So, open salaries are a good thing because they increase the number of good negotiators. Fixed salaries are not, because it eliminates all negotiators.

This has already played itself out with price tags. Back when buying things was a personal negotiation process, it was possible to rip some people off while you had to work to get a good deal. This of course continues today with cars. However, its incredibly hard to charge people different prices at a grocery store when all prices are public. So too it would be very difficult to underpay someone if salaries were public.

This already happens in a fuzzy way now right: most everyone understands that their boss makes more money. We don't know exactly how much of course, but its "understood". If we transitioned to a place where people who are doing amazing work also make more money, I think there'd be no problem at all.

This effect can be even more distorted when people start irrationally factoring in years of experience. If salaries were public, you'd definitely start to see people who have put in their 10 years gripe about newcomers earning way more than them (often justifiably).

It also penalizes good negotiators, which might be a socially positive thing but I certainly wouldn't like it.

No, it doesn't penalize good negotiators. It fails to reward them when being a "good negotiator" isn't relevant to the business metrics for the position they work in, but the absence of an unearned reward isn't punishment.

And this isn't merely socially positive, but its a positive for the business, because it increases the incentive for good negotiators to seek positions where that is relevant to job duties, since it avoids rewarding that skill where it is not relevant. As such, it increases the alignment between the incentives provided by compensation with the business interests of the employing firm.

It probably penalizes snazzy dressers and charismatic people too, which snazzy dressers and charismatic people probably don't like.

But at some point you have to ask, what is a company optimizing for? It has limited resources, X dollars to spread amongst Y people. If you optimize a system to give a lion share of that to good negotiators, its not just socially worse, its economically worse for your business. You might find yourself with a hiring system that ends up with good negotiators instead of good engineers (if an engineer that is socially awkward receives a better offer from somewhere else, he may choose that offer instead of using it to "play" you to get his salary up).

Landon Donovan is a superstar that brings in the crowds to LA Galaxy. Bradford Jamieson IV is an 18 year old who has a career total 8 goals.

The point is not having everyone settle on ONE average salary or something, its not allowing similarly skilled/performing people receive widely different salaries based on unrelated things like negotiation skills. If anything, I'd wager in the sports world most similarly performing athletes make similar amounts thanks to this.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/judge-oks-415-mil...

Seeing ranges via Glassdoor has been very helpful in understanding what I'm worth. Of course that data is not going to be completely accurate, but it's a baseline that I find helpful.

Although Glassdoor is great, it's not a silver bullet. I want to see an even more open culture about compensation moving forward.

anyone negotiating for salary.

you get paid for what you can negotiate, and when you don't have a lot of information to act on, it's hard to negotiate well.

Almost everyone? Except slick talkers and employers.

Open salaries have the effect of making it easier for people to ask for numbers close to the mean, and harder to ask for numbers far from them. Obviously this benefits employees currently making lower numbers. But also, if there are companies paying their "10x" programmers huge salaries because they're worried about them jumping ship, open salary data from other companies helps push back on that, which saves the company money (that could be used to fund paying everyone else more).

Companies that don't do heavy amounts of recruiting don't have a good sense of what competitive salaries are, because they aren't regularly getting indirect information from candidates who negotiate. Open salary info helps these companies pay closer to the true competitive salary, which prevents them from losing good candidates without risking overspending. This is definitely good for the company, but it's also good for employees who have a fairer choice of jobs at fairer salaries.

Closed salaries are a great way to maintain the status quo. There is some Prisoners' Dilemma-ish behavior where one company opening salaries alone probably gets them a particularly bad result in the short term, so the clever thing to do is to exert social pressure for everyone to cooperate.

HN readers.

> who benefits from Open Salaries?

Employees.

The same people who don't want parents reading to their children because it gives that child an advantage over children who's parents don't have time to read to the child. [0]

[0] http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/parents-reading-to-kids-blasted-a...

Er, the WND article you cite to support the existence of such people greatly distorts the ABC source article [0] it cites, where the quote it takes out of context is not supporting an argument that parents shouldn't read to the their children as it presents it (and, in fact, is a joke -- a "quip", in the words of the source -- made by the speaker before being followed by: "We should accept that lots of stuff that goes on in healthy families—and that our theory defends—will confer unfair advantage".)

The philosopher isn't arguing against parents reading to their children, he's discussing work he and a colleague are doing to construct a principled philosophical theory in favor of the family, including the particular activity that WND wants to miscast the article as presenting him as opposed to.

Its always a good idea to have some skepticism when reviewing a news report, and to follow through and check sources (especially when they are linked so it is nearly zero-effort to do so.)

Perhaps particularly with a site with as strong an ideological bent as WND posting something that fits so neatly into an ideological stereotype as that article.

[0] http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszon...

>So many disputes in our liberal democratic society hinge on the tension between inequality and fairness: between groups, between sexes, between individuals, and increasingly between families.

The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time

My bad for selecting a shitty source - I pay absolutely no attention to the political slants of different news agencies - but my point stands: people are making these arguments. They will argue for "equality" by dragging anyone above them down to their level: the LCD.

I can easily see how my parent post could be misconstrued as arguing Swift is making this argument. My argument is that he is investigating this issue largely because people exist that are making these arguments.

No, it does not "admit", or even indicate, or even hint, that there are people arguing that parents should not read to their children because it creates an unfair advantage.

> but my point stands: people are making these arguments.

Well, there's 7-ish billion people on the planet, so perhaps somewhere you can find one making the argument you refer to, but when you do, I think its going to be hard to support your claim that the group making that argument is, even approximately, coextensive with the group proposing open salaries.