Molly McHugh and Wired need to reach out to this woman and ask a few questions. They need to reach out to Google and ask a few questions.
Otherwise, this information is just a shade better than useless. There's a lot of detail missing in these tweets. There's a lot of handwaving where the audience is essentially invited to fill in the blanks with whatever stereotypes -- good or bad -- they feel like.
It irritates me immensely that this story is now out there and getting to be a Big Deal -- and there's no actual journalism to attempt to get to the bottom of it. How time consuming could it possibly be to send a few e-mails, hop on the phone, or go dig up someone you know who works at Google and might shed some light on this?
Maybe Erica Joy is right. Maybe there's a huge problem at Google regarding sharing salaries. Maybe something illegal or, at least, immoral/hypocritical is going on. Or maybe Erica Joy is misunderstanding something about how Google works. About how peer bonuses work, for example. Or maybe some combination of both.
But unless we want to go dig up that information on our own, we just don't know.
I have no problem with Erica Joy's approach here. She told a fairly comprehensive story about a concern she had with Google, and ended it with a fairly unassailable moral (doodles do not an 'ethical' company make).
Wired, on the other hand, stooped to about the journalistic level of Gawker with this. If you're going to run social media content as an article, that deserves background and confirmation. If you're going to implicitly accuse an organization of racism, sexism, and violating labor laws, that demands proper followup and investigation.
Wired had a real opportunity here to do serious journalism here and squandered it.
I am largely in agreement with you, but I can't help but feel Erica Joy is skirting some gray areas here.
In one breath she states its "illegal to retaliate for sharing salary information" yet a spreadsheet she implies clearly evidences discrimination hasn't found itself in the hands of a qualified attorney. If the former is true barring legalities I may not be familiar(disclaimer not an attorney) the participants would seem to be protected.
In addition she strongly implies damning evidence can be demonstrated with some "spreadsheet magic" but is very careful not to use specific language. This could be construed as someone avoiding accusations of libel.
I'm interested though if this spreadsheet has the level of adoption she claims(thought I don't quite understand the bit about 5% of former co. if she means google that'd be 2,500 people) It will certainly leak then we can run the pivots ourselves.
Reposting tweets is not valid journalism. For that matter, including tweets from random people in reaction to a news event is also not valid journalism either. I don't care what muffycat1974 on Twitter has to say about the Iran nuclear deal, unless muffycat1974 is the Secretary of State.
I have a passionate hatred for the practice of replacing informed journalism with vox pop content. The point of following the news on subtle issues is to get better information than I can pull out of my own head, and hearing "what people are saying about this" doesn't offer that.
The ability to replace a call to an expert with a twitter search has done serious damage to local news (not that it was much good to start with), and it's increasingly spilling into sources like Wired.
As an aside, I really hope muffycat1974 is the Secretary of State.
Editors at the Washington Post called this kind of story a "AAA" assignment, meaning that a reporter was tasked to "Ask Any Asshole". This was long before Twitter, etc. They would actually stop random people on the street and ask their opinions.
You probably shouldn't, because I'm often wrong and frequently drunk :-)
In seriousness though, when a news story is breaking, I'd like the news website to provide meaningful commentary from educated and informed people who can contribute to the understanding of the event. I don't care about the lay persons opinion when I'm reading a New York Times story about a world event. I want to hear for someone knowledgeable.
A discussion site like HN is a completely different context with different expectations. I'm coming here for everyone's thoughts.
With regard to meaningful commentary, that is a double edged sword. What you call meaning, I might call bias. Someone you call knowledgeable, I might call a shill. And vice versa.
I've been thinking about data driven news for years now (I'm so fucking sick of Fox, MSNBC, et al.).
Back to twitter, I actually do like the impact of 140 characters on how it compresses information. I would group the OP's article in with a first-person editorial, not journalism. I still read it and I think it merits follow up.
I can see how someone could be comfortable with the quality of today's journalism in the sense that at least it's obviously bullshit. The trouble is that this means we're out of practice when we have to assess what appears to be real news.
I kept scrolling, clicked through to the "next page" (not really) and it's... just a collection of tweets? Without so much as a paragraph of context? Is something not loading for me? This is pathetic.
It's generally considered journalistically correct to mention that in the story. Similar to "We reached out to Google for followup, but they declined to comment."
Of course, if this were a news story and not a copy-paste of a Twitter timeline, it would probably follow those expected patterns.
Sure, but there are still lots of ways to turn this into a good article. I like that they included the original source, but to not write a single word of their own? They could have summarized the tweets, provided history on who Erica is and what her role at Google was, got a statement from Google, talked to Googlers "off the record", reported on any history of allegations against Google in the areas that the tweet brings up, reported on how other companies handle salary information, etc.
I would think a proper journalist would figure out a way to get the information they need for an objective story, even when faced with an unwilling witness.
Certainly it's damning if it's an accurate depiction but I agree with you that just using Storify on a bunch of tweets isn't really anything like "journalism."
I'm not sure how it's damning except against Erica herself. She strongly implies racism is involved, but it sounds like she just doesn't understand the PB system. (The fact that her white friend got multiple PBs for the same thing seems more like his manager also didn't understand how it works).
Well what she's insinuating is that she was retaliated against for sharing salary information, which is against the law. I'm not sure how you intuit from the information available that she "doesn't understand the PB system."
It's too time-consuming to actually do journalism when you can just paste a twitter timeline and then move on to the next headline before your competitors can.
It's not about journalism anymore, it's about getting clicks.
I agree, it is also hard to start a conversation around a handful of tweets. In the end all we can say is that wired messed up and this story will not get a proper write up and conversation.
We do know that the labour of a lot of people is undervalued and that we do know that salaries for tech workers have been artificially kept down; we know there's been collusion between Google and other companies in terms of salaries and poaching.
It may not be journalism but it does raise questions that we should try and answer instead of saying "oh well I guess that's just the way things are".
How do you define journalism? Obviously, this isn't an article, but it is information and I found it entertaining. True, only a single point of view... shall we call it Gonzo? If you compiled all those tweets into a paragraph, it wouldn't require substantial edits to generate smooth prose.
Why does this only go in one direction? "Journalists" regularly publish reformatted company press releases, and quote "insiders" without attribution. That's fine because most news narratives support the status quo and those in power. When the (relatively) little guy has something to say, however, we're going to need some hard evidence! Our biases are telling.
People keep saying this, but it doesn't correspond to much mainstream journalism I can see. Getting competing quotes is not the same as working out which corresponds best to the truth.
How'd that work out for Rolling Stone? When you report without fact-checking it's a disservice to readers, and sometimes, the people's voices you are trying to amplify.
Was stringing together a couple dozen tweets really the best format to share a story like this?
There is a lot that's left out. Once she vaguely mentions that another employee who was "involved" was still getting all of his peer bonuses (which may or may not have been PB's for his "involvement", we don't know), the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me. OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WANTS, as long as we don't actually have any details about it.
Also, generally shit will hit the fan if you tell anyone to fuck off, especially if they're your manager. Again, we don't know that she told her manager to fuck off for being racist (??) because this is a terrible story told in a shitty format. But it's implied. Just like everything else in this "article".
tl;dr she got exactly what you would expect when you're intentionally stirring shit up at any company. I'm not sure what she expected.
The fact that she's a woman is neither here nor there... on the surface where it can be seen. Behind the scenes however, you have politics. When you piss people off that are in power, they find ways to make your life uncomfortable - that goes whether you're male or female.
To expect there will be no retaliation for pissing off higher ups would be incredibly naive. Even if what you are doing (strictly speaking) is legal and retaliation is illegal. You can't expect to not suffer any repercussions for pissing off those that ultimately are in charge of your pay cheque. That's just not how people operate - even if that's how the law (and society, on the surface) says they should.
It takes a long time for ideas and beliefs to become embedded in your culture - look at racism, look at sexism, look at the LBGT community. Gradually society is becoming more tolerant, more accepting and less judgmental, but we've still got a long road ahead of us before equality for all is anything more than a surface ideal that the younger generations long for.
Many like the status quo, they are truly uncomfortable with what change represents to themselves personally. Getting these people to accept that future generations ideals and beliefs are not their own, and are becoming the norm is a hard pill for them to swallow.
When a tiger is cornered and they perceive they have no place left to run, the only thing they will do is lash out and hurt you.
> To expect there will be no retaliation for pissing off higher ups would be incredibly naive. Even if what you are doing (strictly speaking) is legal and retaliation is illegal. You can't expect to not suffer any repercussions for pissing off those that ultimately are in charge of your pay cheque. That's just not how people operate - even if that's how the law (and society, on the surface) says they should.
The whole point is that this is illegal and wrong. We discuss it in order to, hopefully, fix a bad thing rather than throw up our hands and say, "oh well, she had it coming!"
I don't disagree at all with what you're saying. What I'm saying is that human nature and politics are an incredibly complex game. Look at the dirty politics involved in presidential campaigns (see, this behaviour is even in evidence at the very top of the food chain!) as an example. Until you fix the mentality of the people at the top, shit will continue to roll downhill. This goes for corporate environments, political environments, society as a whole.
What exactly is the point of having a law if you don't expect it to be upheld? If these managers illegally retaliated for sharing salary information, then nail them to the fucking wall. Who the hell cares if they're "uncomfortable" that things are changing?
Yeah, maybe a tiger attacks people when it feels threatened. You still put it down.
There's a huge issue of laws built around the intention of an action. That is, the action itself is not illegal unless also backed by a given intention. These cases are nearly impossible to prove in court. How do you prove that someone did something with a certain intention? Especially when they have 5th amendment protection? Unless they come out and say it voluntarily, or unless you have solid evidence such as emails, you're not going to get very far.
Laws where intent is a necessary component of violation are not nearly impossible to prove in court (given how common this is with criminal law, and the higher standard of proof there than in civil cases, yours rarely see criminal convictions in cases that went to trial were intent nearly impossible to prove in court.)
Intent can be inferred from circumstances and other actions alongside the prohibited action; and this is particularly true in civil cases where the standard is a mere preponderance of the evidence rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Upholding a law is more tricky that being obtuse about how the world is going to unfold before The Judgement Day (TM). Look at Aaron Swartz. There is a way to have things done - if the world is becoming a better place it is because a lot of people are doing a lot of things behind the smokescreen.
