- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@europe.pub
- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@europe.pub
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I think I first saw this post in 2018.
Totally agree — comparing ranges helps people negotiate fairly. Best move is sharing numbers with context (role, level, location) so it stays useful, not messy.
I was one of 3 people aty office who got any sort of raise this year. It was based on merit. I’m thrilled about the raise, but I feel bad for my coworkers because management sucks. I discussed the raise with my work besties and one is pissed about it and the other is hyped for me.
I’m also faced with the dilemma of being important at work.
Being important can be tricky.
I work in a very small city, and I wear a lot of hats. I do plan review, permit processing, GIS, Open Records, vested rights determinations, some code enforcement, am the in-house IT guy, city photographer, and more.
What makes me valuable is my ability to multitask, and if I left it would be very hard to fill all those roles. But I’m also kinda a specialist in keeping plates spinning. My role is essential where I am now, but it’s fulfilled my specialists in each of those duties in other cities. My skills etc isn’t in high demand because there’s only a few cities in the country that have the the extreme development complexity we have while also having a municipal staff of fewer than a dozen people due to the city’s size.
This is why unions are usually better, especially the trade unions.
I try and drop subtle hints around the office, like “my family members in unions don’t have this kind of problem” and “friend of mine has a union that got them out of a return to office order”. Feel like I need to go with stronger hints.
“maybe a union might help us? put your email address into this mailing list form if you want to join once I set it up” 👀
Yep. Everyone knows the other person’s pay rate. Heck, you can probably look up most union’s pay scales online even if you’re not a member.
Serious question: how do you start that conversation with a coworker if you’re not 100% certain they’ll be receptive?
“can you believe they only pay us X to do this shit?”
As someone who detests small talk, this is one of the few times when it is essentially.
First step is learning if they are a snitch. Second is seeing if they can be critical of workplace. Third is bringing up your own salary. Fourth is asking for theirs if they don’t immediately reciprocate on step 3.
In practice there are many ways this can happen. Here is one reasonable example:
Did you see the bosses [insert anything, tie, shoes, car, your pick] today. OmG!
[Wait a day or two for any sign that made it back to your boss. Prepare a convincing cover up story in the event he/she/it is a snitch.]
2-4
Our health insurance is terrible isnt it? I swear its like they pick the cheapest option. [Replace the above with any other unpopular opinion depending on how critical the response is of your workplace you can jump immediately to steps 3-4]
I heard a lot of employers like to pay people differently for the exact same work and I dont think thats right. Thats why I want you to know I make Y. If you make less I can help you argue for more. Do you mind sharing your salary too?
You can sometimes just jump straight to step 3 or 4 if you are feeling confident. But do be aware. You can save someone’s job and the boss will corner them in an office and some of them will still rat you out. Happened to me personally. The above isnt without risk. But do not be afraid of humans, especially middle management humans. They are usually the weakest people I’ve ever met.
When you’re running a place I want to work for you
Seriously discuss salaries. My coworker was making half of what I was making for doing the same job.
Unethical LPT: tell the colleague you find most difficult to work with, that you make far more money than you do. If they succeed in getting a raise, you’ll have an easier time getting one, too. If they fail, you know not to bother, and the difficult person will likely leave or be fired soon.
What? Hahahaha
If they succeed in getting a raise
How are you supposed to know if this is the case? Just hope they tell you?
Just hope they tell you?
No, no. That is too unreliable. You can tell whether they got a raise by the odor of their farts. It’s unmistakable.
In the same way, I discovered that everyone got paid. Except me. For a month. I left the job, best decision ever made.
I am terrified everyone in this community doesn’t comprehend the actual problem.
If you’re working for a salary, you have already been robbed.
Ah yes, Marxism. Never fails to deliver interesting but impractical concepts about value creation.
Dividends are impractical?
Is that what they taught you at the NYSE?deleted by creator
I’m not watching a video but based on the title “capitalism is theft” I can guess what it says.
The problem is we can barely get people to understand that the company is not their friend and they have any rights at all.
You can’t teach a child calculus if they can barely do arithmetic. People are fish that don’t realize there’s water. It’s going to be hard to get them to build a space program. A noble goal, but not one with an easy direct path.
I hate how perverse you think of your ancestors that destroyed mountains, built roads, aqueducts, statues, pyramids, etc., and knew about the most cardinal of sins.
