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Ask Slashdot: Should You Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Make?
An anonymous reader writes: Asking someone how much money they make is often -- if not always? -- considered impolite. But over the years, there has been a movement in toward more salary transparency. Some say salary transparency can make workplaces more equitable by helping to eliminate the gender and racial pay gaps. Even in companies that haven't decided to officially make all salaries open, some employees are taking matters into their own hands and sharing their pay rate with their coworkers. What's your take on this?
I think this is a variation of Dunning-Kruger. Lower-paid workers cannot understand what value the higher paid workers actually provide. Sometimes the higher pay is valid, sometimes not. But unless you are already an expert, you won't know. So while you help with race/gender pay inequality, you're also making a hostile work environment for managers and subordinates.
Three possible outcomes:
1- You feel undervalued
2- They feel undervalued
3- You're surprisingly in alignment on the value of the work both of you do, your initial negotiating position, and other possible impacts that may have led to your compensation.
I'd guess most people are not going to fit into the third category.
The province where I work has mandated that all university employees paid over a certain amount must have their salaries publicly disclosed because they are, at least partly, publicly funded. While I don't have a problem with this per se I think it is unfair to single out those of us working at universities. This rule should also apply to all companies who accept government contracts too since, by extension, their salaries are also being paid for, at least in part, by government money.
I usually start by telling them I like transparency and asking if they're comfortable sharing if i'm sharing with them too. Most people actually are pretty willing to do so!
Actually I think it should be done in a way that protects privacy, but the privacy-protecting entity must NOT be under the control of the employers. That's what's wrong with such websites as GlassDoor.
Let me try to reframe the question from a higher perspective: You can't know if you are being paid fairly without valid data on what other people are being paid for similar work. However you cannot know the truth when the underlying objective is to lower your pay (and all the other employees' pay) as much as possible.
Or in philosophic terms, there needs to be a balance between the needs of the customers, the employees, the managers, and the corporations themselves. As things are evolving, the cancerous corporations are running roughshod over ALL the human participants.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"No, no man. Shit no man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked for saying something like that, man."
The idea of keeping wages secret exists mainly because employers don't want everyone knowing what others make. If they did, they might all want to be "more equal" (deservedly or otherwise). For the most, the secrecy is still a tool employers use to maintain low wages.
Transparency puts the onus on employers to explain wage inequality.
YMMV:
In my experience, Fortune 25 companies don't have fixed salaries for positions or roles, but rather pay the least amount possible within a range. For example, the salary range of a lead professional at my company is $70,000 - $121,000. That's a pretty big swing.
I took a paycut to get into this company, and a few years into it, I gathered salary data from my peers (within my professional grouping only), then assembled a short presentation for my manager - our performance is metric driven, with quite clear revenue, margin, scope, and customer satisfaction expectations - showing that my professional output was near the very top, and my pay was near the very bottom. He didn't even realize - and I think most managers aren't intimately familiar with what their employees make.
But the data helped me negotiate for a higher salary, which I wouldn't have been able to do if I didn't have a federally protected right to discuss it with my peers.
My company told me when I was hired (buried in some document) that salaries were considered trade secrets, and we weren't allowed to discuss them. I don't know if they have any legal footing there, especially when discussing them within the company. Also, we've been acquired by another company since then, so I don't know the current policy. But in any case, you may risk some retribution from your employer if they find out you're sharing salary information (potentially forcing them to pay more when the underpaid workers find out).
Your position is a key piece of information when negotiating, a piece that Americans almost never have because of this custom. The only reason you should WANT your salary to be a secret is that you think you make the most compared to your peers. That or tax evasion.
it's "impolite" because we're told it's impolite. We're told that for a reason. It's yet another barrier to Unionizing and organized labor; the only two things that have ever made a widespread enough difference in the working classes quality of life to result in a 'middle class'.
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Double your income when speaking with 'workers' you'd love to see quit and women you want to fuck.
Halve it, when speaking with competitors, in hope that they will think raises are impossible and move on.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Either you make a lot (relative), and you get to brag.
Or you are getting underpaid and you need to know that when you negotiate your next salary.
