As mentioned in another comment thread: we don’t need to speculate about the effects because millions of employees already share salaries with no anonymity in thousands of groups. That is, employees of the US or state governments.
That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington:
https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx
Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.
What are the consequences of this? Is there vicious infighting, and sniping over raises? Uh, no. There is just simple compensation, and way less negotiation. When some job class needs a salary adjustment because the job market has changed, everyone benefits. It’s pretty great.
The root cause is an open argument but I think one of the causes is that you get a demonstrably lower quality of employee because the pay can't be negotiated, and it's pegged so far below market it's insulting. The salary you mentioned is half that of the median developer salary in the US. If you can get into FAANG as a new grad you're looking at 1.5-2x the median. I'm not super familiar with UW's scaling system but I have to go to what appears to be the top level (ES10?) to get anything approaching a reasonable salary, and it's still less than entry level FAANG.
I used to contract for state government. They used contractors for all the "real development" because the developers on state payroll making $40k/yr were wholly unqualified to write any code. So they paid a contracting firm $80/hr to get someone making $100k/yr to come in and do it while the state employees managed the project and supervised the contractors.
If the government could just negotiate individual salaries for developers, they could pay them twice as much, fire the contractors, and get the work done for roughly the same quality, and cheaper.
So, my previous role was as a PE in AWS. I made a high multiple of my current salary, yes.
I think the quality of people around me at UW is mostly just different. Domain expertise is much deeper - the image processing experts really know their stuff! While fundamental systems and devops stuff is pretty absent from anyone’s skillsets. I don’t think you can really simply say that the talent quality is better or worse - it’s different.
I work at UW because I prefer the content of the work over my past at AWS. It turns out there are lots of people like me, who agree that $120k is plenty, and who made a very cushy pile of cash in the past at FAANG.
It apso puts you in the ~75th percentile for household income in the US, if your spouse also works you're doing far better than the vast majority of Americans.
lol, ok I'm not quite sure how discussing fractions of an integer would change the conversation in this case since we're already trying to compare one person's $120k to a statistical median of ~$35k.
If you're actually interested in the numbers on different groups they're here [0]. For ex $120k is ~5.77x the median for a woman without a college degree.
You’re getting unfairly teased for this; I do think its a bit weird. But it’s mostly a problem for FAANG. My advice to everyone who can get a job at FAANG is to put in 5 or 6 years there, raking in a few million dollars (!!). Pay off student debts and secure your future, and then work for ~100k on something you care about or good for the world.
FAANG has to pay so much that they can actually have trouble retaining people. This pattern I have described seems to be becoming more common.
What you're saying is that if you're not motivated by money, and not worried about money, because you already have tons of money, then disclosing how much money you're making and knowing how much money your peers are making won't make much difference. Well, yes, probably. But I don't think this is the common case - especially when we're talking about academia, which attracts people with different set of motivations, usually.
What do you do at UW? I left academic research in an unrelated discipline (cognitive neuroscience) to become a software engineer. I really enjoy my work, but I also miss the deep expertise and intellectual stimulation of the academe. I might interested in this career path - $120k is plenty.
I write software and basic infrastructure for astronomy. I spend most of my time on the upcoming Rubin Observatory, which is actively hiring software people: https://www.lsst.org/hiring/
Academia has pluses and minuses. Less pay, but the overall mission is more interesting. Really really smart coworkers, but not a lot of structure for growth, since almost everyone just thinks in terms of tenure. Laid back pace, but sometimes too laid back; I wish expectations were a bit higher. Overall I certainly like it more than my time at AWS, but recognize its not for everyone.
That's all we needed to know - your primary motivation is not the max salary you can get. On that note, more power to you, I truly believe you're more likely to lead a happy life than most people.
