When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
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Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#2I understand that this is against the "wisdom", but I always wanted to build a compensation-transparent-company.
In which it is open (at least internally) how much everybody makes (including equity). And people have ways to change their compensation over longish periods of time and the ratio of cash / equity.
Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#3there is a need for some tool similar to glassdoor that can verify the authencity of the info posted by a user (email address, position, etc) that can be used reliably by others to confidently share salaries without retribution.
Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#4I understand that this is against the "wisdom", but I always wanted to build a compensation-transparent-company. In which it is open (at least internally) how much everybody makes (including equity). And people have ways to change their compensation over longish periods of time and the ratio of cash / equity.
There are some companies doing that, though obviously they're in the minority at this point.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/07/02/327758712/the-comp...
Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#5I was at a company[1] where all the bill rates for a consultant heavy project got leaked by bad permissions on documents. I didn't think much of it at the time because I knew my bill rate (my share was a %). There were a two groups of pretty ticked off people. The employees who were "underpaid"[2] and the consultants who didn't know their bill rate[3]. It is an odd example of what happens when every knows what the company values them at.
1) no longer around in the form they were, but still not saying
2) truthfully, some of the consultant bill rates given the other expenses like taxes & insurance were not that far off the equivalent employee salary - particularly the H1B body shops
3) I think some were getting paid about 25% of their bill rate
Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#6"The bill that would cover the rest of workers is the Paycheck Fairness Act. The law would both strengthen penalties to employers who retaliate against workers for discussing pay and require employers to provide a justification for wage differentials."
I'm cool with the first part. Information makes the free market better. The second part is problematic and will just add paperwork with about as much hope of being honest as the justification body shops use to get H1Bs instead of local workers.
Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#7I understand that this is against the "wisdom", but I always wanted to build a compensation-transparent-company. In which it is open (at least internally) how much everybody makes (including equity). And people have ways to change their compensation over longish periods of time and the ratio of cash / equity.
I have always wanted to own a company where we put the salaries on the wall of a employee-only conference room and paid profit sharing. I doubt it would work, but I would love to try it.
Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#8there is a need for some tool similar to glassdoor that can verify the authencity of the info posted by a user (email address, position, etc) that can be used reliably by others to confidently share salaries without retribution.
I had a similar thought with regard to verifying employment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8204401
Maybe we're on to something.
Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#9I work for more than a decade now and I still am unsure about what rule to follow. Here are a few things that I have seen happening:
I once believed in transparency about that. I told my salary to a friend I just helped to get hired in the company where I already had a few years of experience. Upon hearing my higher salary, he immediately went to my boss to ask for a raise.
Due to an incredible incompetence of the HR department, I once saw the salary of a lot of different people in the 30 people company I was part of. I was not shocked by the 2-3x that a senior developer was making compared to me. I was shocked to see that our CEO had the highest salary (5x to 6x) for the job he did. That was actually one of the element that made me consider resignation and freelancing.
I think that one of the thing that hiding salaries causes is that it makes it impossible to talk about the cashflow of the company without people being able to compute if they are below or above average (and when the CEO earns the double everyone earns, the average will be pretty high) but it makes it harder for employees to understand what clients are important, what resources are available for a project, and so on.
Re: When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'
#10[deleted]