coast. That can get cut down, but is often even higher. The industry doesn't pay these techs more than $30 an hour.
For $30 an hour I hope they are employees, not contractors, otherwise they are getting ripped off. Bill out rates for employees are usually a lot higher than their salary. The company has to pay for non-billable hours, office space, medical insurance, benefits, computers, tools, etc. In my previous experience, the bill out rates for sub-contractors is usually a lot closer to what they actually get paid since they need to cover all those costs themselves.
As a contractor, you do not enjoy the same kinds of protection that an employee does. Nor is discussing pay with the end client equivalent to discussing it with a fellow employee. Maybe if you had been discussing it with fellow contractor it might match some of what the article was talking about.
I'm surprised that your contract did not include an NDA that prevented you from discussing this kind of information with the end client.
My contract did not specifically mention salary though it was argued it was covered by the general confidential information clause. I'm used to working for the government where salary is publicly available, so I didn't even think twice about mentioning it.
It came up when we were reviewing another consultants report, and he had put his compensation in the report. I made a comment of surprise about how much he was being paid, which pretty much gave away I was getting less and they were paying more.
I was at a company once where they talked about it casually. The career path was clear, etc. You had your salary, and your bonus.
The bonus is easy to compute: It was a percentage of how much the company charged the other company for the work you did.
Like if the job you did that day cost $200k, you get 2k.
But to get back on topic, I think everyone should take a look at a book called "Winning Through Intimidation" by Robert J. Ringer.
The title is misleading. The content is "How not to be manipulated by people who use intimidation tactics, and here are the typical ones they use subtly so there's no way you could complain, and here's how to recognize what they're doing, and here's the way to deal with it".
"The bill that would cover the rest of workers is the Paycheck Fairness Act. The law would both strengthen penalties to employers who retaliate against workers for discussing pay and require employers to provide a justification for wage differentials."
I'm cool with the first part. Information makes the free market better. The second part is problematic and will just add paperwork with about as much hope of being honest as the justification body shops use to get H1Bs instead of local workers.
There's social norms that make many people feel uncomfortable talking about money. One of the big ones being jealously. Either you being jealous of other people's success, or vice-versa.
Be sheer luck, when I entered the tech workforce some 30 years ago, I developed a close group of friends, also in tech, and we would be open about our compensation and help each other with negotiation. I cannot overstate how valuable each of us have found that.
There's two big reasons: First, starting a new job (or sometimes asking for a raise) is a big life change. There's a big emotional element & it's hard to be rational. Having people you trust who have your best interest at heart but do not have their thoughts clouded by emotion is huge.
Second, negotiating is hard for most people, especially if you don't have much experience in it. Talking strategy & approach as a group gives everyone more experience, and there's the added benefit you guy in knowing you're not crazy. You're less likely to have doubt & more likely to stick to your guns.
Throughout the years, each of has leapfrogged each other multiple times. The guy making the least suddenly becomes the guy making the most. When that happens pretty much everyone is happy/excited. The general view is "hey, now we now there's more out there!" The realization is that it's not us against each other, but us against everyone else. The more the group collectively makes, the better.
I'm generally in favor of making information public. I work for a public university, and my salary is public info, so is everyone else's. The sky hasn't fallen.
Real estate transactions tend to be public as well. I can look up how much the house down the street sold for. Imagine if this information were not public, but a few insiders were able to get at it. They'd have a monumental advantage over everyone else. That's kind of the position employers are in relative to employees.
One angle on this - I think that any employer that uses the H1B or other worker visas should be obligated to share compensation information for all workers (not just the visa recipients), the same way public universities and government organizations are required to. That means name, job title, and total yearly compensation.
I was at a company[1] where all the bill rates for a consultant heavy project got leaked by bad permissions on documents. I didn't think much of it at the time because I knew my bill rate (my share was a %). There were a two groups of pretty ticked off people. The employees who were "underpaid"[2] and the consultants who didn't know their bill rate[3]. It is an odd example of what happens when every knows what the company values them at.
