Comment by jachee
3 years ago
Management is the only one who benefits when labor doesn’t openly share salary information. Let the information flow. Knowledge is power.
3 years ago
Management is the only one who benefits when labor doesn’t openly share salary information. Let the information flow. Knowledge is power.
And job seekers. They don’t want potential employers knowing how much they made.
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.
They can guess based off ranges. They dont have a list with your name and exact salary. In fact it’s explicitly illegal for them to ask in many states so this would circumvent that law.
1 reply →
I was quite surprised when a recruiter correctly guessed my total comp at a medium-sized, private company, with little info on levels.fyi
He got within a few thousand dollars. Respect, you’re good at your job. Also to his credit, I still got a hefty pay bump.
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.
No. With full public information, bad employees benefit from being able to ask for more, good employees just flee elsewhere. Because it’s impossible to reason someone on their skills.
Full information is hell on Earth.
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.
Information asymmetry is a natural thing. It benefits job seekers too because your prospective employer does not know everything about them.
If all info was freely available knowledge brokers would have immense power.
7 replies →
So you would rather have your own compensation package be lower if it ensures that your coworkers packages are also low?
You'd be surprised and I can't find the study anymore, but this is a very frequent thing.