13 votes

I Know the Salaries of Thousands of Tech Employees

Tags: salary, work

2 comments

  1. demifiend
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    I see nothing wrong with this, especially if the revolt involves workers organizing and forming unions. Frankly, wages should be public knowledge. Pay rates should be something you can look up on...

    open revolt with disgruntled workers demanding more pay

    I see nothing wrong with this, especially if the revolt involves workers organizing and forming unions.

    Frankly, wages should be public knowledge. Pay rates should be something you can look up on the corporation's website, where a developer with credential X and Y years of experience gets paid $Z dollars/hour.

    And only owners/CEOs should be getting a salary. Everybody else should be getting an hourly wage with time and a half for overtime. If you can't plan a project so that it can get done during a forty hour workweek, then your incompetence should cost the company money.

    motivated people using tools like glassdoor to make a case to their manager for more $.

    This just perpetuates the unequal status quo.

    3 votes
  2. Pilgrim
    Link
    Although I'm sure we can agree that corporate leadership wants to keep costs low, the main pressure to keep compensation details private stems from middle managers who don't want to deal with the...

    Although I'm sure we can agree that corporate leadership wants to keep costs low, the main pressure to keep compensation details private stems from middle managers who don't want to deal with the personal politics of "why X is being paid more than Y. "

    That's where sites like glassdoor are great from both an employer and employee perspective. It's all anonymous which avoids the awkward conversations but still creates pressure on leadership to be competitive within the marketplace.

    The author only briefly mentions this and goes on to talk about how we're all fearful we'll be penalized for sharing this info and attaching our names to it. I do not fear that. I fear that my coworkers will hold a grudge if they find out I'm making more than them and I fear I may do the same (however irrationally). It's the same reason I don't share performance review metrics - I have little to gain but ill will.

    The author is an idealist, which is fine, but I only see two practical outcomes with sharing this type of info:

    1. open revolt with disgruntled workers demanding more pay
    2. acceptance among all staff members that X is better/worse than Y and deserves to be paid more/less

    I think #2 highly unlikely with an established business (but totally doable if done at the outset see Buffer a company who bases their salary on a formula) and #1 being an ugly mess whose same outcomes can mostly be achieved by motivated people using tools like glassdoor to make a case to their manager for more $.

    2 votes