1) no longer around in the form they were, but still not saying
2) truthfully, some of the consultant bill rates given the other expenses like taxes & insurance were not that far off the equivalent employee salary - particularly the H1B body shops
3) I think some were getting paid about 25% of their bill rate
Yeah, I agree. I used to believe that employers are being malicious and selfish when they hide salary details (and maybe some are), but over the years I've come to realize that most employees are simply too immature to accept that they may not actually be as valuable/important as they think. I personally wouldn't want to deal with all the awkwardness and drama introduced into the workplace even if it resulted in a 10-15% pay raise for me (although that's just me).
What we need in the US is tough enforcement of the existing labor laws. The Wage and Hour Act, classification of employees vs contractors, and the right to organize are all in US law, but the penalties are weak. Did you know that you have the legal right in the US to organize a union whether your employer likes it or not?
In Canada, those rights have more teeth, and that alone produces much higher unionization.
Wal-Mart closes stores when unionization gains momentum. Pizza Hut (hearsay) has an undocumented policy of "fire people who talk about unions." When you're pulling near minimum wage, losing your job over labor laws isn't very appealing. I believe Chick-fil-A put wage discussions as fireable in my paperwork, as have other tech companies.
Some of the people who need unions the most can't get them, as the Labor Board hasn't enough teeth and the public isn't very favorable toward unions.
I work for a smaller software company (~25 employees) and basically manage all things IT (internal business IT and software development). I'm responsible for the IT budget, our software developer salaries are the single largest company "expense".
When I started several years ago it came to my attention that the existing developers and IT staff were drastically underpaid (there was one other internal developer, an internal IT guy, myself, and a few outside contractors). I brought it to the attention of my bosses (managing partners) and have made it my goal to bring other developers salaries up to par. When I was hired I was making almost double what the other two were. I realized one of the biggest risks to the company was if either one of them decided to look across the street and find they could probably get a 40% raise on the spot. If they left a lot of knowledge and investment would walk out the door.
Over that past few years we've weened ourselves off the contractors/consultants and have hired internally. We are now at ~8 developers. In order to hire the more recent developers we've had to offer market rate salaries. During reviews and hiring I've always told employees not to discuss their salary, mostly for psychological reasons. No matter what someone will feel bad. "What if you make more than them? They might not think you're worth more than them. Causing tension and friction. What if they make more that you? Same thing."
I know that some have discussed it salary with others. At times it ticks me off.. makes me want to ensure they aren't lying by reducing their or withholding their next raise. (Please note that's a immediate gut reaction and I throw it out the window) quickly.
I'm happy to report, after much effort, I've been able to show the managing partners again this year that some developers still need larger than COLA raises (some should get 20%, 15%, 10% and most 5%). They are weary but I think they finally understand the importance of this. We do reviews and raises in a few months, and when I sit down with them I will still insist on not talking about salary or raise (amount/percent) and use the same explanation as before.
Yes, no one wants to be taken advantage of and the easiest way we think about doing that is salary transparency. That would work great in a world were psychology and subjectiveness didn't exist. I tend to be a very logical, analytical, rational personal. And as much as I hate office politics, emotions getting in the way, and having to hack psychology, they exist and as the logical, analytical, and rational person I think I am those things must be factored into going about things.
> And as much as I hate office politics, emotions getting in the way, and having to hack psychology, they exist and as the logical, analytical, and rational person I think I am those things must be factored into going about things.
You obviously thought about this and got it into account. But being a bit smarter ape that we are all, you decided on what way of going about this is best for you. As a rational ape you should at least understand this much.
The thing is, we are all mature apes and we understand possible problems and we can decide for ourselves if the risk is worth it in a specific situation we're in at one time or another. And we do so, and we have every right to do so, and you trying to take it away from us is very apish and understandable, but unacceptable behaviour.
When a colleague asks me about my salary I think about what to tell him for myself. I consider how well I know him, how long we've been working together, how likely he is to be underpaid, how likely he is to get angry because of it and so on and on. I then decide to either tell him or not, and also on how specific my answer should be, and so on.
Sorry, but I'll trust my own judgement over your arbitrary decision you made without taking into account any of those situation specific things, and - not to forget - for your benefit.
You might be right. I suppose I did what I did for some what selfish reasons. I should have just shut my yapper and let the timid and ignorant coworkers continue on or I should have told them, caused serious issues with the company I was just hired at and job back into the job search in a town with some but limited opportunities.
