<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>AussieWog93</author><text>&amp;gt;Devils advocate- isn&amp;#x27;t this a bit like arguing peanut butter shouldn&amp;#x27;t be uniformly priced, but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown&lt;p&gt;Unlike the peanut butter example, the economic value provided to the business by skilled employees varies not just by orders of magnitude but can even go negative.&lt;p&gt;If you ate $100k worth of peanut butter each year, and some of the jars were only 10% full (or worse, contained horrible peanut-butter guzzling insects that ate parts of your good jars), you&amp;#x27;d definitely start negotiating with the peanut butter industry.</text><parent_chain><item><author>sangnoir</author><text>&amp;gt; Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty.&lt;p&gt;Devils advocate- isn&amp;#x27;t this a bit like arguing peanut butter shouldn&amp;#x27;t be uniformly priced, but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown: soil acidity, use of pesticides, as well as farmers grit and dedication? A jar is a jar, and ideally, a job is a job. An employee can either do the job, and be paid what it says on the can, or they cannot do the job and have to be transitioned out.&lt;p&gt;Sure, jars come in different sizes and brands, but we should stop pretending each job is bespoke when employee organizations function on the basis of them being similar, empirically workers &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; replaceable.&lt;p&gt;My biggest problem is information asymmetry: even if I were to accept your argument at face value (that important attributes are hard to gauge); the employee has much less knowledge on how much they ought to be paid for their skill-level, but the employer will have that information up the wazoo (both internally, and through industry surveys and back-channels)</text></item><item><author>endymi0n</author><text>&amp;gt; Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn&amp;#x27;t it be the same when we&amp;#x27;re shopping for a job?&lt;p&gt;Despite the question being rhethorical, the answer is everything that&amp;#x27;s wrong about this proposal: Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve got people with the same job title with almost a magnitude of difference in actual output. Sure, on paper, they&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;doing the same thing&amp;quot;, but if someone forced me to shoehorn them into categories, that would mostly serve to punish top performes with little credentials and push them somewhere else.&lt;p&gt;I feel strongly about this, mostly because it happened to myself: After being sold, the first company that employed me introduced a &amp;quot;completely fair and transparent&amp;quot; compensation scheme. After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I&amp;#x27;d have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately.&lt;p&gt;I called a recruiter the next day and was out a few months after.&lt;p&gt;Pay transparency is something that has upsides imho, but isn&amp;#x27;t a clear-cut win. It can turn out to be a net negative. Some further reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wsj.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;the-downside-of-full-pay-transparency-1502676360&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wsj.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;the-downside-of-full-pay-transp...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Pay Transparency Is Coming</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/pay-transparency-salary-range-disclosure-laws-colorado-employers-terrified</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>larrik</author><text>I mean, wine ranges in price from $4 to no real ceiling based on exactly those sorts of factors...</text><parent_chain><item><author>sangnoir</author><text>&amp;gt; Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty.&lt;p&gt;Devils advocate- isn&amp;#x27;t this a bit like arguing peanut butter shouldn&amp;#x27;t be uniformly priced, but you ought to negotiate the price of every jar based on various attributes of the farm where the peanuts were grown: soil acidity, use of pesticides, as well as farmers grit and dedication? A jar is a jar, and ideally, a job is a job. An employee can either do the job, and be paid what it says on the can, or they cannot do the job and have to be transitioned out.&lt;p&gt;Sure, jars come in different sizes and brands, but we should stop pretending each job is bespoke when employee organizations function on the basis of them being similar, empirically workers &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; replaceable.&lt;p&gt;My biggest problem is information asymmetry: even if I were to accept your argument at face value (that important attributes are hard to gauge); the employee has much less knowledge on how much they ought to be paid for their skill-level, but the employer will have that information up the wazoo (both internally, and through industry surveys and back-channels)</text></item><item><author>endymi0n</author><text>&amp;gt; Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn&amp;#x27;t it be the same when we&amp;#x27;re shopping for a job?&lt;p&gt;Despite the question being rhethorical, the answer is everything that&amp;#x27;s wrong about this proposal: Because the most important attributes are very hard to gauge and almost impossible to prove — Grit, dedication, responsibility, excellence and loyalty.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve got people with the same job title with almost a magnitude of difference in actual output. Sure, on paper, they&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;doing the same thing&amp;quot;, but if someone forced me to shoehorn them into categories, that would mostly serve to punish top performes with little credentials and push them somewhere else.&lt;p&gt;I feel strongly about this, mostly because it happened to myself: After being sold, the first company that employed me introduced a &amp;quot;completely fair and transparent&amp;quot; compensation scheme. After I saw the scheme projected to the wall in the big All-Hands, I realized that without any degree I&amp;#x27;d have to wait 10 years for stock options while the PhDs would be in almost immediately.&lt;p&gt;I called a recruiter the next day and was out a few months after.&lt;p&gt;Pay transparency is something that has upsides imho, but isn&amp;#x27;t a clear-cut win. It can turn out to be a net negative. Some further reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wsj.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;the-downside-of-full-pay-transparency-1502676360&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wsj.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;the-downside-of-full-pay-transp...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Pay Transparency Is Coming</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/pay-transparency-salary-range-disclosure-laws-colorado-employers-terrified</url></story>