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Comment by nullrouted | Hacker News Reader

You are mistaking the premise. I'm not saying you should not have an idea of what the "market" is paying and ask that from a potential employer. But knowing what the person next to you makes is an entirely different situation. I know there are employees next to me that make more/less than I do. I honestly don't care as long as I feel I'm making a fair salary for the work I perform. You can always get an idea of what the market is paying by talking to fellow employees outside the company or the recruiters that hit you up.

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You don't know what a fair salary is, because you don't know what your peers are earning. I mean, if you can find out what your competitors are paying their employees, surely their own employees can figure that out. So if you can figure it out, it's not a secret to anybody!

The problem with your approach is that it is very easy to manipulate people when you permit a power/information differential like that. You end up saying "the slave is happy with the food we give him; why should we offer freedom?" -- when he's only happy with the food because you've been beating him for so long he's been conditioned into helpless appreciation of your scraps.

You feel you're making a fair salary? Well then what is the harm of knowing your neighbor's salary? Are you going to learn a new meaning of 'fair?' What's the harm in that? That's just updating your priors and giving you the ability to make better decisions with more information. (That anyone would choose to reject relevant information when making decisions is the height of absurdity.)

A statistical summary of salary for the job is almost as good as knowing everyone's salary, and better than knowing the exact salary of your direct peers but not more.

So in such a situation there's little upside. You already know you're not getting scraps.

But there's a painful downside in knowing exactly who the company thinks does worse work than their direct peers.

What are you talking about? Salary for equivalent positions is only tenuously connected to performance. The only people who benefit from salary secrecy are employers, and they benefit greatly.

>Salary for equivalent positions is only tenuously connected to performance.

But it's often supposed to be, and so salary differences can hurt feelings just as much as if the correlation was perfect. Or they can hurt feelings because the actual reason for the difference is unfair.

>The only people who benefit from salary secrecy are employers, and they benefit greatly.

Is that always the case? Remember, in this scenario we have a detailed knowledge of equivalent position salary, we just don't know which of those thousands of numbers belong to our coworkers. How does that remaining ignorance hurt me in any notable way?

There's a painful downside in knowing you have cancer, but that doesn't mean a doctor can (or should) withhold that information from you.

You already know if you have cancer. The doctor not only can withhold information about your neighbor, they are mandated to.

You're taking the wrong part of that analogy. My point is that it is not the doctors responsibility to withhold information in the name of protecting me from "painful feelings." Other patient's health information isn't relevant to me. Other employee's pay is.

Can you explain why anonymous pay info isn't good enough?

I'm not saying that hurt feelings should override important info, but if the info isn't important, and it's not about you, then maybe hurt feelings should be considered.

If I want to improve my (or my company's) ability to make decisions, I need to know how the decisions are made, including knowledge about what is valued.

Let's say I'm playing a game of poker. I know what my hand is, but nobody else's. You are telling me that I am advantaged simply by knowing the odds associated with my hand.

Great.

Except my opponent across the table can see everyone's hand. And they are telling me I should go all in.

That's why anonymous info isn't good enough: it's only anonymous to the losers.

In poker the hands of everyone else directly affect you.

This is more like knowing everyone else's hands in blackjack.

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