[xster]

Yet another corporate lobbyist type response

  - You can't have net neutrality, it'll confuse customers
  - Food origin labeling? Bad, people will realize we have no idea where food came from.
  - Single payer? But it'll undermine the whole employer paid insurance patchwork.
  - Close tax loopholes? We'll just push rich people to move money offshore.
  - Stop bombing the world? Where's all the weapons, oil and mercenary companies gonna make money from?
  - Share compensation data? People will quit once they realize their pay grading mechanism is subjective and arbitrary.

[colemannugent]

>Share compensation data? People will quit once they realize their pay grading mechanism is subjective and arbitrary

Do you have an objective and determinite way to set compensation? If you do then you should tell the good folks here at YC that you have a great startup idea, pay gradation as a service, and collect your easy fortune.

All pay grading schemes are subjective by definition. A product is worth only what others will pay for it. When you are looking for employment you are selling your labor to an employer, of course your prospective employer can always not buy your product, especially if she can find another product for less.

[xster]

I think it's worth taking a step back and looking at the grand scheme. Everything is a non-binary spectrum.

As an example, if you temporarily suspend societal norm (which is what I'm challenging here), to think that we have the audacity to pretend that we know how to tax people and objectively rate society's needs and redistribute wealth into various public programs in a way that's objectively fair to everyone is absurd if we try to think of objectivity as a binary thing.

But our policies obviously have socialistic elements because we don't dogmatically lock ourselves in a strict dichotomy.

And I argue for the same thing in work compensation. Some form of pure cosmic objectivity may not ever be possible but it doesn't mean we should ideologically oppose attempts to approach that end of the spectrum.

[colemannugent]

Since you mentioned socialism I thought I'd try and address that as well.

The problem with redistribution of wealth and price setting by governments is that they cannot properly price goods and services because they have no vested interest in the effect of the resulatant price. As an analogy, it would be like sending your friend Donald Trump to buy your groceries for you, he would have no idea what he should be paying and would likely spend too much or purchase goods that you wouldn't have.

You say that we should keep our minds open in the hope that in the future this problem could be solved, but I think that by trying to look towards the future you look past the advantages of the free market.

As this relates to work compensation, the Trump analogy is still somewhat applicable. You wouldn't send Trump to negotiate your salary as he would probably overvalue you and ask for way more than you're worth to the employer, who would promptly tell both of you to look elsewhere. In a system where the government set your wages this would be great for you, as the employer would be forced to hire you at whatever ridiculous price Trump comes up with, but terrible for the business who depends on you making them more money than they spend on you. Such a system could never sustain itself in the hybrid socialist state, but would be forced to resort to complete government control of prices and wages as the weight of their own bad decsions weighed the system down.

In the capitalist/free-market system the individual takes the hit for making bad decisions, in the socialist/communist system everyone does.

There are systems that are more consistent in the way they reward employees, Gitlab [1] comes to mind, but what happens when the economy shifts and the compensation rates that the algorithm spits out are now way over or below what is normal for that position? They now have to change their algorithm again, which is effectively right where we started at as new hires will all be based off a new algorithm which would lead to dissent from the older employees.

[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

[uoaei]

You've lumped "redistribution of wealth" in with "price setting" as if they are in any way related to each other. They certainly can interact if they're both present, but neither need to be there for the other to exist.

I'm actually having trouble following your line of reasoning because I can't tell how these two are related in your formulation of the hypothetical.

[xster]

This might be a flippant response but I feel like my original response still applies (in that not everything need to fall into idealogical dichotomies). I feel like seeing the word 'socialistic' (which wasn't really the point of my response) automatically triggered a generic response on a strawman cold war USSR but the dichotomy is manufactured and on a spectrum, there are tons of socialistic elements in our government.

Anyway, that's all besides the point. In your analogies, I feel like I was arguing exactly for the opposite of what you're saying. I'm saying "let the pillar of capitalism (freedom of information) be a pillar of capitalism" and you're saying that I'm saying "proletariats of the world unite! don't forget to budget some gulags in our next 5 year plan".

[loa_in_]

This implies the problem is lack of understanding on behalf of the payees. You said what you know, therefore I understand you would not expect to be paid 100% "fairly" and you wouldn't get mad if paycheck information was open to your co-employees.

[HelloNurse]

> it can also have the opposite effect, demoralizing employees and driving valuable talent away, especially when it isn’t clear why some people are paid more than others.

That's the point. Valuable talent _wants_ to be driven away by evidence of unfair compensation.

[nielsole]

There is another argument being made, that people become miserable if they compare their wages, because many people fail at correctly assessing their own value.

> I[sic] found that nearly 40% perceived themselves as performing within the top 5% of their peers.

[xster]

Might just be rhetorical at this point. I'm just thinking would this be similar to "x% of people believe they belong to the (y < x)% of people who don't have any cancerous cells in their body" and then saying cancer diagnostics are bad because information purely serves to make people sad for no reason.