One of the gentlemen ended up leaving with in a year. I had been asking him to fill out a self performance assessment so I could get him a hefty raise. The other guy is quite timid, somewhat immature, and socially inept... I suppose he was getting paid what he and his personality deserves. No?
Or I could have gone about righting the ship rather than throwing all the weight on one side and sinking it... causing not only the two underpaid guys to lose their jobs but also the rest of the dozen employees. Which would be the more appropriate move in your opinion?
If you were one of them... wait, I know you'd never be one of them because you come off as a smarter ape, investigative, not ignorant, not naive, not timid, capable of caring for yourself. You'd have been gone before I got there.
If you'd like I could just as easily justified by rationalizing why they deserve what they were getting paid... because that's what they were getting paid. Their backgrounds/education wasn't very strong and (at least one of them) had poor judgement and reasoning skills (I mean look what he was accepting for pay!).
ADD: The one I probably wouldn't have ever hired in the first place, but he was there before, knew a fare amount of the current situation, and unfortunately got hired because his mom new one of the managing partners. The managing partners were also somewhat clueless to what they were wrongly paying...
I would like to see some kind of framework for people to discuss salaries, should we pay everybody the same? do group evaluation? live with the knowledge of disparity?
When I was a team leader, I didn't have a big disparity of salaries in my team, so I think I had it easy, but when you have a tester or a designer among developers, their salaries might be way different (testers are not engineers, and I have no idea of the rate for a designer actually).
I'm a tester. Some of my work is manual; some of it is coding.
I know I get paid less than the devs (both at my company and in the industry on average,) but I'm paid well and enjoy testing more than the work the devs are doing.
All it takes is for a tester to go on Glassdoor to find out that their average salary is lower.
Half the developers salaries are more than the managing partners salaries (although the managing partners get a bonus which then makes their annual income higher than anyone else in the company so long as the company does well).
When I tell the employees not to discuss salary I offer them a few things to say in case another coworker asks them. My first go to reply is "I consider my salary and finances to be private matters that I don't tend to share with others." or "We're coworkers, what good could possibly come from us talking about this? The only outcome is someone, you, me, or [boss/company] will be upset. Do we want to add drama and tension to our relationships?"
Need to be careful that you're not being the well-meaning villain in all of this. Reinforcing a social stigma of talking about salary problems with other people who may be having similar issues opens up a world where an awful lot of abuse can go unchecked, and even though you're quietly working behind the scenes to resolve it, it doesn't change that for several years those employees may have been making 40% below what they could have been earning.
If they had found out about it, and then decided to look for another better paying job, they could potentially be significantly further along in achieving their financial life goals compared to where they are now. Underpaying people isn't an entirely victimless scenario, and it might be a little bit paternalistic for you to encourage keeping them in the dark while you gradually sort it out.
Clarification: Half the developers salaries are more than the managing partners salaries today,when I started most the developers were making half of what the MP's salaries were.
IMO there is every incentive for employees to compare salaries (except at startups where total compensation is directly proportional to how much risk you took to get there). Everything below is about 1000+ or so employee well-established companies so salary ladders should long since have become consistent.
If you find out you're making more, question why your co-worker is making so much less. It could be you the next round.
If you find out you're making substantially less, you can try bringing it up with your boss, but your boss will likely channel that to HR and then HR will tell you why you aren't worth any more than your current salary (that's their purpose in this situation, don't fool yourself otherwise).
However, if you use this information as a sign that you should go interview to determine your market rate, and you get a better offer somewhere else, you can now use that as leverage against your current employer.
If they need you, they'll match the offer, and your compensation problems will go away for the next few years. At some companies, this is the easiest path to a raise despite the negative perception of "accepting the counter."
If they won't match the offer, then that's a great sign that it's time to leave.
IMO you should treat your job choices as an asset. If that asset starts lagging the market, you need to invest in another one.
there is a need for some tool similar to glassdoor that can verify the authencity of the info posted by a user (email address, position, etc) that can be used reliably by others to confidently share salaries without retribution.
so, basically, a person signs up with some site with high degree of identification ( ssn, state id, email id, office id card, whatever, depending on the situation ).
