<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>pc86</author><text>The root cause is an open argument but I think one of the causes is that you get a demonstrably lower quality of employee because the pay can&amp;#x27;t be negotiated, &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; it&amp;#x27;s pegged so far below market it&amp;#x27;s insulting. The salary you mentioned is half that of the median developer salary in the US. If you can get into FAANG as a new grad you&amp;#x27;re looking at 1.5-2x the median. I&amp;#x27;m not super familiar with UW&amp;#x27;s scaling system but I have to go to what appears to be the top level (ES10?) to get anything approaching a reasonable salary, and it&amp;#x27;s still less than entry level FAANG.&lt;p&gt;I used to contract for state government. They used contractors for all the &amp;quot;real development&amp;quot; because the developers on state payroll making $40k&amp;#x2F;yr were wholly unqualified to write any code. So they paid a contracting firm $80&amp;#x2F;hr to get someone making $100k&amp;#x2F;yr to come in and do it while the state employees managed the project and supervised the contractors.&lt;p&gt;If the government could just negotiate individual salaries for developers, they could pay them twice as much, fire the contractors, and get the work done for roughly the same quality, and cheaper.</text><parent_chain><item><author>spenczar5</author><text>As mentioned in another comment thread: we don’t need to speculate about the effects because millions of employees already share salaries with no anonymity in thousands of groups. That is, employees of the US or state governments.&lt;p&gt;That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fiscal.wa.gov&amp;#x2F;Salaries.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fiscal.wa.gov&amp;#x2F;Salaries.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.&lt;p&gt;What are the consequences of this? Is there vicious infighting, and sniping over raises? Uh, no. There is just simple compensation, and way less negotiation. When some job class needs a salary adjustment because the job market has changed, everyone benefits. It’s pretty great.</text></item><item><author>searchableguy</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s better to share salaries anonymously with the level and company information.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I&amp;#x27;m close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I&amp;#x27;m at.&lt;p&gt;I say this seeing younger folks quibble over a difference of few hundred dollars in compensation and worry they are getting underpaid compared to their peers.&lt;p&gt;Note: Above is an example of highly paid individuals starting out so a few hundred dollar difference wouldn&amp;#x27;t matter.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Hellofresh employees&apos; open salary initiative</title><url>https://hfsalary.org/</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>KallDrexx</author><text>This may just be your personal feelings though.  I know quite a few people who work for public schools and government entities throughout Florida who really really are uncomfortable with their salaries being public knowledge, and at least one has felt it has been used against them.</text><parent_chain><item><author>spenczar5</author><text>As mentioned in another comment thread: we don’t need to speculate about the effects because millions of employees already share salaries with no anonymity in thousands of groups. That is, employees of the US or state governments.&lt;p&gt;That ends up including public universities - at least here in Washington, you can look up the salary of any employee of the University of Washington:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fiscal.wa.gov&amp;#x2F;Salaries.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fiscal.wa.gov&amp;#x2F;Salaries.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go ahead and find me, Spencer Nelson, or any other Software Engineer of any level you want.&lt;p&gt;What are the consequences of this? Is there vicious infighting, and sniping over raises? Uh, no. There is just simple compensation, and way less negotiation. When some job class needs a salary adjustment because the job market has changed, everyone benefits. It’s pretty great.</text></item><item><author>searchableguy</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s better to share salaries anonymously with the level and company information.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s human nature to compare and I feel it would be counterproductive to know what individuals I&amp;#x27;m close to make compared to having idea of the median, top, etc bands for the level I&amp;#x27;m at.&lt;p&gt;I say this seeing younger folks quibble over a difference of few hundred dollars in compensation and worry they are getting underpaid compared to their peers.&lt;p&gt;Note: Above is an example of highly paid individuals starting out so a few hundred dollar difference wouldn&amp;#x27;t matter.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Hellofresh employees&apos; open salary initiative</title><url>https://hfsalary.org/</url></story>