Far from blaming it on the victim, I'm pointing out that this mentality is endemic. I don't disagree with what she did in any way. I fully believe that what she did, she did for the good of all and I applaud her for doing so. What I am saying is that the suggestion that she thought there would be no retaliation is incredibly naive. That is all.
It is still fair to expect there will be no illegal retaliation in the "do no evil" megacorp.
And, naive or no, it is absolutely reasonable to act as though there would be none, knowing that you may receive it, so that you can draw attention to it if it happens, because it is illegal.
This is, at least nominally, a rule-of-law country, and that law's been on the books for a long, long time.
That is probably exactly what she expected. And if this were a small group politely sharing with each, there likely would not be retaliation. But once you make it "a thing", and are impacting the culture of an organization, then you have stepped into politics. The reactions at that point are going to be exaggerated, and not necessarily relevant to the original topic.
I don't like politics, and stories like this are exactly why - things that may be legal and should not be harmful end up turning into something ugly. You have to worry more about who you are pissing off that what you are doing, whether or not their anger is justified or reasonable.
Sadly, for all but very small companies, politics is the reality in the corporate world.
Again, another argument that "she should have known". No. If Google retaliated against her for sharing salary information, this is illegal, and they need to be punished. A bunch of hand waving about "politics" and "the way things are" is completely meaningless and irrelevant, and smacks of some sort of mild corporate Stockholm syndrome.
> If Google retaliated against her for sharing salary information, this is illegal, and they need to be punished.
Absolutely. Which is why I don't understand why everyone is discussing this. Erica Joy apparently doesn't consider it illegal retaliation (and what we know is definitely not enough to warrant such a cunclusion), otherwise she would file a suit. Are we totally sure we didn't just misunderstand her?
I've worked for all manner of companies from the smallest 2 person shops to the largest multi-billion dollar oil magnates and one thing is common across all of them, politics. Even at the Whitehouse one rule is common - keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Its all about who owes who what favours and what you can do to further their agenda. If they don't owe you a favour or you can't further their agenda, you're meaningless (and thus worthless) to them. If you can provide them with software that increases their margins by half a billion dollars a year or give them a leg up the ladder of their career, they'll pay you pretty much whatever that's worth to them.
Politics might appear less evident in smaller companies, because you're more likely intimately familiar with the people at the top. In a larger corporate environment where you really don't know everyone intimately, your perspective of the politics are compounded because you're not necessarily part of the inner circle. The road to the top is all politics though. If you want to get there, you have to know how to play your hand and visibly provide what those at the top need to further their own political agenda.
You can ignore politics but politics will not ignore you; politics is why tech worker salaries were kept artificially lowered and why Google and others had an anti-poaching arrangement.
She should have prepared a bit better but this was the safe move for her; it's out of her hands and the salary information has appeared on sites like GlassDoor. If she's fired everyone will know it's because of this ugly politics and people will want to avoid working for Google since it's no longer a tech company but a company dominated by managerial power players and sharks. Who wants to work at a place where you have ugly politics like this after all?
Unfortunately, legislation like this don't really have any teeth.
Companies can still retaliate against salary sharing in any way they want because it's next to impossible for you to prove in court that they acted in retaliation.
And, according to what I've read, she was spoken to about the salary sharing (whether by her manager, HR or both), but neither reprimanded nor fired because of it.
This is like telling me that water is wet. Water is wet. Assholes are assholes. Companies stretching or breaking the law with respect to retaliation are companies stretching or breaking the law with respect to retaliation. Smug HN commentators are smug HN commentators.
None of this actually says anything about whether she acted correctly, or incorrectly, or whether the company behaved with propriety, or whether information wants to be free, or anything else that--to borrow a phrase from the original HN guidelines--“piques one’s intellectual curiosity."
Here’s my contribution to “she got exactly what she should expect:” Americans got exactly what they should expect when they refused to pay taxes to the King.
What happened next? Why did things turn out that way. What might have happened instead? What could have been done to prevent it from happening? What could have been done to make it happen with less bloodshed?
Are you suggesting that I am blaming the Google employee in this story? Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m claiming that “She should have expected this” is weak sauce.
It’s factually true, but could just as easily be said that entrepreneurs who try but fail could have expected it, or protestors who get beaten and then jailed could have expected it, or people who ask someone out on a date but are turned down could have expected it.
All very true, but saying nothing of interest one way or the other.
Me three. Sometimes I wonder if obtuseness is intentional, to give one the opportunity to bitch no matter what the response. It's like one of those managers who helicopter in while you're doing something else with: "something minor; it'll take you literally no time, we need some data in that one format for tomorrow's meeting, <mumble, mumble>". After one gets burned, one will start sending confirmation emails.
Something, something about "English being twice as hard to read as it is to write, therefore anything written to be clever is guaranteed to be misunderstood."
Including this follow-up. Thanks for the feedback!
So what you expect for 'stirring shit up' is that nothing bad happens to you? If you think that, then the top post of this thread was weirdly inflammatory.
I personally don't believe that not rewarding an action counts as "retaliation" for said action.
I also believe, based on Xooglers commenting, that there might have been very good reasons to reject the peer bonuses (no, that was not the only case, in which peer bonuses got rejected, it's not that unheard of...).
(And I personally think, peer bonuses should be rejected in such cases Because otherwise it becomes a pure popularity-contest. But that's just, like, my opinion :) )
I'm not sure what world you think we inhabit. Are we humanoid automatons? The whole welter of human emotion more or less always outweighs a programmatic injunction like "retaliation is illegal."
Companies are still people working together. They'll probably never be anything but people working together. It does not matter how protected the activity allegedly is; a giant embarrassment campaign run against your company, especially if in pursuit of a particularly feeble branch on the tree of political correctness, means you're out. Or, at least, things won't be pleasant for you. Because your coworkers, above and below, don't like what you've done to their company. One can't write a law preventing that.
The culture has to change from within. There is no reason why that information can't be shared among employees. As the user above you said, retaliatory action to that activity is in fact illegal. Just because the culture of where she works says it is not does not mean she is at all in the wrong for doing it, or that the retaliatory bullshit that was experienced was warranted - even if it was 'expected' as you say.
I for one side with the person who threw together the spreadsheet, not with Google who is trying to sneak by with not paying everyone equally.
Your assertion that the poster above you lives in a fantasy world for thinking that sharing salary information is a protected activity is frankly a nauseating attitude. One that I hope we all in tech can fix.
It seems rather clear from the article that many coworkers liked sharing salaries, so I am unsure where your "Because your coworkers, above and below, don't like what you've done to their company" came from.
Oh, one can write a law preventing that, but what happens when you write laws to curb human emotion? Very little. Human nature takes generations to alter their behaviour - even with laws making that behaviour illegal. It sucks that we can't be less judgmental, more accepting and more adaptable to the wants of others, but that's the way we are: Flawed. Until we can be more tolerant and accepting of one anothers needs and less bound by our own egos, we will be doomed to repeat this behaviour until we destroy ourselves.
Now if only we were as civilized as we'd like to be. It takes many years for these values to become the norm. We make great steps every year and will continue to do so.
>I'm not sure what world you think we inhabit. Are we humanoid automatons? The whole welter of human emotion more or less always outweighs a programmatic injunction like "retaliation is illegal."
The only reason this argument makes sense to you is that you relate to retaliating against employees who exercise their rights in opposition to the employers goals. There isn't a crime that this argument couldn't be cited as a defence of, from double-parking to serial killing.
The term "Social Justice Warrior" is often used to dismiss people who argue against discrimination in various arenas. If you want to be taken seriously in discussions about discrimination, then perhaps avoid it.
Putting that aside, I share pjc50's bemusement that arguing for equal pay qualifies as a "hidden agenda". I also don't find speculation the same as "explicitly exposing facts".
Using the term SJW is revealing an ideology, as surely as using M$ in a thread about Microsoft. You might not subscribe to it but most people are going to jump to that conclusion.
> the whole thing just crumbled into a victim story for me
Are you sure you're not being an Angry Jack[0] and using that as an easy excuse to reject the story firsthand?
> Also, generally shit will hit the fan if you tell anyone to fuck off, especially if they're your manager. Again, we don't know that she told her manager to fuck off for being racist
Were do you see her telling her manager to fuck off at all? She's the one who didn't try to blame her manager, it's that white male co-worker who wanted to do that, and she declined. You are literally accusing her of doing the opposite of what she did.
I'm pretty sure the "telling her manager to fuck off" comment was a reference to refusing to be illegally intimidated over salary information sharing.
Assuming that's an accurate reading of GP's comment, I think it's quite telling that, again, an employee's refusal to be illegally intimidated should be constructed as "telling her manager to fuck off". The sympathies and attitudes thus revealed make me very glad that I don't have to depend on the good feeling of random Silicon Valley magnates and would-be magnates to work in my industry.
Leaving gender out of this (which is a massive hand-wave on my part), HN skews very heavily towards people who bifurcate the world into two kinds: Entrepreneurs and little people (I am referencing Bladerunner, not persons short in physical stature).
Had this story been rewritten to describe the situation as Google (and other BigCos like Apple) erecting arcane and anti-competitive mechanisms to manipulate a market for talent, and the protagonist quitting to found a web-based startup to disrupt their 19th century attitude to business, we might be toasting her as starting the next Uber for people.
How dare those fat cats do dirty deals to prevent the ordinary person from sharing a spreadsheet! SecretSalary to the rescue!
My understanding from reading the vague tweets was the "fuck off" statement was referring to some other occurance of racism that she mentions, unrelated to the salary spreadsheet.
It's a fuck off comment because the manager asked an open-ended question and tweeter bluntly retorted that retaliation is illegal. The manager could be ascertaining the awareness and intent behind stirring up this substantial turmoil. It would be polite to give the manager the benefit of doubt until threats are actually made.
It would be polite for the manager not to allude to threats which would be unlawful to make outright. Where else do you see something like "Don't you know what could happen?" going in a situation like that?
And let's be clear here. There is absolutely no downside to the sharing of salary information from the employee's perspective, and absolutely no upside to same from the perspective of management. So when it comes to hauling the employee into a private meeting with higher-ups, who are already outright declaring their displeasure with the situation, I think the "benefit of the doubt" boat has sailed.
