What happens when you talk about salaries at Google • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#81

Post by danielweber » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:56 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

bronxcoder wrote: post #43

I hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue. It's really a negotiating problem. My coworker and I were hired together, same position, same experience, and offered the same salary. When I was offered the position, I asked for $15,000 more and they gave it to me. My coworker didn't ask for more and is therefore now making $15,000 less than me. After six months, I asked for a raise of $5,000. He never…

I remember reading some studies that suggest that this alone, i.e. men being more likely to go and ask for a raise / negotiate their salary, can account for most of the "gender gap".

It can be, but, women are also socially pressured, by both men and women, not to negotiate salary.

It's a complex issue and you should avoid people on either side who try to scrunch it down to one sound bite.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#82

Post by Shinkei » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:56 PM UTC

bronxcoder wrote: post #43

I hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue. It's really a negotiating problem. My coworker and I were hired together, same position, same experience, and offered the same salary. When I was offered the position, I asked for $15,000 more and they gave it to me. My coworker didn't ask for more and is therefore now making $15,000 less than me. After six months, I asked for a raise of $5,000. He never…

Yes! It's not that somebody said, "hey, we can pay this person less simply because they are a woman." It's that the employee themselves may have negotiated for more.

Correlation is NOT causation.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#83

Post by mikehearn » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:56 PM UTC

bronxcoder wrote: post #43

I hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue. It's really a negotiating problem. My coworker and I were hired together, same position, same experience, and offered the same salary. When I was offered the position, I asked for $15,000 more and they gave it to me. My coworker didn't ask for more and is therefore now making $15,000 less than me. After six months, I asked for a raise of $5,000. He never…

I'm sure there are plenty of ways for this to backfire, but I've always thought one of the most effective ways to eliminate salary bias is for companies to list a role's salary up front, in the job posting, before they've begun interviewing. That way the salary is roughly set before the gender, race, height, physical attractiveness (i.e. any qualities that can cause unconscious bias) is known about whatever candidate a company eventually hires.

Obviously it wouldn't outright prevent negotiating - you could still ask for $15k above what they listed in the job posting - but it WOULD help candidates navigate some of the smaller moments during the interview process that can unknowingly undermine their negotiating position (e.g. "How much did you make in your last role?").

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#84

Post by aaronem » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:57 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #77

deadmik3 wrote: post #47

Was stringing together a couple dozen tweets really the best format to share a story like this? There is a lot that's left out. Once she vaguely mentions that another employee who was "involved" was still getting all of his peer bonuses (which may or may not have been PB's for his "involvement", we don't know), the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me. OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WA…

> the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me Are you sure you're not being an Angry Jack[0] and using that as an easy excuse to reject the story firsthand? > Also, generally shit will hit the fan if you tell anyone to fuck off, especially if they're your manager. Again, we don't know that she told her manager to fuck off for being racist Were do you see her telling her manager to fuck off at all ? She's…

I'm pretty sure the "telling her manager to fuck off" comment was a reference to refusing to be illegally intimidated over salary information sharing.

Assuming that's an accurate reading of GP's comment, I think it's quite telling that, again, an employee's refusal to be illegally intimidated should be constructed as "telling her manager to fuck off". The sympathies and attitudes thus revealed make me very glad that I don't have to depend on the good feeling of random Silicon Valley magnates and would-be magnates to work in my industry.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#85

Post by tashoecraft » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:57 PM UTC

zyb09 wrote: post #65

To be honest, what exactly did she want to accomplish with this? Where I live people are very hesitant of sharing their salary and doing something like this would be considered very rude. All it can possibly lead to is drama about salaries. Drama about why some people getting payed more then others. Should Google now start paying each and everyone exactly the same until everyone is happy? No of course not, it's no se…

The reason people are very hesitant about sharing their salary is because we have constructed a culture where it is taboo to share what you make. That we have these ideals about how terrible things could be if you knew what others were making in comparison to you.

Her manager talked to her saying "Don't you know what could happen?". Well management couldn't fire her for that, but could make her work life less then ideal. Possibly holding back bonuses out of spite? Worse job assignments?

