Tell Your Co-Workers How Much Money You Make

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/smarter-living/pay-secrecy-national-labor-rights-act.html

by js2 • 8 years ago

123 87 8 years ago

nostromo953• 8 years ago

Definitely a tragedy of the commons or first mover disadvantage situation we have here: systemically it'd be better for everyone to discuss their salaries, but individually I'd never be the first one to start that discussion.

some_account3• 8 years ago

What are you afraid of will happen?

recursive• 8 years ago

Speaking for myself, I'm afraid, that I'd lower morale and create division in my well-running and competent team.

nostromo953• 8 years ago

Scenario A: I make more money than them, they (despite their best intentions) slightly resent me.

Scenario B: They make more money than me, I (despite my best intentions) slightly resent them.

Beyond that, I’m not really in an industry where you can easily/beneficially jump ship to another firm, so I wouldn’t even have any recourse if people are making more than me without good justification (superior performance, etc). I’d have to exit the industry.

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

I accidentally got paid my Indian colleague's salary as well as mine a few months back. Rather awkwardly, I discovered that despite being more junior than him, I actually got paid more.

Obviously I'm not complaining, because I want to earn as much as possible, but it does seem a bit unfair. On one hand, I guess I'm better at negotiating a higher salary (mine's not that much higher, maybe 5-10%), but at the same time, it seems unfair that he does the same work and gets paid less.

How would discussing my salary with him benefit me (in a purely capitalistic sense)?

yen223• 8 years ago

If your employers were savvy, they might realize they could replace you with more senior staff at a lower cost (never mind their nationality).

You can make your job a little bit more secure by encouraging your colleague to demand more pay.

inasring• 8 years ago

you could be the equivalent of your indian collegue to somebody else

gempir• 8 years ago

Not sure if you are in the tech industry or something close to it. But I've rarely seen someone getting the salery that they deserve.

Mostly it's based on seniority and experience. Even if you do the exact same tasks and maybe sometimes even faster maybe sometimes slower. The salery will not reflect that at all.

dancek2• 8 years ago

Your colleague would be very grateful to you. If you don't know the value of grateful people, you're not much of a capitalist.

TeMPOraL2• 8 years ago

If you don't know the value of grateful people, you're not much of a capitalist.

Rule of Acquisition no. 1 says: "Once you have their money, you never give it back".

But if you did, the next best thing is suggested by Rule 111: "Treat people in your debt like family... exploit them".

tooltalk• 8 years ago

If he's a smart individual, knowing the market rate for his current skillset would help him prepare better for next annual review so he could ask for better raise. If he's a bitter, negative one, he would resent you and hate everyone at work.

jfornear• 8 years ago

HR professionals will tell you that many people lie about their compensation. This is probably not worth talking about without sharing your pay stubs or tax returns.

some_account3• 8 years ago

HR alis there to protect the company. They consist of smiling faces who know they are snakes. I would not take their advice on anything.

NamTaf• 8 years ago

This. HR's actions make more sense when you realise the R is the operative term in that description and the H is the adjective.

colordrops• 8 years ago

HR professionals are often professional liars and manipulators.

orionblastar2• 8 years ago

Not really as they tend to get jealous and sabotage my work if I am paid more than them.

Someone hacked the password to the HR account and dumped the database for IS I was the highest paid programmer at $50k for a $150k average job. It made me unpopular and people did not want to work with me after that. I had more experience than the other programmers is why.

usaphp• 8 years ago

It made me unpopular and people did not want to work with me after that.

What if there was some other reason people did not want to work with you? I know plenty of people who work more than I do for the same work that I do, however it does not make me hate working with them or something.

orionblastar2• 8 years ago

Different personalities I guess? They worked with me until my salary was leaked.

pmlnr• 8 years ago

Yes, please. It would make the world a much fairer place.

hardwaresofton• 8 years ago

A corollary point: Unionize.

viach2• 8 years ago

And don't forget to prepare your CV in advance. Just in case.

Buge2• 8 years ago

In case you get fired for discussing salary? It's generally illegal to fire you for that.

viach2• 8 years ago

People do illegal things all the time, especially if they are sure there will be no penalty.

js811• 8 years ago

I sometimes (although not very often) do tell people unilaterally. Usually, it's a good way to tell a coward. If the other person is a coward, they won't share theirs. That's a good thing to know about a person. Although I often regret knowing that they are a coward, mostly they are good people.

