By the way, there's at least one more incentive/mechanism at play here: since western society tends to confound fiscal achievement with value as a person, people hesitate (and with reason) to share their salary, in case it is too low. There's some nice discussion to be had there about Calvinism and the general relationship between religion and the attitude towards individual achievement. But I think that would just devolve into a flame-war so maybe let's not go there. :)

Or in the case of Europe, if it's too high. Most youths here are very left leaning and don't like high earners so if you work in tech and want to make friends outside of tech you'd better not mention salaries.

Its not just youth or politics. Its mostly culture and unwillingness to deviate from it, coupled with some strong expectations. People "expect" managers to be paid well, doctors to be paid well, etc, so they don't get angry at these people for getting paid well. On a smaller scale, only if you start deviating from the norm do people make mention or get angry, because a large part of Europe still solemnly believes in Calvinism (especially the Netherlands).

You end up with a risk-averse, middle-of-the-road populace where everything different from the status quo is quickly snuffed out and most stars only get to shine if they are lucky or working for an American megacorp, where excellence is valued more (with its own set of problems). I'd figure that has to do with our lack of a Silicon Valley equivalent as well.

I don't think this jas anything to do with cultural norms (trust me, I don't conform to many of them). It has to do with fairness, and our broken economic system rewarding the wrong things.

Well sure, but the power that sustains that mechanism is very unevenly distributed, and skewed towards the people it benefits. Most people have little choice but to go along with it in their day to day lives.

> If anything, most likely than not you are paid too little as people rarely maximize their negotiating leverage.

You mean, most likely I could be paid more. This is probably true. But it is not at all the same as deserving that pay.

If you take supply and demand as your moral system, then you can justify all sorts of immoralities, after all I have no doubt that there would be plenty of demand for assassins. As a society we choose to disincentivise assassination because we believe that we know better than the market. We can, do and should do the same for economic activity. And just because the status quo incentivises things in a certain way doesn't make it right.

The information is still available, but rate limited, and the person you look up will get a notification. So you can still look up last year's tax return of the person offering you a job - but that person might take offense.

That said, there are a couple of good reasons for the change; digital publication is qualitatively different from having to go down to the city administration to look up the numbers on paper - among other things it makes collecting/checking date of birth trivial (it's part of the dataset - which is municipality of residence, full name and dob).

I don't know where the idea that Calvinism links individual achievement to individual value comes from, but it's found nowhere in Calvinist theology. If anything, it teaches the opposite in that it asserts that every person is implicitly valuable, regardless of race, gender, status, or occupation, by simple virtue of being made in God's image, an inseparable quality of being human.

I worked some years in Norway where tax information is public making it fairly easy to estimate what people earn. I chose not to view this information given I was happy with my salary and work.

I felt if I saw similar level people earnt more and I raised this but didn't get equalised it could hurt my sense of justice and how content I felt in the workplace. Given I enjoyed my work and company I didn't want to risk this as something that might bug me.

Shouldn't it, though? It's like saying your partner is cheating on you, but you don't want to know because it could 'hurt your sense of justice and how content I feel in the relationship'.

I mean, I'll grant you that if you're happy in your job, and honestly don't care about pay, it's different. Just like if you're in an open relationship, and genuinely don't care if your partner sleeps with other people. That's fine. But by saying it could hurt you, you're implying it does matter. And if it matters, the first step to righting any wrong is to know about it and to be able to take adequate steps.

Put differently, suppose other people knew they were worth more, took that information and asked more, got more, and you didn't, even though you could've. That doesn't sound right to me.

What I think could be a useful tool is to take that raw Norwegian tax data, run a basic condition on it, and then spit out only results you find 'relevant', which can protect you from knowing things you don't want to know.

e.g. input 10 names of your peers (who should be earning the same), and only show those salaries that are say 20% above your own. That prevents you from knowing Bob earns 5% more for reasons that may never be resolved, which could still annoy you. But if say Bob earns 20% more, that's something I'd want to know to see if I could take action.

Or, perhaps even more conservative, to only get a sense of where you stand versus company average (for your function) and versus market average. That takes out a lot of the personal but tells you whether you should be happy where you are, or asking for a raise or another employer.

I have never read through the full list of what anyone makes. I honestly don't care. I have checked whether a particular engineer has got a raise I have advocated for or what I believe they are worth, but that's different.

The biggest benefit from this is that even relatively junior people are willing to recommend offers for candidates that actually match market rates based on their skills. To be able and confident to quote offers that are higher than what you make is an incredible leveler.

ß: our market maker unit deviates from this - they found out that hiring from banking or hedge fund backgrounds, new people were not comfortable knowing/disclosing the exact numbers but are okay with salary band granularity. Sure. Fine. Whatever works.

Also "Ignorance is bliss." Which could be interpreted either way.

I was already paid reasonably well which likely helps take this position. Once that threshold is met I value happiness over a bit more money.

If I was frustrated with my income I'd likely be viewing the tax info and looking for negotation points, or knowing a company is a poor payer in general.

No 'right' answer, only what is right for you.

I think the prevailing incentive for most employees would be to have that information, and break the information asymmetry.

That said I don't think clear economic incentives are the only thing at play. Public salaries is, in old leftist terms, a material cultural change. Material meaning that salary dynamics will change as a results of it.

I suppose I'm naive, but it seems obvious to me that a company should want to pay its employees as much as possible—that is, as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver. When I say "should", I don't mean morally. It just seems obviously in the company's interest.

