Comment by sokoloff

Actually addresses being public are causing issues. Sweden has a lot of problems with gang violence, and gang members often register their public addresses to other peoples addresses, causing innocent people to be killed. The address you enter is in no way being verified beyond it needing to be a valid address.

I have a very hard time believing that sales-people and trades-people don't take it into considering when negotiating or quoting a price. One of the reasons a car sales person wants to "check your credit" early in the process is to get your credit rating and address - which helps them guess your price sensitivity - and many home services certainly take into account the area you live in even when it is irrelevant.

the societal consequence is that literally nothing happens. Same with the incomes, nothing whatsoever happens from having this be public.

Objectively not true. Scammers use that data all the time to target high net worth individuals. Especially high net worth old people living alone.

Incidentally, Norway appears among the countries with the lowest perception of corruption in the world: #4 among 180 countries (0). It would be interesting to look if there is any correlation with other countries where income records are publicly available.

0: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank

But you can't look it up anonymously. You have to authenticate with your national ID number, and the person will be notified about who looked up their income.

Norway is the only one. And you can't look up salary, just their total income, which could include say renting out a vacation home or whatever.

Finland is another.

Completely deranged to try to equate those. Do better

I'm pretty sure they know what you made if you worked at a large company anyway. For small ones they can probably guess better than the job seeker can. Excluding insider info because it goes both ways.

Too late. Experian already buys and sells your salary information, and potential employers pay them to see it. I believe the product is "Employment Insight" but it could be one of their others.

I've literally seen the salaries flow from payroll straight onto their servers.

This is the opposite of my experience with salary transparency both as an employee and a manager. It tended to made unproductive employees leave when they realized that the company did not consider them as critical as they imagined themselves to be which saved a ton of effort because we rarely needed to resort to PIPs or firing. It also made it clearer to productive employees how much their work was valued.

Management’s job is to get rid of bad employees. Good employees do not have unlimited places to “flee” to. And full information is when markets allocate resources most efficiently.

So you would rather have your own compensation package be lower if it ensures that your coworkers packages are also low?

40 euros/hour right now. Last job was USD $98k/year. Before that it was $65k. Before that it was $42k.

I was part of a team that led a salary transparency initiative at a previous job, and it eventually led to the creation of a union there, but not until after I left for unrelated reasons.

I don't get this weird paranoia about salary privacy. Opening it up helped everyone negotiate.

The problem with your example is that you are making the assumption that someone with 10 years of experience is less likely to make mistakes in practice than the person with 0 years of experience. I've seen several examples over my career where the technically "more experienced" individual is not truly the better suited for the job. You won't know that until you hire them and, in my opinion, is a good reason for why you should pay someone based on the job (so long as they qualify for it). It doesn't mean that everyone needs to make exactly the same amount, because I think there is an argument to be made for someone who has more tenure at a company to retain them and for their role-specific experience. But that shouldn't be a >5% difference.

Also, I don't see how people can't see that this is precisely the logic that contributes to women generally getting paid less for doing the same job. Anecdotally, I joined a company and had about 7 years of experience. My "peers" in performing exactly the same duties as me had probably about 25 years of experience. I was responsible for the 2nd largest revenue generating P&L that generated the highest profit margin (which I actually turned around from losing money in 6 months). I found out I was getting paid $70k less than "my peers." Are you going to tell me that despite performing the exact same job and actually performing it objectively "better" that I should have made less money? This is the kind of stuff that routinely happens to women.

Isn’t difference in experience one aspect that is represented by different levels? In other words, it’s not the same work if experience vastly differs.

> the actual mechanics of what they are doing, the sensitivity of their work, the skills required for success, the markets/industries they are operating in

Surely these are all criteria that should determine your level. What's the point of levels if you're saying each level consists of arbitrary other levels?

I agree that a range should be public, but an employee's salary should remain within the range for their level. If they're demonstrably more valuable to the company, they should be promoted within a transparent structure.

What does “same level” even mean then?

Most users are workers who haven't figured out they aren't capitalists yet.

"Willingness to work for a given range" gets exploited by employers at the expense of employees. It helps prop up structural (gender/race) pay gaps and breeds distrust among employees as some salaries inevitably leak out.

Why have levels then?

I think the question is more why should an individual's salary be private?

Personally, I think money is power, and I want to know about power disparities to better protect myself. But I understand there are factors to consider.

Does the precise value matter for anything though? I would say that any privacy intrusion happens with the range already.

And that would be bad because… ?