This happens all the time anyways, hiding the salary of the employee isn't going to make any difference in most cases.

And is it so hard to guess what some (say iOS engineer) earns? The salaries that Buffer pays are in the range of what I expected them to be anyways.

> What if I have a very specialized skill that doesn't fit nicely into your matrix? Let's say market pay for my skill is $200k. Do you create a new category for me? Do I get dirty looks from all of my co-workers because I have a valuable skillset that most people don't?

I'd expect the founder of the company should be able to justify paying someone $200k to his employees when he can justify this to himself and his investors.

I mean it's not like anyone will be blown away by the fact that there are people (VPs, managers) that earn 3x to 100x of what they earn themselves.

What is your fear? That the employees will seize the property of the company and turn it into a communist collective?

And if they had the nerve to Google your past salary, then I think you could turn that around and ask for a similar matrix to what you had at your last, more transparent company.

If they refuse, and you can't justify the salary to yourself given the situation, you're probably better off staying at the transparent company. There's more to a job than money, after all.

Typically you aren't working at an internship because you have a proven track record of skills in a certain area. That is kind of the point of doing an internship. And having a proven track record is something employers are willing to pay a lot more money for.

You don't have to justify it, I understand all the bullet points. I'm just corroborating the parent's statement that willful ignorance of someone else's wages can be a useful coping mechanism. Because no matter how many justifications there are, it still stung.

That doesn't stop unbidden thoughts from creeping into my head at 4AM when the two of us are working side-by-side doing the exact same thing.

Another side benefit of this approach is recruiting. I've always felt that "salary negotiable depending on experience" is such a waste of ink. Being transparent let's individuals who have expectations way out of alignment opt-out entirely. Then you get a nice clean signal for when your pay is out of alignment with the market...good candidates don't apply.

So an ios dev who spent the last 10 years elbow-deep in the innards of some database code or something would arguably be "senior" but not "experienced".

Just one way this could fall out, I don't know how buffer defines the terms.

Having salaries be completely open invites comparison even when there is a lack of information. Bob the Developer in XYZ team makes 20k more than me, is that fair? Maybe, but I don't really know, and I can see that creating friction with the right (wrong?) personalities.

This sets a terrible precedent. I've been in places where people knew they had to get a better offer to get a raise, so the entire office was job-hunting. Much better to figure out some benchmark ("To get the best folks we pay in the top quintile and insist on no OT" or "We pay modest base salaries, but give double the usual equity to share upside and incent people to act like owners") and then stick to it. Top people will rarely leave for a small raise, though they will leave over disrespect or boredom.

Oooh, or what if there's a dragon[1], and I need to be paid extra money so I can spend it on dragon-slaying gear? If you really deserve extra money, the conversation goes like this:

"Why do you make more than me?" "Because my job is harder."

Fun fact: you're not that special. Wage secrecy is good for skilled negotiators and bad for everyone else; being a skilled negotiator does not, however, ethically or morally entitle you to make more than other people. It just allows you to get away with it, and it's trivially unfair.

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2207833/

I trust co-workers when they do what they say they will, when they are respectful & smart, when they show up on time, when they tell me when I screwed up in a nice way, etc. I could care less what they make--to me it would be a distraction.

Are you 100% sure that you've valued yourself accurately?

I played "show me yours and I'll show you mine" with a coworker once and he discovered that we were both working the same position but he was paid $8K less than me. The difference was that I negotiated my salary like crazy and he didn't.

Information asymmetry is the best way for companies to ensure their employees are underpaid. While it could cause a bit of awkwardness between peers, at the end of the day I think it's better to know what others are making & let them know what I make, because it strengthens everyone's position.

If I negotiate for myself, I only need to persuade the company to spend $10,000.

A proven ability to keep your mouth shut could strengthen your negotiating position if you're using a quantifiable value-based approach.

It's my job making sure everybody is paid fairly. If Niel came to me and told me about a competitive offer, I'd say, "well, let's look at the market; maybe we've fallen behind." And then we'd sit down and refresh the data that drove our current pay levels. If things had changed significantly, then it would be time for raises. If not, then we'd talk about why a company might be paying well above market, and whether it's the right choice for Niel to go there.

