[snambi]

If all employees share their salary information with each other, it becomes a headache for the employer. Each employee may quote the other person's salary demanding a raise.

This is the reason behind the "keep your data confidential" idea.

[ChuckMcM]

I don't disagree with this. My experience though is that a more common reason it is a headache for some managers if their reports are sharing salary information is that they don't know how to have a conversation with someone about their performance. In particular their less than great performance.

So employee B comes in and says, "Hey employee A makes 15% more than I do and we have the same job! I even have more experience!" And the manager rates employee A's performance above employee B's so the salary is "appropriate" considering their relative productivity.

The problem comes in when the manager can't have an honest conversation with B to tell them this, and instead in their review gives them lots of happy talk and makes some sorry excuse for the small raise (or no raise!) saying something like "It has been a tough year and even I didn't get the raise I had hoped for! I really went to bat for you but nothing I could do could move them on available compensation." When, in fact, that is a lie and the employee is just being gaslighted because the employee would be mad and upset if they told them the "truth."

A good manager tells their reports what is expected of them and how it is measured so that when review time comes they are both on the same page when it comes to their pay. It also helps with making actionable plans to improve.

Sadly, there are a LOT of crappy managers out there.

[randmeerkat]

If society was a meritocracy this might be true, but I’ve seen plenty of engineers paid significantly more than peers that were far better than them. At the end of the day compensation is really about politics and not performance.

[fragmede]

Exactly. There's a difference between an difficult and awkward conversation that goes "Sorry B, A is better than you at writing code", but that's different from "Sorry B, A is honestly a worse coder than you across the board, but they negotiated a bit better at the start, so we pay them more."

[kube-system]

In the job market, it’s mostly a matter of labor supply. If you really need people, and they demand $[x], you pay it or you don’t get an employee.

[randmeerkat]

This only works for the people with the awareness and confidence to know what they’re worth. Even selecting for that small subset of the population, it’s still sometimes difficult to ascertain what the optimal salary is in any given environment. The issue is, the labor supply and its cost is known by the employer, but is largely hidden to the laborer.

[nmfisher]

Yeah, this explains a lot of it. Lots of people think it's unfair that Jim or Pam makes more than they do, but noone ever is blunt with them that "you're making less because you're not as good as them". Even worse are where they've never been told "you're lucky you still even have a job because I was close to firing you for poor performance".

To be fair, there are also the interesting niche cases where someone is equally capable as Jim/Pam, but they're just not as good at selling themselves. Both cases usually more applicable to larger companies.

[ChuckMcM]

And, perhaps not surprisingly, I think that last example "Not good at selling themselves" is also bad management. While everyone loves flattery, managers who aren't comfortable being objective with comparing work productivity are bad managers. I cannot count the number of times I wished there was something like codeacademy.com for learning management skills.

One thing that impressed me about IBM, during my brief tenure there after the Blekko acquisition, was that they had a very deep catalog of online self paced training material for developing manager skills. I don't know how many people availed themselves of that resource but since that time I have really wished I could have pointed people who were struggling at some of the courses they had.

[bananamansion]

if youre one of the employees that found out youre being paid significantly less than your team how do you convince your manager to increase your pay? Knowing youre high performing

[novok]

If there is a reason that they are perceived as higher performing, maybe you can figure out why. What you might think is important might be different from what your boss think is important as a complete package.

Also a lot of people get really defensive and go into denial mode. Or are really full of themselves. People have a really hard time getting the straight out evaluation, or get despondent, and your manager is trying to give the feedback to the capacity level you have shown.

[throwawayboise]

That's not gaslighting. It's just lying.

[ChuckMcM]

Fair enough.

For context, and again I don't disagree here, I was using it in the sense of saying something that may be technically 'true' (didn't get the raise I hoped for) & (went to bat for you) but in context would give the opposite impression than the one you got.

Consider a company that has a 'mandatory fire the bottom 10%' and a manager who doesn't want to go through the effort to hire someone and so argues that they should be allowed to keep employee A even though they are their lowest rated employee (that would be 'going to bat for you') and it would easy to imagine the manager wasn't happy with their own raise, and "it's been a tough year" ? How? Tough to get stuff done with under performing employees or tough for the company?