The huge job salary scandal that Google was a part of kinda shows hows they can't be trusted to be honest about salaries and supportive of their workers.

You feeling ok with what you are getting paid is not what matters. What matters is getting fair market value for your worth. Many people make less then what they are worth because they either don't know how much they are worth, or are even too afraid to argue for what they feel they are worth. Companies exploit this and use salary negotiations as a way to hire employees for the absolute least amount possible.

We applaud companies for making record breaking profits, but we don’t applaud them for decreasing their profits a bit in favor of increasing all their employees spending power.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#86

Post by eli » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

tempodox wrote: post #2

The article format is completely busted by Twitter's display rules and made unreadable. In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued. Those tweets belong to Twitter now and are good for nothing else but ferrying ads. I won't have my time wasted by trying to read that crap.

That's nonsense. The person who wrote the tweets retains ownership, they have simply licensed Twitter to display them in a certain way with certain requirements.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#87

Post by danielweber » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

tempodox wrote: post #2

The article format is completely busted by Twitter's display rules and made unreadable. In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued. Those tweets belong to Twitter now and are good for nothing else but ferrying ads. I won't have my time wasted by trying to read that crap.

> In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued

Has anyone ever been sued for stringing 20 tweets together into plaintext?

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#88

Post by jaawn » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

bostonpete wrote: post #36

amelius wrote: post #12

Google is a company that wants to have access to all the information in the world. But if somebody rightfully publishes some information that is sensitive to Google, look what happens...

In the reddit comment thread for this u/dickbutt_md had a lengthy comment that seemed to call into question some of the details of this story. His facts weren't first hand, but then again, sometimes a little distance can help with objectivity. In any event, I tend to take comments from possibly-disgruntled former employees with a pinch of salt.

Another factor to consider is that, at huge companies, not all management has a unified vision. It is entirely likely that the article source's manager and the next manager above him/her disliked the spreadsheet while the "official HR position" on the matter was given at some kind of large meeting.

I work at an enterprise with ~5,000 employees, and attitudes toward topics like transparency vary wildly, even in cases where there is an official company stance. This is because it is common to give managers a lot of freedom to manage their departments without interference. So, for example, our company has a pretty good work-from-home policy, but your manager is completely allowed to ban it in your department if he or she feels like it.

Basically, it is possible that both sources are mostly accurate, and they represent the perspectives from different parts/levels of the company at Google.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#89

Post by sergiotapia » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:59 PM UTC

Other side of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3e05wg/what_hap...

Either way both are completely unverifiable. Take both with a huge fistful of salt until both parties are interviewed and quoted and research is done into what happened.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#90

Post by abrahamepton » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:00 PM UTC

staticelf wrote: post #49

bakhy wrote: post #30

i hope things like this serve as a wake up call to all young talents willing to sacrifice their lives for these companies, enamored with some idealized visions of what they are and do. a company is a company. an agent for making money, first and foremost. any positive change they bring is a side-effect, and due to their ever greater power they must constantly be policed, at least by releasing unpleasant information l…

And in my opinion as a young talent, Google is highly overrated when it comes to creating good software. Sure they have some hits, but a lot of it also is kind of bad. To be regarded as the best of the best, I think they make pretty shitty software.

I feel similarly about Facebook. I feel it with some justification, but I'm probably wrong. To do what they do at the scale they do it, for it to even work let alone work pretty much perfectly, pretty much all the time for pretty much everyone is a goddamn miracle. But there are so many little things about FB software (mostly the UI/UX) that annoy the shit out of me, so I get grumpy and think their software sucks.

Having worked at Google, I think it's worth saying, their software is fucking astonishingly amazing. The magic tricks that go into the simplest things are mindboggling, and what's been built behind the scenes to enable it all is pretty incredible.

Also, um, a lot of their software is far from shitty: Gmail, search, docs+spreadsheets, new photos, youtube to name a few. If you think any one of those are "pretty shitty", well...I dunno what to tell you.