My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/im-terrified-tell-people-much-make

by luu • 11 years ago

64 82 11 years ago

gamechangr2• 11 years ago

"Did the knowledge hurt my relationships with my coworkers? Yes. Of course it did. I felt cheated. I felt undervalued. I frankly felt I was the victim of a double standard."

hueving• 11 years ago

She failed to negotiate when she was hired. Is that really a double standard?

Dylan16807• 11 years ago

"Double standard" is a fuzzy term, because you it depends on how you describe a situation. If you only accept even numbers, is that a single standard to decide if numbers are even, or a double standard of treating even and odd numbers differently? (yes this is an overly simple example, flesh it out in your head if necessary)

But in objective terms, she had less pay because of negotiation skill, and negotiation skill correlates with gender.

Falkon1313• 11 years ago

Yes. It is a double standard. People do make more money by negotiating a new job than they ever could by excelling at the one they work at.

Most of us are conditioned from the beginning not to negotiate, we can't do so until late in the game, and even then it can be difficult.

Someone who enters a job straight from school (after having been conditioned to believe that parents, teachers, authority figures generally have your best interests in mind and don't negotiate) is less likely to negotiate.

Someone who starts a minimum wage or entry-level job probably doesn't have a chance to negotiate because 800 other applicants are willing to take it for minimum wage.

Later in their career, having worked their way up but discovering that others around them make more, they may realize that they're being cheated and negotiation could be a good idea. So they apply for a new midlevel job at a different company, negotiate, and do well.

Meanwhile their new coworkers who worked their way up from a non-negotiable starting point make much less, even though they may have more company-specific or even industry-specific experience. Typical corporate policy limits raises by percentage, so they can never even reach equal pay no matter if they excel at their job.

Therefore, having been cheated, they apply for a new midlevel job, negotiate, and do well. While their new coworkers who worked their way up make much less...

dmak• 11 years ago

She was saying that she was offered 35,000 less than the previous person for the same role. If she was truly valued, why was she not offered just as much if not more?

wavefunction• 11 years ago

Transparency can only lead to a freer market, which is something many capitalists truly fear.

roopeshv• 11 years ago

Read all that and I still have no clue what the author is making now.

disillusioned• 11 years ago

She chickened out. But it's hard.

yitchelle3• 11 years ago

Its probably a Wired policy to not disclose your salary.

bambax• 11 years ago

Yes it's hard, but if she can't do it she should not say anything, and spare the reader the pain of going through all her hesitations and second thoughts and whatnot. This is cheating.

jmkni• 11 years ago

Yeah! The article kind of loses it's punch when you realize this

lotharbot2• 11 years ago

One of the reasons I like sites like glassdoor is that it separates the judgment from the data. I don't need to know that Alice makes 22% less than Bob, and Bob makes 18% less than Claire, and therefore make personal judgments about each of my coworkers (like Alice is a pushover; Bob is mediocre; Claire is bossy.) I just need to know what the distribution is, in my company or in my industry, in order to negotiate for myself.

kirsebaer2• 11 years ago

Wouldn't it be better if A, B, C, and you joined together and hired some professional lawyers and negotiators to work on your behalf (ie organized labor, union)?

paulbaumgart• 11 years ago

That sounds expensive.

mattlutze4• 11 years ago

From the employer side, if one or the other is a more valuable employee, I need to be able to compensate them more so that I can ensure they stay with our team and don't go to a competitor.

From the employee side, if I go out and learn new skills and abilities, I want to be able to negotiate compensation that reflects the value I bring.

Particularly in creative fields like tech / IT, unionization fails both of those needs, and promotes stagnation over innovation.

So, no.

sukilot10• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, glass door also separates the accuracy from the data. They don't even try to aggregate total compensation properly, when equity and benefits are involved.

sukilot10• 11 years ago

Interesting that your example used "bossy" for a female

lotharbot2• 11 years ago

it was an intentional reference [0], since I was highlighting how putting names to the salaries encourages inappropriate, judgmental attitudes. The list could be expanded -- DeShawn makes X because of racism or affirmative action; Ellen makes Y because she's out of the closet and HR is full of bigots or allies; Francisco makes Z because his foreign accent makes him sound either exotic or uneducated. So instead of using the salary information to break the taboos and negotiate fair compensation, it becomes a way to reinforce stereotypes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8gz-jxjCmg

teekert3• 11 years ago

"Without that knowledge, I would never have known I was being suckered."

