The Programmer Salary Taboo
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The Programmer Salary Taboo
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Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#2I've always wanted to write exactly this blog post. Keeping your salary confidential is great for big companies, but it benefits you in no way. You should be making what your coworkers make. If you make less, you're being fucked, plain and simple. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can remedy the situation. Sadly, some people go their whole careers without doing so.
FWIW, my first programming job only paid $45,000 a year. What a ripoff.
Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#3Anyone has figures for IBM?
Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#4I've always wanted to write exactly this blog post. Keeping your salary confidential is great for big companies, but it benefits you in no way. You should be making what your coworkers make. If you make less, you're being fucked, plain and simple. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can remedy the situation. Sadly, some people go their whole careers without doing so. FWIW, my first programming job only paid $…
So did mine, but that was 1994 so it didn't seem so bad :) (which is another way of saying that context is _very_ important, like year, what part of the country, web programming vs kernel drivers, DBA, etc)
Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#5I've always wanted to write exactly this blog post. Keeping your salary confidential is great for big companies, but it benefits you in no way. You should be making what your coworkers make. If you make less, you're being fucked, plain and simple. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can remedy the situation. Sadly, some people go their whole careers without doing so. FWIW, my first programming job only paid $…
If you're making less, you're possibly being fucked. You're possibly avoiding a layoff.
If you're making more, I'm not sure how showing your salary data can help you personally.
Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#6On one hand, being able to compare yourself to others is very valuable. The challenges arise though in how to square two different numbers. What is the value of each individual skill? If 2 people have differing abilities in 3 different skills, are all skills valued equally?
Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#7I actually think full transparency on salary could make this nasty issue go away. Post what everyone is making and let people negotiate a fair package. There would be some transitional pain in the first 2 months, and payroll costs might go up 10 percent, but people would be happier in the long run. Why use inaccurate gossip instead of full transparency?
What drove up compensation in banking in the 2000s was inaccurate compensation reporting. Pay in banking is one's status, so everyone would claim to have received top bonus when applying to private equity jobs or trying to make a lateral move. This meant that whatever bonus was paid to the top 5% of each year would be claimed by everyone in that year. That ratcheted up pay expectations over time. Banks actually liked this, because the high pay enabled them to make entry-level conditions and hours even worse, but most companies wouldn't be able to afford that process.
In the long run, I think that salary discovery by inaccurate gossip is more expensive and volatile than full transparency, and I can't think of a good reason why, in any company, everyone shouldn't have access to everyone else's base compensation (performance bonuses can be private; the range should be public but not the amount.)
Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#8I've always wanted to write exactly this blog post. Keeping your salary confidential is great for big companies, but it benefits you in no way. You should be making what your coworkers make. If you make less, you're being fucked, plain and simple. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can remedy the situation. Sadly, some people go their whole careers without doing so. FWIW, my first programming job only paid $…
> only paid $45,000 a year
Reading this kind of thing on HN makes me feel ill; my W-2 says $47k. Maybe I need to make some changes.
Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#9Not sure how much value this gives existing employees. If you go up and see that you are making less than your coworkers, then it's a moral destroyer. If you are making average but feel like you are doing more work than everyone else, again moral destroyer. If you are making bank, all the sudden you are now in everyone's cross-hairs- boom! moral destroyer (depending on the kind of person you are).
Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo
#10I actually think full transparency on salary could make this nasty issue go away. Post what everyone is making and let people negotiate a fair package. There would be some transitional pain in the first 2 months, and payroll costs might go up 10 percent, but people would be happier in the long run. Why use inaccurate gossip instead of full transparency? What drove up compensation in banking in the 2000s was inaccurat…
I rather suspect that full salary transparency would result in a race-to-the-top.