[mattnewton]

Get ready to see a) people gaming the formula and b) talent leaving because they feel like they are paid the same as people who contribute less.

Edit: Not that it isn’t currently gamed and not that this doesn’t already happen: I’m pro pay transparency but there aren’t any magic fixes here, this is a really complicated social issue.

[trowawee]

Something like Buffer's formula (https://open.buffer.com/transparent-salaries/) isn't really "gameable", as far as I can tell. And the counter argument might be that you'd attract talent that appreciates the transparency.

[phil21]

I'm curious what talent would appreciate the transparency? The only thing I can come up with is "average" talent.

The high performers will view it has a hard cap on compensation and look elsewhere, in my experience at least. Obviously this cannot be entirely correct, but it's hard for me to get into the mental space of someone who wants to be paid exactly as much as their peer sitting next to them. In my career I've always wanted to outperform the next guy - and be compensated accordingly.

I say this as having been both a high performer and an under performer. In the hard personal years where I am underperforming I would love transparency and know what to expect. In the years I was "crushing it" I'd have set myself back financially by a decade+ had I simply been okay with the average compensation for my position.

[trowawee]

I mean, as long as we're trading unverifiable anecdata, I've known high performers who were being underpaid because they were recently out of school or came out of non-traditional backgrounds. I suspect they would have appreciated this kind of system.

And the only people I can think of who would prefer the existing opague system would be those who benefit from it: management and people receiving outsized salaries for some anti-merofratic reason.

[phil21]

> or came out of non-traditional backgrounds.

That was me! I can say without a doubt I quickly learned to only work for small companies where I reported to the owner directly. This enabled me to get 50% raises YoY when starting out - where my corporate job was limited to the typical "well, that wouldn't be fair to the rest of the group" style politics.

I would say it's vastly more important to the hypothetical vulnerable high-performer than the guy graduating MIT or Harvard working for Google. They start at an extremely high salary and will do fine no matter what. The high performing high school dropout needs rapid massive raises just to eventually get to par with the other group - assuming similar performance.

I can almost guarantee you that if salaries were transparent it would have been a huge scandal in a few of the companies I worked at since I was making 2-3x the wages of those next to me. It would have been untenable for those managers to pay me that, even though/if I were worth it - they'd have done nothing but deal with politics and fallout from it. I still believe I was underpaid in most of those positions compared to the folks they had working there.

Egos are easily bruised. When that 19 year old high school dropout is making more than the 45 year old with a degree people start to complain. Loudly. They don't even look at work output or performance - it's utterly irrelevant to most.

I see both sides to this, but I'm relatively certain salary opaqueness helped me through the start of my career. Now? Maybe not as much. It's much harder to stand out at an exceptional level once you reach a certain point.

[watwut]

I have seen great performers underpaid, because they sucked at negotiation and were humble.

[a_imho]

Discriminating wages on arbitrary criteria like geographic location goes against equal work = equal pay and that compensation should be based on contribution [1].

Location base: For the other 65% of the base, we factor in each location’s cost of living using Numbeo together with data from Payscale and Glassdoor, which we then use to have a base salary for that particular location (say New York or Cape Town).

[1] https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

[walshemj]

And it will lead to pay inflation as publishing CEO's salary proves