[kevinmhickey]

I have worked for a company with full pay transparency and for several with full opacity. I prefer opacity.

At the transparent company, I was hired in as one of the highest paid employees at a time that the company was struggling. Everyone ranked higher than me had taken a voluntary pay cut, to the point that some of them were paid less than me.

I felt guilty for taking more money than them, but conflicted as the problems were not of my making. I felt some resentment at pay peers that were underperforming. I was able to observe the performance of other employees and knew which ones were being treated fairly and not.

It was information that did nothing to benefit me, my peers or those below us in the organization. It led to more bad feelings than good and I am grateful that I do not have that information at my current employer.

I prefer sites like Glassdoor where you can get a general idea of what your coworkers might make, without the fine resolution of a name to dollar amount mapping.

[astura]

>It was information that did nothing to benefit me, my peers or those below us in the organization.

You are mistaken, open salaries benefited you. They let you actually see the huge organizational problems in the company that would have otherwise been hidden. You had more information in which to make your career decisions on.

The bad feelings were not caused by the open salaries, they were caused by the problems you listed.

[unabst]

Exactly. Information is never the cause. It is only the trail. The most information can do -- and is meant to do -- is influence people. Ergo, the bad or good feelings (or decisions, in most cases).

Except, the problem is then the inability of the person with that information to attack those problems.

Anyone with the capacity to do something about those root causes should know everything. For the rest, that information is irrelevant to their job, and distracting at best.

[astura]

Going by that logic you shouldn't tell your spouse if your terminally ill because he or she can't do anything about it and public companies shouldn't be required to release their financials because you can't do anything about it.

[djsumdog]

Terminal illness can't really be hidden and does affect your spouse and family.

A better analogy is infidelity. You shouldn't tell a partner if you've been unfaithful because it benefits no one. I think this quite by the Australian author Bettina Arndt says it best:

"That's the amazing thing. So many people end up confessing to an affair, which strikes me as the ultimate stupidity. Sure, you may believe you are confessing all to preserve honesty in your marriage, or because he/she deserved the truth, but the reality is that this 'telling' business is all about people not having the backbone to live with their guilt. Telling doesn't right the wrong; it adds to it."

(The Sex Diaries / Bettina Arndt)

[unabst]

Actually I did think about that. But that is personal. Jobs are personal too, but they really shouldn't be.

Your spouse isn't paying you to be with them, and you're not doing any "job".

[freedomben]

I completely agree. My experience was exactly the same.

I also noticed that there were engineers that made a lot more than me because of seniority, but they weren't very good and didn't contribute proportionally. In some cases they were actually a drag on the system because they didn't want to stay current with tech. The transparent pay actually became a disincentive to work hard and a demotivator.

We also had some "class-warfare" type problems, especially with some of the technicians that had no prior experience and were straight out of high school. They were generally paid roughly double minimum wage, whereas engineers would get around triple to quadruple the minimum wage. They resented that, and it created conflict and discomfort in the workplace that otherwise would not have been.

Despite some of the benefits, the downsides were just too high. I like seeing "ranges" so you can get a feel for whether you're getting screwed, but not necessarily individual pay levels.

[walshemj]

well Duh you would expect a Technician to get paid less than an "Engineer".

[AstralStorm]

If they perform the same actual job at similar performance? No, you should not, but the companies exploit reduced job market mobility for the former. (Caused by companies aggressively filtering on education.)

[walshemj]

Which sane company does that why hire engineers to do a technicians job?

[majormajor]

A lot of people are paranoid about the malicious case: "the company is trying to screw you over."

I don't think it's that hard to identify malicious employers even without knowing everyone's salaries.

The non-malicious case then boils down, to me, to: who do I think is less biased in evaluating my value vs my peer's value? Me, my peer, or a third party that is neither of us? The answer to that is pretty obvious, and so what am I going to gain except being overly focused on me against my peers vs me against my past self?

I would be very interested to know how many people who want full transparency are managers who've had to deal with things like "there's a mismatch in these people's salary because they came in at different levels but are now performing equally, but if I give a massive raise (say, 30%+) this year am I setting them up to be disappointed when the size of that isn't duplicated in the future vs spreading that across 4 every-6-month slower-paced bumps?" Or with employees who are radically wrong about how valuable they are compared to a peer, because they're focused purely on code and not noticing how their peer laid a bunch of ground work in negotiating with product and other stakeholders to eliminate some requirements that would've made the project take several months longer?

You can be transparent about the why: "we're going to be doing some market adjustments to your pay, but here's how many people we've seen get disgruntled and leave in the past if we do it too fast," and "the next step for you is looking beyond the tasks in front of you to see the bigger picture of these projects, and building a relationship with people from the rest of the business," without the gut punch that "here's how much less money you're making" is.

[gcb0]

so the problem was that the company was crashing, not open salaries.

you sound like a nice person who would have worried about knowing about the pay cuts even if the values were unknown to you. you might even have been more worried thinking it was more.

[dx034]

Part of that could be due to selection bias. Companies that make pay transparent are typically less established and thus carry higher risk. Not saying that transparent pay works better but I think the examples we have give a very skewed view.

[gadders]

Do you think publishing pay bands would be OK, similar to what happens for government employees? So you knew the say 5-10k band that someone was in, but not their place in that band.