But you're really not in a good position to advocate for open salaries - you're an outlier. Most people deeply, deeply, deeply care about their salaries. It's what gets them out of the bed in the morning, it's what makes their partners respect them, it's what might perhaps provide for private schooling for their kids, etc. Most importantly, it's what makes them feel good about themselves. Yes, those are all wrong reasons, and yes, that's how most people are wired [1].
You'll notice that people who work in academia, military, government jobs, etc all have one thing in common - they are ok with not being able to make more than their peers. They get their happiness from other things in life. But the majority of people out there will happily go the extra mile to get an extra bump in their salary. Open salaries don't allow that - everyone is treated the same, everyone works the same, everyone's output is the same, everyone makes the same salary.
If it sounds familiar to communism, it is - where I was born, everyone's salary was also the same and there was nothing you could do about it. It worked great for people in academia and military (and, coincidentally or not, those are generally the strengths of a communist regime), and it demoralized most people working in other parts of economy where there was supposed to be some competition in the market (which again, coincidentally or not, are the weaknesses of a communist regime). Notably, you won't find a lot of salary transparency in more evolved communist regimes like China, and that perfectly correlated with their economic growth.
[1] Side note: I might sound like I am wired the same way, but I actually took a 6x reduction in salary about 10 years ago and have stayed much below my previous level ever since. Life was incredibly comfortable back then, but I am happier now.
> Most people deeply, deeply, deeply care about their salaries. It's what gets them out of the bed in the morning...
This seems to be kind of a problem though? Both to be this person, and to have to work with them, and to have society composed of them. Billionaires are a drain on society and the economy, but the core issue is not the wealth inequality itself but the larger attitude in which "most people deeply care about money, first and foremost".
When you’re trying to save enough money to have 25x your annual expenses saved by retirement (to support a 4% safe-withdrawal-rate), buy a house in a good school district, and save for their kids’ college, people are naturally concerned about their income. This is single-digit barely-millionaire territory, not billionaire level of income inequality.
> If the government could just negotiate individual salaries for developers, they could pay them twice as much, fire the contractors, and get the work done for roughly the same quality, and cheaper.
This isn't a bug, it's a feature intended to funnel taxpayer money into private companies. And I know this is usually a statement laced with malice, but it's not really - it makes sense (on paper) that if competent private companies exist the government should contract them instead of scaffolding its own development company inside of the existing bureaucracy.
In practice we know it would probably be cheaper to just hire 10-ish good developers per county for $1m/yr each and get them to do all the digital work for the state. But that's a harder sell that none of the existing private firms (read: campaign donors who stand to gain no money and lose talented employees) would spring for.
> because the pay can't be negotiated, and it's pegged so far below market it's insulting.
This has nothing to do with transparency. Just because one seller sells something at a certain price does not mean another has to, and same for the buyer.
The pay not being able to be negotiated is a combination of it being a political decision and lack of demand relative to supply.
When the government really wants someone, they start negotiating too.
Edit: one notable example of how it is politically impossible to pay appropriate to get the job done right the first time is the rollout of healthcare.gov and various health insurance websites by state governments. They could have paid enough to attract competent programmers, but the government decided to cheap out. Then it was a political fiasco when the project failed, and they had to open the government wallet to pay for competent programmers. But if they had advertised market pricing for programmers in the first place, and transparently, the the job would have been done right the first time.
Many (most?) states have a Constitutional prohibition against anyone in the government making more than the Governor. It's literally illegal.
I just looked up the Governor's salary for the state I contracted for, and it's less than a first-year FAANG salary. So in this case, no, they can't really negotiate anything under the current structure.
That is incorrect, there isn't a single state in the United States where the highest paid state employee is the governor. They are mostly coaches at state universities, and where they aren't they are upper tier member's of the state university system.
Could you name a couple of these states that have such a Constitutional prohibition (or even a statute) on any state employee making more than the governor?
This implies that a "job class" has relatively similar value output across job titles. That may be the case in universities (or rather, the high performers are more differentiated on directorships/board memberships in private companies, not disclosed on that web page) but in tech two people with the same job title can contribute wildly different value to a company.
