[HillRat]

In general, salaries are “hygiene factors” for retention — you lose people by underpaying, but you don’t in most cases improve retention by overpaying. There’s an interesting wrinkle in Finland in that income tax payer data are considered public records, so if you wanted to benchmark your salary you could simply request applicable data from Verohallintm, so theoretically — a very big “theoretically” it must be said — that should work against companies paying below-industry comp.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Hm. Why is this "theoretically"? I live in Finland and wouldn't mind requesting this data. It couldn't be more than a few days' crunching numbers to figure this out.

[HillRat]

“Theoretically” only in the sense that most people won’t do it (since the data isn’t easily available, and you’d need to figure out who you were benchmarking against before requesting it), so the practical effect may be negligible.

[BobaFloutist]

What percentage of the population do you think would equally not mind submitting a formal governmental records request followed by a few days crunching numbers?