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

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#181

Post by jaawn » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:46 PM UTC

lagadu wrote: post #145

jaawn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if this is true, this doesn't magically make it not a gender issue. What if women are generally given less leverage by default in negotiations? What if implicit gender biases have a chilling effect on women's expectations when they go to negotiate? What if women are discouraged from negotiating at all? I think, given what I've seen so far, women are given less leverage to start with, they are subject to the chil…

If the effect is so widespread, surely it'd be financially irresponsible for any company in their right mind to hire men because women would negotiate less in the middle and long terms.

I think most managers would see that as an unreliable prediction to make, and not very valuable when making hiring decisions. When hiring someone, you are solving an immediate problem, and not often thinking of the future raises the person is going to negotiate or not negotiate.

What you are saying might be true if most hiring was done by CEOs and not department managers.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#182

Post by antsar » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:46 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #155

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...

To be fair, Google respects robots.txt (and the atrocious "right to be forgotten"), and they won't stop you from using GMail if you encrypt everything with PGP. Unlike others ( cough -Facebook- cough ), they usually don't feel the need to trick users into sharing more than they'd want. The classic "if you've done nothing wrong" attitude is more a personal opinion of certain individuals (a certain Eric Schmidt comes t…

> they usually don't feel the need to trick users into sharing more than they'd want

Like the time they didn't feel the need to harass everyone into signing up for G+ any time one used an unrelated service?

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#183

Post by vog » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:46 PM UTC

something123 wrote: post #70

The problem I see sharing salaries is that people tend to overestimate how good they are. So inevitably everyone will have salary envy and no one will be happy. It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous

> It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous

This information is usually already expressed in the titles/roles the employees get. I don't see how publishing salaries would make any significant change to this.

Also, you are assuming that salaries do express the value for the company, which is to be doubted, according to the story at hand.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#184

Post by angelbob » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:47 PM UTC

deadmik3 wrote: post #160

dataker wrote: post #102

>"Don't you know what could happen?" >Nothing. It's illegal to retaliate against employees for sharing salaries. This answer in fantastic and I wish more technical people learned with this. As a programmer, some managers assume(often rightly so) that you have no clue about laws, finance and business in general.

I think this shows how selfish her goals really were. As if her manager asking "Don't you know what could happen?" implied that bad things could happen to only her . Why would she assume they were saying she would be retaliated against (or that anyone would be retaliated against)? What about the other 5% of the company this affected?

Retaliation is illegal against them, too.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#185

Post by dalke » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:48 PM UTC

Anderkent wrote: post #80

So here's a devils advocacy for not having transparency around money: On average everyone thinks they're above average ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority#Reference... ) Two people of equal value and skill will both think they're better than the other person, and thus deserve higher compensation. How do you reconcile that with salary transparency? Seems like you'll be making more people unhappy. Woul…

You may want to ground your advocacy in real-world data. This is a widely discussed topic. You might want to start with http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-case... .

The salaries of public sector workers are public, as are the CEO and other parts of upper management in public companies. Everyone's salary is some countries are available to the public.

Quoting from that Atlantic article:

> The worse the individuals' pay was relative to the median, the worse their satisfaction. Those at or above the median, however, experienced no change in job satisfaction or job search intention.

> These economists conclude that pay transparency just makes workers who are on the low-end of the pay scale feel worse about their jobs, so it accomplishes little. Linda Barrington notes, however, that this contention misses a benefit of being unsatisfied: the likelihood of moving on .... to another job, which would match that improved performance with better pay

Regarding the second, backchannels, again we can look to real-world examples to show how difficult or delayed those backchannels might be. Consider Lilly Ledbetter, who was hired as a supervisor in 1979. It wasn't until (quoting from http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1874954,0... )

> Shortly before she was due to retire in 1998, an anonymous co-worker slipped a note into her mailbox at work comparing her pay against that of three other male counterparts. Ledbetter was making $3,727 per month, while men doing the same job were paid $4,286 to $5,236 per month.

