That's certainly true, and for most of us in the US, it's also true that as an at-will employee at a company, you're only protected by what the law covers. The list of things it doesn't cover is long enough that it's not terribly difficult to find a reason that is legal to cover-up the real reason.

There's the bigger problem with sharing your salary openly: raises.

My dad told me when I started working "Don't talk about your salary unless you don't want to see a raise again." It's not that absolute in practice. For many, raises are doled out yearly and are an average percentage with discretion to give some more and some less than the target. Even when well deserved, it's not easy to squeeze into the higher percentage but one way to make it a whole lot more difficult is to be revealed as someone who'll tell all the coworkers what they received. That'll almost certainly be on your bosses mind when it comes time for that decision and you might find yourself fighting to get an average raise since giving you the lower raise has the added benefit of making everyone else think they did better.

Share it on the Internet, openly, and now everyone in the company can know what you make. If you're paid over-average, your boss might even get a phone call asking "why?". That's just not a good place to be.

Right. If you are underpaid, make noise. If you are overpaid, you deserve a target on your back for profiting off your coworkers.

Ha. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, and I believe it has a bit more innocence behind it.

Interpersonal, HR related issues are usually very low on the list of things your manager enjoys. Assuming you're well known for publicly discussing salary, giving you an average raise and keeping you at the same salary might make you a little upset when you feel you deserve more (to which you might get a "my hands are tied" or "there wasn't room in the budget, this time"), but giving you a salary that eclipses your colleagues will make the rest of the team angry -- and probably a lot more angry than you'll get by just receiving the average. Unfortunately, the math ends up being not to your benefit.

The funny thing is I once asked for so much that they fired two other people.

Smart people make more money, then save it and then use the fact that they have 6 months expenses saved to leverage getting even more money.

You are right, and you also don't know Amazon (as well as many other powerful corporations).

Second that :) Reality is not binary. You can't reduce it to either 0 or 1...

As a clarification: I'm pretty sure that is held to cover employees discussing salaries amongst themselves, and that it has been found not to cover employees sharing salary data with others outside the company.

Do you have a cite for that?

I had a look and I actually can't find any cases that address an employee sharing their salary with third parties, so I might be wrong (or just bad at looking for relevant legal cases). However I can find numerous cites where people mention off-hand that 'of course this doesn't mean employees can share salaries outside the company' and similar - http://www.velaw.com/uploadedFiles/VEsite/Resources/Employer...

I would suggest anyone attempting to claim NLRA protection actually read the document, particularly clauses like the exclusion of protection for supervisors discussing salaries.

But not for divulging confidential information to the world, which is what the OP has done.

are you suggesting that companies can get around labor regulations by declaring your compensation to be confidential? I'd check with a lawyer if I were you, that's some pretty thin ice you are skating on.

Tangential - I asked my manager where I am on the stack rank once. He said it's confidential information.

I have access to VCS, bugbases, all the documents. We're a very metrics-oriented organization. And the one thing that defines where I stand with the company, I can't be trusted with.

I think if I didn't get a check every two weeks with the number on it, they wouldn't tell me how much I'm paid.

I pity the company who has a CTO who puts wishful thinking over the reality of law.