The business owner doesn't want you to tell your salary, but remember they already KNOW all the salaries. They have all the knowledge and are trying to keep you ignorant and underpaid.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This is the classic bootlicker answer. It falls right into the trap of behaving exactly as the wealthy elite want the little guys to behave.
It is absolutely unquestionably _wrong_ though, if you actually care about the rights of the 99%.
It's not my fault if someone is a shitty negotiator.
As a manager more often then not I wish they would talk more, I even suggest it. I can't reveal personal information like that and I need to act on behalf of the company, but if they talk and they bring it up I have a reason to more fairly distribute the pie. In the past it has shown my higher paid workers that the reason you aren't getting the #1 rockstar rating is because you're paid 2x the average joe, and your bonus % is higher, by almost 50%, so your bonus payout is almost 3x. I've seen the leadership really come out in some people when they found out how much they earned. I've had lower paid people really come with a cohesive plan for why they should get paid more. The downside is sometimes a low paid person who is probably overpaid thinks their all-pro, and you have to put up with them demanding 100% pay raises. One time the person stuck around and was a pain for a couple years. Another time the person quit a couple weeks later. I feel like productivity actually went up and people actually worked less. I do now have to discuss, and address equal pay for protected class workers, but I only have 5 pay bands to work with and I only get the average pay in each band for discussions. Having a women or minority have a frank conversation on pay with someone else has helped ease a lot of apprehension on equal pay. Overall I think we're probably overly fair when it comes to pay equality, but everyone compares themselves to band average, not time in band, or contribution compared to others in band.
I evaluate my pay based on how I think I'm doing and how it compares against the rest of the industry. If I think I'm underpaid, I ask for a raise. It's that simple. Not only that, I come right out with it and say I deserve to be paid at least the same as "insert names of folks I think I'm at least as good as". I've done that my entire career and it's always worked out. These tactics only work if you can actually back up your claims and are a top performer. I can't help but think the folks who really "need" to know this information are folks who think they are much more talented than they actually are. Most people fall into this category. Nothing good would come of me knowing exactly how much my coworkers make.
Nope. No one is ever happy. If you make less, you're pissed. If you make more, it's not enough more, and you're pissed.
Do you have a sensible reason why, or just a passionate opinion with zero data?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Your employer benefits from the information asymmetry of not sharing your pay data with your peers. You do not.
Unfortunately no-one wants to be the one that speaks first.
Transparency is easy. Any larger company with more than, say, ten employees should have a clear transparent policy on what a job is with based on job descriptions and years of experience. No individual negotiations on salary required.
... management when you sign the hire package.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... and you have the keys.
Just sayin'.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Sometimes the pay corresponds to the quality of work, and sometimes it does not. Popularity contests did not end in high school.
But the solid fact, the primary beneficiary of silence on salaries is neither the better paid or worse paid employee, it is the corporation who benefits.
You should get together, choose one (or a group) of you to be your representative and tell that person your salaries.
If you live in any sane country, then the employer would be obliged to negotiate with your representative about minimum pay for different positions and equal pay between genders, as well as about other issues such as work climate, stress levels etc.
Yes, I'm talking about a trade union. It is not uncalled for for higher-paid white-collar occupations either, where people could be just as stressed out as in other disciplines. I'm surprised this hasn't even been mentioned yet.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
$125/hr - was my last billing rate before I retired at age 42. I was a consultant, paid hourly and was taking about 8 weeks off a year.
I always billed for every hour, period. The client sent me to a conference and I billed 8 hrs a day. The flights back home, the client's policies prevented me taking a 1st class seat which cost less than a coach seat and had better connections. I billed 16 hrs that day when I could have been home in 6 hrs had the 1st class seat been approved ... on a commuter jet.
I got a new boss, who tried to suggest that I should only bill 40 hrs a week but work more to be a "team player." I pointed out that he was asking me to violate US labor laws. Seems he'd asked all the other contractors in the group the same thing. I was limited to 40 hours, which suited me fine.
My first "real" job paid $3.35/hr ... washing dishes at Big Boy. I got fired.
My first salaried job paid just under $30K/yr - about $14/hr - but it was common to work 60+ hrs/week, which dropped the hourly average pay drastically. I ran the numbers and promised I'd try to minimize "exempt employee abuse" the rest of my career.