So, his identity with the central site is intact.
Then, this person creates a throwaway id for this particular posting, and this throwaway cannot be openly linked back to the person, by anyone other than the site itself.
The weakness of course is in the central site. And to solve this problem, there are a few decentralized trust solutions
I like this. The vulnerability lies with the verifying site, so it would need to be crazy secure. Know any seasoned web developers with some crypto knowledge?
Ahhh. I just see the CEO pay as being "little." I mean, a good dev can earn that much.
I know several ~30 person companies where the CEO/owner is making at least 1mil a year after bonuses.
It's insane. I'd love to see what you linked more often - highest salary (they did start the company) but not by a factor of 10! So it just got me curious.
I agree with the notion that not speaking about money generally benefits companies more than employees. But I have been in situations where people were speaking about it, and refused to say what I make, precisely because they were making so much less than me. Now when that happens, I try to steer the conversation towards things that I think might help them get what they deserve. Some people feel so lucky to get a job that they take whatever's on offer, then they end up feeling screwed later and don't know what to do.
I work for a large games developer(one of the largest ones in the world in fact), and the salaries are completely taboo. No one will say how much they are paid, no one will say what bonuses they've got, nothing. When I asked the HR manager what I can expect to be making if I advance higher up, the answer was "that depends", and when I asked for an estimate they said they can't give one. I absolutely love the job, it's the best thing ever - but I honestly don't understand the salary secrecy.
I'm currently working as a temp at a well-known institution. (I'm getting paid a healthy hourly rate for what would easily be a salaried position if I was on staff.) It's effectively freelancing, but I had to join an agency to satisfy this corporation's bureaucracy.
It's in my contract with the agency that the rate they pay me is confidential, to be discussed with no one. Is that also illegal?
I understand that this is against the "wisdom", but I always wanted to build a compensation-transparent-company.
In which it is open (at least internally) how much everybody makes (including equity). And people have ways to change their compensation over longish periods of time and the ratio of cash / equity.
I have always wanted to own a company where we put the salaries on the wall of a employee-only conference room and paid profit sharing. I doubt it would work, but I would love to try it.
I know that quite a few states do this, I don't have an exact number so I don't want to quantify it, but it's more than at least 8 (<- every state I have lived in does it + cali).
Also, while not directly disclosed on a per employee basis, every single federal employee salary can be determined since their level and years of service is not confidential and their salary is based on a schedule. Same for the military(even easier since they wear their 'level' on their sleeve).
Almost all employee salaries are accessible through freedom of information requests.
In the .gov I work for, HR is so incompetent and people are allowed to make up bullshit titles, that accessing the local newspaper's employee database is the quickest way to find out this type of info.
Yes, but the numbers are always delayed two years. So today, I could look up what someone paid in tax in 2013 if I wanted. But it's just the total taxation amount for that year and doesnt tell you anything in detal. So if you had that number you could roughly estimate what someone earned by dividing with about 32% (the median tax rate). But due to tax deductions, sick days, vacation, pension fund deposits etc your salary guess would be very fuzzy.
There will always be people who think "that guy sits around all day and earns twice as much as me while I work my ass off" rightfully or out of ignorance. This puts the boss/dept. manager in a weak position.
At my previous work it was pretty much an open secret. Plus there was lots of trust & the progression was pretty predictable so you could pretty much ask someone straight what they were earning.
I think when your boss tells you that, the proper response would be to write an op-ed about it on Medium, while blending in themes of Paternalism, The Patriarchy, Feminism, Mansplaining, Manterrupting and Sea Lioning.
If all salary was displayed publicly it wouldn't help the employee. It would take almost all negotiating abilities away (a senior developer with 5 years of experience will be paid the same rate as a senior developer with 10 years because companies don't want unhappy employees and people with the same titles will be upset they are not paid the same rate) and allow many companies to legally collude and pay similar rates (which will be the lowest they can get away with).
For the individual, not having public salary works great because you really do have negotiating power. I no longer work for anyone, but when I did, I would regularly ask for a higher wage at my next company for essentially the same position.
If my next company knows that all other companies in the industry are paying 20% less for my position, why would they pay me more?