I can imagine a number of downsides to publishing pay rates. Not every workplace is a beacon of maturity and comfortable upper-middle-class wages. Some offices have politics, gossip, and troublemakers.
Immediately employees would be calling meetings with their manager to hear the justifications for pay rates they felt were unfair. This could repeat with each new hire, promotion, raise, bonus, and change in responsibilities. This generates wasted time and increased turnover. My wife's design company would virtually grind to a halt for a few days. Even after everybody is placated with their pay rate, each doling out project assignments would be a new opportunity for friction over who deserves to do what. Then let's consider accusations of sexism, racism, ageism. The number of discrimination lawsuits would likely be non-zero. There are also social introverts who don't want to turn half of their co-worker interactions into awkward conversations.
So once profitable workplaces that kept everybody moderately polite and happy could face several obstacles.
Handing out raises wouldn't solve all of these problems either. I'll admit some worker bees would probably get paid a little more.
> absolutely no upside to same from the perspective of management
Are you asserting that 95%+ of companies in the US have, and sometimes enforce, a policy that actively hurts them? I know companies do stupid shit from time to time, but you are basically saying salary confidentiality policies are some sort of mass MBA psychosis. After all, if there is "absolutely no upside" to management, why do we need labor laws to prohibit these policies in the first place?
Edit: So, I totally mis-parsed that statement. I thought you were stating there was no upside to management prohibiting salary discussions.
This post isn't journalism by any stretch of the imagination. It's actually like a perfect caricature of whats wrong with digital publishing. Serious topic on a serious masthead with less than amateur treatment.
Someone sharing something on Twitter isn't supposed to be journalism. AFAIK the original author isn't a journalist, she's a technologist who got fed up.
Then why her writing is taken seriously by anyone? This piece at best is an opinion, mostly trash.
Hearsay, rumours, implication, this is professional gossiping. I don't deny the claims she makes, but the form in which she makes them really doesn't help her case, and the form clearly calls to create an online shitstorm.
We should shame publications who use "stories" like these. It's damaging for everyone involved and whatever the subject matter is. I refuse to take seriously what should not be.
I think you're confusing complaints about copying twitter posts verbatim and calling it a story with an attack on somebody making a public worker's rights and possible discrimination complaint.
The reason we listen to people is to learn things.
People's stories, especially people in disadvantaged communities, aren't "mostly trash," they're worth listening to. They're a way to know what's going on in those disadvantaged communities if you're not a part of them.
We are not commenting on an HN submission that is a link to someone's tweet/tweets. We are commenting on a submission to Wired Magazine, a publication owned by Conde Nast. Wired's reporting added nothing to this story. (There is no reporting) They didn't interview the person, they didn't interview her employer, and they didn't offer any analysis whatsoever. The reporter didn't storify the tweets herself. Wired did insert advertisements and is getting page views for it though. It is Wired's job to do more than they have done here. You should expect more from them or anyone who purports to inform you.
Staff works for management. While it's nice to have times where the management "works for" their employees, the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy.
Staff being subordinate to management in an organizational sense is one thing. Staff members being forbidden even to approach anything, which might grow into a discussion of how and where management's interests are actively inimical to their own, is quite another.
You're making the best arguments for unionization I've heard in the tech industry for quite a long time.
> the whole point is that management is supposed to be happy
What? Workers sell their labor to a company for a price. The whole point of any transaction is to satisfy both parties. Sharing market information is something that both buyers and sellers do. Why do you think this should be unilateral?
Presumably he believes that managers are there to expropriate the surplus happiness of the workforce. It's not alienation of your labour until you're feeling properly alienated.
Don't conflate management with the company's owners, whose happiness is the actual goal. (Granted, sometimes these are the same people, wearing different hats.) As anyone who has worked in private industry can tell you, management often acts in its own interests, even when those interests conflict with those of both employees and owners.
> OF COURSE the MALE coworker can do WHATEVER HE WANTS, as long as we don't actually have any details about it.
I read that differently. My reading:
* The fact that he was still getting them points how how arbitrary this was, and that she was being retaliated against.
* The whole story leaves me with the impression that she had ownership/credit for the spreadsheet, and that is why she was specifically being targeted with the rejected Peer Bonuses.
* He may have still be getting the Peer Bonuses because he was under a different manager/supervisor that was more forgiving.
Either way both are completely unverifiable. Take both with a huge fistful of salt until both parties are interviewed and quoted and research is done into what happened.
One 'side' is a non-anonymous first-person account from one of the major parties in the described event.
The other 'side' is a post from Redditor 'dickbutt_md', who claims to have called up "a friend" who works at Google. In dickbutt's account, the friend claims not to know Joy personally, and not to have been involved in the events, but manages to describe Joy as "passive aggressive" and "not classy", and closes by saying "Google is fucking awesome and anyone who says otherwise is talking out their ass."
I kind of wish this were not the top-voted comment on an HN thread about pay equity.
Google has a lot of internal discussions in town halls, G+, TGIFs, memegen etc. You don't have to know someone personally to know how they approach issues.
Also I can completely understand why the Googler on reddit chose to remain anonymous. There's a pretty vocal brigade of "rabble rousers"(for lack of a better term) at Google.
It would not be the first time we've been duped by people with an agenda. See the whole dongle shitfest for an example. So until Wired does actual research into what happened and quotes people, who the hell knows what happened.
The purpose of my comment above was just to share an opposing side of the story. It's good to question things.
There are a few things in common but that account is far more professional – note the lack of personal disparagement directed at her and the direct acknowledgement that they had significant problems in parts of the company.
Explaining how salary disparities might have happened is very different from saying she's making it up or calling them a rabble-rouser.
Erica is strongly implying that she was discriminated against either because of her colour or her sex, but these reports seem to suggest that there were other reasons for her PB rejection and the salary disparities, and therefore her entire spiel is (probably) invalid.
Some disparagement seems reasonable, unless she has some more evidence to back up her claims of discrimination.
Or, as many others have pointed out, that her experience with her immediate management and group can be true without being representative of the entire company.
Note that, unlike the unverifiable hecklers, deelowe did not claim that her experience was invalid or that the numbers in the spreadsheet were inaccurate but instead discussed the question of sampling bias or simply the sample size being small enough to be skewed by other known factors.
As I pointed out in my comment, I'm talking about the accusations of racism/sexism. In particular the accusations of racism regarding her peer bonuses, telling the "known racist" to "fuck off", etc. That seems to be completely unsubstantiated/refuted.
It's fair enough being upset about your peer bonuses being rejected. What is not okay is to just to some invalid conclusion about racism and then slander your company in public.
I agree that the Reddit user lacks the same level of credibility as the original author.
On the other hand he is basically spelling out all of the things that I noticed from the original tweets.
1) The tweets mentioned normalizing currencies. In every international company that I have worked in, pay ranges varied by geography. I'm not sure how you could do this accurately as the cost of living between many countries in which Google operates is not directly comparable.
2) In reading the tweets it seemed clear that peer bonuses were only being rejected when they appeared to be for the work on the spreadsheet. I haven't worked at many companies with peer bonus systems, but most of them would have frowned on sending bonuses for something like this. It is outside of the purpose of the system.
3) Yeah, this person likes to "stir the pot" a bit. That's not always a bad thing, but it is bound to have some impact on a person's career (politics are everywhere). It's hard to separate the signal from the noise about what actually happened here.
This really reads like more of the same story, I don't see these two narratives to be in opposition. For sure, one reads pretty angry at Google and the other is clearly pro-Google but the facts are much the same.
Well, no. The ex-employee says management was pissed and hush hush.
The reddit comment says management mentioned it openly in one of their scheduled all-hands weekly meeting.
Quote: "Friend says the sheet was addressed a company all-hands meeting (it wasn't the focus of the meeting, apparently they have an all-hands every week and it was mentioned. Can that be right tho? Aren't there like tens of thousands of people all across the world? How can you have an all-hands meeting the world over every week? anyway...)"
Maybe you should read the comment again, it does not say management brought it up. My understanding of these google meetings is anyone can bring up things.
Also:
(1) The fact that management can discuss something does not mean they do not object to it. There are many degrees of disapproval.
(2) Management is not a monolith, it's composed of many people taking many sometimes contradictory actions -- the fact that Joe was not harassed on Friday does not mean that Joe was not ever harassed.
Maybe I'm just too cynical and jaded, but to me it just sounds like damage control from the management side.
Once word got around about this spreadsheet, what else can management do? As management, you let everyone know that you know about it and you backpeddle from your problematic "we will fire you for your involvement" position. Someone from Human Resources affirms what everyone now knows (from doing a quick Google search), that this is not grounds for dismissal but that it makes things hard for management, so on and so forth.
Linked comment from 'guy on reddit who claims to have a friend at google' doesn't actually dispute substance of @EricaJoy's claims although it thinks it does.
Seeing the upvoted comments here makes me /sigh for HN, a bunch of BS, FUD and victim blaming.
Well, rigorous proof is possible within mathematics[1]. However, applying that measure to verifying reality is nonsense. Even within maths, rigorous proofs require decoupling of the abstract proposition (what you prove) from reality (your assumptions).
[1] and "theoretical X" for X in {"computer science", "physics", "chemistry", ...}, which all are essentially math as well.
I hate that wage disparity is being heralded as a gender issue. It's really a negotiating problem. My coworker and I were hired together, same position, same experience, and offered the same salary. When I was offered the position, I asked for $15,000 more and they gave it to me. My coworker didn't ask for more and is therefore now making $15,000 less than me. After six months, I asked for a raise of $5,000. He never asked for a raise. So now he makes $20,000 less than me.
I'm sure there are plenty of ways for this to backfire, but I've always thought one of the most effective ways to eliminate salary bias is for companies to list a role's salary up front, in the job posting, before they've begun interviewing. That way the salary is roughly set before the gender, race, height, physical attractiveness (i.e. any qualities that can cause unconscious bias) is known about whatever candidate a company eventually hires.
Obviously it wouldn't outright prevent negotiating - you could still ask for $15k above what they listed in the job posting - but it WOULD help candidates navigate some of the smaller moments during the interview process that can unknowingly undermine their negotiating position (e.g. "How much did you make in your last role?").
