[pjungwir]

Reflecting on this article brings up a lot of contractions in my own past thinking:

I wouldn't want to work somewhere with public salaries, because I suspect that like unions they wind up enforcing mediocrity. I'm confident enough in my own abilities that I want the possibility of out-performing and being compensated for it.

On the other hand, as an employee I would want freedom to discuss salary with fellow employees, to get better information when it's time to negotiate raises and promotions.

Also, in a professional services firm, which I think is the ideal structure for software developers to capture more of their value, the partners all know each other's earnings (at least assuming the firm is of modest size). What's more, I agree pretty strongly with David Maister's recommendation in Managing the Professional Services Firm that partner profit-sharing should be based on seniority rather than some metric, since that is less likely to distort incentives and cause resentment.

It seems like I am all over the place! I'm not yet convinced these are true contradictions, but having them laid side-by-side does force me to ask why not.