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

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#291

Post by exstudent2 » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:04 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #280

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 hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue. If wage disparity follows gender lines then it is a gender issue.

There is no wage disparity across gender lines when you take into account career choice.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#292

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:05 PM UTC

nathan_long wrote: post #243

deadmik3 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staff works for management. While it's nice to have times where the management "works for" their employees, the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy.

> the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy What? Workers sell their labor to a company for a price. The whole point of any transaction is to satisfy both parties. Sharing market information is something that both buyers and sellers do. Why do you think this should be unilateral?

Presumably he believes that managers are there to expropriate the surplus happiness of the workforce. It's not alienation of your labour until you're feeling properly alienated.

/s

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#293

Post by aswdeffr » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:08 PM UTC

Googler here on a throwaway. I personally know Erica and followed her career. it is quite frankly bizarre to see her biting back against Google given the opportunities she was given.

Erica was a tech stop employee, which is Google's help desk. in terms of technical ability, hiring standards for tech stop are lower than for SRE, where she ended up. every non-erica tech stopper, including me, who wants to transfer into the technical side of the org is required to pass a full suite of interviews, same as an outside candidate. it would be obvious from examining her submit history that Erica is not really meeting this bar. and yet a door was opened into SRE somehow.

she stayed a few months in SRE, underperformed, and spent a lot of time ranting on internal platforms. again, this is verifiable because commits at Google are public. she chose to join a team of about 50% women working under a female director, so I have a hard time believing discrimination is the major factor here. now she is gone and believes she was wronged and is telling everyone so. the similarities to michaelochurch are strong.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#294

Post by defen » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:09 PM UTC

Anderkent wrote: post #69

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…

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).

What's the alternative, though? No salary negotiations? How does that give employees more power? I'd rather figure out a way for poor negotiators to get better at it, than take that away from everyone.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#295

Post by vinceyuan » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:12 PM UTC

It's very common that people with similar skills have different salary, especially in a big company.

Big companies have the rules in salary increase rate for the current employees, but are willing to pay more to hire new employees from other companies.

For example, A's salary is $5000 and yearly increase rate is 5%. Two years later, A's classmate B is hired. B's salary is $6000. A's salary is $5512.5.

Similar thing happened to me. Luckily I got an exceptional salary increase years later. But eventually I left that company after 6-year service.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#296

Post by omouse » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

chasing wrote: post #171

This is not journalism. Do not treat it as such. Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. They need to reach out to Google and ask a few questions. Otherwise, this information is just a shade better than useless. There's a lot of detail missing in these tweets. There's a lot of handwaving where the audience is essentially invited to fill in the blanks with whatever stereotypes -…

We do know that the labour of a lot of people is undervalued and that we do know that salaries for tech workers have been artificially kept down; we know there's been collusion between Google and other companies in terms of salaries and poaching.

It may not be journalism but it does raise questions that we should try and answer instead of saying "oh well I guess that's just the way things are".

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#297

Post by techlibertarian » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

lagadu wrote: post #128

techlibertarian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to be for them (people who believe there is a gender pay gap) to try and make any change. There are plenty of examples where pay is different regardless of gender: sports and entertainment would be two big ones. With sports, people are payed differently even if they fill the same position on a team. Why? They aren't the same. They bring different skillsets. It's the same with movies. The main character will ma…

> But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table. Why? Different people bring different value. The same title can have wildly different roles, some positions with the same titles can be much harder to replace than others. For example: at my company my team has a very specialized role that is far outside the domain…

> Why? Different people bring different value.

I didn't actually mean that. I thought the rest of my comment would give context that statement is what the opposing side is saying.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#298

Post by sctb » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:18 PM UTC

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9906107

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#299

Post by leephillips » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:21 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #235

billyhoffman wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reposting tweets is not valid journalism. For that matter, including tweets from random people in reaction to a news event is also not valid journalism either. I don't care what muffycat1974 on Twitter has to say about the Iran nuclear deal, unless muffycat1974 is the Secretary of State.

I have a passionate hatred for the practice of replacing informed journalism with vox pop content. The point of following the news on subtle issues is to get better information than I can pull out of my own head, and hearing "what people are saying about this" doesn't offer that. The ability to replace a call to an expert with a twitter search has done serious damage to local news (not that it was much good to start…

Editors at the Washington Post called this kind of story a "AAA" assignment, meaning that a reporter was tasked to "Ask Any Asshole". This was long before Twitter, etc. They would actually stop random people on the street and ask their opinions.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#300

Post by scott_s » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:24 PM UTC

dataker wrote: post #283

woah wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The sjw's are out to get me!!"

That wasn't really my point here. Explicitly exposing facts is the attitude I'd expect from this community, instead of ridiculing and wrongly correlating it with ideologies.

The term "Social Justice Warrior" is often used to dismiss people who argue against discrimination in various arenas. If you want to be taken seriously in discussions about discrimination, then perhaps avoid it.

Putting that aside, I share pjc50's bemusement that arguing for equal pay qualifies as a "hidden agenda". I also don't find speculation the same as "explicitly exposing facts".