Worked at a 100 person company in the late 1990s. Found a spreadsheet with all the salaries, bonuses and stock option grants for everyone in the company. I copied the file off and took it home - studied it. It was very fair. I wasn't "highly compensated" at the time, but managed a small team of software developers. The option grants made perfect sense based on who not only worked the hardest, but who provided real results for the company. A few of my team had 3x more options than I did. They deserved it. I was paid more - not too much more, but more. The company hired a new President who was given options - like 40x more than I had. His prior track record was impressive, but he failed completely at our company. He left after about 11 months, 13 months before any options vested. The sales team had terrible salaries, but huge bonuses and some added options when they made a sizeable sale. About half the sales team made huge money yearly. The other half earned below the poverty line. Marketing guys would ruin my team's schedules, holidays, vacations constantly. The sales guys were always fairly demanding when at a client location, with good reason.
Oh ... and I've never lived in NYC or anywhere in California.
I, along with a number of people in my class, did six co-op terms at IBM and was hired by the company. One of my classmates asked me what I was making and I told her - it turned out to be $25/month more than she was.
She complained to her manager and almost ended up getting fired.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
That's what I told the HR girl when she complained that I told others what I was paid. My object was to raise everyone's wage to a proper market level.
7 figure salary
Counting the decimal places?
Have gnu, will travel.
Pay secrecy leads to what economists call information asymmetry and during initial hiring or annual raise or promotion discussions, information asymmetry gives an employer the advantage. But in a 2015 survey, two-thirds of people who were paid at the market rate believed they were actually underpaid and the majority of that two-thirds intended to quit, even if they were paid at market rate. Keeping salaries secret makes it easier to discriminate. Organizations with pay transparency see dramatic reductions in discrimination and increases in the perception of fairness. Researchers have found that keeping salaries secret decreases motivation and performance, and sharing increases performance. When people know where they stand and know how to move up in the pay range they’re more motivated to work to improve their performance and improve their standing. (Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...)
It provides people with low pay for the same job a basis to ask for a raise and it eliminates the possibility of being the "expensive guy" who is easy to cut in turn while then giving the higher producing guy more leverage to negotiate for higher pay. It is considered to be against business etiquette because etiquette is dictated by the business managers and it is universally bad for them when the employees have leverage in negotiations.
I love honesty and openness
I also realize that some use this as a weapon against me
While it is frowned upon, my employer knows my peers and I talk about what we make. Hell, a third of our income is black and white performance pay that everyone knows across the board. So my director and I sat down and he discussed my merit raise, which I earned the maximum, and he said “Now, when your peers ask why you got the maximum, because a few of them didn’t, and they want to know why... here’s why: ...” and he went down a list of objective performance criteria. There is a similar criteria for new hire base salaries: experience, education, etc. and they’ll gladly go over it with you if you think you deserve more.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
When I first got to Europe, I was *shocked* to see a spreadsheet on a network share that everyone could access, that listed everyone and their salary, vacation, the works. I mean, ZOMGWTFROFLBBQ!!1!
After I settled down and removed my underwear from my head, it started to not be such a total freak-out.
By the time I returned to the US, I thought it was really shady and lame for folks to be kept in the dark, never knowing for sure if they were getting what they were worth.
In the end I actually preferred being out in the open, that also sparked honest and frank discussions about who was worth what, why so-and-so got more, etc. If you're at the bottom of the ladder, you deserve to know if you're getting screwed... And if you're a seven-figure exec, you better demonstrate your value or you got some unhappy staff on your hands. I really, _really_ wish we could adopt a modern approach and shed the whole "Ebenezer Scrooge" hush hush system that clearly was designed to benefit only those at the top.
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
Yes, otherwise the pointy haired boss wins.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Companies don't want their employees discussing salary / wages with other employees because it tends to generate a sh*t ton of hostility.
Once this information becomes public knowledge, it can shine a negative light on the business as to why they are paying X $$$$ to do a job while paying Y only $$ to do the same work assuming both are of similar competence in their roles. If no one ever asks, they get to save money by paying you less :|
than you're worth
Besides, since the company isn't going to be forthcoming if you ask them what Bob makes in an effort to determine if your pay level is a " fair " one, you may as well ask Bob directly. He'll probably be interested in it for the very same reasons.
