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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

#71

Post by xpe »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #43
axaxs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> A private company has every right to compensate its employees with its private capital anyway it wants ...

This is a common kind of one-sided argument. For the sake of argument [1], let's say I grant than an organization has the rights and freedoms like you say. There is another side to it: employees have rights and freedoms too. In a democracy, people can and should use their influence and political power to address their concerns.

[1]: Employers do not have "every right" to compensate employees "anyway it wants". As one example, see the Equal Pay Act: https://www.eeoc.gov/equal-paycompensation-discrimination .

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#72

Post by rosywoozlechan »

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.

If someone isn't being paid what they want, they should work hard to achieve that pay by making goals that will lead to compensation they would be happy with, prioritizing those goals and figuring out a roadmap to achieving them. Yes some people have a huge upper-hand in life, but that doesn't mean we can't figure out a way to make our own life better. Maybe not as good as others, but better than it is, and that's something.

You can blame office politics, you can blame your lack connections, or whatever hand you were dealt. It probably wasn't a fair hand, but it's on you to make the best that you can out of it.

I don't cry about unfairness. I look at what I want, and I figure out how to get it.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#74

Post by umvi »

Yeah well, I would imagine with the opposite extreme (equalized wages) I would find I would not care as much about work. Why go the extra mile? Everyone gets paid the same anyway. Just min effort your job and save your work ethic for when you are off the clock.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#75

Post by bo1024 »

jb775 wrote: post #64
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…

If person 1 doesn't tell the group if they're adding their salary at the beginning or at the end, it would provide a little more security between person 1 and 2. i.e. If the minimum rand # is known to be 100,000, and person 2 receives the number 150,000 and knows it includes the salary of person 1...they will know person 1 makes <= 50k

Yeah, you can make this a lot better by just making the random number in the range 1 billion - 1 trillion.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#76

Post by bkuehl »

I believe all employees should be paid a decent wage and it's clear Blizzard is severely underpaying a good part of their workforce. But it's unfair to say that all employees at one level should get the same salary. We try hard to make sure good employees get raises, cause we want to keep them! If someone shared a document around with salaries and someone came to us demanding why they were paid less we'd either have to come back with, ok this is awkward but you're just not as good/productive/etc of an employee. Or you just didn't negotiate enough when hiring.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#77

Post by kevc »

I worked in the game industry on the business side and saw all salaries. Game developers are paid well under software engineers at “traditional” software companies. Similar software engineering job requirements, except one pays less and demands far more in terms of hours worked. Of course the depressed wages are consistent as you move to lower paid roles at game companies.

It comes down to supply and demand. There are legions of young, passionate gamers who want to “work with their passion”. Why they stick with it, I’m not sure. I certainly didn’t.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#78

Post by Pxtl »

tonitosou wrote: post #65
Pxtl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in healthcare where this is handled by job titles and it seems a lot healthier. Job title makes it clear that it's about greater responsibilities. "Why is Jeff paid more than me" "Because Jeff is senior dev and you're junior dev" is a much easier conversation to have, and everybody's job title is very visible.

im not sure. in a perfect society if the junior dev is better and works harder and bring more value to the company he should be better paid than his senior. it is capitalism and if a company is judget by its output an employee should too

If he's better and brings in more value, he'llbecome a SR dev quickly.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#79

Post by jhanschoo »

im3w1l wrote: post #23
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…

Everyone writes their salary on a piece of paper and puts it into a hat. Then you can get a the full distribution.

If the salaries are still too easily identifiable here's how it can be anonymized.

Allow breaking down the salary into a sum of numbers, and putting them as separate slips into the hat.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#80

Post by ncallaway »

manigandham wrote: post #63
ncallaway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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", s…

Are you assuming a company that does that would not have evidence ready?

It depends what you mean by the company would have the evidence ready.

I'm positive the company would have evidence that the terminated individuals were late by 1 minute on two separate occasions. But the company might also have evidence that other employees were also late and not terminated.

You can pretty easily create an evidentiary trail that "Person X did thing Y, and was then terminated". What's harder is creating an evidentiary trail that "Other people at the company are also regularly terminated for thing Y".

If the company really does fire every employee that has two 1-minute tardiness', then it's going to be a real struggle to claim the firing was pretextual. If this firing is the first time the company has fired someone for those reasons, the company is in real trouble.

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