So lying? Yes, all by omission. And of course some particularly bad managers just straight up make things up.

[heavyset_go]

> This is the reason behind the "keep your data confidential" idea.

It's also illegal under the NLRA of 1935. Employees talking about working conditions, like compensation, is a legally protected act whether it's on employer time or not.

[otterley]

However, employers can forbid you from using their facilities or property to facilitate these conversations.

[heavyset_go]

Even if you're on company time, using company facilities and company resources, you have the legally protected right to discuss working conditions with other workers. It doesn't matter if you're using the company's Exchange or Matrix server to do so or not.

[otterley]

I’m afraid you are mistaken. I hope you are not confidently spreading this false information to others as it could put their jobs at risk.

https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d4582ec1a7e

[heavyset_go]

Thanks for the correction, I wasn't aware of this decision.

[wsc981]

As freelancer I was bringing up the discussion with my peers at a company about the amount we were getting paid.

Recruitment kind of worked like the following: the company that we were all employed at just paid a fixed amount per freelance developer. And the developers all got contracted through a preferred supplier. For development jobs the amount per hour for a freelancer was capped at around 90 EUR. The preferred supplier wanted to get at least 10 EUR per hour, so this meant the maximum a dev could earn was around 80 EUR per hour.

However often other recruitment companies would place developers at the preferred supplier, so they wanted a share of the cut as well.

One dev had the preferred supplier and 2 recruitment companies between himself and the company we worked at, so he earned only 55 EUR an hour.

Once we realised that for the employer it didn't really matter how much people earned, as long as it was no more than the hourly rate the company was willing to pay, all of us increased our rates at the next term, at the cost of the middlemen of course.

However, the recruitment company that hired me told me I could get one final raise, but I was forbidden to discuss remuneration in the future with my peers at this company.

[olliej]

Not sharing you salary is only beneficial to your employer.

And yes, the ability for one person say “I am doing the same work as this other person, but am receiving 72c to the dollar” is exactly why employers don’t want you sharing.

They don’t want employees to know what their labour is worth.

[lultimouomo]

If all employers share their salary information with each other, it becomes a headache for the employee. Each employer may quote the other employer's salary refusing a raise.

This is the reason behind the "put all the data in a database" idea.

[zorpner]

Rare to hear such a direct, strong argument for a union on HN.

[redanddead]

Is it not always like this?

[kelseyfrog]

Not sure if you lurked much before creating an account. This is not my first account - I've been here since 2014. HN took a strong left turn a couple years ago. Before that it leaned more tech, and before that more founder/entrepreneurial. If I had to guess, it comes from this change in user distribution as HN is a decent way to keep a pulse on tech and IC's simply have more labor concerns.

(this is a weakly held take. just spitballing)

[luckydata]

I think a lot of tech workers thought they were an elite of irreplaceable specialists that would never experience power imbalance. That's how my peers were thinking (out loud) about 10 years ago in San Francisco, and loudly opposing the mere idea we needed unions.

They then started having kids, running into HR issues and all of a sudden everyone got a real harsh wake up call and understood what their real place in life is.

The kind of "told you so" that doesn't feel particularly satisfying.

[ikiris]

It’s still pretty bad. The majority sometimes seems to have a very naive libertarian slant but as people get older they generally wake up from that fantasy as they get screwed over in various ways.

[qbasic_forever]

And this is bad for the employees how?

[pjmlp]

In countries where unions exist for everyone on the building, everyone knows what everyone else is earning.

Additionally, in most European countries we don't have a culture of hidding our salaries from each other.

[Simon_O_Rourke]

There wasn't too much salary sharing when I worked in Germany, in fact, it was the usual "keep everyone in the dark" approach from HR.

[pjmlp]

If the company signs the yearly tarif agreement done between the government and unions, everyone knows what someone at Tarif XYZ is earning.

You don't need a public list from HR, and almost everyone will answer when asked "do you mind telling me...".

Surely there are people that will answer that they rather not, so far I haven't bumped in such people so far.

[tgv]

Netherlands too, and Belgium as well, AFAIK.

[Arkanosis]

That's definitely not true in France.

Unions and CSEs try to give some transparency on salaries for a given position in a given company, but even then, it's not like knowing the salary of everyone.

[pjmlp]

It is already more than what apparently happens in US.