IMHO, managers like to keep salaries private so that they can take advantage of people who are not great at negotiating. My suspicion is that they believe they come out ahead: the few hires who negotiate high pay are outweighed by the many who end up with lower pay. I'd also be surprised if many of them were concerned that minorities or women ending up with lower pay; it seems like a great opportunity to blame these hires for being, again, poor negotiaters.
I work for a company with a fully transparent salary ladder in development department. We know how much every team mate earns. Still negotiation skills come to play. Those with better skills get promoted _faster_.
I suspect it's more because companies can't chose when they have to expand a team. If they need 5 new devs and they need them now, they are in a weak position when negotiating salary.
Publicising that a new unproven hire is earning more than existing proven staff is simply going to cause people to leave, which is even worse for the business than not hiring new staff.
Most people also agree that in ideal circumstances you wouldn't have to negotiate your wages (because you're effectively being rewarded for your negotiating skill, which is probably completely irrelevant to your actual productivity and value).
At my first "adult" job, I was actually offered more than I asked for, because the employer used this thing where all employees should fit within limits of a median for any given position (they were ranked somehow so many positions shared same rank).
I had a somewhat similar experience. I was doing good work at a place for about a year and got nothing not even a pat on the back. Next year started to get fed up, had a rough patch in my personal life, started getting short, angry and bitchy with people. Ran into technical difficulties on the project I was working on. My idea for solving it weren't listened to and even worse had people listened it would have been a small disaster because my idea was crap. I started staying home either "working" or just plain calling in sick. When I showed up for work people were walking on eggshells around me. So I was an unproductive douche basically. That year I got the biggest raise I've ever had. Don't know why. About two weeks after that I quit.
What's the alternative, though? No salary negotiations? How does that give employees more power? I'd rather figure out a way for poor negotiators to get better at it, than take that away from everyone.
Here's Joel Spolsky on the alternative they used at Fog Creek. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-em... . A goal was that "A manager would have absolutely no leeway when it came to setting a salary. And there would be only one salary per level."
I would agree but I think there is something about a person who believes in themselves enough to negotiate that can be a differentiator. For instance, my coworker is a total slacker, comes in late and leaves early. I come in early and leave late and take on extra work. Someone who is determined enough to feel they are worth more money will probably statistically work harder. I know it isn't the same for all people, but I would bet that the majority of people who ask for more money work harder.
It's not unusual to find female employees who are doing extra work because they don't have the confidence to deflect it or seize credit, and who are comparably underpaid.
Work hardness (how do you measure this, anyway?) and salary are weakly correlated above the minimum in most work places.
That's an extreme generalization that's sexist against males and females. There are plenty of women with confidence and negotiation prowess and men that lack them.
People who are genuinely good at what they do don't need to spend extra time doing it - putting in longer hours is a sign that you're not very good at what you do. Either that or you're going 'above and beyond' (gold-plating in project management terms) and doing things that the client hasn't agreed to pay for. That's actually worse - you're giving revenue away.
I have a near endless stream of work to do. I could easily put in 70+ hours a week doing things that need to be done, not struggling and not gold-plating. Where have you worked that does not always have a "next thing to do"?
Where have you worked that does not always have a "next thing to do"?
There's always things you could be doing, but they're often not critical (or even necessary). If someone is staying late to do those things (or doing them during the day and staying late to do the critical stuff) then they deserve no additional recognition. People should go home when the important stuff is done.
If people can't fit all the important work in to their day then they're either not good enough at their job or their manager is giving them too much to do. Either way, there is a problem.
BS i.m.o. It is more like advertisements and marketing. Your work and your ideas don't have to be good as long as they are remembered. The louder you are, the more space you take, the more you let people know of your ideas and your work, the more money you get. If you quietly just do your job without any fuss you get forgotten. Women seem to have very little room for middle ground in today's corporate world either they get forgotten or they develop the worst case of testicular braggadocio you ever seen and end up being managers and CEOs.
It would be a interesting study to read if that is true. I could see the exact opposite be proven, as people who invest in trade skill don't the same energy and time to spend on negotiating and improving their social/political standing in the company. People have a limited number of hours on the day and focusing ones attention on one thing should naturally result in higher results in that area.
Would you feel the same way if you worked in a company where 90% of the men were paid 15% less than the women? Would you believe that it was just every individual man being worse at negotiating? Or would you suspect there was something else happening? That's the situation women face.
There is no wage gap. Men and women are paid roughly the same for the same position. Aggregate differences in gender pay are due to choice of career not discrimination. Time for this myth to die.
Decades of highly-reproduced social study performed by professionals called a "myth" by a simplistic narrative 1-liner by anonymous commenter on HN. Cool.
Hear hear. There was a big discussion in a London radio station a week or so ago about that, since David Cameron wants to fight for equal pay across genders and have companies over 250 or so people publicise the pay gap across genders. Which by itself sounds a laudable thing but really unrealistic for many trades, and in particular software development. The demand is high, supply is low, and you can have people with less experience than yourself making more because they negotiated better. That has nothing to do with genders as you say - its all down to negotiation skills.
I remember reading some studies that suggest that this alone, i.e. men being more likely to go and ask for a raise / negotiate their salary, can account for most of the "gender gap".
The social pressure is a cop out. There's social pressure to drink alcohol, eat fast food, keep up with celebrities, etc. and there are plenty of people that don't do it. I think it's derogatory to women that we treat them like they can't think and act for themselves.
Half my team are women and they make more money on average then the guys because they don't take shit from anyone.
It doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman. You will never get what you don't ask for. It's in the best interest of every company to pay as little as the employee will take so every employee has to stand up for themselves.
We can't keep blaming "society" for things we need to do as individuals for ourselves.
There is a difference between blaming society and dealing with thousands of years of social pressure. Social pressure doesn't mean listening to what TV and Movies say you should do. It's dealing with input from your parents, your family, your friends, and your peers.
Dismissing the anecdotal evidence of the women on your team, you have no idea of the differences in environmental stimuli women experience vs men.
GENERALLY speaking, and no, it's not universal, but on average, women are much less aggressive and assertive in situations where there is risk to social standing or cohesion. And it's not just their self-perception, others (including other women!!) perceive women as negatively for acting in ways that is rewarded in men.
I'm sure you've never done it yourself, but the fact is it exists, and it will not go away if we pretend that there is no bias, there is no further progress to be made.
Similar to how claiming we live in a post-racism society promotes racism.
You can't dismiss his "anecdotal evidence" then make a sweeping generalization that on average women are much less aggressive and assertive due to their upbringing and provide no evidence.
At least his comment was based on personal experience of successful women on his team.
It's in the best interest of every company to pay as
little as the employee will take so every employee has
to stand up for themselves.
That's true, if the company culture you're looking for is a back-stabbing dog-eat-dog climb-over-his-corpse kind of a thing, which some companies undoubtedly are, and some of those I'm sure are financially very successful, but it's not how I want to spend my week.
>There's social pressure to drink alcohol, eat fast food, keep up with celebrities, etc. and there are plenty of people that don't do it.
And when social pressure increases, more people drink alcohol, eat fast food, keep up with celebrities, etc.; when it decreases, people do these things less.
Going against the social current entails loss and risk of loss. It's strange that libertarian types don't understand economic incentives, since they expect them to alone hold society together.
It's an interesting question, what (if anything) should be done to correct this, if this indeed makes up for the majority of gender wage disparities. Ex-Reddit CEO Ellen Pao got rid of wage negotiations altogether to correct for women's supposed inability to negotiate. That seems to me like the wrong way to go about it. I don't know the right answer, but I tend to favor bottom-up solutions (for example, encouraging people to learn negotiation and assertiveness strategies which are valuable for more than just making money) rather than protectionist top-down solutions (eliminating negotiations, affirmative action programs, encouraging litigious environments, etc).
It has to be for them (people who believe there is a gender pay gap) to try and make any change. There are plenty of examples where pay is different regardless of gender: sports and entertainment would be two big ones.
With sports, people are payed differently even if they fill the same position on a team. Why? They aren't the same. They bring different skillsets. It's the same with movies. The main character will make more than someone 20 spots down in the credits list. Someone with a well-known name will make even more. All of this wage difference that can occur across genders.
But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table.
Edit: To clarify, I have no issue with a company removing any pay difference between employees. I only have an issue with those who think paying people differently is inherently a problem.
> But with tech everyone should be paid the same if you share the same title regardless of how different you are or how much value you bring to the table.
Why? Different people bring different value. The same title can have wildly different roles, some positions with the same titles can be much harder to replace than others.
For example: at my company my team has a very specialized role that is far outside the domains of all other developers (we're talking about a large multinational here, with thousands of employees). You bet your ass we make a decent chunk more than most other devs, replacing any one of us would cost a ton of money and require over a year of learning about our stuff; replacing one of the devs who works on our main product? In half a year you could get someone to full productivity.
In other words: some employees are more expensive to replace than others, either shower them with €€€ or pay a much higher cost when they go work elsewhere.
It is a negotiating problem, and I think that that is an issue (be it gender-related or not). It rewards competitive thinking over cooperative thinking - people who'd rather work in a fair and equal environment are more likely to accept the same salary they perceive others will get - i.e. usually the proposed salary. Competitive minds have less qualms about claiming higher rewards.
Mechanisms like publishing salaries allows for a fairer salary whether you are cooperative or competitive. If you earn more, you probably can justify it in front of colleagues and bosses.
Some say cooperation over competition is a 'female' trait, but personally, I feel the same. I am successful at negotiation, but I'd rather know that my colleagues earn the same when they work the same, which is why I try to encourage talk about salaries.
We need to get out of this mindset that competitiveness is wrong. Competitiveness is a creative force. It's a way of seeking and incentivizing value.
The problem with open salaries is that it spurs continual second-guessing. And if anyone thinks that open salaries are less susceptible to popularity contests, they're wrong.
Assessing value is hard. We'll always get it wrong somehow. Encouraging people to become better negotiators may be the best way to handle salaries. When people make a case for their value and are rewarded in money for it there is at least an extremely grounded avenue for correction. The company will continually look at whether a person is worth that amount of money.
