> It wasn't until it was being actively discussed on the Tech Nottingham Slack that I realised it could have been illegal to talk about
How can we move to a society where talking about compensation isn’t illegal?
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I would prefer to keep my compensation private.
I currently work for a smaller private company. It doesn't pay me as much as a large corporation in the industry. Were my compensation public, I would forfeit the option to increase it significantly again.
I work here because I live next door, like the people and the work environment. It is worth it to me. Public registers would not reflect these choices. Otherwise I would need to keep up appearances and optimise my compensation. I like to keep these options.
Not relevant in Norway because everyone earns a lot. Sweden seems to be a country with significant social pressure, not really a role model for me.
That said, under no circumstances should it be illegal to talk about your compensation. Any company that forbids you to do so probably has some dark secrets here.
> "Were my compensation public, I would forfeit the option to increase it significantly again."
Not at all; you might feel that way, companies will certainly try to make you feel that way, but it's up to you to negotiate and ask for whatever salary you want and companies will generally pay it if it's within their budget. Specially if the company trying to hire you also had public salaries, why do you think it'd limit your growth?
Yes and no. Of course I can argue my way out of it just like I have done here, but it will summon a number in the head of others on valuable your productivity is. There is no way around that and this then also extends beyond the company you work for. It won't feel right for them to increase my salary by 100% just because I now work in a large corporation. They might still hire me for more, but the relation will be influenced by this, like a productivity debt that I have to compensate for. Especially also if my relation to my employer is in good standing.
There are some benefits with openness of compensation, but I would like to keep it private for me. I believe the lower end of salaries might profit from more transparency. As I have said, it should be possible to reveal it. Making it public by default wouldn't be my preference and I would feel the need to demand more from my current employer.
I am aware the secrecy is most often a vehicle for companies to supress wages. But I think selective and voluntary transparency can alleviate this.
100% agreed and I've witnessed this, it may be more common here in Europe. Some companies are very focused on your last salary (if you're desperate or careless enough to tell it to them) and will outright laugh you out the door if they think you demand a jump that's too high.
To the person you were replying to: Please remember this is not the valley, sometimes an increase of 10k per year is noticeable.
I am actually from Spain and I agree; my point though is that you normally would want to negotiate and work for companies based on value, not on your cost. That has many implications and it's not for everyone ofc, but it's generally true IMHO [article pending...].
Put it the other way; if you know a company is paying 60k/employee (at your level/role ofc), and they offer you 40k "based on your previous salary", wouldn't you also laugh on their face?
> it will summon a number in the head of others
For anyone interested, a good search term is "anchoring" or "anchoring effect."
It gives you a chance to argue that asked - current salary=how much that lifestyle is worth to you, and it's the price they have to beat.
A common interview suggestion is to not give the first number. But if salaries are public, the potential employer already has it.
Is your argument that if you get paid too little and this is public, then your next gig won't pay you more because they know this? If so, can you expand a little on why that would be the case?
Because companies want to get you for as little as they can, and if they know your previous compensation, instead of potentially offering you 30, 40, 50% higher than what you're currently making, they will think they can get away with offering you {your previous salary} + 5% or 10%.
That's why a bunch of companies ask what your previous salary was in interviews and why you need to absolutely not give that number in pretty much all circumstances.
Like I got a 60% bump from my previous salary my last job search, in part because I hadn't gotten raises for several years at my previous company as they had wage freezes, and in part because I had been behind on compensation for a while due to having to take whatever halfway decent jobs I could get while unemployed, but if the prospective employer knew I was getting paid so little, they probably would have significantly lowered the salary they offered to me, and I'd still be behind the market rate for my skills, and the next time I went looking for a job I still wouldn't be offered enough to catch up to what I'm making now. It's a vicious cycle when they know your current salary.
You can always do not accept their offert.
Not if that's all the offers you get, because they keep using your previous job's salary as a baseline. Or you have to churn through a 2-3 dozen job offers to find something closer to the going market rate, which is exhausting and time consuming.
Even for that 60% bump, that was after talking to 20 recruiters over the phone, 8 online code exams, 5 multi-stage interviews, and getting 2 offers, over an exhausting three week period, and juggling all those with a day job was super difficult, and I had to schedule enough of those during the work day that it got to the point where my former boss probably started to notice.
I'd hate to have to double, triple, or quadruple that effort just to get maybe a 30% bump if my previous salary was public knowledge.
Maybe they know your previous salary, but they don't know how many offers you have. You just have to put your foot down and say you won't move if they offer less than X and state that you current salary is irrelevant as they up against other companies not your current one.
I managed to get a significant salary bump even without having a job, because I made sure they understand from the beginning I'm happy to walk away.
I've personally experienced this. Salary is taken as a proxy for ability.
After the dot com crash, I took lower paid work in the public sector, working on some interesting things.
I was approached by a recruiter to work for a company that was basically the best possible fit. They were working on a product category that I had helped to define at a previous start up, where I was the chief technical architect.
Once I told the recruiter my current salary, he was no longer interested. He even sounded aghast. Couldn't possibly put me forward for the role.
I've done work in the public sector before. Here's what I told recruiters who asked for my salary history after that:
"In my previous job, I deliberately took a below-market rate to work in the public sector, as a form of service to my community. I don't consider that salary relevant for this discussion."