Quoting now from http://www.nwlc.org/resource/lilly-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-0 (emphasis mine):

> Her co-workers bragged about their overtime pay, but Goodyear did not allow its employees to discuss their pay

She filed an EEOC complaint, which the Supreme Court said wasn't allowed under the law because it the discriminatory acts of the past decades were older than the statutory 180 days for filing an EEOC complaint. The result was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which resets the clock after each paycheck made from the result of a discriminatory act.

Here's another article, http://www.financialsamurai.com/never-tell-anyone-how-much-m... , which says, basically, never tell anyone else your salary.

Since it's easy to show existing cases where people don't talk about their salaries though back channels, your belief that "people already talk about salary" may be true for some, but surely is not universally true.

Plus, how many of those people are not telling the full truth?

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#186

Post by deskamess » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:49 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #93

deskamess wrote: post #55

For some reason I was under the impression the spreadsheet was set up to detect gender/ethnicity based inequality in salaries. Not sure where I got that impression as the tweets do not mention it explicitly other than suggesting that some people asked and got increases. At the end of the day, this is what I am curious about - was there inequality in pay, and if so, what was the difference.

The use of the sheet was orthogonal to discovering her peer bonuses weren't being approved.

True... but the peer bonus aspect seems to have overtaken, for me, a more interesting metric (pay inequality amount from spreadsheet data).

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#187

Post by kriro » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:49 PM UTC

relet wrote: post #103

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…

It is a negotiating problem, and I think that that is an issue (be it gender-related or not). It rewards competitive thinking over cooperative thinking - people who'd rather work in a fair and equal environment are more likely to accept the same salary they perceive others will get - i.e. usually the proposed salary. Competitive minds have less qualms about claiming higher rewards. Mechanisms like publishing salaries…

I think it's not necessarily an edge if you are competitive instead of cooperative when negotiating. Both styles can work at least according to the theories I've read. The problem is of course some people are generally less likely to negotiate and they are the ones that are shafted.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#188

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:50 PM UTC

bronxcoder wrote: post #106

Anderkent wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people also agree that in ideal circumstances you wouldn't have to negotiate your wages (because you're effectively being rewarded for your negotiating skill, which is probably completely irrelevant to your actual productivity and value).

I would agree but I think there is something about a person who believes in themselves enough to negotiate that can be a differentiator. For instance, my coworker is a total slacker, comes in late and leaves early. I come in early and leave late and take on extra work. Someone who is determined enough to feel they are worth more money will probably statistically work harder. I know it isn't the same for all people, b…

It's not unusual to find female employees who are doing extra work because they don't have the confidence to deflect it or seize credit, and who are comparably underpaid.

Work hardness (how do you measure this, anyway?) and salary are weakly correlated above the minimum in most work places.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#189

Post by sergiotapia » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:50 PM UTC

chockablock wrote: post #174

sergiotapia wrote: post #89

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.

One 'side' is a non-anonymous first-person account from one of the major parties in the described event. The other 'side' is a post from Redditor 'dickbutt_md', who claims to have called up "a friend" who works at Google. In dickbutt's account, the friend claims not to know Joy personally, and not to have been involved in the events, but manages to describe Joy as "passive aggressive" and "not classy", and closes by…

It would not be the first time we've been duped by people with an agenda. See the whole dongle shitfest for an example. So until Wired does actual research into what happened and quotes people, who the hell knows what happened.

The purpose of my comment above was just to share an opposing side of the story. It's good to question things.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#190

Post by onion2k » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:50 PM UTC

bronxcoder wrote: post #106

Anderkent wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people also agree that in ideal circumstances you wouldn't have to negotiate your wages (because you're effectively being rewarded for your negotiating skill, which is probably completely irrelevant to your actual productivity and value).

I would agree but I think there is something about a person who believes in themselves enough to negotiate that can be a differentiator. For instance, my coworker is a total slacker, comes in late and leaves early. I come in early and leave late and take on extra work. Someone who is determined enough to feel they are worth more money will probably statistically work harder. I know it isn't the same for all people, b…

People who are genuinely good at what they do don't need to spend extra time doing it - putting in longer hours is a sign that you're not very good at what you do. Either that or you're going 'above and beyond' (gold-plating in project management terms) and doing things that the client hasn't agreed to pay for. That's actually worse - you're giving revenue away.