I once did a short stint at a phone survey company that specialised in health and social welfare surveys. I wasn't on this particular survey crew, but I remember a colleague telling me that it was strange - a stranger rings up and with your consent conducts a 20-minute anonymous survery on the subject of abuse, sexual or otherwise, that the respondant suffered as a child.
It was a delicate survey and required a fair bit of rapport building, and lots of 'I need to remind you that the next question is voluntary'... but we were still getting plenty of respondants, and the weird thing was that despite being a (relatively) anonymous stranger with which you have just shared some sensitive, deep secrets about childhood abuse, the question that most balked at was the 'income level' question in the demographic rundown at the end.
I think our culture (well, American, capitalist society is all I can really comment on) has a very strong implied link between income and worth/value. We have magazines that routinely have lists of the highest paid / richest people. People give incredible leeway to highly paid execs, as if due to the number of zeros on their paycheck they clearly have to be right/smart. There are sayings like "that decision was made above my paygrade", that seem to show there is a pretty tight linkage, mentally, between income and value as a human.
I don't agree with this mindset at all, mainly because I don't believe most organizations are truly meritocratic in any objective sense. It's a good PR story, but people, evolutionarily, tend to "look out for their own", for whatever traits puts someone in that in-group. I have seen many examples of people espousing meritocracy but clearly considering those with the most "merit" as being one in the same with "those they already seem to like", coincidentally enough. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, with balance. I think a 100% meritocratic org would be lacking in basic humanity and kind of a terrible place to work. All humans make mistakes, have struggles, have setbacks, etc...
Even with that being said, and me not believing in the income -> value/worth link in general, I would not be comfortable talking about my salary with most friends/family. I live a comfortable life with little stress about money, but bragging about that (which even trying to downplay it sounds like a humblebrag) seems wrong somehow.
I think the cultural thing is actually the reverse: Westerners including Anglo-Americans usually don't want to discuss money because they see it as a proxy for social hierarchies they profess disbelief in and orthogonal to self-worth.
On the other hand, in countries like India where salary is usually the third thing a complete stranger asks you about have a strong sense of social hierarchy and see frank discussion of income differences as an important part of establishing where they sit in it (and their potential for moving up). Meanwhile, I wasn't even mildly curious about how much they earned relative to me and their peers because it wasn't going to affect my perception of the conversation in the slightest, but was a little embarrassed that I could afford to spend months travelling in their country without having to do much to earn the privilege and a salary I'd been unhappy with was usually a large multiple of theirs.
I always viewed the "that decision was made above my paygrade" as mildly sarcastic in its implications.
>I would not be comfortable talking about my salary with most friends/family.
In my family, it was always taboo to talk about money --my father hardly ever discussed money with friends (that I recall). So it was instilled in me that "money-talk" was somewhat "vulgar". To this day, I can only guess my siblings' fiscal positions.
On the other hand, when I lived in the East (Asia), people there openly talked about money/salary, etc. It was one of the acceptable topics at personal intrductions, in addition to where are you from, what do you do and have you eaten.
That's interesting. I've never felt any reservation in talking about my income, except to coworkers. I just feel like it invites resentment if mine happened to be higher, even if on a sub-conscious level.
Near the bottom of this article is an interesting post mortem of RethinkDB's transparent salary policy. When it was posted years ago [1] folks here took pretty kindly to it, though some were skeptical [2].
I'm kinda disappointed (who doesn't like to know?) but also not very surprised that it didn't work out. Negotiation doesn't work super well if the other players have complete information about your strategy.
What if you had front loaded the open salary information in the hiring process? Something like, "We have a no-haggle policy on engineering roles. In order to streamline negotiations, please only apply for this job if you are comfortable with X starting salary and Y options. We are very fair and promotions are rapid (see our comp ladders here), but want people to join who share our sense of efficiency."
Law firms manage to pull this off with a standard $160k base, and probably something similar works in other spaces?
"Negotiation doesn't work super well if the other players have complete information about your strategy."
Economist's point: perfect markets don't work if anyone has restricted information. Employees can't sell their labour at the market rate if they can't see every other salary in the economy... :)
Your highest-level engineer makes only twice as much as your intern (stocks are worthless, on average). That makes zero sense to me. True senior level engineers are dozens of times more productive than interns, make infinitely fewer mistakes, and know infinitely more. To max out your engineer salaries at 125K in Mountain View, CA is just crazy. No surprise it didn't work out.
First, interns at big-name tech companies are highly overpaid for the work the company gets now; it's seen more as a hiring cost than a salary. The company pays ~$50k (~20k is three month's salary; add in housing stipend, taxes, and overhead) per intern in the hopes that a decent proportion of them will be back. Those that are back are solid engineers that are known quantities; false positives should be much more rare than in your general hiring process because you get to see them work in your company for three months before deciding whether to make a full-time offer. Given how hard and expensive engineer recruiting is, this is an ok deal for a lot of companies. But regardless, comparing to intern salary isn't meaningful because few companies actually believe that they are paying for what the intern will produce in their three months when they pay top dollar for elite interns.
Furthermore, while higher salaries are certainly available, those salaries don't seem absurdly low for the stage of company they were (tiny staff, no product released). Most companies at that early of a stage do expect employees to accept a nontrivial cut from their market rate in return for more interesting work, more autonomy, and fairly significant (if high-risk) equity.
Yep, I was hired by a company where I did an internship and was actually paid slightly less as a full-time employee than as an intern (more benefits, though). As an intern I made $40/hr, hired full-time at $80k/yr.
Figure 10 days PTO and holidays, 40 $/h * 40 h/wk * 50 wk/yr = 80 K$/yr. You made the same amount. OK, maybe you work more than 40 hours a week, but if you're salaried you don't account for that anyway.
