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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, talking about pay is often counterproductive, as you never see the blood sweat and tears that went into someone's pay, you only see the end result and it seems "unfair". On the other hand, at Google, there's a gigantic spreadsheet where people share their comp, and it helped dispel some narratives like "women in the same positions are paid less" to some extent. It's not the same when the company itself shares the stats - you always know there are a million ways to lie with statistics. So there are positives and negatives to this.

Were it up to me, I'd ban all such discussion. By all reasonable measures, FANG employees are paid more than enough. Focus on work, not on someone else's wallet. But it's not up to me, for better or worse.

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Nope, make pay transparent. At least people can have a fair discussion with their managers why they don't get paid the median amount at their level.

So sick of companies promoting transparency in all engineering processes, but when it comes to pay it becomes this opaque thing that's also taboo to talk about.

How do you make _effort_ transparent though? If pay is conditioned on effort and productivity (which it arguably should be), how do you surface that explanation, rather than just the extremely inflammatory "this person makes $700K a year" number. For all you know this person might have made the company 10x the amount, whereas someone who "only" made $600K a year had effectively negative productivity. Without this context comp numbers are effectively useless.

I'm mature enough to understand some people work harder / have greater output, etc. That's for my manager to explain. If I'm getting feedback that I'm doing well at my level but still being underpaid or not hitting the 90th percentile, than there's a disconnect between the feedback I'm receiving and the compensation.

There's another problem in the industry that new hires get way higher salaries than tenured engineers. This allows me to understand what salaries are being paid to new engineers. It's hard for me to believe a new engineer coming into the org is more productive than me. This further allows me to make a case against my manager to adjust my pay.

As a (former) high level manager: your manager knows _exactly_ who her best people are, and she prays to dear god every day that they don't leave, because then she'd be SOL. This tends to lead to unequal distribution of rewards (and as some people in 2021 would say "inequitable" since the meme is now that everyone should be poor), but without this all business would collapse.

Note that I'm not talking about "old boys network" situation here. That should be dealt with at the cultural level. I'm talking about some folks being just legit amazing and making more money than I do because of it.

> I'm mature enough

If that's the case, you're _way_ more mature than most people. Most people couldn't care less how valuable someone else is or what they do, if they make $1K/mo more.

To some extent, the "levels" constrain the compensation ranges in most organizations. Those ranges get much wider the higher you are on the org chart, and sometimes disappear entirely for VPs and up. But this isn't about how much VPs get paid. This is about how much Joe from 2 cubes down the hallway gets paid, and why that's "entirely too much" and "unfair".

The best raises I ever got were due to changing jobs, not by pleading with my manager.

> The best raises I ever got were due to changing jobs, not by pleading with my manager.

Agreed. This really sucks about the company.

> If that's the case, you're _way_ more mature than most people.

I don't think so. If managers provide detailed feedback about what went right and what went wrong the correct expectations will be set.

> If managers provide detailed feedback about what went right and what went wrong

I'll let you in on a management secret: most of the time managers can't articulate this even to themselves unless they are talking about the few people in their organization that truly, quantifiably kick ass. They're human, they live by perceptions. The only limiting factor that grounds those perceptions is whether you're solving the hard problems your manager's manager wants to see solved. You could say this is biased (and it is), but bias is not uniformly bad, woke corporate edicts notwithstanding.

Before I get lynched over the previews sentence, let me explain exactly what I mean by it. For the record, I don't mean any kind of bias based on unchangeable traits. Simply put that has no place in a professional environment. However, _any_ manager worth their pay will be biased in favor of an employee who makes the impossible possible. Most of immediate peers would even view this as "fair". But even slightly remote peers (perhaps another, nearby team), would not have much, if any, visibility into why this "bias" exists. Worse, even immediate peers who are angling for greater rewards (often without merit - their mom just told them they always get a trophy when they were a kid) will perceive the situation as deeply "unfair".

TL;DR: hot takes are not helpful, it's a difficult landscape to navigate. My opinion on this is not particularly strong because I don't see it making much of a difference. Kickass people will still get disproportionate rewards, and whiners will get pissed off and leave. It's the potential strife that I find objectionable.

My job is hard enough. I don't need to worry about my manager's job.

If I can be asked why X was implemented like this,or why a particular decision was made when implementing a feature. A manager should sure as hell be ready to answer why Bob from ProductZ team is getting paid more than me.

I have no sympathy for managers and their human biases. Everyone does their job with human biases.

> Kickass people will still get disproportionate rewards

And, they should! You're very focused on the 1% of the kick-ass people. This isn't about them, this is about the other 99%.

> You're very focused on the 1% of the kick-ass people

Quite frankly, most of the rest don't matter one way or the other. And it's usually more like 10%, not 1%. Perhaps your job is so hard because you're expending effort on things that don't matter to your manager's manager (and therefore to your manager as well). There's a second derivative to this. If you want a decent longer term trajectory, make sure to pick the manager who ensures that his/her teams work on things that matter to _his_ manager's manager. You could easily bust your ass for a decade for zero reward if you don't keep this in mind. Or you could go work in a small company where none of this applies at all.

> My job is hard enough. I don't need to worry about my manager's job.

Once you second guess your manager's decisions (pay, raises and promotions) I think it's fair game to at least understand what those decisions really entail...

Just saying.

I agree with you on the issue with new hires getting paid more. It's market forces at work, but... yeah that shit sucks.

Regarding your first point I think you're a bit optimistic as to how well people take such a conversations. For example, doing well _at level_ (in my experience) means meeting expectations. There's no way someone meeting expectations should get 90th percentile comp for their level. So are you mature enough to accept that you're not good enough to warrant p90 comp?

doing well is not meeting expectations. Meeting expectations, is well just meeting expectations. Doing well, is definitely exceeding expectations.

I actually disagree. You are expected to do your job well. If expectations are high (as they should be) then meeting them is great (ie: meets = you get your target bonus.)

Exceeding expectations is above and beyond "doing well."

I’d like to see how employees split on this. People always frame it as if it’s the company fighting the employee want for transparency - but as an employee I do not want transparency (although that highly depends on the level of transparency we’re talking about which is also rarely discussed).

If this a vocal minority of employees that what transparency or a larger group?

Curious why you don't want compensation transparency? That information asymmetry is a huge reason an employer has a negotiating advantage against you.

Because like most freethinking super-minds on HN, they think they are the 10x exception that can easily get compensation well beyond the average.

Its the pit your average IT sallaryman falls into.

Maybe best to wait for my reply to the parent before jumping in with a snarky response.

I feel when people can see what they’re getting paid relative to close colleagues (especially if you include data from multiple countries and/or cities) a lot of people won’t be happy. In theory we all know the engineers working for the office in the more expensive cities get paid more but seeing that on paper will cause a lot of animosity. I also know for example my company pays employees in similar cost of living cities differently because the local market is less competitive in one. Again, wouldn’t be good to see on paper.

Also, I think this idea that knowing what colleagues are paid improves your negotiating position is wrong. It’s much more important to figure out what competitors will pay you.

Transparency data can be useful for preventing discrimination but that should be left up to the state to monitor.

Make employee ratings from management and peers public too.

This is the way.....

Talking about pay is pretty much always a win for workers. If people have an emotional reaction, maybe they need to do it more or maybe they have some unique need to opt out. Otherwise, it’s the lowest effort way for workers to improve their outcomes.

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