There have been countless articles that talk about how there isn't a huge pay disparity between men and women in skilled jobs, and articles like The Confidence Gap (Salon) that show that when disparity does occur, it's simply of women not being confident enough to ask for what they deserve.
(On a side note, I hypothesize if you could objectively measure confidence and then compared incomes to confident vs non-confident people in their field, the pay distribution would be low to high among them, regardless of gender. That's difficult theory to prove though).
At larger companies, you have pay grades listed and everyone in Active Directory has a pay grad associated with them (BlueCross orgs are like this). So you can actually look up, within a $8k range, what everyone around you makes, and it pretty much stays accurate until you get up to the VP/board positions.
I wish more companies had transparency on this, but I feel like income transparency is going to stay limited to the public sector.
The people who are least likely to join in on that have been the older devs but I think the taboo was much more ingrained back when they first started their careers and younger folk are following more out of tradition than an actual strong belief
Additionally, people were pretty much free to set their own work hours (I worked with a great designer who typically left at 4pm, but was never an issue because he always did what was needed - and often went above).
The only possible downside I can think of is that we didn’t really hire a lot of young people (no graduates) so potential for stagnation of ideas (??) however I never saw that have a noticeable effect, and actually at the time the company was quite progressive in its approach to technology.
Our highest ‘executive’ was an interesting mix of someone who could understand and communicate to business, technology and design people.
I’ve often wondered what the secret sauce to this culture was, and how to replicate it...
The _sample_ is flawed because H-1B visa holders are atypical. In some situations they are hired precisely because they have lower salary expectations than US residents (paying them less than the prevailing rate violates the terms of their Labor Condition Application, but it happens). In other situations the employer puts up the with expense and delay of the visa application because they have unique skills that also make them more valuable.
The _data_ itself is flawed because the salary information is only recorded at the time the offer was made, since which it has presumably increased, and it does not include bonuses or non-cash compensation.
They just have my base salary listed there, which is a super-inaccurate way to compare salaries, in my opinion. RSUs and bonus are almost 50% of my comp. They also have my starting salary there, no increases, etc since then.
The biggest impact to my career has been the semi-anonymous mobile app Blind. I realized I was getting underpaid and I quickly fixed it. I thought I negotiated hard in previous jobs but maybr it was all a ruse to make me feel like I was getting the best salary. Glassdoor and Paysa had lower total compensation numbers for my position.