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Comment by dataking | Hacker News Reader

Lots or reporting requirements only take effect once a firm reaches a certain size. This makes a lot of sense given that tiny firms (say less than 10 employees) may not have formalized wage scales, in-house administrative staff, and have a harder time amortizing compliance costs. So yes, there are disadvantages to consider.

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Smaller companies can just report whatever they're paying each employee that year, then?

I mean they already do?

Publicly and to their employees?

Grandparent poster asked what the disadvantages were. Some employees might not want their personal salary information revealed.

I think the legal requirements is declaring pay ranges for which the companies agree to hire (IDK if they must reveal current actual pay). A range can conceal enough for a particular employee not to feel exposed.

Even the lowest paid employees at the state and federal level already have their pay revealed, and it hasn't caused a problem yet. As far as I know, only orgs like the CIA (and similar) where their employees aren't public are hidden from public view.

It's probably the highest paid ones who don't want others to know... goes against equal pay for equal work and all that.

For every rockstar 10x developer who actually is worth much more because they are truly exceptional, there's probably a bunch of others that just happened to have good. career trajectory, or entered during a bubble peak, or have a better diploma, or the right connections, or are skilled negotiators or whatnot.

The hope is that salary transparency will bump their colleagues doing similar work at similar quality up to similar pay. The fear is that it can create workplace resentment, or lower everyone's wages, or invite retaliation, etc.

IMO those are short term growing pains that wouldn't last once transparency is normalized, like in government pay.

I don't see how it couldn't result in lower wages over time, especially for folks who are good at negotiating, have planned their career/company moves out over years or decades to maximize salary, etc. Businesses have a budget for payroll, not every business owner is Scrooge McDuck hoarding their gold coins. You have a distribution in pay for lots of reasons, and if you try to eliminate that you're going to end up with the same amount of money spread across the same amount of people in a slightly different way, but everyone at the upper end loses out.

That's because the state doesn't generate revenue, it isn't the state's money, and the people have a right to know how their taxes are being spent. I'm not saying that invalidates your broader point but it is an important distinction. It's by definition something completely different than a coffee shop with 15 part-time employees and one owner, or a budding new web agency with a half dozen full-time designers and coders.

Hasn't caused a problem... among a sample group who knew that their salary would be public information before choosing that career. If you change the rule so that no one even has the choice of salary privacy, is nothing lost? I'm skeptical.

Does everyone want their salary even more trivially scraped by Experian and packaged up into a data product?

I'm sure all sorts of entities would like to know exactly what your income is.

> I'm sure all sorts of entities would like to know exactly what your income is.

But it will be useless because they cannot play with it. Even now they ask you what your pay was.

E.g. landlords?

If I know exactly how much you make, I know exactly how much to raise rent.

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