End of story. I'm fortunate to be in a place where broader salary statistics are available, so from there I simply redirected the conversation to "here's what I'm seeing as the range of market rates here, and why I think I deserve to be on the high end of that", and that was fine.
Remember: in this industry, your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is...just walk away, and answer the next recruiter who's begging for your time. If they can't consider putting you forward because of an arbitrary number from a non-comparable position, well, that's their problem and their loss.
That works. As you say, it was their loss, but the reaction surprised me at the time. I didn't have any problems negotiating a better salary when I finally left.
This is pretty consistent with communication most people get from recruiters: tell me your salary so we can know what you are worth. Back home I have a few screenshots of LinkedIn messages that opened conversations asking for screenshots of pay slips so they could verify. Not suggesting I agree with the practice of course.
You don't have to comply with their request. If it's for a company you're interested in, you can say no while also being polite, i.e. "Let's not worry about compensation until we're sure it's a good fit."
To be fair, the salary is relevant to recruiters for their compensation. For lower wages it often isn't worth it for them to recruit people. It isn't necessarily a judgement of you, although yes, overall your income is.
Why is previous salary relevant to recruiters for their compensation? Only the salary of the role they are recruiting for should be relevant.
Yes, only that salary is relevant, but they too see the previous salary as a baseline for any future compensation.
They know that the typical case is that salary maybe increases by 10% (number pulled from thin air here) and calculate if the effort is worth it for themselves.
oh wow, it's a bit off-topic, but I'm on a desktop now and the mobile view of Wikipedia looks so much better, never realized!
In India, this is almost always the norm. Most companies are willing to offer only 30% on top of what you’re currently making. Anything above that is considered “asking too much”.
"Were my compensation public, I would forfeit the option to increase it significantly again."
No, it doesn't, and it would matter less if employers had to print legally binding starting salary ranges for jobs (they can't pay you less than the range, and the top must not be less than their top earner in the job).
I can’t speak for the country you work in but here in the U.K. not every company has salary ranges and even those that do, a great many will try to negotiate salaries down rather than up (salaries are a businesses largest expense after all). Thus having a lower published salary gives you less bargaining power to negotiate a higher starting salary.
This isn’t a universal problem even in the U.K. but just an illustration of how the GPs point isn’t as inaccurate as you claim.
Company A can decide to not interview you because the publicly shared salary of your current company (B) is very far away from the range of company A.
So if in negotating that next salary, if asked - "What is your current salary?" You would refuse to disclose it or lie?
Oh yeah, I treat that question as "what salary would you like?". My current salary is entirely irrelevant, as this question just serves to begin the negotiation, and I sometimes say "it entirely depends on your needs, do you have a range in mind?".
Never be the first to give a number. Then you have lost the negotiation.
An option is to go with something along the lines "I have a number in mind that would satisfy, but as I'm sure you have looked at the market rates I trust you'll make a great offer if in the end you are interested"
Absolutely. My current salary is irrelevant, because you're not competing with that. You're competing with the other places I'm applying.
Yes, definitely.
>Sweden seems to be a country with significant social pressure
I'm curious what you mean by this?
i think it is in the other way: many companies will try to hire you for less-> big competition for you-> some will try to pay more, or you can say that you got an offer for much more. As result you filter out the greedy ones
It isn’t illegal. The right to discuss your pay publicly, with anyone, is enshrined in British law.
Any contract terms to the contrary are invalid, and actions taken against you for sharing are illegal, and UK employment tribunals take a very dim view of employer misbehaviour.
He does say that it "could have been", but it turns out it's fine.
It depends on where you're based, but I doubt that it's actually illegal in most countries. I know that I'm legally allow to tell people how much I make. It is kinda interesting when your open about your own salary, but your coworkers aren't. Apparently I made less that other in the same position at my previous job, I was just never told by how much.
I'd be astonished if it was criminal-law illegal in any country. But in eg. India, it's pretty common to sign an NDA covering your own salary, meaning that sharing it externally could get you sued.
It’s very specifically legal in the USA to talk about your own compensation.
Likely not what's being discussed in the article here, but I used to be active on a developer mailing list where discussion of pricing/hourly rates/etc. was forbidden because there were a lot of contractors/freelancers working in relatively narrow spaces and some jurisdictions could consider it a form of price fixing. Essentially, imagine if all the experts on some particular niche technology sat down and said "we all are going to charge at least $X/hour". Doing that explicitly is illegal. And in a forum related to some profession, having conversations about "how much should I charge for X?" or "how much do you all charge for X?" can quickly run into legal grey areas. Discussing salary probably is safe (but IANAL) but you do have to be careful if it's a conversation about rates happening between competitors in a market.
Dad took a photography consulting class and they instructed the whole class to charge market rates and to not cheapen the industry as a whole by starting a bidding war to the bottom. Felt wrong but my dad finally started charging competitively so I didn’t blink twice
When they say illegal, they probably mean breach of contract, not illegal in terms of criminal law. Also just because something is in a contract, doesnt make it lawful or even actionable.
We are already in such a society. Secrecy is an option in your employment negotiation. If you want to talk about your salary - go ahead and make it a part of your employment agreement. If others don't want to talk about their salary and instead negotiate for something else like a higher salary or more time off it's their prerogative too.
Move to America... Or at least bake free speech above being offended.