My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#2>"Did the knowledge hurt my relationships with my coworkers? Yes. Of course it did. I felt cheated. I felt undervalued. I frankly felt I was the victim of a double standard."
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#3Transparency can only lead to a freer market, which is something many capitalists truly fear.
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#4Read all that and I still have no clue what the author is making now.
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#5One of the reasons I like sites like glassdoor is that it separates the judgment from the data. I don't need to know that Alice makes 22% less than Bob, and Bob makes 18% less than Claire, and therefore make personal judgments about each of my coworkers (like Alice is a pushover; Bob is mediocre; Claire is bossy.) I just need to know what the distribution is, in my company or in my industry, in order to negotiate for myself.
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#6Read all that and I still have no clue what the author is making now.
She chickened out. But it's hard.
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#7>"Did the knowledge hurt my relationships with my coworkers? Yes. Of course it did. I felt cheated. I felt undervalued. I frankly felt I was the victim of a double standard."
She failed to negotiate when she was hired. Is that really a double standard?
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#8>"Without that knowledge, I would never have known I was being suckered."
Suckered by yourself you mean, and suckered by the people that never taught you the principles of a free market where the assumption is that when two parties agree, the situation is satisfactory for both. If not, there is no agreement, no deal. The other party was not suckering you, you were happy with the deal, you took it. Why do you put something as important as your salary entirely into someone else's responsibility and then complain later?
Whoever raised or educated you forgot to mention some critical things to you. Like objects, people's skill have no intrinsic value. It is you and the other party that set the value to an agreeable level. Wow, you even got pissed at others that did receive the lesson in time. Well, just be happy someone taught you in the end.
What helps me in negotiations is thinking not about coworkers but about how I could be working less (later in life perhaps), how my wife could be working less, how we could travel more... If only I can convince them I'm worth more. I know myself well enough to see that I need the reason to be "not just for me". I wish it was enough to just do it for me though.
I do think the situation is a bit different in the Netherlands where very often there is a collective work agreement (with all wages defined) which puts people in levels. The requirements for the levels are clearly defined. At the healthcare company I work we have "key areas of responsibility tables" where you can see what to do exactly to go to the next scale. I check them before my yearly progress meeting and indicate to my boss if I should be at a higher level. Your salary within the scale is determined by the progress you make. It makes the gaps with coworkers less, still there is a lot of room for negotiation.
Also we have http://www.loonwijzer.nl/home where everyone can enter their salary and you can look up how you are doing. That said, I find it difficult to compare directly to others.
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#9I find it interesting to read about this "taboo" because, as a scientist at a public university, the issue is...nonexistent! If you are a scientist writing grant applications with other people (the norm), then you need to know their exact salaries in order to fill out the application. This includes the salaries of people above and below you in the food chain. There is no mystery or taboo in it whatsoever. Working at a public university, the mystery factor is even lower, if possible, because all the higher salaries are published online.
I remember dimly when I thought this complete transparency was strange and it made me uncomfortable. Now I don't usually give it a second thought.
Re: My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary
#10I have had three managers till now. I have asked all three what was their salary. Only one told me his salary, rest two didn't.
I keep asking salaries when I become friends with my coworkers, mostly because its a taboo and hence makes it fun. It makes them laugh when I suddenly in the middle of a conversation ask their salary becuase nobody has in the 10-15 years of their careers. I am a fresher, though.