I'd like to be paid more for being a good musician.
Paying somebody more for being a good negotiator would seem to make sense if negotiation were an important part of their job. Otherwise it's just inefficient.
We don't have to hire everybody. If what you care about is salary above all other things, that's absolutely fine. I don't judge you for it. I care about making money too. The kind of people we do want to hire care about making enough money, and making a fair amount in relation to how the company is doing, but they care just as much about working in a great environment which has the features that transparency allows us to have.
In other words, you may be very good at what you do, but based on the above you would be a poor culture fit for a place like GrantTree or Buffer - and that's absolutely fine, on both sides.
Framing salary discussions in the context of how the company is doing is one way that employers try to manipulate naive young engineers. Same with all "8 Pieces of Flair is the minimum, but if you want to wear more, we encourage that" tactics, it tries to compare something relevant to the employee with a second, completely irrelevant thing. It's easy enough to spin those discussions in a way that make it look like we're all pitching together to build something great, but at the end of the day, it's still a negotiating tactic.
Personally, I prefer to separate salary negotiation from the rest of the decision about whether somebody would be a good fit. After all, that's a one-time negotiation that probably won't ever be revisited. A guy's skills, sense of humor, leadership ability and overall fun-to-be-around-ishness are the things that matter every day for the rest of his tenure, and are therefore a lot more important when deciding whether you want him on your team.
That's twisting my words. What I said is that if salary is their primary concern, then they're not a good fit. Asking for your market rate is just fine, so long as you understand that what we can give you is constrained by what has been decided by the team is a reasonable level of pay for that position.
Someone who, knowing our culture, still insists on being an exception and getting a different salary, is basically saying that they care far more about their own outcome than about the outcome for the company as a whole. Teamwork is one of our core values, so they've just marked themselves out as a bad culture fit.
> Personally, I prefer to separate salary negotiation from the rest of the decision about whether somebody would be a good fit.
Arguably, with our system the salary negotiation is entirely separated out - and then reduced to nothing. There is no salary negotiation. The salary is what's on offer in the job ad, and that's that. If you don't like it, don't apply.
For example:
"You are our top performer." "Then why am I in the 10th percentile for people I work with? Can I have a bigger raise to fix that?"
"Nobody got a raise this year." (Which you can see is a lie, upper management gave themselves a raise while telling the peons they didn't have money for a raise)
Everyone understands that salaries are going to be different for different people who perform at different rates.
Me: I'm really excited about the company, but we need to talk about the salary.
H.M.: Sorry, that's set by a formula. We can't change it.
Me: Yes, but I've demonstrated that I can bring in value in excess of $1m per year, and have higher offers from 2 other companies.
H.M.: We can't do that, or everyone will see that yours is higher.
For other roles, how would someone argue that they can "bring in value in excess of $1m per year"?
Transparency also sounds good to lots of engineers who don't like negotiation, see it as unfair, and aren't any good at it. No need to bother with all that. Salaries are set. Everything is "Fair", which resonates nicely with an engineer.
But it sounds really bad to an engineer who's genuinely good at what he does and knows how to negotiate a rate that reflects that. Why would a fella leave, say, 100k on the table to go work for a place like Buffer, where even the CEO is only making $150k/year? No thanks, but thanks for saving us the trouble.
The worst thing that could happen is that this sort of thing takes over the industry. That's definitely a possiblity because it's so attractive to those first two groups, and let's face it, there are a lot more managers, introverts and suckers in this industry than guys who are willing to negotiate their worth.
I could see a whole generation of engineers coming up, expecting to be valued on seniority only, and thinking the Industry Average is the correct value for their output.
Not a happy prospect.