<story><title>The Downside of Full Pay Transparency</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-downside-of-full-pay-transparency-1502676360</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevinmhickey</author><text>I have worked for a company with full pay transparency and for several with full opacity. I prefer opacity.&lt;p&gt;At the transparent company, I was hired in as one of the highest paid employees at a time that the company was struggling. Everyone ranked higher than me had taken a voluntary pay cut, to the point that some of them were paid less than me.&lt;p&gt;I felt guilty for taking more money than them, but conflicted as the problems were not of my making. I felt some resentment at pay peers that were underperforming. I was able to observe the performance of other employees and knew which ones were being treated fairly and not.&lt;p&gt;It was information that did nothing to benefit me, my peers or those below us in the organization. It led to more bad feelings than good and I am grateful that I do not have that information at my current employer.&lt;p&gt;I prefer sites like Glassdoor where you can get a general idea of what your coworkers might make, without the fine resolution of a name to dollar amount mapping.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>astura</author><text>&amp;gt;It was information that did nothing to benefit me, my peers or those below us in the organization.&lt;p&gt;You are mistaken, open salaries benefited you. They let you actually see the huge organizational problems in the company that would have otherwise been hidden. You had more information in which to make your career decisions on.&lt;p&gt;The bad feelings were not &lt;i&gt;caused&lt;/i&gt; by the open salaries, they were caused by the problems you listed.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Downside of Full Pay Transparency</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-downside-of-full-pay-transparency-1502676360</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevinmhickey</author><text>I have worked for a company with full pay transparency and for several with full opacity. I prefer opacity.&lt;p&gt;At the transparent company, I was hired in as one of the highest paid employees at a time that the company was struggling. Everyone ranked higher than me had taken a voluntary pay cut, to the point that some of them were paid less than me.&lt;p&gt;I felt guilty for taking more money than them, but conflicted as the problems were not of my making. I felt some resentment at pay peers that were underperforming. I was able to observe the performance of other employees and knew which ones were being treated fairly and not.&lt;p&gt;It was information that did nothing to benefit me, my peers or those below us in the organization. It led to more bad feelings than good and I am grateful that I do not have that information at my current employer.&lt;p&gt;I prefer sites like Glassdoor where you can get a general idea of what your coworkers might make, without the fine resolution of a name to dollar amount mapping.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>majormajor</author><text>A lot of people are paranoid about the malicious case: &amp;quot;the company is trying to screw you over.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s that hard to identify malicious employers even &lt;i&gt;without&lt;/i&gt; knowing everyone&amp;#x27;s salaries.&lt;p&gt;The non-malicious case then boils down, to me, to: who do I think is less biased in evaluating my value vs my peer&amp;#x27;s value? Me, my peer, or a third party that is neither of us? The answer to that is pretty obvious, and so what am I going to gain except being overly focused on me against my peers vs me against my past self?&lt;p&gt;I would be very interested to know how many people who want full transparency are managers who&amp;#x27;ve had to deal with things like &amp;quot;there&amp;#x27;s a mismatch in these people&amp;#x27;s salary because they came in at different levels but are now performing equally, but if I give a massive raise (say, 30%+) this year am I setting them up to be disappointed when the size of that isn&amp;#x27;t duplicated in the future vs spreading that across 4 every-6-month slower-paced bumps?&amp;quot; Or with employees who are radically wrong about how valuable they are compared to a peer, because they&amp;#x27;re focused purely on code and not noticing how their peer laid a bunch of ground work in negotiating with product and other stakeholders to eliminate some requirements that would&amp;#x27;ve made the project take several months longer?&lt;p&gt;You can be transparent about the &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt;: &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re going to be doing some market adjustments to your pay, but here&amp;#x27;s how many people we&amp;#x27;ve seen get disgruntled and leave in the past if we do it too fast,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the next step for you is looking beyond the tasks in front of you to see the bigger picture of these projects, and building a relationship with people from the rest of the business,&amp;quot; without the gut punch that &amp;quot;here&amp;#x27;s how much less money you&amp;#x27;re making&amp;quot; is.</text></comment>