As mammals, we know when a neighbor got more berries than me. But as a species, we shared that bounty to survive. All you should be asking your
employerlarcenist is the dividends that your work yielded. Not less than what you worked for. Especially not a lunch money cut.
what’s funny is that while the institutional gender pay disparity is mostly gone (at least where i work) - there’s still a couple of dozen ways women get screwed out of money for doing the same work.
my favorite case from this year was with data engineer position - simple middle level position Pandas Airflow Databricks stack, 3k median. two candidates hired - same skill level, salary - male 3,5k, females 2,7k - why? if you look strictly at the skill assessment reports - you wouldn’t even be able to tell where is who. so what the fuck is going on? well, if you look at the HR report - dude been showboating and oversharing about his skills all the way for the ladies and that’s good thing that should be rewarded while the lady just laid down the facts as she was asked during the interviews and was deemed distant and not very personable, “she doesn’t seem happy to be here” so to speak therefore she is not that good. fucking literally. and then the very same recruitment and human resources specialists wonder why people leave.
I have a very high suspicion they are pulling same trick to a degree depending on overall background like race too.
probably, but that stuff doesn’t go into reports so i can’t spot it from there.
Yeah, there is a clear preference in racial hiring which I’m sure affects salary negotiation as well.
Unfortunately, people who sell themselves to the company make more than people who don’t. Hell, sometimes just asking for a pay bump during the hire/on-boarding process can make a difference. Two of the last few gigs I’ve been at have given me 5-10k more a year simply because I laid out my creds and asked for the high end of the scale when I probably would have been given the mid range if I didn’t ask and justify it.
Many people don’t understand that you’re selling yourself to the company, and they’re buying your time and labor. If you present a mediocre product, don’t surprise when you get a mediocre offer. I can’t stand it, but not playing the game doesn’t get you anywhere.
the whole “sell yourself to the company” thing is not what it seems. it has less to do with candidates getting around the idea of self-presentation and more with the overall degradation of recruitment and human resources talent pool. there are lots of people who bear the titles but can’t do their jobs properly. and they look for shortcuts and easy decisions. “selling yourself to the company” is one of them. it’s not a knock on the candidate trying to get by, but if the recruiter whose job is to spot that (among other things) can’t spot that - that’s a problem that makes a mess. hell, most companies don’t even have transparent pay scale systems to clearly communicate who gets what and why so the salaries are all over the place for no good reason and it leads to toxicity and disgruntlement.
You’re also assuming recruiters are involved at all, and it’s not just HR and a hiring manager looking over resumes, which doesn’t match my experience at all. There’s also the explosion of hyper specialization in job roles, so a lot of HR drones can’t do much more than look for buzzwords and see if they think your personality will fit the org.
Just about every job I’ve had was either via resume or word of mouth, and in both cases, there’s not really someone between me and the interview process to handle those items you called out. So selling myself was how I both got the job and pay bumps. The one recruiter I used was good and put me in with a good job that was a good fit (and had a public pay range), and I still sold myself to the company to hit the high end of the range (a guy hired after me makes less than me in the same position, but has a lower skill set).
Selling yourself makes you more money, recruiter or not. It’s fine to blame the system for its failures, but the candidate needs to put themselves forward and advocate for themselves. The only time that isn’t needed is when you have something like a union that sets your pay based on seniority/position/tenure, and selling yourself doesn’t change your rate. Any other situation, and you’re selling yourself short.
Like I said before, I hate the game, but I have to play it. And ignoring the need to sell yourself only hurts yourself, even if it does feel icky in the moment.
And I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong about the degredation of the talent pool, but a lot of that is due to the current work landscape being back to the pre-pandemic state where companies have the upper hand in negotiations, leading candidates to spray and pray, targeting jobs they’re not qualified for (since all of the entry level jobs are being taken away). I got my current gig and the golden years after the pandemic (when we actually had the upper hand for like a year or so), and helping my manager interview for another body is painful with how many people are applying for a mid-level job when they’re a better fit for our entry level.
I don’t disagree about “the nature of the game” but it is not that case. There was no “selling yourself short” in that specific situation - it was the HR screw up, one of the many.
What i can’t stand is this, for the lack of the better word, gamification of recruitment process when the company makes up some imaginary assessments and bases their decision-making on that instead sticking to tangible facts. And i’m not making assumptions. i had to clean that mess afterwards.
