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Comment by protonimitate | Hacker News Reader

> Are people good judges of how much value they bring a company?

IME skils/merit/value contributions have very little to do with salary. It's mostly negotiation tactics.

Having public data on salaries would help potential employees make more informed decisions about working for companies in the first place.

"Sour grapes" is only really a concern if there is a huge discrepancy between pay when job roles/responsibilities are similar.

I've yet to be convinced that hiding salary information is in any way beneficial to employees, only to employers (at the expense of the employee).

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> Having public data on salaries would help potential employees make more informed decisions about working for companies in the first place.

Translation: "if a company doesn't pay well, talented people won't want to work there" - why would a company that doesn't pay well release information that would disadvantage them like that? Unless you are suggesting they be forced by law to make all salaries public. But you can already get an idea of the salary bell curve at a given company with things like Glassdoor.

Employers are legally enjoined from stopping their employees from sharing this info with each other and once this info is floating around keeping it off the internet ought to reasonable become challenging.

Your experience does not match mine as a manager. At any given moment a manager worth his/her pay is acutely aware who does what they said they'd do, who is capable of more than others, who solves more problems, who causes less fallout, who deserves that promo and raise and so on. There are always one or two people out of a dozen who, if they were to disengage, would doom the productivity of the team. So you want to keep your A players happy. The rest, you divide into two buckets essentially: B players aspiring to be A players, and everybody else. You keep the former happy. You don't really care about the latter and give them whatever is the default they'd normally get.

A lot of A players suck at negotiations, IMO. If they didn't, their career would advance much faster. It's much easier to negotiate if you have the goods, and very few people have the goods.

So you are basically in agreement with the gp by saying that your A players get shortchanged because they suck at negotiating...

"So" is a tell for cognitive dissonance: whenever someone starts their response with a "so", in 100% of the cases what follows is the opposite of what the person they're responding to said. A deliberate misinterpretation.

I'm saying that your ability to deliver is of foremost importance to your comp, more so than negotiation skills (which help, but not replace the ability to deliver). Why? See the first part of my post that you've deliberately misinterpreted. It may seem to you that you can fool your manager, but that's not the case, if they're paying attention.

So you're saying that any reply that starts with "so" is willfully dense, and never exists to point out a logical flaw or unintended consequence of the written argument?

> _So_ you're saying

I see what you did there. :-)

For average folks, their ability to deliver is of little importance. What sets their compensation is the market rate. They can slack off for a few years, do bare minimum, then move to another FANG and double their pay, because such is the new market rate. Their past performance means shit. Their ability to perform on interviews and get competing offers means everything.

For exceptional folks it's silly to be the A players unless they have a buddy in the VP ranks who drags them up the ranks, as otherwise they would waste their best years on flat compensation and a bunch of petty bonuses. Exceptional folks should really slack off, become those C players, and build their own gig on a side.

I would like you to try to "slack off" at a FANG. You'll be out in 6 months.

I said that exceptional folks can slack off. Average folks can't.

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