Say you have 10 people sitting at a round table. Person 1 picks up a piece of paper and on it writes a sum of their salary + randInt(100_000, 10_000_000) remembering what the initial random number was. We can call this number the seed. They then pass the piece of paper to the right and person 2 reads the number, adds their salary and writes that number on a new piece of paper that they pass to person 3. Finally when person 10 hands the paper to person 1, person 1 subtracts the seed from the final number then divides that value by the number of people. That gives you the mean salary of the group.
I can't remember the exact phrasing but years ago my boss said at the team meeting something about not discussing salaries, and someone said later "I don't think you can say that" and he was like "oh, ok". The message was delivered though.
You know what those top earners are going to do then? Quit. And then you end up with overpaid mediocre talent and a product roadmap that is suffering from the loss of top performers.
The more we celebrate victimhood as some kind of hero status, the more we shame and punish those who achieve and create success the worse off we're all going to be. A private company has every right to compensate its employees with its private capital anyway it wants, and they're going to want to do it in a way that achieves the goals of the business. They're not distributing welfare checks, they're a business.
Public servants have a progression table, so by knowing their level, you know the salary.
Companies either have an union agreement, so it goes back to the same level agreements, or they have internal evaluation with salary matrix, so again by knowing department and skill level, it is relatively easy to get the salary value, minus possible bonus.
They are even part of some job offer descriptions.
So at the end of the day it is hard to grasp why it is so sacred to discuss it on US.
Roll a die and multiply (salary - 100k) by the spots on the die. Share that value publicly. Sum all such values and average them then divide by 21/6 and add 100k. Choose the 100k value to be closest to but not greater then your guess at the lowest salary.
Allow breaking down the salary into a sum of numbers, and putting them as separate slips into the hat.
Comparing confidential numbers is an important question in cryptography.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao%27s_Millionaires%27_proble...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_millionaire_problem
For example, if person 3 and person 5 collaborate, they can find out the salary of person 4.
i.e. If the minimum rand # is known to be 100,000, and person 2 receives the number 150,000 and knows it includes the salary of person 1...they will know person 1 makes <= 50k
The solution can be to include negative numbers in the RNG range, or keep the RNG range a secret (except to person 1).
The best part was, and they would emphasize this at every meeting, "that the company would pay the taxes for us" as if it were a big deal. People never believe me when I tell them this is how the non-devs got treated.
There used to be whole towns where you'd get entirely paid in, and shop with, corporate funny money
Oh, and Hearthstone packs
[edit: forgot Hearthstone]
[1] https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warcraft-iii-reforged
I don't know if it was Activision's influence, many of the original devs moving on, or World of Warcraft coming out, but since then everything about the company seems to have changed. So much of what they do nowadays just seem like money grabs. They release pay to win content meant to be addictive, dumbed down their art style to looking like cartoons that appeal to the least common denominator, follow trends instead of doing anything innovating, and seem to have completely stopped caring about making any interesting story. The villains in Diablo 3 were comically badly written.
At some point they even tried to force users to use their REAL WORLD names on battle.net[1].
It really isn't the same company as it used to be in the early 2000's.
[1]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/blizzard-requires-rea...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080702062733/http://www.netwar...
The concept that if anything about x pisses you off, just be done with it entirely would be great in theory if a large portion of the market felt the same way but in the end it's vidja games and a lot of people are sucked in and don't want to give up something fun for some high minded ideal that doesn't really impact them
Not really. The last good game that Blizzard made was StarCraft 2, 10 years ago. It's free anyways, so you can cost the company a few cents in server charges without supporting them. I don't play console games, so Activision is completely irrelevant to me.
> The concept that if anything about x pisses you off
I was talking about Blizzard specifically, not x. Ditching Blizzard will save you years of disappointment and frustration. It's quicker & easier to forget them for moral reasons than to be gradually disillusioned by their releases.
If you can avoid the COD and “Blizzard games are always the best” hype trains, there’s a lot out there to play, and a lot of games which respect your pocketbook.
Boycotts work. I enjoy playing competitive FPS shooters occasionally, and I’ve personally been able to stay away from COD since the private server debacle with no issues. To claim that their games are so good no boycott will ever work (so why bother) is conceding defeat before you’ve even tried.
I'm almost certain my pay is different from my colleagues, but I've bargained like hell to get it. When I was hired, every time we've been acquired. I'm no executive either, I'm just a developer with a proven history of give-a-damn.
I think it's perfectly fair game in a job where it's hard to replace individuals, jobs where people with the same title can achieve vastly different amounts of value for the company, and especially for a company that values its employees.
