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Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

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Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#31

Post by sokoloff »

donatj wrote: post #25

So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. 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. I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individ…

I don’t see any reason to think that all engineers contribute the same amount of value (and therefore paying different amounts is entirely reasonable).

Thought experiment: if you were going to form a startup and needed two other engineers, would you know across your history which ones to pick from and which ones to avoid?

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#32

Post by tyre »

donatj wrote: post #25

So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. 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. I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individ…

sure, you bargained. But your job isn't to bargain for salary. That's not the value you provide to a company.

And so the dumb part, the unfair part, about salary discrepancies is that it is divorced from performance. It is divorced from value.

Which doesn't mean that you, on an individual level, shouldn't negotiate.

But it does imply that salary negotiation generally leads to results that (very) (incredibly) (if at all) loosely correlate with what the job is.

And all of this assumes that any two people walking into the same negotiations with the same skillset, exp, etc. will have the same experience. Which is, you know…not how it works.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#33

Post by vvanders »

The game industry as a whole was pretty fucked when I left. I remember doing the 40hr+1.5x overtime calculation and realizing that if I wasn't salaried I'd be making $4/hr with the mandatory hours we were working(70-90 hrs/week).

I tossed 2 months of PTO to leave that industry(yay Washington laws) and made up the difference in the first 2.5 paychecks of the new gig.

Be careful of industries that over-index on "passion" and don't compensate people accordingly. Last I checked that industry was still built on chewing through new faces every ~3 years or so. Taking care of your people makes business sense and I wish more companies got that.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#34

Post by virtuous_signal »

donatj wrote: post #25

So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. 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. I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individ…

When I was teaching college math classes, there were people who tried to argue for more partial credit after exams. Not to get into specifics but most of the requests came from the same demographic. If I as an instructor hadn't watched out for this and set a universal, and uniformly applied policy (and if I had an agreeable enough personality), then I would have consistently made the scores of this group higher. Would you say this is fair? Should math grades reflect whether someone has that "it doesn't hurt to ask"-attitude?

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#35

Post by donatj »

virtuous_signal wrote: post #34
donatj wrote: post #25

So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. 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. I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individ…

When I was teaching college math classes, there were people who tried to argue for more partial credit after exams. Not to get into specifics but most of the requests came from the same demographic. If I as an instructor hadn't watched out for this and set a universal, and uniformly applied policy (and if I had an agreeable enough personality), then I would have consistently made the scores of this group higher. Woul…

Fortune favors the bold.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#36

Post by api »

vvanders wrote: post #33

The game industry as a whole was pretty fucked when I left. I remember doing the 40hr+1.5x overtime calculation and realizing that if I wasn't salaried I'd be making $4/hr with the mandatory hours we were working(70-90 hrs/week). I tossed 2 months of PTO to leave that industry(yay Washington laws) and made up the difference in the first 2.5 paychecks of the new gig. Be careful of industries that over-index on "passio…

Any industry with more people passionate about getting into it then there are jobs develops a whole host of pathologies from overwork and low pay to influence cliques, nepotism, the "casting couch," etc.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#37

Post by ncallaway »

perl4ever wrote: post #12
kasey_junk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also important to note that in the US sharing salary data is protected by federal law no matter what your employee agreement says.

That only matters if someone is dumb enough to fire you and writes down somewhere "s/he was fired for discussing salaries". I can't remember the exact phrasing but years ago my boss said at the team meeting something about not discussing salaries, and someone said later "I don't think you can say that" and he was like "oh, ok". The message was delivered though.

Here's the thing, though. Wrongful termination lawsuits aren't "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". Most civil actions—including wrongful termination—need to show a "preponderance of evidence". That is, you need to convince a jury that the claim is more likely to be true than not true (e.g. 51%).

So, assuming you have evidence of the chain of events:

- Group shares salary openly - Employer says: "you cannot do that", someone responds: "You can't say that", employer: "oh, ok" - Group continues sharing salary - Employer shortly thereafter fires 2 members that had shared their salary citing other reasons ("You had 2 1-minute late attendance events within the last 2 weeks")

If I'm on that jury, if that's all the evidence presented, that gets me to a "preponderance of evidence" that the termination was wrongful. At that point, I would need to see some evidence from the employer that the attendance events leading to the firing was not pretextual.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#38

Post by axaxs »

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.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#39

Post by segfaultbuserr »

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…

A related problem in cryptography is The Millionaire Problem [0] - how do two millionaires Alice and Bob compare their wealth (whether a >= b) without revealing any information about it? Many solutions exist. A variant of this problem is the Socialist Millionaire Problem (SMP) [1], it asks whether a == b, and can be solved with a minor modification to the standard Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which can provide a 2^128 level of security.

Comparing confidential numbers is an important question in cryptography.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao%27s_Millionaires%27_proble...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_millionaire_problem

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#40

Post by stoops »

virtuous_signal wrote: post #34
donatj wrote: post #25

So possibly unpopular point of view here, maybe not on HN, but I think pay discrepancies can be entirely fair. 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. I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individ…

When I was teaching college math classes, there were people who tried to argue for more partial credit after exams. Not to get into specifics but most of the requests came from the same demographic. If I as an instructor hadn't watched out for this and set a universal, and uniformly applied policy (and if I had an agreeable enough personality), then I would have consistently made the scores of this group higher. Woul…

It's your class. You can decide what a grade is worth.

I had many teachers who would give better grades to better people.

Who do you think is "better" or more deserving?

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