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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

Talk to your friends and coworkers about salaries. No one needs to reveal where they're at, but just talk about what the market's paying for relevant employees.

Also ask them if their company is hiring and has reasonable interviewing practices. Not everyone makes candidates jump through hoops.

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Everyone revealing where they're at exactly (cash + bonus + stock + extra perks/PTO/whatever), while potentially a little uncomfortable in the beginning, is better for everyone long-term. I used to be against it, if only because I was typically at the top of the pay band for my role so had little to "gain" from the practice, but I've come around the last couple years. There's really very little downside, even if you're a top performer.

1. People who are legitimately being taken advantage of can more quickly realize it and either work to correct it or leave.

2. Top earners should be able to justify their outsized compensation to others, including peers.

3. Some people just legitimately don't know you can negotiate things like non-discretionary bonuses, extra PTO, etc.

4. Maybe your company pays everyone below-market, not just you, and at least knowing this will make it easier to decide if it's worth the lower pay (for QOL/WLB or whatever) or if you want to leave.

Also if there's a quick change in market rates (happening now in the US?) the more people you share information with the sooner you'll find out.

I used to be against this as well, until I worked at a company that abused this and leveraged it against it's vulnerable employees. Basically, more Jr. or bootcamp people were making _way_ less than market even though they have been working for a while at the company and delivered as much if not more value than coworkers.

Also, if this results in underpaid workers getting better salary, this results in the average salary going up and then the max salary going up.

This is what happened with CEO salaries after "transparency" laws were passed making them public.

Now, it's tough to say whether that can be extrapolated out to knowledge workers, but it is a useful datapoint non-the-less.

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