Whether or not pay discrepancies can be fair, this doesn't sound like a case of them being fair. What happens to your (hypothetical) colleague who gives just as much of a damn as you do, but doesn't feel comfortable hitting the appropriate negotiation notes to get their due?
Similarly: given that companies are liable to offer a lower initial rate to women and minorities, how do we account for the fact that they might negotiate just as hard as you and still end up behind?
If you are not willing to fight for your corner, that is an issue with you. You can't expect the world to come to your rescue.
This is just as true in relationships as in business. What happens when your partner dumps 100 tasks on you and doesn't realise they're being a dick? Will you stand up for yourself? Or there's just some simple situation where the other person doesn't see your perspective?
Life is full of situations where you either stand up for yourself, and communicate, or someone runs you over by standing up for themselves. And they might not do it with bad intentions, it's just that everyone has different interests.
If you aren't assertive, you need to learn to be, or accept that you will be treated unfairly. There are obviously nuances to this entire point, you might be able to outsource your assertiveness to others, like a friend to help you, or a union at work or whatever, but unfortunately there will always be situations in life where you need to stand up for yourself, and if you don't, that's 100% your fault and responsibility, no one elses.
By contrast I agree with your second example as systemic discrimination is something sharing salaries can directly help with. I had a female co-worker who was the same level of engineer I was at our company, had more experience and a Master's degree (to my Bachelor's), and was making 10k less a year than I was. Now I'm not sure if that was due to her being a woman or being rather conflict-avoidant (or both), but seeing the difference certainly made her push for a promotion that she eventually got.
Keeping individual wages a secret ultimately benefits the employer as they can use the knowledge disparity to their advantage.
I even know of arguments that a new father doesn't need to receive a relevant raise as he is extremely unlikely to switch jobs due to the newborn.
Employers, even most of the ones claiming to be fair, will do everything to keep employees in the dark regarding fair pay.
And so the dumb part, the unfair part, about salary discrepancies is that it is divorced from performance. It is divorced from value.
Which doesn't mean that you, on an individual level, shouldn't negotiate.
But it does imply that salary negotiation generally leads to results that (very) (incredibly) (if at all) loosely correlate with what the job is.
And all of this assumes that any two people walking into the same negotiations with the same skillset, exp, etc. will have the same experience. Which is, you know…not how it works.
This is a bit nonsensical. Nobody knows better than you what your time is worth because it is your time.
You don't owe companies anything, including working for less than you are willing to take in payment.
I had many teachers who would give better grades to better people.
Who do you think is "better" or more deserving?
Every negotiation favors the person who can afford to walk away from the deal.
In a salary negotiation, this puts healthy, young, and single people at an advantage. It penalizes people with disabilities, disease or dependants - the most vulnerable groups.
That's where the demand for open and fair compensation comes from.
Thought experiment: if you were going to form a startup and needed two other engineers, would you know across your history which ones to pick from and which ones to avoid?
Then the engineers sharing their salaries with each other should also be reasonable. If anyone complains about the discrepancy, you can point out that the engineers being paid more are more talented.
Extending off of your thought experiment. If you were going to form a startup, and you believed that pay discrepancies corresponded to value, wouldn't you want interviewees to be extremely open about their previous salaries and their salary comparisons within previous companies? That would make it even easier for you to find the engineers who were the most talented. We already ask interviewees where they've worked -- would you feel comfortable asking them "how much money did you make in comparison to your coworkers?"
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My feeling here is that companies want to hide salaries for the same reason my car mechanic would prefer me not to discuss my bill with any other customers. In an open market, discrepancies in knowledge about market rates favor the people with more knowledge; in this case, the companies. Companies are smart, not stupid; they understand how the market works. They're hiding salaries because that gives them an advantage when trying to drive down the price of engineers.
Whether or not pay discrepancies can be justified is kind of a false conflict. Regardless of whether or not pay discrepancies are a good idea -- in a free market, the prices should be transparent so that companies are forced to compete on honest terms for employees.
A generally applicable question that I've found applies to a number of situations beyond just this one: if a thing is good, then why do we need to hide it or force people to accept it?
People early in their careers have flexibility of moving around, but if you have mortgage, kids, family or need to take care of your parents, this strategy carries a lot of external costs.
For games speficaly it is nealry impossible to negotiate meaningfully because every postion is budgeted ahead of time, including salary increases. By that I mean if someone asks for 5% increase, they are basically negotiating against spreadsheet, not human across from them. The best one can do is to hit just under the cut-off line.
