[bawolff]

> If you perceive that John Smith is weak and lazy, but know he makes 20k more than you, that creates discord within you

You say that like its a bad thing. Emotions exist for a reason. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also slavery.

> your organization doesn’t have the same opinion of John Smith’s value to the organization than you do.

In which case there is two possibilities. Either:

They are right, in which case this gives you the insight to look into yourself and fix it or emulate john smith.

Or b) they are wrong, in which case you can probably go somewhere else to get more money. Or you could figure out why they are misestimating your value and fix it.

No matter the situation,more information always gives you an advantage.

[kcplate]

If you have to have total salary knowledge of your co-workers and them you to measure your self worth and value to your organization, I find that unbelievably sad. You should know your value and whether or not it jives with your comp. If you are unhappy with your compensation as compared to your perceived value, ask for more. If you are unable to get a good “read” of your value from your employer, move on.

While I don’t have to manage people any more (PTL), I am pretty sure if I had an employee come to me demanding more comp because of a colleague makes more, I’d ask them why they weren’t arguing from their own merits and capabilities instead of from a colleague’s weaknesses.

[bawolff]

You said anything about self-worth? If you measure your self-worth by how much you are paid, that's pathetic as it has very little to do with instrinsic factors.

We live in a capitalist society, and employment is a business arrangement. There is nothing wrong with trying to maximize what you get out of employment (whether monantary or otherwise). Why would you sell yourself, if not to get paid? Part of effective negotiation is knowing how much comparable people make. Your ecconomic value is not what you bring to the company. It is primarily how expensive it would be to replace you with someone who could bring something equivalent. Knowing that cost gives you the upper hand in negotiations.

After all, if you were doing it for the love of coding, you would just be working on open source projects, not working for a company.

> While I don’t have to manage people any more (PTL), I am pretty sure if I had an employee come to me demanding more comp because of a colleague makes more, I’d ask them why they weren’t arguing from their own merits and capabilities instead of from a colleague’s weaknesses.

When it comes right down to it, if you are a manager you have a budget. If you are on that side of the table, your job is to keep expenses down. One way of doing that is to manipulate people into thinking their ecconomic value is less than it is. A great way to do that is to steer the conversation away from objective measures like, the going rate is $x, and towards subjective things like, i do the job really well, which dont have an objective price tag attached. It's easy to argue the fair value of a job well done to whatever you want it to be. There is no wiggle room for: the going rate is $x.

I mean, if you really do truly think this way, do you do this in your other business dealings. If you were buying a car, the other car lot had an equivalent car for 10% less, and you wanted to try to negotiate down, but the car salesman said something like "why aren't you arguing from your own merits as a potential future car owner, instead of from the weakness of other car salesmens?", would you think that is a reasonable thing to say?

[kcplate]

If one of your negotiation points why you should be paid more is because your colleagues are paid more, you are basing the starting part of your negotiation from a position of “I’m average”. I honestly cannot see how this helps you in anyway.

Sure, managers have budgets and want to keep costs down, but in a career that spanned a couple of decades+ in tech leadership, I always had the flexibility from my employers to assemble the best team I could within my budget. I never had to manipulate people like you are describing. Frankly if you are working for a company where you perceive that happening…you should probably exit asap. That’s toxic.