I think it's not necessarily an edge if you are competitive instead of cooperative when negotiating. Both styles can work at least according to the theories I've read.
The problem is of course some people are generally less likely to negotiate and they are the ones that are shafted.
Not sure that I buy into the argument that negotiating salary is "competitive thinking". The goal is to reach a compromise that everyone is happy with, which, to me, seems rather cooperative.
I had a similar experience when I was at my last job; a woman and I were being hired for two open spots in a development group, and she was being offered $3,000 less than me(not sure why, especially since she had a Master's whereas I just had a bachelor's). I found this out from the recruiter who was trying to place me, as I had tried to negotiate for another $5k over the offer, but they wouldn't budge since the other person was already $3k under me. I had no way of reaching out to her to try to get her to go higher, too :)
If your employer said to your colleague 'look bronxcoder asked for and received a raise and you both work equally hard so you will get the raise too' - would you be annoyed or happy ?
I think is much more ethical to treat people like this but maybe your colleague isn't doing such a good job as you.
I spoke to my manager about our pay gap a while ago and he said that I showed much more initiative during the interview process than my coworker did. I have more polished side projects than he has, scored better on the entrance test, etc.
He told me that I was worth the extra money but if I hadn't asked for it, he wouldn't have given it to me extra money.
Yes! It's not that somebody said, "hey, we can pay this person less simply because they are a woman." It's that the employee themselves may have negotiated for more.
Even if this is true, this doesn't magically make it not a gender issue. What if women are generally given less leverage by default in negotiations? What if implicit gender biases have a chilling effect on women's expectations when they go to negotiate? What if women are discouraged from negotiating at all?
I think, given what I've seen so far, women are given less leverage to start with, they are subject to the chilling effects of gender biases, and they are discouraged from negotiating more often than not.
Sure, a woman can overcome these obstacles, but she shouldn't have these extra obstacles in the first place. The "pay gap" is almost certainly not due to managers thinking "oo I'll pay her less because she's a woman," but it is still indicative of some (more complex) gender inequality.
If the effect is so widespread, surely it'd be financially irresponsible for any company in their right mind to hire men because women would negotiate less in the middle and long terms.
I think most managers would see that as an unreliable prediction to make, and not very valuable when making hiring decisions. When hiring someone, you are solving an immediate problem, and not often thinking of the future raises the person is going to negotiate or not negotiate.
What you are saying might be true if most hiring was done by CEOs and not department managers.
I think this shows how selfish her goals really were. As if her manager asking "Don't you know what could happen?" implied that bad things could happen to only her. Why would she assume they were saying she would be retaliated against (or that anyone would be retaliated against)? What about the other 5% of the company this affected?
Yeah I didn't even at first take it to mean "the company can retaliate". I assumed the manager was referring to unrest & animosity at people undeservedly making more money than others.
It might also refer to the forced redundancies that will follow after everyone has received their pay rise and the organisation need to make budget cuts. Then of course projects start to fall behind and so temporary funds are release to bring in a bunch of contractors, who are on way more than anyone else.
And before anyone says that Google is too profitable an organisation for this to be an issue, remember that PLCs have shareholders who can demand that costs be cut in order to increase profits. If you have a pension, you could indirectly be that shareholder.
As an employee you should kind of care about the company's problems, especially if they're ones that you caused. It doesn't read like a threat to me as much as it's a "Do you even realize the internal repercussions of everyone discussing their salaries?"
They're just asking for insight into why this could be a problem (think 3rd grade, "Do you know why this is wrong?") and she shoots back aggressively. I think her inability to produce any sort of thought besides oppression shows that she probably isn't able to handle issues like this.
Those repercussions are irrelevant in their entirety because it is both legal and right to discuss compensation. There's nothing for her to consider as wrong and inconveniencing an employer by exercising completely and utterly protected rights is not, in any way or by any stretch of the word, her problem. The company may have a problem with openness and truthfulness, but it's not hers, and to lay it at her feet speaks volumes of you but not of her.
I don't think she's an SJW and putting quotes around it doesn't mean I ever said that (I didn't). I just think she's a shitty employee.
Whether or not it's legal for her to discuss those things, it's also legal for her employer to be upset that she's making the work environment more difficult for others.
The problem with these noble issues is that there's a view that you can do no wrong as long as you're fighting for what's right. She clearly sees herself as some Snowdenesque whistle-blower, and she's surprised that it's cold in Russia.
> it's also legal for her employer to be upset that she's making the work environment more difficult for others
I guess I'm not done, because I am compelled to point out that this is completely false. That's the entire point of all of the legality around the protection of these discussions under United States law: that, no, your employer cannot be "upset" at you for choosing to exercise that right.
But they didn't actually do anything to her! What did they do? Please, I am clearly missing it.
Yes they can absolutely be unhappy that their employees are causing a problem, that's why they tried to discuss it with her. But they didn't do anything to her for it.
An employer is the power-holder in almost any employer/employee relationship. And so even the "discussion" exists to have a chilling effect upon that worker. The act of having that uncomfortable and fraught discussion is in itself a threat. You have those "discussions" to get a worker to stop exercising their rights. There's no other reason to have it.
When your employee does something that is entirely legal and protected, you don't have a "discussion" with them. You nod, say "OK", and you do absolutely nothing else, because nothing you do in response to it, as it pertains to that employee, can be anything other than hostile--and hostility of your direction. Not the employee's, not now and not ever.
First off, all we know is that it was a question "Do you know what could happen?", not some scary "discussion". Such a chilling question to ask someone, so intimidate, very trigger.
It's good to know that my employer can never question anything I do legally without being hostile, though.
That's an interesting misreading of what I said. Let's try again: your employer had best not even give the appearance of questioning legally protected actions. Is that straightforward enough? Does that make sense?
But I cannot envision a situation where the question "do you realize what could happen?" is not implicitly suggesting that the realization to be made is one of company harm--and thus, yes, threatening.
Isn't it possible that employee and employer can have a non-antagonistic relationship? What if the "discussion" was intended entirely in the interest of the employee?
In any event, it seems to me that it was good advice given the context.
> Isn't it possible that employee and employer can have a non-antagonistic relationship?
I'm skeptical, given the vastly divergent goals of employer and employee. I'm borderline-dismissive at Google scale, where there's no meaningful employer/employee relationship to be found at most levels of the hierarchy (and a relationship with a manager isn't the same thing). Of course, there are models of organization (co-ops and the like) where one can have a mutualistic relationship with the other stakeholders, but--these aren't that.
> What if the "discussion" was intended entirely in the interest of the employee?
The interest of the employee just happens to involve not rocking the boat, not ensuring that everybody's got an accurate picture of the market, and depressing workers' negotiation position so that the company can profit? To me the possibility of this what-if is so remote as to be laughable.
It might not be illegal, but you have to realize you've labeled yourself as a pain in the ass, or someone willing to irritate and cause problems for a company, thus this will probably affect your ability to be promoted, or work on important projects / teams.
Everyone can respond how it is legal, their right, etc, but the fact that you are now known as a troublemaker won't bode well for you.
If a company decides that exercising one's rights is "troublemaking", that company should be utterly destroyed without hesitation or remorse.
The corporation exists solely at the sufferance of the society that grants it its charter. Someday maybe we'll remember this instead of throwing our hands up in the air and giving up.
Sorry but not really...You could be totally in the right to say whatever you want on a conference call, make promises to a customer that you've decided for yourself matter that the company has no way of fulfilling, these things are all legal and fine, but you aren't going to be getting promoted any time soon.
The world is not black and white, no matter how naive folks here believe it to be.
I don't think you have a particularly strong conception of what a right is. I do not have the right to represent my company to a third party (though I may be tasked with doing so in the course of my duties, as an agent of the company). I do have the right to discuss compensation with my colleagues, as enshrined by the government that ensures that company's legal status.
The world is not black-and-white. This is. I do not understand, Steinbeck notwithstanding, the steadfast desire to take the minimal power of the worker out of the worker's hands.
You seem to be equating 'acting within the law' with both moral conduct and efficacy (from the perspective of the charter). This is denying that efficacy from the perspective of the company, contra the law, moral code, or the charter could have a positive outcome. In fact, it appears that successful corporations are constantly pushing on all 3 restraints, and in the marketplace, corporations that ride the edge are more competitive, thus more successful, and therefore deliver greater benefit. How then does it make sense to immediately dismantle a corporation that breaks the rules even in a small way (destroying huge amounts of value)?
It seems that you're advocating a 'punishment as deterrent' strategy for society along the lines of capital punishment. "If you violate the rules even slightly, you will be executed." Is that a good strategy for encouraging lawfulness while preserving efficacy? And is law the perfect (or the best) mechanism for encoding moral behavior?
> How then does it make sense to immediately dismantle a corporation that breaks the rules even in a small way (destroying huge amounts of value)?
It determines the values of your society. Fuck with the powerless at your own, extreme risk. If your values are more important than your spreadsheets, then the violation of the rights of the weak must take precedence. And, for me, it does; I'm proud to say that I've been pretty on-point about hewing to that in my adult life, even when balancing managerial responsibilities to an employer.
We can argue about the level of impact that must be assessed; I'll bend on something like the revocation of a charter for this (though there are plenty of corporate crimes for which it's a fair response). But suppression of worker rights should involve a very, very harsh penalty that makes the company not simply think twice from, but recoil in utter fear about, doing so again. (Perhaps a personal consequence to the actor involved; I don't really believe in the fictional person of the corporation and I'm okay with holding its agents responsible for its bad behaviors.)
> It seems that you're advocating a 'punishment as deterrent' strategy for society along the lines of capital punishment.
Essentially, yes, but there's a multiplier involved that makes this comparison fuzzy. Organizations, which are not people, should be held to significantly higher standards of moral rectitude than any individual due to their geometrically (even exponentially?) greater power and ability to impact others. Impacts that would be "small" on the individual scale are seismic at Google-scale, and the punishments must reflect this.
I think there are better strategies for encouraging lawfulness (and, more important, ethical behavior) at the individual scale, and even at the societal level. But the modern corporation's entire schtick is being above that society--look how many useful idiots speak positively of the "amorality" of a corporation. If an appeal to the better nature of which people celebrate its non-existence, I'm okay with giving fear a go. I mean, we already live in the cyberpunk dystopia of the eighties, minus the mohawks and shoulderpads--at this point, inaction is acceptance.
