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

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#301

Post by cbr » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

zippy786 wrote: post #170

toyg wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> To be fair, Google respects robots.txt Not all of their crawlers respect robots.txt

Do you have an example? A crawler ignoring robots.txt sounds like a bug, and if you have details I can file a bug with the appropriate team.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#302

Post by omouse » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #162

mhluongo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected. What? Sharing salary information is a protected employee activity, and retaliation is illegal.. so maybe she expected there wouldn't be retaliation?

That is probably exactly what she expected. And if this were a small group politely sharing with each, there likely would not be retaliation. But once you make it "a thing", and are impacting the culture of an organization, then you have stepped into politics. The reactions at that point are going to be exaggerated, and not necessarily relevant to the original topic. I don't like politics, and stories like this are e…

>then you have stepped into politics

You can ignore politics but politics will not ignore you; politics is why tech worker salaries were kept artificially lowered and why Google and others had an anti-poaching arrangement.

She should have prepared a bit better but this was the safe move for her; it's out of her hands and the salary information has appeared on sites like GlassDoor. If she's fired everyone will know it's because of this ugly politics and people will want to avoid working for Google since it's no longer a tech company but a company dominated by managerial power players and sharks. Who wants to work at a place where you have ugly politics like this after all?

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#303

Post by chebum » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:29 PM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #150

mikehearn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IMHO, managers like to keep salaries private so that they can take advantage of people who are not great at negotiating. My suspicion is that they believe they come out ahead: the few hires who negotiate high pay are outweighed by the many who end up with lower pay. I'd also be surprised if many of them were concerned that minorities or women ending up with lower pay; it seems like a great opportunity to blame these…

I work for a company with a fully transparent salary ladder in development department. We know how much every team mate earns. Still negotiation skills come to play. Those with better skills get promoted _faster_.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#304

Post by mwfunk » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:30 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.

Using the term SJW is revealing an ideology, as surely as using M$ in a thread about Microsoft. You might not subscribe to it but most people are going to jump to that conclusion.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#305

Post by eitally » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:31 PM UTC

mhluongo wrote: post #94

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…

> tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected. What? Sharing salary information is a protected employee activity, and retaliation is illegal.. so maybe she expected there wouldn't be retaliation?

And, according to what I've read, she was spoken to about the salary sharing (whether by her manager, HR or both), but neither reprimanded nor fired because of it.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#306

Post by srpablo » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

exstudent2 wrote: post #288

onion2k wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you feel the same way if you worked in a company where 90% of the men were paid 15% less than the women? Would you believe that it was just every individual man being worse at negotiating? Or would you suspect there was something else happening? That's the situation women face.

There is no wage gap. Men and women are paid roughly the same for the same position. Aggregate differences in gender pay are due to choice of career not discrimination. Time for this myth to die.

Decades of highly-reproduced social study performed by professionals called a "myth" by a simplistic narrative 1-liner by anonymous commenter on HN. Cool.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#307

Post by acdha » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

cpncrunch wrote: post #262

chockablock wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here is an (apparently) non-anonymous comment from HN which seems to be saying the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908030

There are a few things in common but that account is far more professional – note the lack of personal disparagement directed at her and the direct acknowledgement that they had significant problems in parts of the company.

Explaining how salary disparities might have happened is very different from saying she's making it up or calling them a rabble-rouser.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#308

Post by keso_77 » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:34 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…

BS i.m.o. It is more like advertisements and marketing. Your work and your ideas don't have to be good as long as they are remembered. The louder you are, the more space you take, the more you let people know of your ideas and your work, the more money you get. If you quietly just do your job without any fuss you get forgotten. Women seem to have very little room for middle ground in today's corporate world either they get forgotten or they develop the worst case of testicular braggadocio you ever seen and end up being managers and CEOs.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#309

Post by nicboobees » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:35 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #203

nicboobees wrote: post #192

Nothing good comes from knowing other peoples salary. Only jealousy, resentment, unhappiness, and greed.

Or an actual understanding of market position and--in the case of less privileged folks--a way to smoke out systemic bias. You know--things that any worker should want to know.

Maybe it's different here. In the UK it's considered vulgar to discuss money or how much you earn.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#310

Post by eropple » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:35 PM UTC

vehementi wrote: post #271

deadmik3 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is the manager might not have even been implying any retaliation. Can you think of other possible meanings behind the manager's question?

Yeah I didn't even at first take it to mean "the company can retaliate". I assumed the manager was referring to unrest & animosity at people undeservedly making more money than others.

Which is still not the employee's problem, and so bringing it up is, to me, very much a threat.