$40/hr is a pretty ridiculous salary for an intern, good for you, man. Maybe you, personally, were worth that much, but on average, it's at least double of what the companies should be paying to interns. Heck, $15/hr should be fine.
There's nothing stopping you from talking to other employees about salaries. It's a myth that is propagated by companies in order to keep you in the dark about what they are paying other people, to deprive you of information, and to keep you at a disadvantage in any negotiation.
Also, it is very much a western thing. I have a lot of Indian friends and they happily trade salary information amongst each other. This reduces any informational asymmetry that exists in such situations.
It's not a taboo thing. In my contracts I've had always clause that all the information are confidential, including salary amount. And I can be sued by company if I break the agreement.
How can such a thing be legally binding. Did you tell your wife? Can they sue for that? What if you're not married to your partner? Your bank and every person who has seen your bank statement (a lot of people) knows what you're earning. Can they sue for that?
It's allowed to say that to your spouse. I think the regulation is just to prevent from publishing on web page or sending email with your real documents. If there is leak from the bank, the bank is responsible. In practice you talk about your salaries but in unofficial way, with a beer in a pub, but you never show the official contract.
The other interesting thing is clause about installing not approved application on your laptop. Everybody does it - your favourite editor, messenger, file manager etc. But when they want to fire you, they say that you've broken the rule and you're going to be sued unless you agree to leave company immediately without any punishment.
It's not just a myth, it can make people jealous of each other or cause a variety of tensions. I don't talk to my friends who work for charities about how much I earn, nor do I want to talk to the couple of people I know who are in finance about what they bring in.
Of course it also helps the company get an unfair advantage in negotiations, but it does have a social purpose too.
When I was working in New York City, I always found employee secrecy over the salaries pretty interesting. It seemed like a taboo to tell someone your salary or ask them what they're paid.
I understand why employers would want to disincentive salary disclosures but employees? Your peers salary is clear indication of your valuation to the company and there should be every incentive to share. Back home in India, pretty much everyone knows each others salaries for all sizes of companies.
What I also found weird in NYC is that people can be really cagey about their rent, because our have a rent ceiling that most landlords won't let you go past, and that's a multiple of your salary. So if someone's paying X amount of rent, you know that their salary is at least Y. It's really strange.
Really? I didn't notice this at all while living there. And it's also hard to peg someones rent with respect to their salary because some people chose to live beyond their means while others would potentially live 'cheaply' in order to save enough to buy a place.
no, your career path can be public unless you're James Bourne.
Special agents can still share what they do with their co-workers. But there are certain risks such as your co-worker being a spy.
And, we build our ego around our salary and bonuses. Exposing those numbers is quite embarrassing. And, knowing my salary is none of your business. You can tell me yours, I'd retweet it.
In my last job I was in a position where I got to see all the salary wrangling that goes on behind the scenes, and it was pretty awful. You get people with power dishing out preferential treatment to their mates, you get situations that are incredibly unfair but for whatever reason can't be easily resolved, and you get a lot of gossiping and speculation that is wildly unproductive for a company. I've never worked anywhere with salary transparency but I'd love to try it - I think with the right people it could work well but I'm sure there's plenty of scope for petty jealousies of other kinds. But I did come away with the fact that the secrecy in many cases is often to hide things that your average worker is going to be offended by, i.e. how much executives are paid.
I've worked for a large company where if you know someone's band (and you generally know that just because you do, not by asking about) and how long someone has been there, you know within about a grand, how much they get paid.
I now work for a place where I'm told to never talk about my salary, yet 5 members of the (very small) company were invited into my salary review.
I often think that the more they stress to not talk about it, the more likely it is I'm underpaid compared to my coworkers.
This is not too uncommon for government employees, including (e.g.) professors, coaches, doctors at state schools. For example, I had no idea top surgeons raked in that kind of dough. Damn. http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/
Quite the contrary. If an engineer asks for considerably less than they're worth, that goes into the "may be out of touch with his profession" column.
With the exception of starters and a few semi-autistic outliers, engineers that have no idea what they're worth generally aren't the best of engineers. Not asking for it however is a different matter.
That's just not true. Many, many engineers severely undervalue themselves for a variety of reasons. For some, underconfidence. Even for those that are confident in themselves, for many there's a fairness issue. ("Do I really need more than 100K?") Also, if they're in one underpaid job, the anchoring effect is pretty strong. I know someone who was in DC for <70k, applied to work remotely for a Valley company, and when they said yes, he asked for a big raise to 90k. They valued retention enough that they decided to actually pay him what he was worth and what comparable teammates got, tens of thousands a year more.
People are socialized to try to make others happy, not inconvenience someone by asking for more than they feel is necessary and fair, etc. This does not speak to their competence, though it might also mean that they're less effective at making you realize how competent they are once you hire them (because they're also the type of people who don't flash all of their accomplishments in front of you).
Women also tend to fall into this even moreso because of gender socialization.
I can see how this is interesting, but it seems like it would be too easy for no one to ever be happy. Employees tend to either over or under value themselves pretty strongly, and while trying to level the playing field seems like a good idea, it's just inviting confrontation if you have a mix of both (like a lot of workplaces). Combine that with the proclivity for workplace lawsuits at even a hint of discrimination (in the US) and I don't see how this could ever gain wide adoption.
I also think the idea of scheduled raises breeds a sense of complacency.
It was a delicate survey and required a fair bit of rapport building, and lots of 'I need to remind you that the next question is voluntary'... but we were still getting plenty of respondants, and the weird thing was that despite being a (relatively) anonymous stranger with which you have just shared some sensitive, deep secrets about childhood abuse, the question that most balked at was the 'income level' question in the demographic rundown at the end.