To be fair, Google respects robots.txt (and the atrocious "right to be forgotten"), and they won't stop you from using GMail if you encrypt everything with PGP. Unlike others (cough-Facebook-cough), they usually don't feel the need to trick users into sharing more than they'd want. The classic "if you've done nothing wrong" attitude is more a personal opinion of certain individuals (a certain Eric Schmidt comes to mind) than intrinsic to Google culture. So I don't think you're being fair here; it's not like they actively try to distribute salary details of all other companies...
When one signs up for G+, their G+ profile (containing information about them) becomes public. It is easy to rush through the setup process, especially when one did not desire to go through it, and accidentally share more information than desired.
That's totally different, antsar. I'm 95% sure the motive for that was to simply grow the user base of G+ and try to get more people to know that the platform even exists.
That probably was the motive. But the side effect is that now people have public G+ profiles which they may not have wanted, sharing information about them (even as simple as their name and photo) that they would rather keep private.
Those two things don't overlap as much as you think they do. Just because I want all the info for myself doesn't mean I want all the info public or for everyone (no matter what I say).
In fact if getting info is getting money/an advantage/..., then wanting all of it while not wanting others to have it, and not liking yours being given away, makes total sense.
Not taking side for or against Google here (and if I did, I would be all for salaries being publicly accessible), but you can't blame them or accuse them of being hypocrite when they do what they believe makes sense for them.
That depends on your motives... they believe that all information should be available to them so they can leverage that information to make a squijillion dollars. Nothing about that mandate suggests that all information should be available to all... information wants to be free - to them. The fact we all want it is not their concern. It is not in their financial interest to give up that information to anyone, it doesn't further their bottom line, which is the only real mandate they care about. If they could monetize salary transparency, trust me, they would have made that information free too.
In fact, it potentially hurts their bottom line because then they'd have to have pay equality amongst their ranks - and I don't mean pay equality from a male/female standpoint (though that is a concern), I mean from an employee to employee standpoint. Pay transparency gives everyone an equal footing on the negotiation playing field. This also means that even the worst negotiator in the room can potentially earn the same as the top superstar on the team. What do you think that does to Google's bottom line? They could have been paying the superstar with the shitty negotiation skills peanuts to earn them millions, now they've gotta pay him the same as the pretty good developer with excellent negotiation skills because he has them over a barrel and he knows he is the only one that has the ability to provide what they need to get where they need to go.
I wouldn't say this is hypocritical, this is accounting. Accountants want to keep the bottom line at the absolute minimum. When this means paying people different amounts to do the same job, salary discussion pisses people off. In the interest of keeping the peace and getting the job done, salary discussion must be suppressed or people figure what they're worth amongst themselves and they have more negotiation power. More negotiation power causes the bottom line goes up, counter to the accountants' mandate. You would have to completely upend accountants' viewpoints on capitalism to turn that perspective around, and until you do, law or no law, practices like this will continue.
Salary negotiation since the dawn of capitalism has been like a game of poker. You need to figure out their motivations and what value they're trying to extract from you. Once you know what your value is to them and what return on their investment you are capable of providing them, the negotiation begins. People make the mistake of comparing themselves against others in order to negotiate their salary when in fact it comes down to the game you play at the negotiation table. The game is to understand what value you provide to the company in the role you're pursuing and figure out a number you're both comfortable with. Too high and you don't get hired, too low and you get exploited. It doesn't matter whether you're male or female, it all comes down to figuring out the value they know you will provide them and exploiting that.
In the reddit comment thread for this u/dickbutt_md had a lengthy comment that seemed to call into question some of the details of this story. His facts weren't first hand, but then again, sometimes a little distance can help with objectivity. In any event, I tend to take comments from possibly-disgruntled former employees with a pinch of salt.
Another factor to consider is that, at huge companies, not all management has a unified vision. It is entirely likely that the article source's manager and the next manager above him/her disliked the spreadsheet while the "official HR position" on the matter was given at some kind of large meeting.
I work at an enterprise with ~5,000 employees, and attitudes toward topics like transparency vary wildly, even in cases where there is an official company stance. This is because it is common to give managers a lot of freedom to manage their departments without interference. So, for example, our company has a pretty good work-from-home policy, but your manager is completely allowed to ban it in your department if he or she feels like it.
Basically, it is possible that both sources are mostly accurate, and they represent the perspectives from different parts/levels of the company at Google.
first hand account from even a disgruntled employee or some maybe true maybe false 2nd hand account from reddit rando? one doesn't hardly even seem like it's worth a mention unless it helps confirm your preconceived bias.
On one hand, we have a primary source putting her name on the line, publicly, with a story about her personal experiences. On the other, you have "dickbutt_md" talking about his-friend-at-Google/his-uncle-at-Nintendo and how the primary source that the secondary source doesn't know personally is "a passive aggressive rabble rouser."
And we have HN posters reposting it like it means something.
I think we just hit the peak of this "do anything to discredit a woman who has a beef with a tech company" thing.
Is this one of those "high information", intelligent comments? Seems like it amounts to little more than gossip. I'm also wondering if you could point me to what you think your best comment is? Thanks.
The article format is completely busted by Twitter's display rules and made unreadable. In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued. Those tweets belong to Twitter now and are good for nothing else but ferrying ads. I won't have my time wasted by trying to read that crap.
I had no idea this was a trend. How could anyone ever think this is a good idea? You'd think the editors at wired would be able to copy and paste, surely that's easier than embedding 45 tweets.
Or Wired could do some actual journalism and, I don't know, interview the original poster plus ask her ex-boss and Google for comments plus try and track down the mysterious other man?
Journalists don't need to obey a TOS (at least in the US where it is specifically protected in the constitution "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"), watch the news sometime they don't get consent forms for all the people walking by in man on the streets segments. (Or a better example where news outlets published details from the snowden leaks)
I guess if all you want to do is post a bunch of tweets and not write any context or additional information about it this is the way to do it, but if you actually want to be a journalist TOS means nothing.
30 tweets makes 30 times the claim on attention of your followers, regardless of content. A single tweet is 30 times less likely to be read. This is a structural inefficiency of the twitter platform.
They probably wouldn't sue a private person for using tweets however they want in a private context. A publication with millions (just a guess) of readers is something quite different.
That's nonsense. The person who wrote the tweets retains ownership, they have simply licensed Twitter to display them in a certain way with certain requirements.
Slight variations in legal details don't make the article any more readable. Even the reasons why it can't be formatted otherwise stay exactly the same. The difference you're pointing out makes no difference at all.
Totally disagree. The article is hard to read because the author is lazy, it has nothing to do with "Twitter's display rules." The author could have quoted the tweets or asked permission to reprint them in another format or used them as the source for original reporting instead of posting them verbatim. It's the difference between embedding the PDF of a legal ruling vs writing an article about what it means.
i hope things like this serve as a wake up call to all young talents willing to sacrifice their lives for these companies, enamored with some idealized visions of what they are and do.
a company is a company. an agent for making money, first and foremost. any positive change they bring is a side-effect, and due to their ever greater power they must constantly be policed, at least by releasing unpleasant information like this.
And in my opinion as a young talent, Google is highly overrated when it comes to creating good software. Sure they have some hits, but a lot of it also is kind of bad.
To be regarded as the best of the best, I think they make pretty shitty software.
I feel similarly about Facebook. I feel it with some justification, but I'm probably wrong. To do what they do at the scale they do it, for it to even work let alone work pretty much perfectly, pretty much all the time for pretty much everyone is a goddamn miracle. But there are so many little things about FB software (mostly the UI/UX) that annoy the shit out of me, so I get grumpy and think their software sucks.
Having worked at Google, I think it's worth saying, their software is fucking astonishingly amazing. The magic tricks that go into the simplest things are mindboggling, and what's been built behind the scenes to enable it all is pretty incredible.
Also, um, a lot of their software is far from shitty: Gmail, search, docs+spreadsheets, new photos, youtube to name a few. If you think any one of those are "pretty shitty", well...I dunno what to tell you.
Gmail is good. Search is good. Docs+Sheets are .. ok for small things. The rest of Drive is a mess. I've not used the photos nor ever been linked to someone's gallery there. Youtube is technically impressive but also notorious for its comments section, and of course all of these are subject to the usual data retention questions.
My question was a rhetorical one to get the OP to think about what the relationship between "making money" and "generating value" might be. The way he put it, it's as if they are completely disconnected. Another way to phrase "making money" is "providing a service that people are willing to trade some of their livelihood for." Could that not be a proxy for at least some "positive change"? And anyway, is "change" the only thing of value?
and i ignored you because this method of trolling with "rhetorical" questions is first of all very disrespectful, and somehow always used by people with predictably boring insights.
if you will pay more attention to what i actually wrote, i never implied that "making money" and "positive change" exclude each other, nor did i ever say something so incredibly stupid like saying that providing a livelihood for people was wrong.
edit - ok, after rereading the comment: i'm sorry, this was an over the top reaction..
Managers evidently aren't supposed to approve more than one peer bonus for the same single act. I work at Google and hadn't heard of that policy before (then again, I'm not a manager) but it came up in an earlier thread.
Googler here on a throwaway. I personally know Erica and followed her career. it is quite frankly bizarre to see her biting back against Google given the opportunities she was given.
Erica was a tech stop employee, which is Google's help desk. in terms of technical ability, hiring standards for tech stop are lower than for SRE, where she ended up. every non-erica tech stopper, including me, who wants to transfer into the technical side of the org is required to pass a full suite of interviews, same as an outside candidate. it would be obvious from examining her submit history that Erica is not really meeting this bar. and yet a door was opened into SRE somehow.
she stayed a few months in SRE, underperformed, and spent a lot of time ranting on internal platforms. again, this is verifiable because commits at Google are public. she chose to join a team of about 50% women working under a female director, so I have a hard time believing discrimination is the major factor here. now she is gone and believes she was wronged and is telling everyone so. the similarities to michaelochurch are strong.