I like to joke that my company is ashamed about what it pays me, therefore I shouldn't talk about it. And I am a nice guy, and don't want the company to feel the shame without a good reason.

PhilWright• 8 years ago

Maybe they do not reciprocate because they earn much more for doing the same job and do not want to depress you with that knowledge. Maybe they earn much less for the same job and are embarrassed about that. There are many reasons someone would not share their salary with you and being a coward is unlikely to be the main one.

js811• 8 years ago

I don't mean the word "coward" in a judgemental way. Think about what you just said for a minute. These people don't want to reciprocate honesty because they are afraid of my emotional reaction.

That means, how can I trust them with other things? For example, something goes wrong and they mess up. Will they be afraid to tell me, because they will be worried that I am going to be angry or depressed?

Now, it's perfectly fine to be afraid of other person's emotional reaction (that's why it's non-judgemental). But if you are still afraid after I made the first step, then it's a good thing for me to know about you.

nostromo953• 8 years ago

Not to be crass, but you might just as well call someone a coward when they won’t show you their genitals after you unilaterally show them yours.

If you uninvitedly told me your salary I’d think you’re a clown.

js811• 8 years ago

First of all, to clarify, I do it unilaterally but only within a certain context (among friends, if it comes up).

For complicated human reasons, it's a bad analogy. Although you're right that the game-theoretic reasons for humans hiding their genitals and hiding their salaries might actually be similar.

Interestingly, there was nudism movement, which was basically about right to display your genitals (in non-invasive way). And I think we should, as humans, also have the right to count our money in public. Shouldn't we?

squiggy22• 8 years ago

Its probably easiest to do this as a departing gift to colleagues you are leaving behind.

sashokbg• 8 years ago

I do not agree at all with this article. Most people are jealous haters and it is perfectly normal to have a lower salary if you don't have the guts to ask for more.

js811• 8 years ago

In other words, it's OK not to be paid according how well you do your job, but according to your negotiating skills?

HunOL• 8 years ago

1. Negotiating skill is a skill as any other soft skill.

2. If somebody consider that he doing the same job (have the same skill) it doesn't mean that it's true.

mirko22• 8 years ago

That’s how sales work unfortunately

flyinglizard• 8 years ago

You pay the asking price if the product provides you enough value. Negotiation is simply setting the asking price, which is absurdly mundane in a free market economy. In fact, not setting an asking price - thus letting the buyer decide what he pays - contradicts norms.

The metric of “how well you do your job” is highly subjective anyhow; between an employee, their manager, their product manager, their coworkers and HR there would be significant variance of opinion.

Buge2• 8 years ago

Just because something is currently "perfectly normal" doesn't mean it should remain that way. People should be incentivized to do good work, not to be good negotiators (unless their job involves negotiation).

Fezzik• 8 years ago

I like sharing my salary just to be open about what I make and give people something to (possibly) work for. The reasons in the NYT article don’t really apply to my gig directly as it is a government job with a rigid tiered payscale based on years in practice, but many of my peers just do not get how much they can make in pretty cool government legal jobs. I do not make a ton - just a smidge over that magical six-figure mark, but I have too many friends who are much smarter than I earning far, far less. That saddens me a little bit, and government legal work has an odd reputation for having poor compensation, which is just not the case.

On the other side of the coin: when I was a law clerk I accidentally was given a pay-stub for another clerk. Said clerk was notoriously incompetant, but somehow making almost double what many other clerks were making. I said something to our senior administrator, and he did not even know why she was making so much. Likely, when she was hired a judge asked for her to start at her salary and she started there. Her contract was running out and she ended up not being re-hired. I felt like a jerk, and that was not my intention, but had I not known her salary nothing would have happened. Or if I could have kept my mouth shut, but that is difficult when I see such pay disparities.

edit: grammar

eanzenberg• 8 years ago

Most people don't understand risk and expected value. Let's say we go ahead and report each others' salaries. There's a non-1 chance you would be able to bump up some modest amount and a non-0 chance you'd be let go. The expected value of the move may put you below "doing nothing", not even considering the added stress of being out of a job.