On top of that, employee providing different "value" to the company is just a myth, because if someone was literally providing value to multi billion company they would be paid millions. For most people their value is just replacement market value.
If people want a meaninful compensation in games, they have to be an executive or creating new revenue stream for the company.
There are multiple definitions of fair. One definition is people are paid proportional to how well they do their job. With that definition, bargaining for something else is actually unfair.
Everyone is replaceable. True that it is much harder to find a new dev or manager, but they still exist. I believe thinking a bit outside the box is a good idea, doesn't mean you have to start a workers union.
And while it might not be fitting to single out Blizzard as a company here, I think this "compensation" is taking the piss out of employees.
But then I consider, I've seen many individuals who are such strong engineers AND communicators, and deliver amazing work.
Yet, I was constantly paid higher than them, simply because of my more aggressive/arrogant attitude.
Time has given me a different view. There ARE pay discrepancies that shouldn't exist, but do simply because of lack of information.
And companies fuel the idea that it's something we need to protect, from our fellow colleagues because we worked/earned those pay discrepancies.
But in the end, it's the company that benefits the most from those discrepancies. Not me and not you.
I tossed 2 months of PTO to leave that industry(yay Washington laws) and made up the difference in the first 2.5 paychecks of the new gig.
Be careful of industries that over-index on "passion" and don't compensate people accordingly. Last I checked that industry was still built on chewing through new faces every ~3 years or so. Taking care of your people makes business sense and I wish more companies got that.
For a while I was working as a server-side programmer for a major gaming company making a MMO game based in Eastern Europe. The background of my manager was network programming, and they did a lot of network programming, so he hired me as network programmer, not a game programmer. Salary was world-class.
Then for personal reasons (got married) I moved to London, UK. The same company had an office in London but they were only hiring gamedevs for the same job. Those guys were offering less money in London then I had back home.
Long story short I do my server-side programming in a social network company now.
I went back and did the numbers, it was closer to $6hr but well below minimum wage for a dev position. From the little bit of salaries I heard art, design and test had it even worse.
One consequence of this is, in companies that are willing to do it, it can be useful to negotiate a title promotion even if they don't give you a raise, because you can then use that title in your next job negotiation.
BTW, giving this advice depresses me. I'm constantly amazed companies make such a weak effort to retain employees via good compensation policies. The cost of recruiting and interviewing candidates, not to mention training new hires, is huge.
As a team leader let, I have been so frustrated with this. HR has no clue on how time consuming is to transfer context knowledge. There is a point where companies should do all in their power to keep people. But they fail to account for these types of indirect costs.
It is not consuming HR's time, I suppose. Therefore...
The general problem is that different parts of the company are evaluated based on their separate metrics, which usually ignore the "externalities" they create for each other. Sometimes those externalities are caused by incompetence that isn't captured in the metric. (Imagine that you would pay developers by the number of lines they write, but no one would ever check for bugs. If one day the developers start producing really bad code, their measured productivity stays the same; it's the measured productivity of the users that would plummet. The developers might even get a bonus that quarter, if they produced more lines of code than usual.) Sometimes the metric is actively harmful, so that doing the right thing would actually hurt the measured productivity of the department. (Imagine that the developers are paid for introducing new features, but no one acknowledges the existence of bugs. It would be a nice thing to fix at least the worst bugs, but doing so would mean the developer stays behind at implementing new features, and gets fired. So even if the developer is fully aware of the situation and wishes to fix the bugs, out of self-interest they would choose not to.)
Clearly it's not more than the cost of providing higher pay. Most people would rather not switch jobs as there is considerable risk involved if you're not performing labor that results in very profitable sales.
People would rather work with the devil they know than the devil they don't, so unless they're in upwardly mobile careers such as engineering, law, finance, or medicine, they probably don't have many good options.
Usually if you're debating management, especially non-technical management, solid numbers win out over hand waivey numbers, even if the hand waivey numbers are representing something far more important and the solid numbers are representing something in a very limited context.
An example: Tom is a mediocre programmer, but he's worked for the company for 5 years and has a lot of institutional knowledge. He wants an above average salary now. Should we give it to him? The obvious answer would be to let him walk, he's asking for more than he's really worth. Ok, but how much does the equation change if we factor in that it's going to take 3-5 months to hire his replacement, and you'll need to interview about 20 candidates, some of them for multiple hours, not to mention potentially flying them out? Also now Tom is walking with his institutional knowledge, and the bugs that used to go to him are going to someone that doesn't have the 5 years working with the system he does, so whoever has to pick up his slack is going to be slower than Tom is even if they're a better programmer overall.