If that's the case it looks like she wasn't aware of it; especially if you're suggesting a door was opened for her maybe there's some more transparency that's needed in the process.
Nobody really believes michaelochurch received an apology from upper management. the lawsuit potential alone means that even if there was such an apology it would never be in email. he really actually seems to be crazy.
I personally really appreciated the spreadsheet because I am anti-capitalist, but I find Erica's version of the facts to be distorted in a self-serving way. I find it hard to believe this would meaningfully impact her career.
Two people of equal value and skill will both think they're better than the other person, and thus deserve higher compensation. How do you reconcile that with salary transparency? Seems like you'll be making more people unhappy.
Would wages turn into status goods, where both of those people continuously ask for raises because in their view they're underpaid, and eventually get denied, which will probably offend them and cause them to leave?
Secondly, does this actually solve any problems that simple backchannels between employees don't? People already talk about salary at lunch breaks or over coffee; the advantage is that those are private conversations between friends, rather than your salary being broadcasted to everyone for them to judge. What problem does this actually solve?
The salaries of public sector workers are public, as are the CEO and other parts of upper management in public companies. Everyone's salary is some countries are available to the public.
Quoting from that Atlantic article:
> The worse the individuals' pay was relative to the median, the worse their satisfaction. Those at or above the median, however, experienced no change in job satisfaction or job search intention.
> These economists conclude that pay transparency just makes workers who are on the low-end of the pay scale feel worse about their jobs, so it accomplishes little. Linda Barrington notes, however, that this contention misses a benefit of being unsatisfied: the likelihood of moving on .... to another job, which would match that improved performance with better pay
Regarding the second, backchannels, again we can look to real-world examples to show how difficult or delayed those backchannels might be. Consider Lilly Ledbetter, who was hired as a supervisor in 1979. It wasn't until (quoting from http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1874954,0... )
> Shortly before she was due to retire in 1998, an anonymous co-worker slipped a note into her mailbox at work comparing her pay against that of three other male counterparts. Ledbetter was making $3,727 per month, while men doing the same job were paid $4,286 to $5,236 per month.
> Her co-workers bragged about their overtime pay, but Goodyear did not allow its employees to discuss their pay
She filed an EEOC complaint, which the Supreme Court said wasn't allowed under the law because it the discriminatory acts of the past decades were older than the statutory 180 days for filing an EEOC complaint. The result was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which resets the clock after each paycheck made from the result of a discriminatory act.
Since it's easy to show existing cases where people don't talk about their salaries though back channels, your belief that "people already talk about salary" may be true for some, but surely is not universally true.
Plus, how many of those people are not telling the full truth?
This is a good point, especially regarding what would happen at a company immediately after going from opaque to transparent on salaries.
However, the resolution is pretty simple. Employees can either accept the justification given by management or not. If they are disgruntled about it, they can try their luck at a different employer, or use the information to learn how they can get a raise. This last point is one of the benefits for employees—they learn what would get them more money at their current employer.
Example: person 1 makes 15% more than person 2, and now both are aware of it. Person 2 is upset and talks to their manager. They find out the reason is because person 1 has additional education/certification and a couple years more experience. Now person 2 knows they can pursue the extra education/certification and use it as leverage to get a raise, when prior to the transparency they would have had no idea and possibly gone awhile longer making less money.
The company I work for tries to do this by giving you a "salary ratio" of you to everyone in your peer group (i.e. if your salary ratio is 1.06, you make 1.06x the mean salary within your band). By all accounts (verified with private conversations) they go out of their way to ensure women are compensated equally to men, so that's not an issue, but I wouldn't say it's really all that transparent. I don't know what my "peer group" is defined as, and I don't know if the number they give me is total bullshit.
It's really hard to provide salary transparency unless you have a spreadsheet with all the variables that go into creating it -- considered a closely guarded secret at most companies. The irony of all of this is that if you provided this to people, they would likely either agree with the formula or have constructive ideas for change.
It is important that things like this come out into the open.
When the typical doe-eyed college senior steps into the real world and is tempted to drink Eric Schmidt's kool-aid about changing the world (and how the honor of working at Google offsets the lower wage), such disclosures will help him understand that Google is just another money-making corporation. No more, no less.
Not that it matters and it was already said elsewhere, but peer bonus can be awarded only once for one thing. And it makes sense in a 50k+ company, where some social interaction happens and a single person can become peer-bonus-celebrity easily. It's not a good thing to incentivize :) Also if I were a manager sifting through some kind of peer bonus app I'd too be tempted to mark all as rejected after a while.
There was a book recently, Work rules! by Laszlo Bock who happens to be a head of people operations. He describes exactly those inequality patterns. It's nothing unusual, some of it is accepted (some people earn more for their higher value) and some not (woman not asking for a raise so easily). Seriously, just go and read a book, not some stream of contextless tweets gathered together.
I just finished Work Rules! and was going to say the same thing. There's a whole chapter in there explaining why it's smart not to pay everyone exactly the same.
Collecting evidence is the right way to approach situations like this. However, when the position is so politically entrenched, extra care _must_ be taken so that opponents cannot dismiss the data due to poor collection practices.
Unfortunately, that care was not taken in this case, and of course, you see opponents dismissing the data. The worst part is that this effort may actually prevent proper data collection in the future: "remember what happened last time we did that?"
a thing bothered me yesterday and it's still bothering me today and so now i want to tell a story.
One Sunday, some former coworkers & I were bored, talking about salaries on the internal social network instance. A spreadsheet was created. we put our salaries in the sheet, realized that it was created on a public to the world spreadsheet, so I copied it to internal. I then put a form on it and posted the link to the form and the spreadsheet on my internal social network account.
It took off like wildfire.
It got reshared all over the place. People started adding pivot tables that did spreadsheet magic that highlighted not great things re: pay. I did some general housekeeping stuff to the sheet (normalizing the gender field where it could be, exchange rate stuff, that sort of thing).
More reshares.
More people adding pay.
It became a thing.
I was invited to talk to my manager on Mon or Tues. Higher up people weren't happy. She wasn't happy. Why did I do it? "Don't you know what could happen?" Nothing. It's illegal to retaliate against employees for sharing salaries. "Wellll....".
Meeting ended.
Sheet kept going.
People were thanking me for it. They were also sending me peer bonuses. here's how peer bonuses work @ former co:
If you did something good, someone peer bonuses you, you get $150 net in your next paycheck. An important thing I learned during that time: peer bonuses are rewarded at managers discretion. My manager was rejecting all of them. Wasn't sure if this would be good for the company. Wanted to see what the outcome was. Mind you once a PB is rejected, that can't be undone.
Meanwhile, one of the other people involved, a white dude (good friend I won't name, he can name himself if he wants), was also getting PBs. His weren't getting rejected. I told him mine were. He was pissed. Wanted to tell everyone what was happening. I declined. A smattering of people knew what was going on. Backchannels being what they are at former co. (lol IRC #yallknowwhoyouare), it got around. Rejecting PBs was so unheard of, ppl didn't know it was possible. There was outrage when they found out. Shock that I wasn't talking abt it. Meanwhile, spreadsheet still going, getting spread around, pointed questions being thrown at mgmt about sharing salary ranges (hahah no). Most people agreed that it was A Good Thing. PBs kept rolling in. Rejections kept rolling out. One PB eventually got approved. Way after everything died down. Because the person worded it in a way that was vary vague. Any that were outright about the spreadsheet got rejected. 7 total in the end I think?
Higher ups still pissed. Some I used to support as an exec tech would pointedly not interact w/ me anymore. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Before I left, about 5% of former co. had shared their salary on that sheet. People asked for & got equitable pay based on data in the sheet. The world didn't end. Everything didn't go up in flames because salaries got shared. But shit got better for some people.
I explicitly gave ownership of the sheet to someone else before I left so it couldn't be taken over by mgmt when I was gone (can happen).
I am thinking of this because of everyone celebrating the fact that Google put Ida B. Wells in the doodle yesterday. Ida B. Wells was great. She did stuff to affect change of such a magnitude that if I'm half the woman she was, I'm doing pretty good. I don't claim to come close, but from time to time, I do stuff that will make things better for people at the expense of the establishment. I'm a pretty big believer in justice and fairness and will fight for both if necessary. Fighting for justice & fairness INSIDE Google doesn't go over well. Salary sharing is only 1 example. Blogger porn. Real names. Many others. Shit WILL hit the fan if you tell a racist (a well documented racist) to go fuck themselves though. In defense of the racist, obvi. So sure. Rah rah, Google did an Ida B. Wells doodle. Guaranteed that if Ida Wells were alive & working at Google today, there'd be many private calendar meetings focused on "her future" there.
tl;dr the sharing of one doodle does not a bastion of support for justice and civil disobedience make.
Isn't the reason why Erica Joy no longer works at google highly relevant? If she did this during a contract termination notice period requested by google, the reason for the termination might have something to do with whomever had any say in denying the peer bonuses. Which seems to be the whole point of the article, as the rest is pure speculation.
She did however mention that one bonus passed through, arguing it was too vague to be given because of the spread sheet. Hm.
I am struggling with the response to this. My questions are
1. Does the spreadsheet really cover 5% or so of google employees? If so it has pretty decent statistical validity despite selection bias etc?
2. Is the spreadsheet accurate, or at least will the reporting differences cancel out?
3. Assuming the above two are correct, and it seems fair to say yes, then whether she used Twitter, or is grinding an ace is totally irrelevant - Google has a fair pay problem, and really needs to deal with it.
On a personal note, a company is not a market. Class's theory of the firm says it eschews market discipline to achieve more efficient allocation of hard to judge resources. and as such I do not believe that saying "negotiate better" is a valid option for a company of this size. It's bad for everyone but the good negotiators.
It is unfortunate that a large amount of the discussion is being distracted by the stringing-together-tweets thing. Yes, it was lame to do that, but isn't it more worthwhile to talk about the content?
I think most of us probably work at a company that discourages salary transparency (most people do in general). I think we could have a more valuable discussion about how our experiences compare/contrast to the content of the tweets, and save the "omg a bunch of tweets are not an article!" comments for when someone writes a blog post about that and shares it on HN.
It's very common that people with similar skills have different salary, especially in a big company.