Suckered by yourself you mean, and suckered by the people that never taught you the principles of a free market where the assumption is that when two parties agree, the situation is satisfactory for both. If not, there is no agreement, no deal. The other party was not suckering you, you were happy with the deal, you took it. Why do you put something as important as your salary entirely into someone else's responsibility and then complain later?

Whoever raised or educated you forgot to mention some critical things to you. Like objects, people's skill have no intrinsic value. It is you and the other party that set the value to an agreeable level. Wow, you even got pissed at others that did receive the lesson in time. Well, just be happy someone taught you in the end.

What helps me in negotiations is thinking not about coworkers but about how I could be working less (later in life perhaps), how my wife could be working less, how we could travel more... If only I can convince them I'm worth more. I know myself well enough to see that I need the reason to be "not just for me". I wish it was enough to just do it for me though.

I do think the situation is a bit different in the Netherlands where very often there is a collective work agreement (with all wages defined) which puts people in levels. The requirements for the levels are clearly defined. At the healthcare company I work we have "key areas of responsibility tables" where you can see what to do exactly to go to the next scale. I check them before my yearly progress meeting and indicate to my boss if I should be at a higher level. Your salary within the scale is determined by the progress you make. It makes the gaps with coworkers less, still there is a lot of room for negotiation.

Also we have http://www.loonwijzer.nl/home where everyone can enter their salary and you can look up how you are doing. That said, I find it difficult to compare directly to others.

pparkkin• 11 years ago

I think what she's referring to is a situation of information asymmetry, which puts the employee in a position of less power in the negotiation.

Of course it's up to you to negotiate for yourself. That's pretty obvious. But if the other party holds more power, you're negotiating at a disadvantage. And the way I understood the article, that is what she meant by being "suckered". Being put at a disadvantage when negotiating for something important to her.

mgalka2• 11 years ago

You wrote this just as I was typing effectively the same response. I agree.

kabouseng• 11 years ago

What information assymmetry. Surely you can find out from your network what a typical salary for the position is. With sites like glassdoor you also can get a good indication of what you typically can expect. And by being savvy in the interview, you can find out of what value the position might be to the company and you can negotiate on those grounds.

Sometimes the employer is in a better position, sometimes the employee. Sometimes the employer needs to fill a position urgently, has got specialised requirements or the employee is gainfully employed somewhere else and in a much better bargaining position.

We really should stop playing the victim.

teekert3• 11 years ago

She did not negotiate, she repeatedly assumed that the offered salary was normal. Assumption is the mother of all f* ups.

mgalka2• 11 years ago

Despite being a libertarian, I Disagree.

The salary of her colleague is not intrinsic value, it is a market-determined value. And her skills are similar enough that the comparison is relevant.

If we were talking about a different market, I would probably agree with you, but labor markets are different. One side has all the information and all the bargaining power.

The company starts off knowing pretty well the typical salary for the position. And if they lowball, there is not a lot of risk because if the person is offended and rejects the job, they can just go to the next person in the list.

The person applying for the job faces much bigger consequences if they cannot reach an agreement. Finding another job may take a long time. If I was in her shoes and had very little idea of what other people with my skills are paid, I would be very hesitant to do any real negotiating, and risk losing the opportunity.

I think she should acknowledge that some of it is her own fault, but it does sound like she was suckered.

teekert3• 11 years ago

I agree with her that the taboo is not helping in this situation, still it is her own responsibility to go to a job application while being well educated on what to expect and to know what you want. To simply accept anything they throw at you is naive at best. A typical hard-learned life lesson that you can't expect others to have your best interests at heart.

I also really don't believe that the taboo absolutely prevented her from getting any indication on what salary would be "reasonable", or average for her ability and age. Again, if people were more open it would have helped. I see this piece more like a lesson for others: There is a taboo but try to break it before you apply somewhere and feel suckered afterwards. The taboo also has some benefits, openness may create (absolutely unnecessary) feelings of inequality in groups of friend or among siblings. I have a friend that breaks this taboo constantly and he annoys me to no end (although there is a difference between informing upon asking and bragging of course).

