Salary transparency without job descriptions would be akin to showing house prices without describing house details - location, square footage, number of bedrooms, etc.
This whole notion that the only way for someone who thinks they aren't paid enough to get a raise is to know everyone else's salary and then use that as leverage is absurd. If you feel like you aren't paid enough ask for a raise and explain why you feel that way. If you're turned down look for a different job that values you at a level you're comfortable with. If you still can't make the amount you desire maybe then it is time to check your own assumptions and see what you can do to provide more value so that you can get it in return.
People are trading their time based on certain assumptions, including the viability of the company; seeing the company's books is a vital way to do that.
"Trust me" is a shitty position for companies to put workers in, and yet we see again and again how they go under and leave people (individuals, families, etc) in the lurch.
Secrecy never benefits the person in the weaker position.
Now, developer 1 has a rage-boner because developer 2 is being paid more but there's the reason of his/her desirable skills being utilised in the role. Yet, developer 1 doesn't see this qualifiable reason and just sees this as being unfair/unequal.
Pay transparency would only exacerbate the current problems around pay, not help alleviate them.
Citations?
That's the reason why it's criminal for employers to punish employees for discussing compensation with each other and why employers try their hardest to prevent that from happening.
I posit that in a lot of (most) companies profit is born wholly by the underpaid employees.
So the markets have been improperly functioning, this entire time, because they didn't have the relevant information...?
All public servants or just those paid by your statea and/or federal governments? Could you find out how much someone made at the NSA, for example?
>Sweden.
Tax returns are not the same as pay transparency. In premise, yes, in practice, no, because a tax return is based on taxable income only. So, let's say I have tax credits for having three kids. My taxable income would be vastly different from yours, if you have no kids.
>Buffer
Overflow...?
>Sweden.
You are conflating tax returns and taxable income. A tax return shows the salary AND the tax credits. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-nordics-idUSKC...
>Buffer
Plenty of situations? Where? Documented somewhere, I should hope, yeah?
Is that better dev from a subjective or an objective perspective?
The reason that I ask is because one dev can think that they're better than another and believe that they should be paid more but that could very well be the fault of fevered ego and not, necessarily, a reflection of reality, yeah?
Also, salary transparency wouldn't actually address anything. It would be a tool to address the salary issue with management and management (plus, HR) would address it, yeah?
The first step to address issues is to gather relevant data so an informed decision can be made. right now we have only very incomplete data.
Okay. Let's make a thought experiment.
Company A. Senior Java Developer. $100K.
Company B. Senior Java Developer. $120K.
I still don’t understand the thought experiment. How about: Car A costs $30000, Car B costs $50000. Which is the better value? Makes as little sense.
Market transparency that you mentioned earlier makes sense only for standardized goods/services. Software jobs are not standardized and many people don't want their colleagues to know how much their earn.
As a fun thought exercise, imagine that you were the head of a multi-national conglomerate (or working in the interests of a multinational conglomerate) who stood to gain from paying people as little as possible. Would it be in your best interest to: a) standardize pay fairly or b) convince some people that they were being mistreated to the benefit of some other people and watch them fight each other while you laughed from your corner office, puffing cigars lit off of $100 bills?
But that's not how a lot of jobs, software development included, work. It's entirely possible for someone fresh out of school to be a far more valuable team member than someone with ten years experience... yet we would point to a disparity in pay between those two people as [sexist, ageist, whatever-ist]. Now let an experienced employee find out they're getting paid less than someone with far less experience? Hooo boy, talk about creating a toxic environment.
there are plenty of environments where salaries are known and there is not more conflict than anywhere else. For example Congress staffers' salaries are public, there are huge pay differences for the same position but it sill works.
I think most arguments against transparency are spread by employers to keep the information asymmmwetry.In most markets the party that has more information will have the advantage.
Counter-example: pay on commission. Salespeople are "directly compared", but are not doing exactly the same work. Still, the work they are doing is fungible—you can compute the value in dollars both of closing one big account, or ten small accounts, and compare those.
This is essentially how a very small subset of IT people get paid, as well: vulnerability researchers, who make a living off of bug bounty programs.
Attempts have been made to expand this approach. Some FOSS projects have bounties on each issue, where whoever submits a PR for that issue (that gets merged) gets paid the bounty.
The question is how to scale this approach to work that requires more than a single person to complete. (I.e. how to distribute the "spoils" of a bounty among a team.) There are historical examples one could look at of bounty programs where the entrants were teams (e.g. the Netflix Prize), but IIRC in none of them were any of the teams really motivated by the bounty above all; rather, they were just in competition with the other teams to be the first ones to solve an eminently-achievable-but-challenging problem, and it was competition for competition's sake—essentially, a sport.
Stable incomes are essential for most people's sanity. Always being at risk of having projects shift away from work you do, and to work other people do directly conflicts with that stability most people are looking for. You could be spending an incredible amount of time trying to catch up with another project, while still maintaining your own, all the while having the looming threat of not being able to pay your bills over you head.
Freelancer type pay isn't for everyone.
Which goes back to that issue of not having an objective measurement to pay by.
You're completely throwing context out of the window, though, and that's a dangerous precedent. Is the person making 300k in sales? Is the person making 32k merely the frontline helpdesk?
To try to "even it out, to decrease the dispairity, and - thus - the inequality" would mean the sales person and the helpdesk person making around 150k but only one of them is performing highly skilled, desired, sought-after work and the other is a generalist whom can easily be replaced. You intentionally devalue the sales person to add unwarranted value to the frontline helpdesk person.
So, your sales person leaves and your helpdesk person stays with your company until they either die or company runs under or what-have-you. They could improve themselves to move up the ranks but where's the onus for that, if they're already making gold bars, without having had to have done anything to actually earn that value?
The entire premise is wrought with problems because it doesn't address the principal fact that the desparities probably exist for a reason...
Why? That's far too simplistic. Are you comparing e.g. a senior engineer to a part time janitor? Why should their pay be closer?
Look at the position and demand for it. Comparing salary without context is a waste of time (unless you truly believe market forces shouldn't be relevant, but I think you'll have a hard time convincing people in the US to join your side.)
When I was in industry, our company was a 20-person R&D house that paid everyone equally, from new hires like me to founders of the company. And it worked great!
We would all occasionally compare over the years and it would always come up that there would be a small difference (<$1k) where someone happened to hit a lucky streak of getting promoted in a better % year, and people's feelings would be hurt.
I don't think that's the conclusion being reached here. What I'm getting at is performance is a VERY hard thing to quantify to everyone's satisfaction (after all, I doubt anyone thinks that they aren't a valuable employee, and everyone has numerous examples of "well this other guy sucks, I'm much better than him"), but it has a major impact on pay.
But for this specific case, there's one of two things happening:
1. As another poster said, "men" is code for "men working under H1-B visas." 2. In an effort to not look sexist, Google let the pendulum swing the other way and pay women more out of general principle.
Granted, that probabbly wouldn't stop recruiter spam and of course there is MUCH MORE to a good job than pay.
If a woman is promoted over a man in the name of gender equality, are his three daughters better off because of the new equality? Are "women" better off?