Also, all this idea will create is animosity, jealousy and politics at work. Everyone thinks they're hot shit, the egos in the bay are out of this world.

nandemo2• 8 years ago

Where I live permanent employees are protected, so the probability of being legally fired for disclosing my salary is 0, and the probability of illegally being fired should be very close to 0. However, the probability of my salary going up is also very close to 0. In fact, the probability of my salary decreasing is arguably higher than the probability of my salary increasing, since bonuses vary and are decided semi-arbitrarily. :-)

In any case I know a much more effective way to increase my salary: getting a green card and moving to the US. The flipside is that my American wife would have a hard time finding a good job in her field in the US.

drukenemo• 8 years ago

Let me guess: the Netherlands?

greenhatman• 8 years ago

It helps employees negotiate more effectively. And some people need to realise that they're not hot shit, if they're not.

If a company is not willing to pay a person more, then they're likely not worth that much to them. And that is something they can then work on, instead of living in a dream world.

imh• 8 years ago

I strongly agreed with this advice when I made less. Now I agree in principle, but in practice try to only discuss it with people on about my same tier. As per usual, disparities in money make for awkward relationships, with the weirdness increasing as the disparity increases.

It's so damned hard to identify the reasons for these disparities and what "fair" means, which is the best way to alleviate bad feelings. A couple years experience at the right companies, a particular project you've done, a team you've been on, the degree you have, the right people vouching for you, a lucky day of interviewing, etc. Tiny variations in those can take you from no offer to a crazy high offer. There's so much noise in the system that leads to salaries. In this imperfect information game of hiring, I can't fault companies for paying heed to those factors and paying more/less based on them, but after that information is revealed and you've been working together for a while, things usually don't equalize. The initial lucky/unlucky salaries persist.

The whole thing is weird. To too high a degree, the open salary discussion is now, "Yeah, I got pretty lucky." Doubly so with the stock comp we get in tech.

criveros• 8 years ago

What if you are a really good negotiator and you got a salary higher than peers that are technically better than you?

TangoTrotFox• 8 years ago

How is this supposed to be a good idea? At best it's going to lead to jealousy and other issues. And having lived in a country where salary discussion is not so taboo, while also being privy to what those people make, a fair number of people lie about their compensation which adds even more issues and antagonism.

CaliforniaKarl• 8 years ago

I suggest checking out Tom Scott's "In Norway, Everyone Can Know How Much You Earn", at https://youtu.be/1bO8zEaSuWg

And then, have a look at the bibliography in the video description!

femto• 8 years ago

Might be a job for a website, along the lines of a crowd funding site? People would post their salaries, but they would only be revealed (anonymously or not?) if a certain number of fellow employees also posted theirs (by a certain date?) Surely someone has already built this? It might include an mechanism to send an anonymous invitation email to a list of fellow employees?

There are already salary survey sites, but they seem removed from the individual's situation, as the results are averaged over so many people and the underlying assumptions aren't clear. Knowing your immediate coworkers' salaries seems much more immediate.

Trust and privacy would have to be absolute, so people have complete control over the spread of any information they submit, which rules out most existing websites.

--- Edit:

On further thought, I'm not sure that I agree with my own proposal, in that it's a complicated solution. Wouldn't it be better to establish the necessary level of trust with your coworkers in real life and talk about it? There's also less of a paper trail and information leakage that way.

Gustomaximus3• 8 years ago

In Norway the Government publish how much tax you paid for the year. This makes it fairly simple to know what a PAYE employee is earning.

Having come into this enviroment mid career from another country I considered whether or not I should look up colleagues. Naturally I was interested.

I decided not to. The main rationale, I was reasonably ok with the salary and very much enjoyed the job. If I discovered colleagues doing similar work and getting paid more I would find this demoralising and didn't want to bring that into a job I enjoyed.

I do understand this knowledge could be a negotiation tactic, but 1) happiness is more important than money to me and 2) my personal experience is most companies are reluctant to significantly change salary without promotion, and even at promotion they tend to bump you up under market rate. So maybe I could have gotten more money, but at the risk of reducing the enjoyability of a job I really liked. So if you are going to announce your salary, I would suggest you do it in an enviroment where you know the other people want to hear it.

For me I've found the best way to make more money is change companies.

And side point: A bit disappointed the article had this like '“Let’s face it, it’s 2018 and there’s still serious disparities in pay based on race and gender,”"

Regarding gender I believe this has been fairly comprehensive debunked with multi-varied analysis. Once accounting for careers choice, age, occupation and personality-type etc and the commonly quoted 18% gap reduces to 2% on gender, and currently under 30's men are paid less than women.

js811• 8 years ago

Another comment here states: "all this idea will create is animosity, jealousy and politics at work"

Based on your experience, do you think this characterizes the workplace in Norway?