Moreover, I am sure any of my friends would give me honest replies if I would ask them their salaries. Did she even try?

notahacker• 11 years ago

The most transparently-advertised salaries are minimum wage and other low-income commodity jobs, precisely because there's no bargaining power. The least transparently advertised salaries are senior management.

That's because salary opacity works in favour of those who do have market power and bargaining skills, and can negotiate high percentage wage increases each time because the cost of hiring somebody else is much higher to the firm, and their prospects of finding alternative employment are good. But not everybody in the company can be the highest paid member of the firm, and not everybody can have a 25% pay rise.

Firms don't give vague indications of salary because they have strong bargaining power, they give vague indications because the ideal candidate has strong bargaining power, and they don't want that to influence people's perceptions of their own market rate.

sukilot10• 11 years ago

Holy cow can you communicate an idea without being a raging asshole?

For bonus points,go for an idea that isn't a long boring paraphrase of the person you are commenting. Being "suckered" means exactly what you said, with all the self-deprecation you felt so needed to be reinforced with others deprecation.

dennish00a• 11 years ago

I find it interesting to read about this "taboo" because, as a scientist at a public university, the issue is...nonexistent! If you are a scientist writing grant applications with other people (the norm), then you need to know their exact salaries in order to fill out the application. This includes the salaries of people above and below you in the food chain. There is no mystery or taboo in it whatsoever. Working at a public university, the mystery factor is even lower, if possible, because all the higher salaries are published online.

I remember dimly when I thought this complete transparency was strange and it made me uncomfortable. Now I don't usually give it a second thought.

geon• 11 years ago

Here in Sweden, taxable income for everyone is bublicly available. I always find it amusing/sad to read about this taboo in the US.

hebdo• 11 years ago

What do you mean? Can every citizen learn how much taxes has anybody else paid, including the incomes of the people outside the public sector?

Cederfjard2• 11 years ago

Isn't it sort of taboo here too, though? I've seen people being told to fuck off for asking that question, or at least politely declined. Even my close family have always been reluctant to divulge their exact income to me, with a few exceptions. It's not a thing that I would ask someone without feeling pretty certain they wouldn't mind.

tincholio• 11 years ago

It's the same in Finland, but people are still very reticent to talk about their salary.

ajdlinux• 11 years ago

Here in Australia, the majority of academics and university staff fall under union agreements with publicly available pay scales, so you can work out at least an approximate pay grade based on minimal information about the people involved. I also happen to live in the capital, where about a third of the working population is employed by the federal government, the vast majority of whom are covered by union agreements on standard pay scales. It's fairly normal to talk openly about being an "APS5" or an "APS6" knowing that many people around here wouldn't even need to look up the pay scales to know your salary from that.

I get the impression though that in general Australia has a fairly similar level of taboo-ness about salaries as the US, it's not something you really talk about with co-workers.

_Robbie• 11 years ago

Here are the salaries for all University of California employees. https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

mkagenius3• 11 years ago

I have had three managers till now. I have asked all three what was their salary. Only one told me his salary, rest two didn't.

I keep asking salaries when I become friends with my coworkers, mostly because its a taboo and hence makes it fun. It makes them laugh when I suddenly in the middle of a conversation ask their salary becuase nobody has in the 10-15 years of their careers. I am a fresher, though.

yitchelle3• 11 years ago

That is interesting. Did you disclose your salary to your coworkers, and if you did, did that effect your relationship with your coworkers?

mkagenius3• 11 years ago

All three of my managers know my salary (of course).

Apart from that, people with whom I am close with know my salary and I know theirs. Mine is the lowest even though one of my friend is IC1 and I am IC2, others are senior to me.

Some of them tell me to talk to the manager for my salary. My priority is learning, so it doesn't bother me much. But I did talk to the manager (and her manager's manager too), because if you don't, they take you for granted.

By knowing I had the lowest salary gives me lot of opportunities to crack jokes :-)

daeken• 11 years ago

I've come to realize lately that I have absolutely no idea what I should be making. I know what I make and I know what I have made in the past, but I have no idea whether it's above or below average.