So I wouldn't say it's 100% clear whether a company saves money retaining employees vs training new.
On the other hand, turnover can bring a new perception to a problem. I have no idea what the value of that relative to the cost of recruiting and onboarding. In some companies like FAANGs it wouldn't surprise me if some level of turnover was intentional. Google probably benefits to some degree by hiring engineers that just quit over at Amazon; it gives them an insight into how Amazon is solving X problem, which may inform how Google tackles that problem.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpU...
When oh when are midrange tech companies going to get their shit together with raises and bonuses.
10% should be mostly seen as a (shock) _normal_ raise when the company is doing well, above and beyond annual equity and a bonus at least in the range of 10-15%.
Stop giving people reasons to job hop every few years. If you want loyalty and you want your investment in employees to pay off over time, give them good stuff! Give it to them before they reach any point of questioning if they want to go to the next company down the street for that extra 15% raise you were too stingy to give them on merit.
As a manager, I can safely say the worst compensation mistakes I made were cases of not giving enough compensation sooner rather than later, and giving good people a reason to leave over money.
I learned my lesson fast, and can say later in my career I take compensation planning much more seriously and absolutely do not ever settle for company pay band crap and scheduled 3% / 5% raise crap. If someone is doing good work for you, pay them!
I've always had the philosophy that if you want to retain good employees, pay them more before they ask for more. If they have reached a point where they had to ask for more, they're probably going to leave soon.
I don't understand how do companies fail to realize this. Say an engineer leaves because you didn't get him that 20% pay bump. Even in the highest ranks of engineering, that's like what a 100k? 30k-40k on an average. Now imagine you go through the whole recruitment cycle. You have anywhere between 8-12 weeks of productivity loss of an engineer. Then you waste time from the productivity of recruiter, hiring manager, hiring engineers on the team, etc., all of whom are highly paid. You cycle through 8-10 candidates. Then you finally get the person you need. In my experience, it takes at least a month to get onboarded, usually more. And it takes at least 6 months to get to productivity levels of the engineer that just left if your new candidate is good. All in all you wasted almost 6 months of engineering time worth of productivity, which easily exceeds the money you saved not giving that 20% raise. All of this, assuming the new guy didn't negotiate more than the previous one. Seriously, get your shit together.
On the converse, your boss doesn't pay the cost of hiring new people. It doesn't come out of his pocket. But giving 20% raises to everyone he has the suspicion of leaving will get him canned real quick, imposing a real and sizeable cost on him.
The tippy top dogs of the company aren't completely stupid for running things this way. Budgets would get out of control in a hurry if they let managers do whatever they want with wages. Nepotism would run rampant without costly oversight and surveillance. Employees would learn to take advantage of easy raises.
So the company bears a smaller cost (employee turnover) rather than the bigger and unpredictable costs of frequent and decentralized wage raises.
There's not a great solution to this. It's an example of market failure. Everyone acting in rationally on an individual scale does not lead to group rationality.
I wish more managers/executives would understand what you just explained and how badly it hurts their business to constantly have employee turnaround. I have yet to meet a manager or executive who consistently understands motivation and rewards it properly in the way you describe. There are other handcuffs though, especially in the software industry: tech stack, pay available in the area, remote work, flexibility, and now corona.
It comes down to supply and demand. There are legions of young, passionate gamers who want to “work with their passion”. Why they stick with it, I’m not sure. I certainly didn’t.
That's the key quote in the article for me. If you feel that your compensation is below market rate, switch jobs and prove it.
Imagine how many game devs there are who are roommates with web devs, or who went to college together. How is it that the web devs don’t tell their friends “you need to quit that awful 90hr/week job that pays you shit and come work at my company”? Or why don’t startups try to lure game devs? I’m sure many of them could figure out Rails or React in no time. They would surely be able to offer slightly lower wages in exchange for a (comparatively) better work life balance.
Apart from "The job" work is not a mental and emotional void. You invest yourself. And it hurts when your investment is ignored or treated as lesser than another human.
Employee pay should be two parts: - salary as per usual - significant stock in the business. NB: significant. 50% of stock(non-voting, purely monetary) is for an "employee fund" and come dividend time it is shared equally among employees. People get their salary they can preen over. And company profits are tied to individual motivation.
Why should I care if the company does astoundingly well as opposed to being mediocre if I don't have a stake in the outcome?
But the system you built doesn't necessarily achieve the goals you want. If everyone gets the same dividend it becomes a tragedy of the commons since an individual player can do the minimum while profiting off other players actions. Even if its varied in dividend for example one person gets 10% while another gets 40%, this still applies as a player with the strategy of being mediocre will still get benefits of the hard work of all other players while minimizing the amount of work he has to do.
