Simply put, I'd like to make the most my negotiation position makes possible. Different people with the same qualifications and title would not have the same circumstances. If negotiation played no role, the practical outcome is that wages would stagnate as employers would engage in some version of a cartel, which would be worse for the people at the bottom of the bell curve as well.

> If negotiation played no role, the practical outcome is that wages would stagnate as employers would engage in some version of a cartel, which would be worse for the people at the bottom of the bell curve as well.

You mean, the thing that repeatedly happens under the existing system, despite negotiation?

For example, https://www.cnet.com/news/google-adobe-apple-intel-settle-wa...

Exactly that thing. If you believe it wouldn't be a lot worse with no negotiation I'd like to hear your reasoning.

Negotiation is entirely irrelevant. Why should a 2-5x variance in individual compensation factor into whether or not companies form a cartel to suppress all salaries?

Because there needs to be a trickle to start the flood. All companies are incentivised to co-ordinate prices to some degree, it's the desire to fill a particular role quickly or poach a particular superstar that causes companies to break from whatever happens to be the"industry standard", and those variances become factors in future negotiations. If there was never any variance in individual pay there'd be no pressure to adjust salaries at all, barring collective action. Which has its own negative externalities.

Cartels are weak because every individual member and every non-member is motivated to break them. That particular one was broken by Facebook.

Because a very high percentage of programmer types (of whatever sort of title) genuinely believe that they are well above average, and thus that performance-based pay would advantage them over others.

This is, of course, statistically impossible to be true for everyone who believes it.

Even if it were true, there's no contradiction. More granular roles could be created or more scrutiny could be had in promotions.

Unless you're overwhelming overpaid irrespective of your actual ability, no employee would suffer any downsides from pay transparency. If you (not you specifically, but any reader) disagree feel free to present a scenario.

Oh, no; I'm fully in favor of pay transparency. It's absolutely clear to me that pay opacity benefits only the employer.

Negotiations and bluffing.

I lie to every employer about competing wages.

One time I took a suitcase to my office and told my manager I was away for some interviews. Subsequently told him I didn't feel like I was earning my market rate - this was after my performance reviewed raise+bonus. Gained another 15% that way.

Because I want to be paid the same as equally performant people. I want the company to hire equally qualified people and pay according to equal performance.

Considering we all know hiring is an imperfect measure of skill, I would expect that pay diverges over tenure conditioned on identical qualification at hire.

What I do not want is for equally performant people to be paid differently on non-job-characteristics: so if, for instance, two people are roughly in the same bucket of performance, paying the woman less/more is unacceptable. Obviously individuals will see individual variation, but if across a number of employees, n, you see x% lower/higher pay for women than for men something is strange for sufficiently large x and n.

That is, either your hiring practices for women and men are not congruent, or they are and for some reason you're seeing poorer/better performances from women/men, then you have to identify the cause. The null hypothesis is that gender does not affect ability.

> Because I want to be paid the same as equally performant people. I want the company to hire equally qualified people and pay according to equal performance.

Without pay transparency you wouldn't know regardless so I'm not sure what your point is.

I'll try again. We seem to have suffered some context-loss. I'll keep the question and answer close to each other to avoid that.

Your question was:

> why wouldn't you want to be paid the same as equally qualified members with the same title on the same team?

My answer is "because performance is more important than qualifications and once you're in I could give a flying fuck about your qualifications". That's the point.

Pay transparency is a different discussion. I am fully capable of transmitting and receiving pay information without forced pay transparency.

You're missing the point. For two people who just started, without transparency they could've been paid differently irrespective of their qualifications or nonexistence performance at their role.

Furthermore even if there are discrepancies in pay and performance without transparency you wouldn't know anyway. My question was in the context of the other post - in the context of your post it's the same question except with respect to performance.

So, are you against pay transparency, or not? You say you're capable of receiving and transmitting, but ultimately you aren't receiving the truth, only what is told to you - which may or may not be the same.

> So, are you against pay transparency, or not?

Against. Not because of the ideal but because sufficient numbers of capable engineers I'd like to work with are simultaneously poor evaluators of whether others are capable. i.e. lack of pay transparency permits us both to turn the situation into a low stakes situation if we do not highly estimate each others' ability to evaluate others.

> You say you're capable of receiving and transmitting, but ultimately you aren't receiving the truth, only what is told to you - which may or may not be the same.

I am capable of having trusted relationships where I do not need third-party enforcement of truth. Just like I'd believe a friend who says she's going to the store without having to check her location on Google Maps, I am capable of believing my trusted co-workers when they express things like this as truth. I do not lie to them and I am capable of forming relationships where I believe they do not lie to me.