> What is the social value of having negotiation skills be a large determinant of one's salary?

Nothing in my comment said there was actually social value in having negotiation skills.

I'm talking about my personal experience and the drawbacks I see.

Do you think Buffer pays its employees fairly?

Your argument is circular.

You're saying that we shouldn't talk about pay, because when we talk about pay we get paid like Buffer devs do, which you think is obviously low compared to other salaries, which we can't actually prove because we don't talk about pay.

It's a bit like telling someone that you're giving them $100 in a box, but not to open the box, because if you open it, it'll turn into $20. "You can only have a high salary if you have no way to verify that it's high." Even if true, where does that leave us?

> which we can't actually prove because we don't talk about pay.

Just because salaries aren't public doesn't mean you can't get any salary information. Just go on a few interviews, set up an auction, and see what you can get.

> It's a bit like telling someone that you're giving them $100 in a box, but not to open the box, because if you open it, it'll turn into $20.

It's a cute analogy, but the more complete version would include a box market, where other people with insight into the box market are interested in buying the box I've been given. In such a scenario, I could shop around my box to see what it's actually worth without having to open it up.

I dunno, let's try the more complete version:

"There's $100 in this box. You can't open it, or look inside it, but trust me, it's there. Now you need to go over to my mate George, and give him the box, and he'll give you $100 for it. But only if you haven't opened it!"

Now it just sounds like you're being recruited as a drug mule. :)

Okay, granted, in your scenario their are multiple box dealers who are willing to bid on your unopened-but-totally-contains-$100 box. If you work at it, it's quite possible that you might even get some semblance of a fair offer. But should you need to work at it? And this still feels like a system which lends itself to collusion, uncertainty, and unfairness. Nor is that even hypothetical; we KNOW that our industry suffered from a serious wage-fixing cartel which was only recently busted open.

I feel like any argument against transparency has a high bar to clear.

So discount the value of negotiating as a skill, simply because others aren't good at it?

Seems just as biased as rewarding those with negotiating abilities.

One hopes that you're being paid for value to the company, and it's not obvious that being good at negotiating your own salary is well-correlated with providing value / having valuable skills. Though I see that morgante disagrees, so maybe we should explicitly discuss this!

I actually think it's not only rational but also good for the industry and society (long-term) for employees to push hard on improving themselves at the expense of their current employer. But many employers will act in what seems to be rational self-interest, and prefer candidates who won't prioritize themselves over their employer when it's close to zero-sum. (For instance, many employers require tracking and approval of expenses, instead of saying "We hired you to act in the company's interest" and dealing with abuse of expensing after the fact, as they would with e.g. abuse of root credentials.)

I'm also not particularly convinced that being good at negotiating your own salary is well-correlated with things you might do on behalf of the company, especially for many non-management-track software engineering careers.

> Though I see that morgante disagrees, so maybe we should explicitly discuss this!

I'd actually love to have a discussion about that, as I think it's an implicit assumption behind a lot of these anti-negotiation threads.

For my part, I do think that negotiation skills correlate with ability to deliver business value. Ability to command high salaries tends to follow from: (a) understanding what businesses actually value, (b) understanding market dynamics, (c) strong storytelling and communication skills, and (d) confidence/risk tolerance. All of these are, to me, valuable skills for software engineers as they help to translate business strategy and market dynamics into functioning software.

(Then again, I come from a place of believing engineers should have broad latitude and that software-driven companies should be more like law firms.)

So I think that's true for some roles but not all. I personally end up arguing about what markets we should and shouldn't enter, presenting at industry conferences, etc., because I find that interesting. But, for instance, a junior ops employee on a pager schedule primarily provides business value by getting good at the technologies that other people have chosen, not by paying attention to the market, by being able to present convincing arguments to others, etc. Yet that's a crucial role to business values.

I think this may be true of junior roles in general, and I think it's junior roles where I'm most worried, as a social-responsibility thing, about the fairness of salaries. I care less about earning $150K when I should be earning $200K than I do about earning $50K when I should be earning $100K, since it makes far more difference in my quality of life. (Even though they're the same delta value for the company!)

I could buy that there is a more generalize skillset of communication and persuasion: ops getting dev to clean up messes before putting them in prod, developers convincing open source maintainers into fixing their bugs for free, employees convincing prospective new hires to join, etc. And I do think it's valuable to measure that in addition to raw technical skill, both in hiring and in performance reviews. But I suspect there's enough reason to doubt that that correlates strongly with personal salary negotiation. Some people just don't do well pushing back on their direct superiors, but none of these other cases involve direct superiors. Somewhat more rationally, if you're worried about your job for office-politics reasons, or if it's riskier than usual to lose your income (maybe you're starting a family or have health issues), the right decision might be to take a safe, lower salary instead of trying for a higher salary with a small percentage chance of losing the negotiation badly. People without those concerns -- like me, who lives alone with no medical expenses and can bother my parents if worst comes to worse -- have a much higher risk tolerance, and I don't think personal risk tolerance particularly proxies for business value.

I also think that skill is learnable, and there are obvious poor incentives for a company to teach employees how to ask for more personal salary, but probably great incentives to teach employees how to negotiate better in the general case.

(As I understand it, big law firms rely on a sizable work force of associate lawyers and especially paralegals and other staff, who at least start out with very little say in the direction of the firm, what cases are taken, etc., right? And the partners are owners, not simply employees? I can definitely imagine open salaries and probably even unionization for the staff, which wouldn't compromise the ability of the partners to keep running the firm and making plenty of money.)