Not only that, businesses are meant to make money if the people who start the business is giving out half their money away this system better make 2x the revenue every single quarter or why would they do it.
US business has a history of "stock options" and "yearly bonuses". So this isn't new. (I haven't seen it here in Australia as a common thing.)
> If everyone gets the same dividend it becomes a tragedy > of the commons since an individual player can do the > minimum while profiting off other players actions.
They still don't get the same salary as you. Unless they do in which case, no real change.
Alternately, if the company is making megabucks to the point where salary becomes insignificant, then I am ok with others being better off too, even the dead weight.
Also, you could argue that with everyone in the company wanting a bigger share, this puts pressure to remove the dead weight. 1 less employee means a bigger share for me. 1 more productive person(as opposed to dead weight) means more for me.
> Not only that, businesses are meant to make money if > the people who start the business is giving out half > their money away this system better make 2x the revenue > every single quarter or why would they do it.
This doesn't change the idea of businesses making money. Just who they should be making it for. It doesn't force a bonus every year. It just says that if rentseeking investors get dividends, employees do too.
Do we want a society whereby rich people can buy shares and then seek rent forever, using that rent to buy more shares etc.
Or where the people who do the work, get the rewards?
I understand that floating publicly is used to draw large sums of money for business to do great things. But it is also used as a forever debt, to pay shareholders forevermore for doing nothing more. Under this scheme, those investors would do their sums differently, obviously and it may well come down to the business getting "less for their float action".
But I like the idea of trying not to trample salaried employees to make others rich.(Many startups do in fact operate on stock option basis. I'd just argue the stock options should be equal value, from the CEO to the cleaner.)
Honestly, I'd prefer more than 50% go to employees - I hate "rentseeking" - but lets not go crazy.
I.e. you can go to the tax agency (or town hall) and ask for data on a given individual since 1973, but you can't just publish it willy nilly.
In 2008 the tax collecting agency decided to put all of them online, as that seemed like a reasonable extension of the 40 year old rule, and there was a huge shitstorm[0].
At some point the privacy authority stepped in and imposed them to hide it again, citing a lot of more and less valid concerns.
[0] which in my modest opinion proved it was a great idea
This probably hints at why I am unlikely to actually end up running anything, but in the off chance lightning strikes...
In the future, I plan to add support to predict salary from Linkedin profile. So based on education, experiences, role, the browser extension can predict the salary range. I'm thinking of adding a way to share the salary range in this application in a safe way. The mission of my application is to democratize the salary ranges.
This way, in the future, workers in other companies (other than Blizzard) have the ability to know the salary ranges in a convenient way.
There's a thing that happened last year that wasn't picked up by any major news sources. It was really troubling to see it completely swept under the rug. I can't even find a "reputable" news site that covered it:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-09-former-bli...
Unless you are an executive, don't expect someone to give you huge salary increase for your performance. At best, even when your manager is very satisfied about you, (s)he is limited to the percentage range that is defined by HR for salary increase. Even if you get better title, the salary increase is still limited.
For big companies, if you take all of the exec pay (C suits) and give it out to rest of the employees, the average employee income only rises by 3-5%. While CXX packages are extra-ordinary, one has to understand that its often drop in the bucket for big balance sheets and even less relevant when you have couple of hundreds of thousand employees around.
So the metric of disparity we should use is not max/min salary but rather avg % increase if CXX salaries were all given to employees.
American public company executives are grossly overpaid, and there’s been numerous studies proving this. Both historically in the US (exec pay has ballooned here since the 1980s) and currently in most other developed countries, companies with lower exec compensation don’t show lower ROE when sorted by industry.
Exec compensation in many American companies is basically normalized theft from shareholders given the revolving door of incestuous boards and C-suites and the constant conflicts of interest.
However, the money execs are looting from American companies doesn’t belong to employees. It belongs to shareholders. So a metric of giving that money to employees is irrelevant. Employee salaries are (and should be) set by broader market demand.
If the Cxx team each makes 100x what the average employee makes, it doesn't matter if there are 10 employees or 10,000. There's rampant income inequality either way.
Or unionize. You are tech people. You can setup setup your own loomio (or whatever decision making software exists these days) server and start making decisions today. Be the change you want to see.
This is execspeak for screwing the majority and only giving their chosen few a decent raise.
Job title makes it clear that it's about greater responsibilities.
"Why is Jeff paid more than me"
"Because Jeff is senior dev and you're junior dev" is a much easier conversation to have, and everybody's job title is very visible.