From Chapter 3 of the book: "The Spanish Theory...held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people's back."

I think that most folks, once they're a few years into their careers, have seen and understood that this theory of management and value extraction is alive and well in corporate America today.

From the same chapter: "Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference."

So I agree with you. It seems obvious to me as well that companies should pay as much as possible. But they don't think that way, because they're coming from a different value set.

I'd be curious to see an economist take a look at what's going on here. The software-development profession continues to incentivise employees to constantly change jobs, despite that employers pay a real 'onboarding penalty' for employee churn.

If someone knows the answer I'd be interested to hear it.

> as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver

But what does that mean? If an employee delivers $100,000/year of value, how how much should you pay them? Surely the answer (regarding the employer's self-interest) should factor in the odds of them leaving at any given pay-grade. The answer presumably isn't $99,999. The employer is looking to 'capture value', after all.

"As much as possible" is everything. So no.

> that is, as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver.

If companies paid for the value the employees delivered, the company would have no profit. Companies make money by taking a share of the value employees delivered.

> It just seems obviously in the company's interest.

Maybe in a disneyesque/"it's a wonderful life" fairy tale but not in real life. Obviously it isn't in the company's interest because no company does it your way.

Actually, employees salaries, like rent, fuel costs, supplies, etc are viewed as costs/expenditures for a company. Something all companies want to reduce as it eats into their profits.

Even in that type of system, there are ways to make high performers get compensated better, and there is very little of any alienation. You can also see this at play with corporate officers whose salaries vary dramatically.

Why not?

People wouldn't be job hopping if you could get the same raise as the new guys.

Not saying I like this but it's the current situation in Europe where the power lies with the company and the ones who loose are those that are too loyal to the company(most employees outside SW dev don't bother looking around every few years like we do).

2. If you don't want people to job-hop because they see what some new hire earns, then you're either overpaying the new one (and unnecessarily alienating your workers) or you're underpaying the current employees, and you should raise their salary or expect them to hop.

2. That's how it should be in an ideal world but the reality is different and companies know through years of experience that the current system works better for them rather than the one you'd want.

Supposedly you can because you're offering them 10% more than the rest of your employees...

I hate this approach, but for most companies in Europe it's the reality that works in their favor.

- Worth is subjective. I'm sure we've all had conversations about someone where some view the person as great and others view the same person as meh or under performing. Value is also determined based on information, which usually people don't have the same amount of. So very possible the hiring person or committee sees different value in a person than fellow engineers or teammates.

- Value judgement, especially for hiring is also point in time. Could very well be the person as presented during interview is a rockstar, but after landing on the team doesn't perform well for whatever reason.

If you have established salary bands, then you cannot justify offering somebody something outside of that range. That defeats the entire purpose of having salary bands to begin with, and not complying with them would be lying to your employees. What salary bands are, is a levelling mechanism. The answer to “why does x get paid more than me?” should be “because for some particular reason we decided x was worth more to us than you”. With the levelling mechanism, you have less options for paying people what they’re worth, instead you simply decide that everybody will get paid +/- a few % of whatever the average value of an employee in that role is, regardless of their contribution.

Not if the new guy is 10% better at what they do.

And if he's not, then maybe the others actually deserve that 10% more.

Good thing.

In most cases, this is not the case. In fact, it's often the case that the new person is really new and will require significant hand holding to be productive.

They pay them 10% more because the new person has multiple offers, and most existing employees aren't seeking alternatives, so they have little leverage.

Seems to be a good idea to change that.

This sounds like a massive win for all but the bottom of the barrel tier companies. Finding and training new people (while giving them 10% more) as the old guys who know their shit leave for a better job is super expensive.

If companies had pressure to give raises internally, this would give less reason to hop jobs. I think that's a good thing for mostly everyone (including their employers). Everyone except dirt cheap shops where nobody wants to work anyway if they have choices.

But who is encouraging you? Since in Europe/Rest of the World(except US/UK) companies never mention how much they're willing to pay and even the recruiters they hire are sometimes not allowed to mention the upper range to their candidates. So nobody knows they're underpaid unless you're willing to take your free time and apply to jobs, contact recruiters and go interview at a few companies and go through some rounds of negotiations.

And even then lots of companies will look at your application very suspiciously that you're applying to new jobs so soon and they'll expect something's wrong with your relationship with your current employer or with you so some might not even make you an offer.

For most senior employees with families that's a lot of trouble to go through so they don't even bother unless a recruiter knocks on their door with the offer of a lifetime.

Lots of employees here have bought into this company spread propaganda that job hopping like in the US will make you unemployable in the future.

As the employees get older and get tied down with families and homes and also Job Stockholm Syndrome they're less likely to shop around for new jobs so the savings on salaries on seniors being paid below market are huge.

And afaik, large companies and large successful projects tend to have more stable core team behind them.

But is that ultimately true? It feels to me that the companies hold the power to make that true, regardless of the propaganda. So even if you try to job hop, after a certain age they have all the power to make you unemployable. Am I wrong? (I hope I am)

I think constant job hopping is bad in 3 situations: 1) If you work a non lifelong-learning job. 2) If you work a job that is mostly industry-specific relationship based. 3) If you are jumping around to different job roles entirely, where you never really become exceptionally talented at any single role.

My general rule of thumb for deciding when to job hop is when I feel as if I've stopped learning new things.

That sounds like a huge win for companies.