Comment by jf

No, it doesn't. Because comp transparency is within a company. And this is outside a company. Think about the venn diagram of participants.

$200/hr as a full time ML consultant.

Contracting is interesting. You make more, but there’s more downside. No sick days.

Though the last 3 month contract was kind enough to calculate the start and end dates to be exactly 12 work weeks (60 work days, skipping holidays) which was a nice Jedi mind trick. I still don’t get paid for Christmas, but somehow it doesn’t feel like I’m losing a day since the end date was extended by a day to compensate. But of course that only makes sense if you don’t think too carefully about it. :)

I dunno. It’s stressful but I like the freedom. But you live with a sword over your head; salaried employees don’t.

Plus now my salary isn’t in a database somewhere since it’s not salary. blows raspberry

I'd be in favor of salary sharing in this sub-thread:

$155k base $145k/year RSUs (2021); $175k RSUs (2022 est)

"Senior" SRE in SF 3.5 YEO, 3.5 years at current company

I don't disagree with this. My experience though is that a more common reason it is a headache for some managers if their reports are sharing salary information is that they don't know how to have a conversation with someone about their performance. In particular their less than great performance.

So employee B comes in and says, "Hey employee A makes 15% more than I do and we have the same job! I even have more experience!" And the manager rates employee A's performance above employee B's so the salary is "appropriate" considering their relative productivity.

The problem comes in when the manager can't have an honest conversation with B to tell them this, and instead in their review gives them lots of happy talk and makes some sorry excuse for the small raise (or no raise!) saying something like "It has been a tough year and even I didn't get the raise I had hoped for! I really went to bat for you but nothing I could do could move them on available compensation." When, in fact, that is a lie and the employee is just being gaslighted because the employee would be mad and upset if they told them the "truth."

A good manager tells their reports what is expected of them and how it is measured so that when review time comes they are both on the same page when it comes to their pay. It also helps with making actionable plans to improve.

Sadly, there are a LOT of crappy managers out there.

> This is the reason behind the "keep your data confidential" idea.

It's also illegal under the NLRA of 1935. Employees talking about working conditions, like compensation, is a legally protected act whether it's on employer time or not.

As freelancer I was bringing up the discussion with my peers at a company about the amount we were getting paid.

Recruitment kind of worked like the following: the company that we were all employed at just paid a fixed amount per freelance developer. And the developers all got contracted through a preferred supplier. For development jobs the amount per hour for a freelancer was capped at around 90 EUR. The preferred supplier wanted to get at least 10 EUR per hour, so this meant the maximum a dev could earn was around 80 EUR per hour.

However often other recruitment companies would place developers at the preferred supplier, so they wanted a share of the cut as well.

One dev had the preferred supplier and 2 recruitment companies between himself and the company we worked at, so he earned only 55 EUR an hour.

Once we realised that for the employer it didn't really matter how much people earned, as long as it was no more than the hourly rate the company was willing to pay, all of us increased our rates at the next term, at the cost of the middlemen of course.

However, the recruitment company that hired me told me I could get one final raise, but I was forbidden to discuss remuneration in the future with my peers at this company.

Not sharing you salary is only beneficial to your employer.

And yes, the ability for one person say “I am doing the same work as this other person, but am receiving 72c to the dollar” is exactly why employers don’t want you sharing.

They don’t want employees to know what their labour is worth.

If all employers share their salary information with each other, it becomes a headache for the employee. Each employer may quote the other employer's salary refusing a raise.

This is the reason behind the "put all the data in a database" idea.

Rare to hear such a direct, strong argument for a union on HN.

And this is bad for the employees how?

In countries where unions exist for everyone on the building, everyone knows what everyone else is earning.

Additionally, in most European countries we don't have a culture of hidding our salaries from each other.

It's implication logic.

Employer sharing your data means you shouldn't think twice about doing the same.

Employer not sharing your data does not necessarily imply you can't.

Many people have an ethical sense that if something is understood to not be done to them they will not do it to others.

It takes a while for people to learn that, with exceptions, companies have never heard of this rule. But it's understandable that people would still feel bad about doing stuff we've been taught all our lives isn't really a good way to be.

Sure, a company isn't your friend, but that doesn't make "betraying trust" in response a nice feeling.