As an engineer in the bay area, I don't really want to share my salary information. It's very personal. I don't want people to know that I'm making far less or far more, I just don't even want to think about it. I already have enough things that cause me social anxiety, I don't really need another. If I'm happy with my salary, why can't that be good enough? I'm fine with people being allowed to talk about how much they make, but if I don't want to share my information, that should be OK too.<p>I would probably consider not working for a company if they said they made salaries public. Some people value their privacy to a greater extent I guess.
The book Predictably Irrational[0] has a good section on how making the salaries of CEO's of publicly traded companies public information is one of the things that has helped lead to their salaries spiking so incredibly in recent years. It's been some time since I read the book but if I remember correctly the argument is that making them public basically removes any social embarrassment or taboo around having extravagant salaries. If sharing salary info becomes more commonplace in other areas I wonder if you'd see the same thing or the exact opposite.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061353248" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061353248</a>
I've been open about my salary for years with friends and family and the taboo is starting to change it seems. When I first started talking about salary in the early-2000's I met a lot of resistance, but now I've notice friends dropping how much they make in casual conversation.<p>For me at least, there is no embarrassment and instead is used to make decisions about the future. If someone makes more, I ask myself why and how can I get there? If someone makes significantly less, and they care to know, I tell them how I got to where I am in hopes of helping them.<p>Unfortunately, employers trying to squash this has not changed. I remember 15 years ago when I got sat down the first time, by a fortune 100 company, and told we do not talk about salary. I also remember when the same conversation happened in a start up just a few months ago. The motivation still hasn't changed -- keep the worker 'happy' and underpaid whenever possible through information disparity, intimidation and "right to work" laws.
I really hope this "open salary" trend doesn't continue. It has the effect of systematically decreasing the standard deviation in developer salaries. Poor negotiators (and some poor performers), of course, love having access to this salary information as pointing to a public average is any easy way to ask for more money without having to put much effort into actually negotiating. Great negotiators, on the other hand, are getting salaries far above the median for their positions and the additional information wouldn't help them at all. I strongly suspect that if salaries were public companies would be far less willing to give in to great negotiators as a single isolated case could easily cause cascading demands from other employees.<p>(Note that salary ranges/averages are irrelevant if you're a great negotiator except as a story-telling tool. All you should be playing with is your BATNA and the company's BATNA.)<p>If you don't think open salaries have a negative effect on top engineer salaries, look at how little Buffer is paying.[0]<p>In the status quo, open salaries are a tax on poor negotiators which companies and good negotiators split. As a pretty good negotiator, I hope we don't go public.<p>[0] <a href="https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries/" rel="nofollow">https://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buff...</a>
For most companies, the amount of money represented by the difference in salary of 2 employees is negligible. (Definitely not negligible for the employees!) It's not even a blip on the cash flow statement. This is especially true of venture-backed startups whose operating model is going-for-broke.<p>What this means is that a person has a price that he or she can command and it's based less on their work experience/abilities and more on their experience of getting paid: they get used to a certain standard of living. If a company wants to hire a person, it will need to meet or beat that standard.<p>So yeah, the longer a person has been in the workforce, the more they are probably getting paid. But even this can vary from person to person, depending on how the person has been managing his or her salary and what companies he or she has worked at.<p>"Experience" is a proxy for technical ability and expected standard of living.<p>Usually a company will decide if it wants to hire a person, first. If yes, they start to negotiate pay based on a bunch of factors. Really, it's two parties trying to find each others' comfort zone; there isn't a formula. Sometimes there is no middle ground and no hire happens. Sometimes, to save time, recruiters will probe you to find your comfort zone before they even interview. Most of the time, if a company decides it wants to hire you, it will do what it can to make that happen. It's the desire to win.<p>If the candidate is a no-hire, there is no negotiation, he can't say "what if I work for less!"<p>Other factors that bear on salary:<p>* What are the current market conditions? When you were hired?
* What is the rate of job churn?
* Salary versus equity
* Location
* Employee demand: well known companies and probably pay less because more people want to work there.
* What does your boss make? Can't make more than her
* Name recognition on your resume. Did you go to Stanford? Did you work at Google?
* Signing bonus?<p>When I was younger this used to upset me. I guess I got over it as started to get paid more. But I realize that getting paid a personal and psychological endeavor, not a simple mathematical formula.<p>I caveat all this by saying I'm an engineer in SF in 2015: shit's crazy.
It's always seemed strange how salary/pay is a "private" thing in American culture. In NZ, AU and UK it's something that could be brought up at a party (if talking about work), and no one would think it was rude.<p>Is this because people feel judged about how much they make in the US? (At least, more so than other countries?)
I just had a realization (seems obvious in hindsight), here's my hypothesis:<p>The desire to share salary is inversely proportional to the gap between the top and bottom.<p>On one extreme, if every engineer were paid exactly the same, there's clearly no reason to hide salary, since everyone knows it. At the other extreme, where one engineer is paid $500k/year and another is paid $100k/year where both were hired on the same date and do the same work, the higher paid one doesn't have much to gain from publishing salaries. Nor does the company, since they're getting the same value from both engineers, but saving $400k on the cheaper engineer.<p>Reality is somewhere in between these two extremes.
The company I work for makes all salaries and bonuses visible to anyone in the firm.<p>Salaries are simple, there are only 3 bands of salaries.<p>Bonuses are based on the firm's and employee's performance as well as a multiplier based on how much salary they took. Smaller salary, larger bonus multiplier and visa versa.<p>The system works pretty well and I haven't noticed any negative consequences from having this information internally visible.<p>Maybe if we get above 100 people at some point this will break down?<p>Serious question to others... What's the downside of having your fellow team member's know your salary?
Who cares about a "movement"? This reminds me of the hashtags #Together4Her when somebody shares a tweet about a young woman with cancer, or a woman attacked by thugs, etc. What _exactly_ will 50k tweets with this hashtag do to make this woman feel better?<p>Similarly, what would a "movement" achieve? Would 50k people make a public announcement of their salaries, risking immediate lay off due to breaking their promise for silence on the matter when they have signed their labor contract?<p>No? Then what is this post even about? Click-bait for more page hits?<p>Actions > words. If you can't put your wallet where your mouth is, keep the hell quiet, there's enough noise as it is.<p>I admire the guy from SumAll, though. Wish more people would do the same as him -- or join him.
I haven't put that much thought into people knowing my salary, since it's private. I went to great lengths to hide the value of the transaction of my home though. At the time, I was a bit embarrassed about how much I spent and I didn't want it being public.
Sharing salary information would give rise to more social inequality, taboo and bias about type of role, company and growth prospects. It allows HR to negotiate with you on their terms rather than based on competence. If they want to make salary sharing info public for all employees, they should also make it voluntary and pay employees each month for this release of private info.
I'm surprised this article didn't mention sites like Glassdoor, which uses yelp-like reviews and metrics on salary as the lead for it's job search site. I'm not horribly impressed with Glassdoor - I feel it has some flaws in how it collects and presents information - but it's a conversation opener, and should be lauded.
Is there a non-company-specific place to post salary info? Maybe many of us on HN could provide data on it. Particularly interested to see salaries outside the valley, in the UK as well.
Using h1b salaries to establish a baseline sounds like the worst possible idea.<p>"Let's see how much immigrants with a gun on their head make so I can ask the same."