The only way I can think of to determine my value is to go interview in a bunch of places and see what they offer. However, I have no interest in leaving my job right now, and I feel like it's dishonest to go through the process knowing that I wouldn't take anything but a ridiculously great offer.

How do other folks deal with this? (Edit: Glassdoor has no decent information for my position, at any of the companies I've looked at.)

bobbles• 11 years ago

If you're in Australia or New Zealand (I think you're US?) there is the Hays salary guide http://www.hays.com.au/salary-guide/

It's an awesome document. Even though the numbers would be completely different I think that something like the breakdown between junior/senior etc level roles would probably be similar in the US? (in terms of the % salary jump you'd get from moving up or sideways)

corobo• 11 years ago

How I deal with it is - I'm definitely qualified to be in the role I am currently in. I make enough to cover my bills right now but I should be earning more. I'm going to ask for more, I'll move on if my current position can't pay more within 6 months and there's no sign of that changing (e.g. through promotion)

If my bills were covered and a bit extra for savings, fun, rainy day fund, etc? That's how much I should be making. Anything more is a bonus

Don't try comparing your salary to someone elses. Maybe they're a better negotiator than you, maybe they have a skillset you don't know about the boss is going to utilize in a year's time in a project being chalked up now. Maybe they have nudie pictures of the hiring manager? Not your concern, you look after you.

sukilot10• 11 years ago

It's not dishonest at all! They have no intention of hiring people they interview, unless thy find an insanely great offer!

johnward• 11 years ago

My problem is that glassdoor has information for my specific position, in my city, in my company but it's double what I currently make. I don't think I'm that underpaid but the taboo of employees not discussing salary leaves me without any real idea of where I really should be. I know for a fact I make more money in one quarter for the company than I earn in an entire year. I still asked for at least 20% more and am awaiting a response. Also applying for other positions.

The only big increases I've ever gotten were by switching companies or bringing a competing offer to my boss. People say the latter is career suicide but they are wrong.

pearjuice• 11 years ago

Spoiler: at the end he still hasn't admitted what he makes at Wired. Link bait confirmed.

pixie_• 11 years ago

If salaries were transparent wouldn't that create an incredible amount of animosity between co-workers? When HR has to negotiate and pay someone more to join the company everyone else is going to be extremely jealous. You think people are going to understand? They are not going to. People are not rational. It's more common sense than fear. Disclosing salaries is going to create way more social problems than it solves. Companies aren't forcing anyone to keep their salary secret. People themselves don't want their salaries disclosed, and for good reason. Kind of hard to work together when everyone is reduced to a number.

pavlov2• 11 years ago

You can already see how 100% salary transparency works in Finland or Sweden.

Anyone can look up a co-worker's salary from data made available by the tax office. (Of course the information is about a year out of date because it's based on tax returns.)

Are employees "reduced to numbers" in Sweden and Finland? Certainly not. On the contrary, these societies are considered some of the most open and equal in the world. Maybe salary transparency has something to do with it too.

morgante• 11 years ago

Actually, I believe employees are reduced to numbers in Sweden and Finland. You don't see star employees or developers making what they make in the US. Everyone is in something of an equilibrium—decent pay, but not much incentive to strive for more.

4ad• 11 years ago

This is a myth easily dispelled by the existence of countries where salaries are publicly available (e.g. Sweden or Finland) or cultures where people talk about their salaries freely (e.g. most of the world outside US).

PhasmaFelis• 11 years ago

When HR has to negotiate and pay someone more to join the company everyone else is going to be extremely jealous.

You're assuming that this model, where pay is determined by how well you banter when you sign up, is the only possible one. This model is entirely manufactured by employers to let them fleece employees, and they make rules to forbid discussing your salary precisely to keep employees from realizing how bullshit it is.

In a transparent salary environment, the management is incentivized to pay everyone equitably based on their actual value to avoid the "OMG Susie gets paid 40% more than I do for exactly the same job" problem.

mattlutze4• 11 years ago

In a transparent salary environment, the management is incentivized to pay everyone based on their socially perceived value, to avoid the "OMG Susie gets paid 40% more than I do for the same job," even if Susie is actually 40% more valuable than you are.

