Assuming you're not american, by the way you reference it. Thought I'd throw in a few things I've experienced in America, that I think are pretty common.
Almost every job I've had with a company that's of any decent size (e.g. ten years ago when I worked for a five man moving company) has made it pretty clear that sharing compensation numbers with a coworker was an immediately fireable offense. I never really considered whether or not that would be typical outside of the US. Anyone care to comment? I'd be interested to know.
You're still right though, that in my experience there's a social pressure not to share as well.
I also definitely agree that saying "a junior programmer makes x dollars a year" or "a senior programmer makes y dollars a year" has been pretty meaningless at the major corps I've worked with. They're typically had some kind of pay band where "junior" meant x to y, and the closer you got to y, or if you crossed y, meant getting approval from higher levels of management. I'd be interested to know if this has been other peoples experience as well.
As an example, I know a guy (not in programming) who went from being in a realtime data monitor to a supervisor in a call center, and jumped his salary probably 15%, then went back to being the data monitor a year later, and retained the salary increase, which was way larger an increase than the company at the time would have allowed, had he stayed the data monitor.
> Almost every job I've had with a company that's of any decent size (e.g. ten years ago when I worked for a five man moving company) has made it pretty clear that sharing compensation numbers with a coworker was an immediately fireable offense. I never really considered whether or not that would be typical outside of the US. Anyone care to comment? I'd be interested to know.
Almost every job may say that, but in almost every case that provision is illegal[1] and grounds for a lawsuit if they actually carried it out.
Interesting; thanks for the link. I'm going to read it over in a little bit (making food).
I'm not beyond believing that it's mostly just common lore, and I'm definitely going to look into it.
An unrelated instance of something like this would be how most hourly workers think they're legally obligated to get a lunch break and a paid break if they work x hours, when in the states I've lived in there's no legal requirement, except under specific circumstances (I think missouri was for employees under 16 working in certain kinds of service industries).
Where I worked in Europe I don't think it's considered a "fireable offense", but it's definitely something you tend not to share with coworkers, and it would be frowned upon by your boss/HR.
On the other hand, it's not uncommon to share it between friends or ex-coworkers.
Salaries also tend to vary wildly, and are not necessarily linked to seniority. The best way for a junior to rapidly increase his salary is to change jobs, or threatening to change jobs and receiving a counter-offer.
Almost every job I've had with a company that's of any decent size (e.g. ten years ago when I worked for a five man moving company) has made it pretty clear that sharing compensation numbers with a coworker was an immediately fireable offense. I never really considered whether or not that would be typical outside of the US. Anyone care to comment? I'd be interested to know.
You're still right though, that in my experience there's a social pressure not to share as well.
I also definitely agree that saying "a junior programmer makes x dollars a year" or "a senior programmer makes y dollars a year" has been pretty meaningless at the major corps I've worked with. They're typically had some kind of pay band where "junior" meant x to y, and the closer you got to y, or if you crossed y, meant getting approval from higher levels of management. I'd be interested to know if this has been other peoples experience as well.
As an example, I know a guy (not in programming) who went from being in a realtime data monitor to a supervisor in a call center, and jumped his salary probably 15%, then went back to being the data monitor a year later, and retained the salary increase, which was way larger an increase than the company at the time would have allowed, had he stayed the data monitor.