<story><title>Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer</title><url>http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tikhonj</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always felt the culture of hiding salaries was doing a  significant disservice to employees. It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. In turn, this makes the entire labor market less efficient for the employee.&lt;p&gt;This also makes the employer less accountable to the employees. The employer can easily pay somebody significantly more or less than they contribute, and the rest of the team cannot really say anything about this.&lt;p&gt;Now, there are some cultural reasons to do this--preventing jealousy, hiding inequality. But it really feels like a social band-aid, a temporary solution hiding the symptoms but not the underlying problem. Besides, everyone ends up having a reasonable guess as to who makes more and who makes less anyhow! The same dynamics develop, just with more uncertainty.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, making salaries public takes these problems head-on. Inequality isn&amp;#x27;t bad in and of itself; some is basically necessary. But hiding that fact doesn&amp;#x27;t really help anyone. Instead, forcing people to see it head-on, deal with it and talk about it is probably a better solution.&lt;p&gt;I really applaud Buffer and the general movement towards transparency. I think it&amp;#x27;s a very healthy cultural progression and hope it catches on more widely, so that people stop having knee-jerk reactions to salary information.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As an interesting additional note, all salaries (beyond a token minimum) at Berkeley (and the whole UC system) are publicly available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucpay.globl.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ucpay.globl.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve looked up various professors at the ParLab (where I did some undergraduate research). The fact that their salaries range from ~120k to ~350k did not change my perspective of anyone and did not seem to affect the lab&amp;#x27;s culture at all.&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I&amp;#x27;d be perfectly happy to see this outside of public universities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grecy</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely.&lt;p&gt;Having employees not discuss salary is all about the employer having more power&amp;#x2F;control, and the employees having less.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve always thought it&amp;#x27;s a little like an adult giving candy to a child and then say &amp;quot;Now, don&amp;#x27;t tell anyone I gave you this!&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Why doesn&amp;#x27;t the adult want anyone to know about the candy exchange? Because they benefit from keeping in concealed.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I also think this is a generational thing. Everyone I know over 40 wouldn&amp;#x27;t dare talk about their salary, or how much they paid for their house, etc. Everyone I know under 30 will happily talk about it to anyone and everyone. Give it a few more decades, and this will be the norm.</text></comment>
<story><title>Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer</title><url>http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tikhonj</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always felt the culture of hiding salaries was doing a  significant disservice to employees. It creates a significant and largely artificial information disparity, giving a major market advantage to the employer. In turn, this makes the entire labor market less efficient for the employee.&lt;p&gt;This also makes the employer less accountable to the employees. The employer can easily pay somebody significantly more or less than they contribute, and the rest of the team cannot really say anything about this.&lt;p&gt;Now, there are some cultural reasons to do this--preventing jealousy, hiding inequality. But it really feels like a social band-aid, a temporary solution hiding the symptoms but not the underlying problem. Besides, everyone ends up having a reasonable guess as to who makes more and who makes less anyhow! The same dynamics develop, just with more uncertainty.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, making salaries public takes these problems head-on. Inequality isn&amp;#x27;t bad in and of itself; some is basically necessary. But hiding that fact doesn&amp;#x27;t really help anyone. Instead, forcing people to see it head-on, deal with it and talk about it is probably a better solution.&lt;p&gt;I really applaud Buffer and the general movement towards transparency. I think it&amp;#x27;s a very healthy cultural progression and hope it catches on more widely, so that people stop having knee-jerk reactions to salary information.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As an interesting additional note, all salaries (beyond a token minimum) at Berkeley (and the whole UC system) are publicly available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucpay.globl.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ucpay.globl.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve looked up various professors at the ParLab (where I did some undergraduate research). The fact that their salaries range from ~120k to ~350k did not change my perspective of anyone and did not seem to affect the lab&amp;#x27;s culture at all.&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I&amp;#x27;d be perfectly happy to see this outside of public universities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davemel37</author><text>I had a boss bully his employees with fellow employee salary information. (i.e. bill took a pay cut because of the recessions, so should you...)&lt;p&gt;As far as I&amp;#x27;m concerned, salary is a completely private matter that is no one elses business, and no good could possibly come from sharing it.&lt;p&gt;I see this openness at buffer essentially being a tool for management to deny raise requests, etc... with... If we do it for you, we have to do it for everybody... which is a just a BS excuse to not face the reality that every persons value and work situation is different, and should be treated differently.</text></comment>