The company’s lack of transparency regarding these things cost them quite a lot. It is specific situation when an impression took precedence over facts for no good reason and it also happened to be discriminatory towards women at the same time.
i can also go on and on how they wasted much of that middle talent by giving them zero upwards mobility with no real career development plan while also demonstrably hiring senior staff externally because “there were no worthy contenders in the company” type of shit. As a result, they rendered themselves into a feeder for other companies in the field with some insane turnover rates but hey - they had 10-year recruitment and human resources professionals with the “legacy of success” leading the charge.
well, sounds like a skill issue on her part at this point.
it’s more of a skill issue on recruiter’s part because you have to cut through bullshit like that. it is less of a problem with dev teams because loudmouths get humbled eventually but it is a huge problem for sales, business development and marketing - it can do a lot of damage. funnily enough - AI tools for candidate screening and chatbot interviews actually help spotting that kind of thing.
Assuming your manager has the authority to increase your salary. I’m a manager and have 0 power in any say and very limited in what I can do. I’m just paid to babysit my staff to make sure the job is jobbing.
Worked at Lowe’s and was astonished how little power the GM had. However, he could have paid me more, point-blank asked me to ask for a raise. Left in a fit before we met. :)
Same. You gotta go like 2-3 levels up in management to get someone with authority to raise wages. I think it’s by design at this point.
100% by design. I know people who will say “but my manager can’t get me it” as reasoning. Which is strictly correct but also like, man.
It’s also a tactic to separate those who decide and those who don’t, so that the decider doesn’t feel as much guilt.
I’m second rung on the ladder and I still have to work to the budget I’m given regardless of what I would like to increase salaries by 😔
It’s all relative. Is your manager trying to get you a raise? Or, are they getting a bonus by denying you one? If you aren’t sure, maybe it’s the latter.
I technically dont have the authority to increase anyones salary, but I have the information and can be a huge advocate for them.
I personally have also rejected promotions. No counter offer, just said, “if thats all you can afford to offer me, ill try again next year when you can make me a better offer.”
They came back and doubled the salary increase
Yeah I’m at a job that pays dirt, and doesn’t pay for holidays. I asked my boss if he could just say my assignment on Thanksgiving was to eat dinner, and pay me for the day. He was like “mm maybe”, but had to ask his boss. She, allegedly, said no.
Out of college, I got my first job at a decent salary. A woman I interviewed with saw the salary offer they gave me, and then promptly went to HR to demand that she at least make as much as I was offered. She had been at this company for 3 years. It shouldn’t be this hard. Women shouldn’t have to fight to make as much as men. Normalize discussing salary.
It’s everyone. Corporations screw everyone as much as they can. You think if they could hire the same equally qualified person for 30% less they wouldn’t do it in a heartbeat? Corporations care more about profits than they do being anti women (barely) otherwise every field would be dominated by low paid women. As OP, best solution is to discus wages openly so no one gets fucked over.
All-male team here, but my colleague made considerably less than what I was offered as a new hire few years back. We discussed about salary at coffee break and now we all have the same salary and it’s even better than what I started with. I never understood why it’d be a secret that I make 4,5k€/month before taxes.
It isn’t just women, although it does affect us more for sure.
I used to work at a small startup making peanuts and a male colleague hired on was making even less. Thankfully, we went against the company policy of not being allowed to discuss salaries (an illegal policy in my state, btw), and managed to negotiate him up a bit.
sometimes it doesn’t even benefit the company
as an example, I used to be partially responsible for my team’s hourly rates. we hired a proper manager though, and I am no longer responsible for that, and seemingly no longer even involved in that discussion.
as a result, I don’t know what some of my team members are paid, which means that I don’t know how to properly evaluate them and set expectations for their work output. if somebody is making $5 less an hour than somebody else, I’m going to expect less work product from them, and judge them according to that expectation. but I can’t do that without knowing their wage.
I used to work at a shitty company that banned discussing salaries. I never thought anything about it because it was a call center and I just kinda assumed we had standardised salary across the board. One time when having drinks at a friend’s house who worked with me but had a higher position, I found his payslip lying around and I was making, I shit you not, about 70% more. Fucking hell.
I hope you told them when you left
I always talk salary with coworkers, but I’ve discovered that it can occasionally be a liability as some people lack class solidarity and lean into resentment before considering collaboration. Do talk salary, but look before you leap. Reach out the the coworkers you know you can trust first.