Having access to an individual coworker's pay does nothing except invite demoralizing comparisons. What if you make more? Is that because you're a better employee, or a better negotiator, or because your college GPA happened to be higher? Or maybe some other good or bad reason. Who knows? Their salary won't answer those questions for you, but it might easily make it uncomfortable to work together. It's rude to ask about other people's income because it's unhealthy and counter-productive to compare yourself to other people.
On the other hand, having access to anonymous, aggregated data about the compensation range of people doing similar jobs in a similar location is useful because it helps you see if your pay is within the normal range. Instead of demanding to see your coworkers' pay, demand to see the salary bands for your position (or just look on glassdoor). If you're within the normal range and otherwise happy with your situation, stop worrying about where your coworkers fall in the range. If you're below the normal range, ask for a raise or change jobs. If you're above the normal range and you're still not happy with your job, maybe it's time to decide whether money or happiness is more valuable to you. In any case, you don't need to know what any particular coworker takes home to make your decision.
Google has a sort of a tradition, going back four or five years, of employees volunteering their salary information via a Google Docs spreadsheet (actually a Google Docs Form, with results summarized on a read-only spreadsheet). Not a lot of them, but enough to be interesting. In 2017 3.64% of them (us; I participated) did it. Sharing your name is optional. About 15% of those who share their salary info provide their name. I did. The system also obviously knows exactly who participated so if management wanted to they could find identify the "anonymous" contributors.
The sheet has columns for base salary, bonus and equity grants, as well as job ladder, level and location. For employees at major sites (e.g. Mountain View), there are enough entries to give people a reasonable view of what the range is, so they can see how they compare. The data is self-reported and not verified against anything, so people could lie, but I expect few do. If any.
The company doesn't encourage openness about compensation, but it doesn't chastise those who share, either. I think it's useful.
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I know it's inconceivable in 2018 but I don't measure my worth by external validation.
I don't care if that guy is driving a nicer car, if I'm happy with mine.
I don't care if that woman lives in a bigger house, if I'm happy with what I have.
I don't need people to ooh and aah over how much money I make, if I'm happy.
So why say anything?
-Styopa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xH7eGFuSYI
In every company there's someone that makes more than you, but works less.
Conversely, there's always someone that makes much less than you and works much harder than you.
From someone else's perspective, you are one of those two people.
I worked for a company that published salaries. There were a number of issues. These aren't necessarily inevitable, but often go together. The first was that rapid promotion, even for those who obviously deserved it, just did not happen. I think the feeling was "she got promoted last year, what will everyone think if she is promoted again before Bill, who's been there for three years?". One of the two typical career patterns was to join, get one promotion and move on to a higher position elsewhere.
The second issue was that you seemed to have to spend as much time documenting your successes as working. Now some people can be on a project for a week, contribute little, but write an end of year report that makes it sound as though they single-handedly rescued a project. Others feel false "bigging themselves up" for "just doing their job" - even if they are one of the best at it. It seems that the best developers would fall into this category.
Finally, I think because of how public it was, almost everyone got some sort of increment every year, usually a reasonable amount. That meant that there were a lot of people who were not very good, had been with the company for years and were pretty well paid, more than someone with their ability would get in the market.
(I am sure that some people will have twigged by now this was for a government agency)
I work for a US company but am not based in the US so not on a US contract.
I have been told by my local, in-country HR Team that discussing my salary or performance bonus with colleagues is listed as "gross misconduct" and therefore could result in my immediate termination, with cause.
I'm not aware of this ever being used in anger, but I suspect that it is a useful mechanism to either enforce silence by coercion or to "get rid" of a troublesome employee should the need arise.
I'm guessing that this is going to be governed by the variations in employment law in different countries.
I think people should share their salaries. Yes there are differences in people that often drive different salaries. Regardless of how things end up, by sharing salaries, you promote discussion, it forces transparent and honest conversations which I believe there should be a lot more of. In the end, some people will make more than others etc., but at least the conversation is had, everyone understands (whether they agree or not).