You can just invent a billion different job titles, but you could also just figure out what each person is happy to accept a job for and bump their salaries by the saving you make on not employing people to create and maintain and negotiate salary bands.
This may just be your personal feelings though. I know quite a few people who work for public schools and government entities throughout Florida who really really are uncomfortable with their salaries being public knowledge, and at least one has felt it has been used against them.
In some countries you can look up anyones salary, Nordic countries for example.
Do you feel their entire society is harmed and uncomfortable?
Your whole argue is basically it might make a few people uncomfortable for a generation. While completely ignoring any benefits for future generations.
Nordic countries also have a different culture and values than we do (not better, not worse, but different). This is normal that subjects that are taboo in one area are not taboo in another area, and things that work for one culture may not necessarily work out for our culture.
There's a very specific culture in the US that favors income opaqueness, and it's not necessarily employer based. My sister in law is very uncomfortable having us know that she makes 70k a year for whatever reason. I know real life stories of people who make 150k in low cost of living area and people around them treating them like they can afford to pay for their dinner when they hang out because they make so much more then them.
We live in a society that has MUCH more pay inequality than a lot of other 1st world countries and we are a society that heavily values income and wealth over other social signals, and because of that money has become a sore subject.
Then you add the job situations where if you make a lot more than other people (maybe you literally deserve it because of the value you bring to the company) it can be an uncomfortable situation if peers find out because now the company has to justify why person X is worth more than Y without insulting them, risking a lawsuit, or making them leave.
To be clear, I am vastly for pay transparency for many reasons (especially minority and gender equality) but let's not pretend like it can just be airlifted into America's culture just because it works in other countries.
The only reason people are uncomfortable sharing their salaries is because : A. wages in america are pathetic and their ashamed. B. Because it's been told to them that this is 'proper' and 'ethical', that to 'share' this information is a corporate 'sin' and just really poor manners.
People who work in most professions do as they're told. They've been told to do this since they were in school, which was actually setup the way they are to funnel kids into factory jobs where they will -you guessed it - do as they're told.
Total openness about wages is one big step towards conquering income inequality. You can see it play out in the news lately w/ the strikes, the rise of /r/antiwork, the growth of unions, etc...
This is often the case in lower per capita income area's where you have a public sector worker demanding a pay increase (i.e higher taxes) but are making 65-70K, where the tax payer they are wanting more money from is making 40-50K, the tax payer tends to not believe the appeals to poverty of said public sector employee
Totally incomparable. Almost all of those roles are on non-negotiable payscales set by the agencies, with very tight working hours.
And as for infighting and jealousy, it is very existent: not over money, but often promotions given out due to patronage, seniority ranking for choosing work duties, people abusing probationary procedures to retaliate against others... public service has plenty of misery for people on the wrong end of things, and it's a major factor for why unions are still strong there.
Public service salaries are public because it's public money. That's it. Don't glorify it.
I don’t really understand your comment. The original concern was that if workers in a private company knew each other’s salaries, there would be particular problems. I am claiming that those haven’t appeared in my experience with public salaries.
You have named many problems with working in public service. That doesn’t seem really relevant, though; I certainly am under no illusions that this is a perfect environment, just that salary transparency is not disastrous.
I'm saying salary transparency problems don't appear in the public sector because there is no social basis for them to appear. And as a corollary, that even when this aspect of possible inter-employee strife is removed, that people in those work environments still find ways of warring against one another. So why would you think adding an additional anxiety-inducing way for people to relatively rank one another in the private sector would lead to anything positive?
This style of pay leads to Tenure based pay, not performance bases pay.
Which some people like, and will excel in such an environment, however also can lead to other problems. I prefer performance based pay, vs tenure. If a engineer is turning out project after project, completing task after task why should they be paid less simply because they were hired 3 years ago, where Dave down the hall has been there 30 years but has 1/2 the output making significantly more because of tenure
Because those categories are not so neatly separated as you think they are. Most work is done in teams, and some enable others to churn out project after project by takingn care of the maintenance, meetings, documentation, etc. It's hard to say who did more, but it's also hard to say someone in the team has more output than others.