(I am honestly interested in hearing the answer, although I don't think so. There are so many things you can be jealous at which are completely in the open at work - company perks, travel, type of work, team.. And nobody ever claims the same problems here. I think it's pretty much a non-issue, basically jealous people will be jealous and catch straws if they don't have the information and normal people will be normal regardless whether they have the information or not.)

smueller1234• 8 years ago

Not GP. Having worked in a number of countries and having managed people from many tens of countries, I do think there is a pretty strong cultural bias around competitiveness/ambition and the degree to which it is considered good form to show it. (Of course, any individual can behave and feel vastly differently from any cultural stereotypes!)

So for example, just because this sort of thing works reasonably well for a Scandinavian country wouldn't mean it would necessarily work well in, say, California.

jononor• 8 years ago

I am from Norway and have worked with companies in Norway, Germany, US and Finland. In my experience, Norway is typically less competitive/backstabbing/maneuvering. It helps that wage differences, both in society at large, within a company, and for a given position is smaller than other places in the world.

However, I don't think that wages being published online is a big contributor to this. More important is being generally quite egalitarian, low degree of personal exceptionalism, and not so much money-is-success.

Also, it is not uncommon to use an average wage (for the role, education,years), as published by unions and state, as one reference point to negotiate around, especially for people without a lot of experience. Practically everyone has 3-months bidirectional resignation period, which makes changing jobs slow but safe.

Gustomaximus3• 8 years ago

To answer you questions directly - no.

With more detail, the 2 variables I feel impact this and makes it hard to compare doing this in other countries are;

1) Norway has a strong culture of being reasonable and non-conflicting. My theory on that is it comes from being stuck indoors so much with each other...but for whatever reason, it is the case.

2) Norway has had this system a long time. So when you take a job this information is available to you, not suddenly after years at a company. The latter could more easily cause issues I feel.

So while this does not create issues from what I saw in Norway, I dont think its fair to lift and shift that view to other countries.

mynewtb• 8 years ago

currently under 30's men are paid less than women.

Can you provide a citation? That is new to me.

Const-me2• 8 years ago

See second graph: https://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap

Gustomaximus3• 8 years ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=women+under+30+paid+more+tha...

missingcolours• 8 years ago

The thing about this is that people are bad at objectively analyzing contributions, especially their own. Some aspects of value to an employer/manager include your regular work output quantity and quality, ability to learn new skills quickly (thus being dependable in unexpected situations), willingness to jump in to new challenges, mentoring other team members, etc. People often overlook these factors in others and say "I do the same work as them, or more!" and get upset about different compensation. I mean, certainly sometimes there is value in sharing this information, but there are also plenty of situations where it causes discord more than it helps the people involved, so I don't know that "discuss your salary!" is universally good advice.

da_murvel• 8 years ago

I've always felt like, in situations where I earn less than the people I'm talking to, that I'm earning less than them simply because I'm not worth to earn more. This feeling occurs especially when talking to people within my own field, software development, but regardless of how much experience I have versus them. And maybe that's the truth, sure someone with 30 years of experience might be better at their job than someone with 5 years of experience, but the also might not. Just because you've been doing something all your life doesn't automatically mean you've done it right.

JokerDan• 8 years ago

As a bit of an extension to the experience thing. I recently changed jobs and they hired somebody else, to the same team, for the same work as me at the same time.

I had 0 experience with this software stack/language but I am an extremely fast learner. The other guy boasted 30 years of software experience and 8/9 in this specific tech stack.

After ~2 months he was let go in his probation period and people had told me that I had already picked up, was doing more work and knew more than what he was showing in the same role.

He was on just under double my salary - my salary did not change. I believe people should be evaluated and have salary adjusted based on merit and value over time

----

As an extension to the merit thing, I changed to this new job because my old one had the directors of the company, who didn't really have a huge understanding of individuals roles across the 150-200 person software section employees, telling us they pay on merit.

