Sharing your salary with coworkers

I have to qualify my statement by saying in all but a couple of cases I’ve been lucky enough to have great bosses who did their best to fight for what their teams deserved. I have tried my best to do the same, not always successfully, but you have to keep trying.

Not clear on the details of performance vs. compensation above, but annual performance reviews often involve peer reviews, whereby team members offer input on collaborators and team members over a given period. It’s supposed to be agnostic of previous life and/or achievements.

If someone bitches about their compensation, they can be reminded that their performance was measured real-time by broader consensus, and not individual managers’ whim.

plus you can always use the core77 salary survey: Design Salary Guide | Coroflot

Also, if you and your friends feel comfortable, then you should talk about it. I have a few friends who work at competing firms and they shared their pay with each other just to compare how different firms compensated people. All three of them had similar levels of experience, and were all very good. In that case I think it was helpful.

I agree with a lot of the points mentioned above. I would never say my reason for a raise is just because Johnny sitting next to me makes more than me. But to see from another POV, here are some counter arguments.

Being in the dark about what coworkers make can reduce your understanding of what you’re worth. Working next to Johnny every day I have atleast some understanding of how much contribution I give compared to him, but I have no clue how that translates into dollars if I don’t know what Johnny makes.

One sided knowledge takes confidence away from the employee to ask for more compensation, and gives more power to the employer.

This also allows things like wage discrimination to persist quietly.

I’ve shared my salary, and vice-versa, during work related conversations amongst a few close friends, but never with co-workers at my current employer.

If I thought I was worth 50k/year then thats what I’d ask for, and if I thought I was worth 100k/year then I’d ask for that. There’s no guarantee that I would receive it, but I think it’s fair to negotiate for compensation based on the value that I add, and not simply based on what the person next to me earns. In saying that, my employers so far have been reasonably fair with compensation, and I haven’t had to negotiate my way out of a minimum wage offer situation.

The sharing-my-wage concept seems like a way to avoid the potentially awkward conversation where you have to tell your boss what your worth and why, or that you want more money and why, and replace it with an blanket everybody else gets paid this much so I should as well statement.

I do however think that anonymous group data reports like the Coroflot salary survey are very useful to use as a baseline given the variations for similar positions in different cities and countries.

I’m a Gen X/Y hybrid (one year more X, other year more Y…)…I feel comparing salaries is a bit old-fashioned, the millenials know they are going to make it big one day anyway right. As long as salaries are fair and nobody is being taken advantage of, it is good to be aware of each other’s circumstances but no need to talk about it in detail. Of course in general we do want to know where the money is going i.e. ‘fiscal organisational transparency’.

the millenials know they are going to make it big one day anyway right

:slight_smile: funny

I only share my salary with my boss, HR, and my family.

I had a pair of designers awhile back who were also close friends and told each other how much they made. Put me in an uncomfortable position when they wanted to go tit-for-tat on salary increases. This was a couple years ago and now I’d probably handle it more like Mike explained above.

There’s a big aerospace engineering company out here that (urban legend goes) posts everyone’s salary on the boss’ door. Including the boss (who is also the founder). They are well-known for being rather unconventional, and skirt the edges of employment laws in other aspects.

I’d never openly share mine with a coworker.
However, I was persuaded to in an odd situation a few years ago with another coworker. Knowing what he made compared to what I made at the time made me respect him quite a bit less, compared to the amount of work we both did.

Right??
No good, either way.

I’ve tried to be more open about my salary, even with co-workers. If asked, I will tell, but I don’t volunteer it. The thing is that this information is that keeping it secret ONLY helps the employer. Maybe if the average worker was more open about it, we would have the kind of wage growth that we’ve been lacking. As a side note, I think people in rapidly developing countries do share their salary and that’s one of the drivers to wage growth.

As an aside, Ontario passed the Public Employee Salary Disclosure Act in 1996. This requires that the government of Ontario publish the salary for every provincial position. This includes by name for people who can negotiate their salary. The result has been huge salaries in the public sector there because everyone now does go to their boss and say, “I need more than Mrs. X because …”.