I've also heard stories from Sweden where larger companies will pull tax returns of the other companies (and employees) they are doing business with and will base their contracts on this information being a regular practice(giving lower rates because they know the company is making more money. Or even not dealing with the company at all because they are so small).
I've never understood why smart people want to willingly give the more powerful in this world even more tools that will work against them.
a senior developer with 5 years of experience will be paid the same rate as a senior developer with 10 years because companies don't want unhappy employees and people with the same titles will be upset they are not paid the same rate
Really? People are all too stupid to understand the value of experience or skill? Personal experience says this is nonsense.
and allow many companies to legally collude and pay similar rates
Have you looked at any news about how horribly ineffective OPEC is? There are too many countries with too much capacity outside the cartel, countries in the cartel cheat on their quotas, ... .
Cartels are not as effective as you think they are.
For the individual, not having public salary works great because you really do have negotiating power.
Say what? The companies already know how much they're paying everyone else. The only one who doesn't know is you.
If my next company knows that all other companies in the industry are paying 20% less for my position, why would they pay me more?
Because you can make a convincing argument that you're worth 20% more.
I've never understood why smart people want to willingly give the more powerful in this world even more tools that will work against them.
The powerful already have those tools. This is about giving those same tools to the less powerful as well.
> Because you can make a convincing argument that you're worth 20% more.
Except since everyone in the same position at the company will see you're making 20% more the company will have to either pay all of existing employees in the same position 20% more or convince them their new hire is 20% better than all of them.
It seems like the effect would be that either they can't offer you the 20% because they can't afford to give everyone a 20% raise OR several employees will leave because they feel slighted this new guy is getting paid more
Most salaries for all occupations across the board are almost the same. I believe this is one of the results of public tax/salary information.
"Because you can make a convincing argument that you're worth 20% more."
Like I said, if everything is public, it won't matter. If I see that all of my competitors are paying 20% less (which won't be difficult to aggregate with everything public..a search engine for employers will popup in no time) I know that even if the potential employee goes somewhere else, they won't get a higher wage. Why would I pay them any more?
On an Individual basis, I can also figure out exactly what you were paid at your last job (instead of guess work/relying on what you are asking). If you were paid $50K at your last job, why am I going to pay you $70K?
"The powerful already have those tools. This is about giving those same tools to the less powerful as well."
As an individual, privacy is a great tool to have at your disposal and is one of the only ways to defend against powerful companies taking advantage of you.
I agree. When salaries are not public, there is just one factor that influences them, that is, the value that the company puts on that employee and the fear of losing him/ her to a better offer. On the other hand, it's much easier for the company to reject a request for a pay rise because it might upset other employees. Note, this mechanism only works downwards: the company will never give a pay rise to nine employees on the grounds that the tenth already has a higher salary.
Note, this mechanism only works downwards: the company will never give a pay rise to nine employees on the grounds that the tenth already has a higher salary.
You assume the outlier will always be at the high end. What happens when instead of one person being paid much more than everyone else, it's one person that's paid much less than everyone else?
There's a little cognitive dissonance there. You think that public salary info would be bad for everyone, because companies would no longer be willing to pay them far above average. But that's ignoring the obvious fact that the majority of people are not making far above average, so they don't have that to lose. Some of them are even making below average, so they would gain.
I had co-workers tell me 'its rude to share salaries'. This tech company in Vancouver was well known to pay the lowest salary in North America and excruciating overtime.
I always find it amusing how hard people will fight over something so small, when there's so little to gain, people will work so hard for it.
I have a hard time buying this argument. If you are an employer despicable enough to systematically be paying women less just for being women, I don't think another redundant law is going to change your behavior.
This seems like a feel good exercise. People still buy drugs? Pass another law that says trafficking drugs is super duper illegal. Another heinous murder? Make it extra illegal to murder someone. In fact, make it extra illegal to murder someone with a specific type of weapon.
This stuff doesn't seem to matter. Drug dealers know they face stiff penalties if caught. People who have decided to murder another human really don't care if the penalties are higher if they use a gun versus a tire iron. And, misogynist employers aren't going to be swayed by yet another law that says treat all people the same regardless of sex, for reals this time.