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

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#361

Post by marrs » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 12:17 AM 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 suspect it's more because companies can't chose when they have to expand a team. If they need 5 new devs and they need them now, they are in a weak position when negotiating salary.

Publicising that a new unproven hire is earning more than existing proven staff is simply going to cause people to leave, which is even worse for the business than not hiring new staff.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#362

Post by marrs » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 12:21 AM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #299

Bartweiss wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LOL. I'm guessing the irony of that title is intended

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#363

Post by marrs » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 12:27 AM UTC

fixxer wrote: post #237

billyhoffman wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably shouldn't, because I'm often wrong and frequently drunk :-) In seriousness though, when a news story is breaking, I'd like the news website to provide meaningful commentary from educated and informed people who can contribute to the understanding of the event. I don't care about the lay persons opinion when I'm reading a New York Times story about a world event. I want to hear for someone knowledgeable.…

With regard to meaningful commentary, that is a double edged sword. What you call meaning, I might call bias. Someone you call knowledgeable, I might call a shill. And vice versa. I've been thinking about data driven news for years now (I'm so fucking sick of Fox, MSNBC, et al.). Back to twitter, I actually do like the impact of 140 characters on how it compresses information. I would group the OP's article in with a…

I can see how someone could be comfortable with the quality of today's journalism in the sense that at least it's obviously bullshit. The trouble is that this means we're out of practice when we have to assess what appears to be real news.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#364

Post by marrs » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 12:29 AM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #249

Anechoic wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. Erica has explicitly written that she's not interested in speaking to reporters about the story: https://twitter.com/ericajoy/status/622154558140080128

It's generally considered journalistically correct to mention that in the story. Similar to "We reached out to Google for followup, but they declined to comment." Of course, if this were a news story and not a copy-paste of a Twitter timeline, it would probably follow those expected patterns.

I guess there's no point in even pretending to be trying any more

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#365

Post by marrs » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 12:41 AM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #130

malchow wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"retaliation is illegal" I'm not sure what world you think we inhabit. Are we humanoid automatons? The whole welter of human emotion more or less always outweighs a programmatic injunction like "retaliation is illegal." Companies are still people working together. They'll probably never be anything but people working together. It does not matter how protected the activity allegedly is; a giant embarrassment campaign…

It seems rather clear from the article that many coworkers liked sharing salaries, so I am unsure where your "Because your coworkers, above and below, don't like what you've done to their company" came from.

I think it said 5% shared the spreadsheet. We know nothing of the other 95%

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#366

Post by marrs » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 12:51 AM 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.

It might also refer to the forced redundancies that will follow after everyone has received their pay rise and the organisation need to make budget cuts. Then of course projects start to fall behind and so temporary funds are release to bring in a bunch of contractors, who are on way more than anyone else.

And before anyone says that Google is too profitable an organisation for this to be an issue, remember that PLCs have shareholders who can demand that costs be cut in order to increase profits. If you have a pension, you could indirectly be that shareholder.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#367

Post by eropple » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 1:56 AM UTC

deadmik3 wrote: post #355

eropple wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An employer is the power-holder in almost any employer/employee relationship. And so even the "discussion" exists to have a chilling effect upon that worker. The act of having that uncomfortable and fraught discussion is in itself a threat. You have those "discussions" to get a worker to stop exercising their rights. There's no other reason to have it. When your employee does something that is entirely legal and prot…

First off, all we know is that it was a question "Do you know what could happen?", not some scary "discussion". Such a chilling question to ask someone, so intimidate, very trigger. It's good to know that my employer can never question anything I do legally without being hostile, though.

That's an interesting misreading of what I said. Let's try again: your employer had best not even give the appearance of questioning legally protected actions. Is that straightforward enough? Does that make sense?

But I cannot envision a situation where the question "do you realize what could happen?" is not implicitly suggesting that the realization to be made is one of company harm--and thus, yes, threatening.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#368

Post by oh_sigh » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 2:52 AM UTC

deadmik3 wrote: post #151

aaronem wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Heaven forfend staff should behave in a way potentially inimical to the interests of management, instead of the other way around.

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.

No, staff and management work for the shareholders, essentially

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#369

Post by aaronem » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 4:22 AM UTC

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #360

aaronem wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be polite for the manager not to allude to threats which would be unlawful to make outright. Where else do you see something like "Don't you know what could happen?" going in a situation like that? And let's be clear here. There is absolutely no downside to the sharing of salary information from the employee's perspective, and absolutely no upside to same from the perspective of management. So when it comes…

I can imagine a number of downsides to publishing pay rates. Not every workplace is a beacon of maturity and comfortable upper-middle-class wages. Some offices have politics, gossip, and troublemakers. Immediately employees would be calling meetings with their manager to hear the justifications for pay rates they felt were unfair. This could repeat with each new hire, promotion, raise, bonus, and change in responsibi…

As I said, no upside for management.

Re: What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

#370

Post by tempodox » Wed, Jul 22, 2015, 7:22 AM UTC

eli wrote: post #353

tempodox wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight variations in legal details don't make the article any more readable. Even the reasons why it can't be formatted otherwise stay exactly the same. The difference you're pointing out makes no difference at all.

Totally disagree. The article is hard to read because the author is lazy, it has nothing to do with "Twitter's display rules." The author could have quoted the tweets or asked permission to reprint them in another format or used them as the source for original reporting instead of posting them verbatim. It's the difference between embedding the PDF of a legal ruling vs writing an article about what it means.

I see your point now. I didn't get it at first.