For specialized skills, yeah, a new matrix category's the obvious fix. If co-workers are the kind of people that freak out at market economics, then it means we're not educating them well, so that's something worth fixing.

I think it's important to remember that secret salaries rarely stay secret, so the choice isn't between full knowledge and zero knowledge; it's between full knowledge and half knowledge plus substantial speculation.

What if the company is not that profitable, can you still stay competitive? Are you willing to risk the future of the company?

I deny the choice. I think most companies that make a habit out of underpaying good people to stay barely in the black don't survive in the long haul. If I were faced with that choice, I'd be honest with everybody about the financials and we'd work something out. Either we're pursing something pretty lucrative, in which case it's a temporary deviation from market rates, or we're barking up the wrong tree, in which case the company isn't worth doing.

First, most recruiters/hiring managers ask for current comp (or at least a salary range) early in the discussion, so it should be easy for them to offer well over someone's current pay. This simply removes one bargaining tools (lying about current comp) for an employee considering a move elsewhere.

Second, matching outside offers very quickly becomes a slippery slope. Anyone who figures out that such a policy exists will quickly come to the realization that the easiest way to get a raise is to put themselves onto the market. That's toxic, not to mention unsustainable.

Finally, equity. The one-year cliff exists for a reason, and if you're playing for keeps with an early-stage startup, you're probably expecting (or at least hoping) for your ownership stake to be worth a lot more in the long run than your salary.

Currently this screws "Niel" (to stick with the example). He wants to move someplace else and is convinced that he is worth $140k. He's convinced he's underpaid right now. He interviews at, say, Google (random example), who does a bit of research and hey, he's only making $88k. Suddenly they don't have to offer him market rate, they only have to offer him a raise on what he makes now.

Obviously this only works if one company (Google in this example) isn't as open about their salaries.

"Lying about current comp" is not the only tool for an employee considering a move elsewhere. Nor is it, in my opinion, the best tool for that.

You can get pretty good results by refusing to disclose your current comp and it has an added benefit of keeping you honest. Open salaries would ruin that negotiation tool.

Also, matching outside offers is not necessarily a slippery slope. Not everyone who gets an outside offer and considers it is motivated by pure greed. Sometimes people's situation changes and they would prefer to stay at the same company, but the company needs an additional incentive to meet their new requirements.

For example, if you really like working at company Foo, but you just had a kid and you're noticing that your budget is too tight for your peace of mind, you might need a raise. Now, you might be an asset to your company and your boss genuinely understands your situation, but he or she simply doesn't have enough leverage to give you a raise outside the regular process. If you have an outside offer, that gives your boss the leverage and you might be able to negotiate a raise that would allow you to stay. And if they truly can't afford it, you have the choice of accepting the outside offer.

Put another way, let's say we both make 100K in salary, and then, all other things being equal, you have a kid. Do you get a raise to 120K just because you had a kid? I didn't have a kid. Don't I get a raise too?

"If you were worth $100K and you negotiated for that, then that's what you make" was true at the time of the initial negotiation. This is a separate negotiation, with a source "hey, company X will pay me 20% more"

No, you don't deserve $20k more as you didn't ask for it, you might if you reopened negotiations.

See, whereas you never quite understood the "what if you have a kid" argument, I never quite understood the "don't I deserve the same as that other guy" argument. The way I see it, the magical answer is always the same: maybe you do. Do something about it and you might be surprised.

There are some significant advantages in building an open team like this. People know what's their pay-grade and what part of the company they actually represent. If they don't think their cut is fair they can signal it. Many companies have confidential salaries so even when you know you are underpaid you can't argue it without throwing peers under the bus for revealing their salary to you.

I don't find that there's a lot of information asymmetry, at least as an engineer. Beyond a first job, is there really that much? I know what I made at my last job, I know approximately what I'm worth, and I argue from there. If a company won't pay me what I think I'm worth, I look elsewhere.

Every situation is unique: how desperate is the company, how desperate is the employee, how many roles will a person fill, how many intangibles does the person come with (i.e. work ethic, contacts, what-have-you)...

I've no particular confidence this would work well, but it seems a consistent approach that has some potential.