Which means management is incentivized to probably pay mediocre employees a little more, and stand-out employees less than they could have otherwise earned.

pavlov2• 11 years ago

In Finland wages are public information. The tax office makes the data available yearly, so you can easily look up how much your neighbor made last year.

godzilla82• 11 years ago

I feel this is a faulty exercise. Would you disclose your salary if you knew you made more than your peers? I guess the end effect would be, only those who feel they are making less would disclose.

falcolas• 11 years ago

Because you would like to see your peers get paid equitably? They can't use your salary as leverage in their own negotiations unless they know what it is.

somberi• 11 years ago

In California, the salary of its state employees are publicly available here: http://transparentcalifornia.com/

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

In California, the salary of its state employees are publicly available here: http://transparentcalifornia.com/

That's not just state employees (its public employees from different public entities within the state), and its also fairly poorly aggregated from disparate sources, such that if you add all the pay and benefit columns together, they often don't match the pay + benefits (and some people who I personally know have non-zero regular pay show with zero in all pay columns, an actual number in the benefit column, and a pay + benefit that is both higher than the benefit amount (remember, all the pay columns are zero) and lower than the person's actual pay before benefits.

There's another similar source [0], which has slightly different coverage (but both cover state employees), which has substantially different numbers for the same years for people covered by both.

Presumably, for state employees, both of those third-party aggregators have done public records requests for the same public information from the State, but they've both processed it using different (and opaque) methodologies, so that no one actually using it knows what they actually mean (the latter source, by using only one number for each person, doesn't make it as clear that they are doing something funky with the data; the former tries to do more, which makes it even more clear that they are doing something weird, because it makes inconsistencies visible.)

They do a good job of creating the illusion of readily-accessible accurate data if you are only aware of one of them and don't have any independent knowledge to verify them against.

[0] http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/arti...

valdiorn2• 11 years ago

What about people with very large paychecks?

I don't want to make my friends uncomfortable when they realize I make literally an extra zero at the end of what they make.

Should I keep my mouth shut or disclose... for their sake?

spacemanmatt3• 11 years ago

I think that's the point of the article. It's only fair to talk about it.

sukilot10• 11 years ago

Maybe your heart is telling you that you shouldn't be spending an extra 0 on yourself than your peers. If you acknowledge your incredible luck, and that there is diminishing marginal return in lavishly rewarding yourself for our efforts, and you invest the excess in meaningful projects that improve the lot of the world....

valdiorn2• 11 years ago

Your comment doesn't make much sense. I put most of my money into a savings account as I'm saving up for a house. I don't live a very frivolous lifestyle, if that's what you mean.

However, I emigrated from Iceland to the UK, and some of the people I left behind do not have the luxury of doing the same, as they have families or relationships back home.

How would it be fair of me to disclose my salary, just to show them what they can't have? Most people know I make good money, but maybe not exactly how much, and I try not to boast as I feel that is rude.

Constantly going around telling people about my salary would probably not be well received, even if it was "in the interest of transparency of fairness"...

Edit: I do not acknowledge it as luck, I worked my ass off to get where I am today!

omahlama• 11 years ago

In my previous job at the Finnish software consulting company Futurice (http://futurice.com), there was a long discussion about this that ended with a volunteer-based publication of peoples salaries - around half of the 200 people opted in. The result was a bit anti-climatic: peoples wages were consistent and fair, no big drama.

After switching jobs to another software consulting company Reaktor (http://reaktor.com), I brought up this topic and the discussion was very similar. I decided to try a different route: I created a wiki-page called "Voluntary salary information" and added my name and salary to the top of the page. I then wrote a post to our discourse board explaining why I thought this was important. As of now there are 68 names on that list ( with only 1 obvious troll ) out of about 300 employees. Our head of HR replied to my discourse post with a detailed explanation of how peoples salaries are decided. Overall a great day for transparency.

wodenokoto• 11 years ago

I don't get why this is a taboo. I tell my salary to everyone who cares to listen, to the point where an employer threatened to fire me if I told my coworkers about my raise.

My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary

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