Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities • Hacker News Board

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#101

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:32 AM UTC

axaxs wrote: post #38

IgorPartola wrote: post #5

Whenever the topic of sharing salary information comes up I always bring up the algorithm for figuring out the average salary for a group of people without anyone learning anyone else’s exact salary: Say you have 10 people sitting at a round table. Person 1 picks up a piece of paper and on it writes a sum of their salary + randInt(100_000, 10_000_000) remembering what the initial random number was. We can call this n…

Why all the hoops? Companies have shamed us into thinking sharing salaries is bad. It's not. People should share freely, in my opinion it benefits all parties except the company.

I also don't get it, here in many European countries that is very easy to know and we don't make such a big deal out of it.

Public servants have a progression table, so by knowing their level, you know the salary.

Companies either have an union agreement, so it goes back to the same level agreements, or they have internal evaluation with salary matrix, so again by knowing department and skill level, it is relatively easy to get the salary value, minus possible bonus.

They are even part of some job offer descriptions.

So at the end of the day it is hard to grasp why it is so sacred to discuss it on US.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#102

Post by caymanjim » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:33 AM UTC

intended wrote: post #51

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't benefit top earners to share salary information. If I'm making more money than everyone else and the consequences of sharing salaries is equity than it is in my rational self-interest to keep my salary hidden because I'm unlikely to get any kind of raise until equity is achieved whereas I may continue to get raises otherwise. You know what those top earners are going to do then? Quit. And then you end up w…

Sadly your pay has little to do with merit, and more to do with perception, connections, face time and ability to handle office issues better than your cohort. It may well be, if not more likely to be, the other way round - you could be a GOOD performer, but since you can't or don't gork office politics, you are underpaid or even not at the level of challenge and seniority you should be.

> Sadly your pay has little to do with merit, and more to do with perception, connections, face time and ability to handle office issues better than your cohort.

These are merits. They mean you're easy to work with, people want to work with you, you know how to make and maintain important relationships. You'd make a good leader. You can recruit talented people. You can get preferential treatment from vendors. Your projects get noticed.

If you can't play this game, it doesn't matter if your technical skills are better. You won't have a chance to put them into practice. You won't have allies. No one will want to work with you or listen to your opinions.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#103

Post by grahamburger » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:38 AM UTC

intended wrote: post #51

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't benefit top earners to share salary information. If I'm making more money than everyone else and the consequences of sharing salaries is equity than it is in my rational self-interest to keep my salary hidden because I'm unlikely to get any kind of raise until equity is achieved whereas I may continue to get raises otherwise. You know what those top earners are going to do then? Quit. And then you end up w…

Sadly your pay has little to do with merit, and more to do with perception, connections, face time and ability to handle office issues better than your cohort. It may well be, if not more likely to be, the other way round - you could be a GOOD performer, but since you can't or don't gork office politics, you are underpaid or even not at the level of challenge and seniority you should be.

> and more to do with perception, connections, face time and ability to handle office issues better than your cohort.

These things are all extremely important pieces of keeping a company functioning well. To the extent that if you're good at these things and mediocre at whatever your main job is you are probably more valuable to the company (as in very literally adding more value) than someone who excels at their main job but can't cope with working in an office. If it's true that people who are good at those things are being rewarded more than people who aren't then we are actually doing pretty at basing pay on merit.

Office politics are, obviously, something you need to be good at to achieve seniority in an office.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#104

Post by CarbyAu » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

cleong wrote: post #87

CarbyAu wrote: post #67

I have previously mentioned that employees should be seen as significant investors in the business and should be treated as such. Apart from "The job" work is not a mental and emotional void. You invest yourself. And it hurts when your investment is ignored or treated as lesser than another human. Employee pay should be two parts: - salary as per usual - significant stock in the business. NB: significant. 50% of stoc…

Although this sounds like heaven and from your perspective as an employee it makes sense. But the system you built doesn't necessarily achieve the goals you want. If everyone gets the same dividend it becomes a tragedy of the commons since an individual player can do the minimum while profiting off other players actions. Even if its varied in dividend for example one person gets 10% while another gets 40%, this still…

Well, I don't expect this is a simple perfect system. It isn't new. I just think it might be better than what most places have currently.

US business has a history of "stock options" and "yearly bonuses". So this isn't new. (I haven't seen it here in Australia as a common thing.)

> If everyone gets the same dividend it becomes a tragedy > of the commons since an individual player can do the > minimum while profiting off other players actions.

They still don't get the same salary as you. Unless they do in which case, no real change.

Alternately, if the company is making megabucks to the point where salary becomes insignificant, then I am ok with others being better off too, even the dead weight.

Also, you could argue that with everyone in the company wanting a bigger share, this puts pressure to remove the dead weight. 1 less employee means a bigger share for me. 1 more productive person(as opposed to dead weight) means more for me.

> Not only that, businesses are meant to make money if > the people who start the business is giving out half > their money away this system better make 2x the revenue > every single quarter or why would they do it.

This doesn't change the idea of businesses making money. Just who they should be making it for. It doesn't force a bonus every year. It just says that if rentseeking investors get dividends, employees do too.

Do we want a society whereby rich people can buy shares and then seek rent forever, using that rent to buy more shares etc.

Or where the people who do the work, get the rewards?

I understand that floating publicly is used to draw large sums of money for business to do great things. But it is also used as a forever debt, to pay shareholders forevermore for doing nothing more. Under this scheme, those investors would do their sums differently, obviously and it may well come down to the business getting "less for their float action".

But I like the idea of trying not to trample salaried employees to make others rich.(Many startups do in fact operate on stock option basis. I'd just argue the stock options should be equal value, from the CEO to the cleaner.)

Honestly, I'd prefer more than 50% go to employees - I hate "rentseeking" - but lets not go crazy.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#105

Post by sytelus » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:54 AM UTC

Unpopular opinion:

For big companies, if you take all of the exec pay (C suits) and give it out to rest of the employees, the average employee income only rises by 3-5%. While CXX packages are extra-ordinary, one has to understand that its often drop in the bucket for big balance sheets and even less relevant when you have couple of hundreds of thousand employees around.

So the metric of disparity we should use is not max/min salary but rather avg % increase if CXX salaries were all given to employees.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#106

Post by mnm1 » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:56 AM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #18

> “ The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, significantly less than Blizzard employees said they expected following the study.” When oh when are midrange tech companies going to get their shit together with raises and bonuses. 10% should be mostly seen as a (shock) _normal_ raise when the company is doing well,…

Yeah, I agree. The people that don't hop put in minimal effort. Like me a lot of the time. My minimal is still better than any other engineer's average usually, but still. I haven't been motivated by anything other than the tech itself in awhile and it's gotten to the point where I no longer care what the best decision is for the company but only for myself. Hey, that's what they're paying for. Due to inflation and new policies, I make less money, have half the vacation, and much shittier health insurance than when I started over half a decade ago. So overall, I have decreased my time, dedication, passion, and performance to compensate. If that's the only way I can get a raise, that's how I'll get it.

I wish more managers/executives would understand what you just explained and how badly it hurts their business to constantly have employee turnaround. I have yet to meet a manager or executive who consistently understands motivation and rewards it properly in the way you describe. There are other handcuffs though, especially in the software industry: tech stack, pay available in the area, remote work, flexibility, and now corona.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#107

Post by missedthecue » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:57 AM UTC

darth_avocado wrote: post #82

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #18

> “ The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, significantly less than Blizzard employees said they expected following the study.” When oh when are midrange tech companies going to get their shit together with raises and bonuses. 10% should be mostly seen as a (shock) _normal_ raise when the company is doing well,…

^This. I've always had the philosophy that if you want to retain good employees, pay them more before they ask for more. If they have reached a point where they had to ask for more, they're probably going to leave soon. I don't understand how do companies fail to realize this. Say an engineer leaves because you didn't get him that 20% pay bump. Even in the highest ranks of engineering, that's like what a 100k? 30k-40…

It's basic economics. Everyone acts in their rational self interest, including your boss. Your boss doesn't get in trouble if you decide to leave. Your boss gets in trouble if his budget gets way out of control by giving promotions and raises left and right.

On the converse, your boss doesn't pay the cost of hiring new people. It doesn't come out of his pocket. But giving 20% raises to everyone he has the suspicion of leaving will get him canned real quick, imposing a real and sizeable cost on him.

The tippy top dogs of the company aren't completely stupid for running things this way. Budgets would get out of control in a hurry if they let managers do whatever they want with wages. Nepotism would run rampant without costly oversight and surveillance. Employees would learn to take advantage of easy raises.

So the company bears a smaller cost (employee turnover) rather than the bigger and unpredictable costs of frequent and decentralized wage raises.

There's not a great solution to this. It's an example of market failure. Everyone acting in rationally on an individual scale does not lead to group rationality.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#108

Post by TeaDrunk » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #85

woodruffw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm almost certain my pay is different from my colleagues, but I've bargained like hell to get it. When I was hired, every time we've been acquired. I'm no executive either, I'm just a developer with a proven history of give-a-damn. Whether or not pay discrepancies can be fair, this doesn't sound like a case of them being fair. What happens to your (hypothetical) colleague who gives just as much of a damn as you do…

I'd argue your first example is actually fair. Someone who has trouble negotiating in professional circles is going to have issues far beyond the workplace, if nothing else they're going to get repeatably screwed buying a car, and they should work on that. Why shouldn't the more aggressive, more strategic people earn more on average? I'd argue they give more of a damn by definition. The ability to project social forc…

Statistically women ask for raises just as much and as aggressively as men, but they’re less likely to be granted. The idea that aggression is a skill recurved the same between men and women is very much false...

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#109

Post by asciident » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 4:59 AM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #102

intended wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly your pay has little to do with merit, and more to do with perception, connections, face time and ability to handle office issues better than your cohort. It may well be, if not more likely to be, the other way round - you could be a GOOD performer, but since you can't or don't gork office politics, you are underpaid or even not at the level of challenge and seniority you should be.

> Sadly your pay has little to do with merit, and more to do with perception, connections, face time and ability to handle office issues better than your cohort. These are merits. They mean you're easy to work with, people want to work with you, you know how to make and maintain important relationships. You'd make a good leader. You can recruit talented people. You can get preferential treatment from vendors. Your pr…

All the things the OP listed are real merits. It's not even a game, but being a professional.

Perception = you are good at communicating your work to others

Connections = you have a strong network and stay informed and know who to talk to for different tasks

Face time = you are easy to get along with

Ability to handle office issues = you are a lubricant that make the group dynamic work

If you don't do those things, then you could write fantastic code, but: no one will know about it, know to ask you about it, be aware you're doing it, and find you somewhat of a drag on the office atmosphere. Basically, your work is not useful to the company that is paying you, and you should be paid less because of this.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#110

Post by solipsism » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #85

woodruffw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm almost certain my pay is different from my colleagues, but I've bargained like hell to get it. When I was hired, every time we've been acquired. I'm no executive either, I'm just a developer with a proven history of give-a-damn. Whether or not pay discrepancies can be fair, this doesn't sound like a case of them being fair. What happens to your (hypothetical) colleague who gives just as much of a damn as you do…

I'd argue your first example is actually fair. Someone who has trouble negotiating in professional circles is going to have issues far beyond the workplace, if nothing else they're going to get repeatably screwed buying a car, and they should work on that. Why shouldn't the more aggressive, more strategic people earn more on average? I'd argue they give more of a damn by definition. The ability to project social forc…

Surprise! People have different definitions of what "fair" means in any given situation. It's completely arbitrary and subjective. The only thing that could be less interesting is describing one's dreams.