Are the wheels of the car more productive than the frame? I agree with those that say this is a discussion not worth ones time. I can always go to another team, or go at it myself, if the pay isn't what I want.
> I can always go to another team, or go at it myself, if the pay isn't what I want.
In industries that have tenure-based pay, you often cannot do this because you reduce your pay when you switch companies because you reset your tenure.
What you’re describing is an uncommon scenario (at least in the US) where within a given industry some employers are paying for tenure and others are paying for performance. This is uncommon because pay for performance tends to win out because it attracts the best talent, at least in highly paid fields. Pay for tenure probably results in higher average pay across a role but lower pay for the top performers.
no it is not really, but to use your car analogy, should a wheel on the car that is flat, and slowing the car down be paid the same as the 2 wheels that are operating to spec?
Because non-performance based pay tends to flat tires....
I think generally that a competent manager without too many direct reports can have a good sense of who’s contributing more in the end, even when mixing apples and oranges like you describe.
Performance based pay seems great in theory, but in reality is not so simple. For one, how do you measure performance? Whatever system you come up with to measure it, you will have people trying to game the system to make themselves appear more valuable than they are.
I'm sure there are other things that factor into it, but I'd suspect that people who have worked with you for a long time (1 year+ close contact) would get a very clear idea of your competence and reliability.
The hard part is expecting people close to you to be honest to management.
I also don’t know how accurately we can rate our colleagues productivity… it is hard to separate out how you feel about the person on a personal level.
But in government entities usually the immediate superiors have very little leeway to change your salary, so the employees know it's pointless to argue over differences in a salary that has very strong rules that very few people can influence.
In private companies on the other hand there's usually a much larger margin for salary to be negotiated, which incentivizes the consequences you mentioned.
That is endogenous to publicizing salary data. If the data were public, you might make an argument that all engineers need to be paid more or that you need a promotion rather than lobbying your manager.
It used to be the case until the 1980's, whereupon there was a deliberate shift away from quantifying the value of a role and towards quantifying the value of a candidate. Somewhat counterintuitively, this was a deliberate measure to reduce exposure to discrimination lawsuits. The reasoning was that you could always argue that candidates were unequal in their experience/competence/etc., hence the observed wage differences within a single role. To be clear, there are upsides to this arrangement as well, namely: the ability to negotiate one's salary.
Rather funny that if you order by salaries, the top ones are by far the sports coach. That's the peak (or close to) of human existence I guess.
While it's expected in capitalism, I find it sad that tax dollars go into those salaries (don't start the "they make more revenue than their salaries" thing. Government is not a business)
We don't generally set salaries by the employee's proximity to the peak of human existence: find me an economic system that does and I'd learn about it. In this case, like it or not, the football program brings a lot of value to the University in terms of notoriety and money.
>(don't start the "they make more revenue than their salaries" thing. Government is not a business)
Governments may not be, but universities most definitely are. Unless/until we move over to a system of 100% tax-funded universities sports teams are an important source of revenue for them.
Isn’t it basically PR to attract students, who in turn will pay very expensive tuition (often backed by student loans, and guaranteed by the government to boot, meaning it can be cranked up really high)?
That’s a great point. It could be seen that way. Though it’s certainly not how it’s usually explained, and I don’t think most people would see that as a satisfying answer. “Sports are profitable because they allow us to charge you more” just doesn’t have the same ring.
That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington: https://fiscal.wa.gov/Salaries.aspx
Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.
What are the consequences of this? Is there vicious infighting, and sniping over raises? Uh, no. There is just simple compensation, and way less negotiation. When some job class needs a salary adjustment because the job market has changed, everyone benefits. It’s pretty great.