Slashdot Mirror
Google Found it Paid Men Less Than Women For the Same Job (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The story we're used to hearing is that women get paid less than men. In Google's case, according to its own internal pay audit, it turned out male-identified Level 4 Software Engineers received less money than women in that same role. That led to Google paying $9.7 million to adjust pay for 10,677 employees. It's not clear how many of the employees who received pay adjustments were men but Google does cite the underpaying of men as a reason for why the company paid more in adjustments for 2018 than in 2017. But The New York Times reports men received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.
The ladies feel like they are being paid less and how dare Google suggest their feelings aren't valid?!!! I expect they'll correct this correction within a couple weeks.
Women are more likely to get a college degree (in the US anyway) and that has had a knock-on effect in job opportunities and futures for a huge number of US men.
Are women (or men for that matter) also more likely to obtain an actual useful degree?
Even a 100% college graduate rate isn't worth a shit if the end result is a nation full of social justice warriors who majored in transgender studies.
It's very often that people doing the exact same job will be in different pay grades. That's based upon your years of experience often, or how well you negotiated after the interview, or just based on whim (were they more desparate to fill that slot this year than they were in the past). It's only after the person is hired and has been working awhile that you learn that the high paid worker is actually less productive than the lower paid one, at which point it is very difficult to fix the situation.
The writer wanted the reader to wrongfully conclude that women were once again somehow slighted. Carefully chosen words to make it sound biased for click-bait purposes, I suppose.
Google is actively trying to increase the diversity of their workforce. That means they are discriminating for under represented groups. Differences in pay are the easiest way things are subsidized / discriminated for.
In the supply of Level 4 Software Engineers, I'd actually think that Google would have to pay females significantly more than males to attract them, since they are almost certainly represented in the pool of Level 4 Software Engineers much less than men. Rare attributes are more expensive than common attributes.
It's not possible to treat people equally, and try to increase the diversity of a workforce that draws from an uneven pool of people. If 9/10 CS graduates are men, then why would companies be expected to have anything other than a 9/10 distribution in their workforce? When the expectations are different, then there has to be some sort of discrimination / subsidy in effect.
Isn't this basic economics, combined with basic statistics?
Unfortunately, job descriptions rarely map cleanly to individuals, particularly those with exceptional skills in a few areas.
I've known Software Engineers that had zero interest in being "leaders" or "architects" - perhaps because they eschewed conflict, were somewhat antisocial, didn't like being responsible for other peoples' work, or just didn't like doing that sort of work. However they were absolutely awesome at some particular aspect of their job such as having an unparalleled ability to track down and eradicate concurrency related heisenbugs which occur extremely rarely and leave core files that are quite inscrutable. These bugs can hold up releases by months, piss off Fortune 50 customers who have spent big bucks on your product, and harm the reputation of the company. Noticing and resolving them quickly (hopefully before Alpha) is generally far more important than any new feature in a release.
There, unfortunately, often isn't a proper standard job description for such people but they can be the most valuable employee on your staff and almost impossible to replace and worth twice as much salary as the typical "conformant" Level X (who is striving to get to Level Y). They are not likely to be promoted because that puts them in a situation they would find untenable - for example, having to engage in conflict over designs - and be doing less of the more valuable work they love to do and are excellent at. These people tend to be stuck at Level X, get great bonuses every year, and end up at the top of their pay grade -- yet they are way underpaid compared to their actual contributions.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading