Show me the salary!

Don't you get the P45 after you left your old company? Which means they can only look at it after you were hired.

Also, why is it the employee's responsibility to not drive inflation? If the company is fine with paying someone X for a job, why does it matter what the person earned before?

This is exactly why we are launching the Offer Drive:

http://offerletter.io/drive.html . In short - submit your offer and equity information, get back access to a statistical pool showing where you stand.

A few notes on this subject from my perspective as the founder of http://OfferLetter.io (we provide negotiation advice and career matchmaking to developers and other techies).

Companies also oftentimes just don't know what someone is worth, and don't want to publicly publish numbers that are too high or low for fear miscalibrating expectations w.r.t. large swaths of potential candidates.

1) Market rates are complicated. As I've written about before, the outcomes that people can see because of outsize startup exit scenarios means that their market rate can be very very high. Google does't publish this kind of info because they can and will match even crazy startup exit numbers, but don't broadcast this for fear of screwing up expectations.

2) At the end of the day it is contingent on the individual to define their own basis and see what places are willing to offer what compensation, and how much they are willing to budge. This is how markets work.

3) On a related note, oftentimes, companies will try and prohibit discussion of compensation by saying it's confidential, or a trade secret. Confidentiality and wage secrecy requirements in the workplace are illegal under California law. The exact statue is here: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection... As we have seen repeatedly, these kinds of requirements tend to disproportionately harm people from many kinds of non-privileged backgrounds.

And, under national labor legislation, companies cannot prohibit discussion within the workplace.

MathWorks tried to pull similar shit with me. When we started discussing salary while setting up an on-site the recruiter balked at the salary delta I was asking for, not the absolute number. It was one of a few reasons I ultimately declined the on-site.

I imagine there would be potential problems due to the fact that people have differing opinions about what people deserve.

For one thing, there are different but equally reasonable criteria on which to base "deserve." Maybe Bob in Engineering contributes more to company profits than Steve in janitorial, so Bob deserves to get paid more. Or maybe Steve is intensely loyal and stuck with the company through hard times and often stays late to get everything done, so Steve deserves to get paid more. Or Joe in sales hasn't been selling well this year, but his kid has cancer and he's obviously distracted and he deserves high pay because he's having such a hard time.

And of course, given a choice of criteria, people will invariably tend to choose whichever one gives them the results they like. Bob will be more likely to think the profit-based evaluation is best. Someone who's good friends with Steve will think that loyalty is more important.

Maybe it can be made to work (and it definitely can work in a smaller company), but I don't think it's as easy as you make it sound. Sometimes it's just impossible to please everybody, and if you try then you'll only succeed in displeasing everybody.

As a technical manager, I regularly have a similar problem. I often hire folks [in Mexico and Brazil] with minimal experience, either fresh from school or coming off their first 1-2yr job(s) out of school. As such, we pay them pretty low. If they prove their value and become key contributors, I naturally want to give them a 50-100% raise after a year or so. This always results in painful discussions with HR/Comp about why our typical "20% max salary increase" rule is stupid and inapplicable. I usually, but not always, triumph. Last year one guy got a 98.5% raise. :D Doing things like that always makes me feel really good.