Yet I had joined and quickly become one of the more knowledgeable people on the team, so much so that people would often come to me. I did a lot of the software releases, worked (unpaid) overtime a lot, especially around said releases, worked to improve processes and in my spare time worked on tooling. No recognition other than from the team and one of the principal developers. All while someone who had half my throughput with daily work but had worked there for 30 years, had about 1.8* my salary.

What was it more, loyalty, that they meant?

----

Overall, me knowing other peoples salaries in similar/the same position just demotivates me (partly due to my mindset at the moment) in that some people can have such well paid positions while blagging, or doing little in comparison. Why do I even bother trying? At the same time, I am always at home teaching myself something new, learning something to better myself for my career, but that is more my nature than to do with knowing salaries.

endymi0n• 8 years ago

Having seen this topic from both sides of the tables, I'm not sure if I agree. Don't get me wrong, I'm generally all for transparency, and I've also seen my share of cases (including my own) where someone was treated unfairly and it would have been good to talk about it.

But there's a few important and complex psychological factors at work here:

- Self-serving bias. There's a study that about 80% of employees think they're better than average. Obviously, that's impossible, but it already sets the stage on a path to unhappiness.

- Group bias and Dunning-Kruger. People mostly don't know _why_ exactly someone else earns more than them. Excluding real unfairness or the points below, there are often time cases where people really don't get the importance of some roles in the company or think they can do as good or the company can do without. As a techie, I've personally ridiculed the "business side" until I've witnessed the importance myself (and how much difference a bad to a good execution in this regard matters).

- Global and local unfairness and market development. Firstly, local markets develop for hotly contested skills, sometimes very fast. Also, it makes a heck of a difference in which company stage someone is hired. A year later, I might have to pay someone much more to get into the same team.

- Lastly, there can even be unfairness in fairness, hidden in plain view: Does someone getting relocated into a hot market really have to suffer paying double the rent as someone living there for years? Is having a family a personal luxury or partly beared by a socially responsible employer? Does someone with a PhD who's being outperformed by a young smart college dropout earn the same? More? Less? I don't know the answer to these questions, but all possible answers have some merit. Often times, I try to factor something about this in when deciding salary. In any case, it's freakishly hard to develop such thing as a "fair" salary over a whole company as an employer.

- In most countries including mine, it's prohibited to _lower_ someone's salary, so the only way you can ever adjust local or global unfairness is to raise wages.

What's following is this: All of these factors work together to create a lose-lose case to talking salary with others. The chances are enormously high you'll get demotivated. Most likely from your own salary, but even if you earn more than the others, it's awkward and hard to handle emotionally.

Although it's probably good for your brain and overall heuristics development to do so, it will be bad for your heart. Proceed with care — and if you want my personal 2 cents: Don't keep what you learned from always giving your best and optimizing for learning. Keep up your spirits, stay positive and don't get into a defensive attitude. Search for like-minded people who see your real value and you'll keep reaping your fruits later on, trust me.

tomp• 8 years ago

Self-serving bias. There's a study that about 80% of employees think they're better than average. Obviously, that's impossible, but it already sets the stage on a path to unhappiness.

It’s not impossible.

If Bill Gates walks into a room, most other people in that room (99%?) will have below average wealth.

microDude• 8 years ago

Companies want to have a bilateral agreement with each employee and have all the information.

The best strategy is to use competitor salary information, taken from the likes of Glassdoor or similar.

purplezooey• 8 years ago

It's OK to jump on the OSPF bandwagon though. Nobody wants to run RIP.

grakker• 8 years ago

The local paper makes an information request every year and puts up on their website what everyone was paid who works for the school district. I work for that school district. It really makes me laugh from the asshats on both sides of the argument. I just don't care if people know what I make, or what I drive. Although I tend to have a rather low opinion of people who value stuff over anything else.

speedplane• 8 years ago

It would be great if everyone knew what everyone was making, it would definitely help with salary negotiations, but it's horrible to ask. It introduces such awkwardness, and can invite jealousy and comparisons.

Just do what everyone else does... snoop around on the network drive and try to find unsecured documents that list compensation.

beardyw• 8 years ago

In the 1980s I worked for CMG, an IT consultany here in London. Salaries were completely open, and openly discussed. However the culture was that you were expected to perform to that salary,not that the salary was a reward for performance.

Every year all staff were ranked, completely ignoring current salary, and then new salaries were set from that. Some would see a decrease.

I got used to it quickly and it felt very liberating.

Tell Your Co-Workers How Much Money You Make

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