Big companies have the rules in salary increase rate for the current employees, but are willing to pay more to hire new employees from other companies.
For example, A's salary is $5000 and yearly increase rate is 5%. Two years later, A's classmate B is hired. B's salary is $6000. A's salary is $5512.5.
Similar thing happened to me. Luckily I got an exceptional salary increase years later. But eventually I left that company after 6-year service.
For some reason I was under the impression the spreadsheet was set up to detect gender/ethnicity based inequality in salaries. Not sure where I got that impression as the tweets do not mention it explicitly other than suggesting that some people asked and got increases.
At the end of the day, this is what I am curious about - was there inequality in pay, and if so, what was the difference.
The problem I see sharing salaries is that people tend to overestimate how good they are. So inevitably everyone will have salary envy and no one will be happy.
It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous
> The problem I see sharing salaries is that people tend to overestimate how good they are.
Absolutely. Gather 10 people from a company in a single room and I really doubt they will be able to agree on it. Especially when it's not even about how good they are, but how much value they provide. I have seen this issue in a team of 3 people I managed, it's hard to imagine what it will look like with 100+ people.
> It also would make explicit who is most valuable to the company.. which can be dangerous
This information is usually already expressed in the titles/roles the employees get. I don't see how publishing salaries would make any significant change to this.
Also, you are assuming that salaries do express the value for the company, which is to be doubted, according to the story at hand.
Be evil, pretend not to be. Google is evil and knows everything about everybody and shares it with various orgs including three letter orgs. The only thing positive about Google is the fact that it releases a lot of code out there for people to use. Other than that, Google is a corporate overlord.
She created an internal spreadsheet allowing Googlers to add their salary information.
Lots of people helped tweak the sheet adding data visualizations, comparisons, etc.
Google management told her they didn't like it, she pointed out that you can't be fired for sharing salary information.
Lots of colleagues were giving her "peer bonuses" for setting this up, but her manager kept blocking them, something which is apparently unheard of to the point that most people didn't know they could be blocked.
By the time she left, 5% of staff were apparently using the sheet.
Even more TLDR: Nothing particularly happened except that Google showed they dislike colleagues talking about salaries.
I've read that you can award a $150 bonus to another colleague, at which point a manager can approve or block the award. The second part,- manager blocking her from getting the bonus is what sparked the additional controversy.
edit: sibling comment says $100, could be either or.
Fellow Co-Workers nominate someone for a peer bonus, and if approved by a manager (edit: or whomever is responsible for approval), you get an extra $100 on your next paycheck (on your gross pay at least, but still nice).
Author created a spreadsheet with her salary/few other salaries of coworkers on it, posts it to google internal social network, 5% of workers fill it out, people start asking for better salaries, managers mad, her peer bonuses (coworker endorsements that net you a small bonus) get denied, everyone mad, she left(?)
TL;DR - Google operates in a parallel universe called "California", where employees can share each other's salaries on a company-wide shared spreadsheet without getting fired.
Not only did Google NOT fire anybody for it, they haven't even removed the spreadsheet from their own internal network. They simply refused to approve some $150 "peer-recognition" bonuses, meant to reward the employee for creating the spreadsheet. THAT is apparently enough to engage some kind of weird quasi-SJW outrage. As opposed to the real world, where everyone involved would be fired and given a negative reference for the rest of their career.
That's so cute. I bet you also have a link that says union-busting is illegal, too.
I'm not making a normative statement about the way things "ought to be", I'm making a positive statement about the way things "actually are" across most of the world (http://beta.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/positive-and-nor...). Shoot the messenger if you like.
> Google operates in a parallel universe called "California", where employees can share each other's salaries on a company-wide shared spreadsheet without getting fired.
Ought to be is the way it is. Firing an employee because he discusses his salary with other employees is illegal. You are free to fire that person, but you should expect a lawsuit.
And did you really link to a tutoring lesson about objective and subjective statements to 'prove your point'? What a useless thing to do. Your knee-jerk anti-establishment opinion about how the world works, based on your limited experience is not a good bellwether. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sophomoric); shoot the messenger if you like.
This is exactly what happens: jealousy and people thinking that they somehow deserve the money more than the person making more...blaming of on "sexism"
'Everyone with a different opinion than me is ignorant and stupid, and the downvotes I'm getting are surely because they want to maintain their bubble and not because I'm being rude.'
You're an asshole and no one is sorry that you're gone.
Sorry friend this is nonsense. One of the key pieces of negotiation is access to information. Organizations and managers respond well to rational appeals like "so and so has the same experience and does the same job but earns 10% more" or "I have an outstanding offer for X I am currently at (X-$10000), I know your position(BATNA) to imply a cost of (X-$1000) I think its reasonable to settle here for (X-$5000)"
The key is having information specifically to formulate your company's BATNA. The notion that salary sharing is bad for the employee is hogwash from unfair labor practices developed over decades.
Would you buy a car from a dealership if the dealer told you "you shouldn't comparison shop it will only make you resentful"? Yet we are willing to accept that claptrap from a company. Not in this lifetime.
In 2 previous jobs, I found out what others at the company were making. OK, they were managers, but still, it just made me pissed off. It didn't make me happy by any means.
As others note, people tend to generally think they're above average. Can you not see that exploding their delusion might not be such a great idea? Some of them have to be below average. A team who doesn't share salary info, can all be happy that they're all above average. If they start sharing salary, half will be below average and probably pretty pissed off.
The people who benefit, are people who are generally happy as they are. Would you like to know how much money your neighbours have? Why should it matter?
To be honest, what exactly did she want to accomplish with this? Where I live people are very hesitant of sharing their salary and doing something like this would be considered very rude. All it can possibly lead to is drama about salaries. Drama about why some people getting payed more then others. Should Google now start paying each and everyone exactly the same until everyone is happy? No of course not, it's no secret companies have different salaries for different employees. What matters is that YOU feel ok with what you're getting payed, not what others are earning.
The reason people are very hesitant about sharing their salary is because we have constructed a culture where it is taboo to share what you make. That we have these ideals about how terrible things could be if you knew what others were making in comparison to you.
Her manager talked to her saying "Don't you know what could happen?". Well management couldn't fire her for that, but could make her work life less then ideal. Possibly holding back bonuses out of spite? Worse job assignments?
The huge job salary scandal that Google was a part of kinda shows hows they can't be trusted to be honest about salaries and supportive of their workers.
You feeling ok with what you are getting paid is not what matters. What matters is getting fair market value for your worth. Many people make less then what they are worth because they either don't know how much they are worth, or are even too afraid to argue for what they feel they are worth. Companies exploit this and use salary negotiations as a way to hire employees for the absolute least amount possible.
We applaud companies for making record breaking profits, but we don’t applaud them for decreasing their profits a bit in favor of increasing all their employees spending power.
The issue is your employer has all the information on this. You are negotiating salaries at a disadvantage.
I find the idea that sharing salaries will cause drama highly suspect. Causing some to go and ask for equivalent pay is probably a good thing, managers don't have to go out and give you raises all the time, it's usually on you to push for it. With this information you can have a better idea of what to ask for and make negotiation more efficient.
What happens is that your spreadsheet won't be properly adjusted for all factors, people will look for bias, claim discrimination, and get a big bully to fine your company (and look caring and compassionate while doing it)
If a manager and company have any justification for pay differences that are not due to protected classes, then they have nothing to fear. If they do pay people differently because of protected classes, they may run into trouble, but I think that's okay.
If most companies were transparent, employees would be a lot more knowledgeable about what leads to more pay. I think we would see more negotiation and engagement and healthier conversations about money. People would be upset at first, but once we start collectively understanding the legitimate reasons for pay discrepancies, and we eliminate the illegitimate ones, I think most people would be happier.
Of course they have nothing to fear, because these prosecutions never serve a political agenda, the judicial system has displayed a commitment to integrity, people don't assume the accused are automatically guilty, and trials are so cost efficient that people only settle when they've done something wrong.
Even political agendas and sensationalist trials need some leg to stand on to be successful. If you hire honestly and set pay honestly and fairly, with recorded justifications, it is unlikely that your company would suffer any negative repercussions of pay transparency. However, this doesn't mean "absolutely no company anywhere will run into legal trouble due to this"
There are always exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions. The existence of an exception or outlier does not disprove what generally holds true for everyone else.
No, they really don't. I've seen it happen many times in finance, baseless accusations extracting large fines because settling is almost always cheaper than fighting in court. In something like hiring policies which can be discretionary, the problem is 10 times worse.
Are you verifying that the users are actually who they say they are when they share salaries? What if I were to go into the form and say that I was you, and that you made a billion dollars more than everyone else. Would that cause drama?
This just seems like a horrible idea. Feelings will be hurt. Productivity will be lost. Someone will quit. Maybe someone will benefit, but it's almost certainly not good for your team or your company.
People agree to work for salaries. They put down numbers like what they earned at their last job, or what they are looking for in the new job, and then employers make offers based on that. If someone agreed to work for a number, and is getting paid that... why make drama?
naive and oversimplified view... are you an employee or employer? I don't have issue negotiating salaries hard, but I personally know very bright people, who for various reasons failed at that, and once they learned other people's salaries (which happens eventually to most), they got extremely frustrated, felt strong injustice and some left. I have more sympathy for community-based approach rather than selfish everybody-for-themselves in this.
and no, you don't just come with any number you would like to see to an interview. if you overshoot too much, you probably won't be hired, depends on recruiter and company.
Well I manage a team, I have direct reports. I can tell you that Sally and Steve and Joe all have the same job title, but Joe is a rockstar and earns more, and Steve is a slacker who got the job because he knew someone. So when the averages come out, and Sally gets pissed because she's not making what Joe is making... that's what causes drama.
Pay really does, more often than not, reflect the individuals contributions. Why? Because as Joe's manager, I want to keep Joe. I know what market rate is for his position, and I do what I can to make sure he is paid above it. Steve... fuck that guy, let him make below average... he didn't deserve the job in the first place, and we'd all be better off if he quit.
Anyway the fact that it's not by name (so you can compare yourself to another person) makes it worse in my mind. If you are just going to share the salary for your position, we'd need to make different positions for Steve, Sally, and Joe... It would be Title Blah, Rank Joe. Everyone is different.