I am a contractor at a major telecom, and knowing that there are some people making 50-100% more than me for doing the exact same work has been a source of stress for a little bit. I just try and remind myself I at least didn't come in with that much experience even if I know as much / more than my co-workers now and that it will all work out eventually.
I have never had any reservations about revealing my salary in an anonymous survey so that other people can learn what salaries are paid in my job and geographical location. But, I have found over the years that exchanging salary information with a co-worker has never made me happy, whether they were paid more or less than I was.
next!
I made the mistake several jobs ago of finding out that a fresh off the boat co-worker who was the cousin of a VP, and could barely troubleshoot a paperjam was paid almost as much as me. All it did was create resentment and anger at the company and my co worker. I soon left the company for many reasons and that was surely one of them.
As someone else said, in IT we can probably look at anyone elses salary if we so choose. However i think its a horrible idea. You end up looking at people and questioning why they make X more than you and it just makes you bitter and jaded. There is no up side unless you want the impetus to look for another job.
Do a good job, and if you don't make enough to live, then find another one. Multiple times I have submitted a resignation letter after finding another job only to have my manager come back and offer me a few dollars more an hour to stay. And its like, well why the fuck didn't you do that in the first place? then maybe i wouldn't have even looked for another job!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Look for comments like that one. 'Nuff said.
However, I'll go a bit farther and say that I've never been at the top of any organization period (though there was that time I was on the board of directors), so I've always had some managers above me. Mostly retired now, and happily so, but I had LOTS of experience with LOTS of managers, with LOTS of second- and third-hand evidence from books, too. Many of my managers (and most of the managers I've read about) were shit, and that's putting it politely. When you get a good one, you work like hell to keep him (or her), and the usual result is he gets promoted away because ALL of his people are working the same way and his results show it.
I already believe you, dcw3, are one of the managers who make the top 90% of managers possible. Probably more than 90%. You should read The Peter Principle for the career advice.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It's really none of their business and it can hurt you. Say you manage to negotiate higher pay. Say it's on 30K more than the person in the same office as you, doing similiar, however not nearly as tough work as you. They won't see it. The human mind is terrible that way. If it's a black person or woman, the abrasive people out there have put it in their mind that it's because of that, not because of their abilities.
Now the boss has a problem. What to do? Raise their pay which they probably can't or you'll leave because they're not as bright or fire you/them?
Better you just STFU. Not cause problems.
I can remember a time when someone I was working with was being very much underpaid. I mean way underpaid. The boss left the details on his desk, so I told the guy he may want to look at the guys desk. He resisted ... I said - you *REALLY* need to look at that paper. He didn't say a word. He quit that day and more than tripled his salary that coming Monday when he started in his new job.
Nepotism runs strong in India. Nearly 85% of the countryâ(TM)s businesses are family-run, and Bollywood is dominated by just a few families. Even job-seekers with impressive resumes have to fall back on personal connections to find work.
https://qz.com/889524/the-us-s...
Casteism
Work is no different from assessing peoples drivi g. To the untrained eye the expert and the lunatic look the same. Everyone who drives faster than you is an crazy idiot, everyone who drives slower is a useless idiot and people who are about the same get ignored as you focus on how much better you are than everyone else - usually because you have no idea how good someone else could be.
I know this is late to the party, but...
I believe in a company promoting the 'floor' level of pay for a position. I think it would resolve a lot of the self-evaluation doubt, and let people evaluate themselves with their co-workers. By not defining 'ceilings', the upper bounds are still ambiguous, but people can evaluate themselves in a better understanding of how the company values them.
It also shows how progression 'may' be beneficial. But, because there is no ceiling in place, you can have that 'Sr. Developer' that is baselined at 75k in the same position for 20 years, and leave a window for question for why he didn't take 'Tech Lead' baselined at 90k.
It eases negotiation, but also allows it room. To me, this is an ideal solution.
Those with less need are first in line to receive more. All the resources lost from the Commonwealth and public domain to those who already have more then enough is just more waste lost to the overhead of maintain a few spoiled people at the expense of the majority.
You would think the value of toilet cleaning service would go up due to their not being near the supply available from the labor vendors.
The person who offered X $$$$ and Y $$. If they cannot justify it, it's a negotiation skill thing.
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