New York publishes the salaries of all state employees, but in my experience (especially with a wife, mother and sister who are all public school teachers) it tended to have the opposite effect. 1 - Public workers are mostly unionized, which means their wages are almost completely gated by long, grueling contract negotiations and tenure, rather than individual contributions or performance. 2 - Tax payers now have ammunition to scold teachers, police and other state workers for being “over paid”.

I don’t think disclosing salary really is an inhibitor to wage growth, I think it’s just capitalism at work. There are just not enough ID jobs, and those in ID jobs face a perpetual influx of high quality new graduate talent that keeps the median costs lower. Combined with more and more offshore designers who can work closer to the factories where stuff is made, the value proposition in a lot of industries is to have a couple of good workers stateside and let the rest fall over into Asia for 1/3rd the price. I think I was paid well as an Industrial Designer, but basically doubled my salary after switching to UX.

So, inspired by this discussion, I traded some salary history with a couple of close friends… now in all 3 cases these were friends I have known for over 15 years, and none of us work together now, though I used to work for one of them, and the other used to work for me. The one that used to work for me I’ve known since design school, so lots of trust. All three of us have worked in house, and as a consultant, and all three of us have worked at the exec design leadership level. Here is what I learned:

  1. I was getting paid at just about the right level (I thought I was paid higher than average, but based on my sample set, either all three of us are outliers, or what we were paid was about normal)

  2. I charge about the right amount for my level of experience.

So, while it may have eliminated a little bit of that “I’m ahead of the game” feeling, it also eliminated that “what if I’m not getting paid enough” feeling which was worth it.

That’s great to hear!

i don’t know if the bit about wage growth would necessarily follow but that compensation is so opaque and in some workplaces explicitly prohibited (as i found out at my 1st job out of school when i told a temp designer who used this info to negotiate their salary for full-time hire) is only to the benefit of employers really…voluntary wage surveys only go so far & may not be fully representative of a specific workplace

I’m of the “would never share that type of information” mindset. At my first big corporate employer, I negotiated a higher entrance salary than the offer then left there in a year and negotiated a higher entrance salary based on my previous “higher than others” salary. In my 12 years there, I moved laterally to other ID groups twice, reaping me a 10% bump for the voluntary move - all along the regular 3-7% cost of living raises were normal and then once I hit management my raises also included bonuses - that would be a tough journey of reasoning to have to explain to coworkers who came in at the same time but accepted their offer and then stayed in the same department the whole time they were there.

Scott: People who care about their salary should be looking at job openings and occasionally going to interviews to see what they are worth on the market. Even if I didn’t share my salary, I would tell me to get out and do some leg work (again, if they care).

I completely agree - any professional at any level has so many resources these days (glassdoor, etc) that we never had!

I wouldn’t be surprised if the shift in “share” vs “don’t share” mentality aligns much more closely with age.

In the millennial “we’re all equal, share your house, share your bike, share your car” economy I see it being much more acceptable that two people with the same title should feel they deserve equal pay.

Those of us who are old(ish) fogies and grew our careers through recessions, .com busts and other cycles realize that every chance we could take to advance our own careers was up to us, and other people are mostly irrelevant to that discussion.

As a hiring manager who is figuring out salaries across a bigger team, I get enough Linkedin recruiters calling me to get a pretty good estimate of my market value and the value of candidates as a whole.

Mike: I bet that Baby Boomers and Gen Xers saw a decline in sharing salary info. I bet with unions and the kind of work that most people were doing before 1970, people were more aware of what others were making.

I don’t even fill out the coroflot salary survey, because I work in an area where there’s only one general employer.

I will say this; I’ve been underpaid and overpaid, and generally that is a direct result of what you agree upon WHEN YOU ARE HIRED. If a company is looking to fill a position and they’ve made an offer, COUNTER. They have a range.

Sort of related, gender gap in ID? Are you serious? Any female I know in ID who’s decent is absolutely killing it.

I bet if you took two identical portfolios/resumes, one being female, the other being male, the female would get way more calls back. They’re in much higher demand.