Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-15-2010

[andrewducker]

• Rogue Tory kills debt relief bill
  (tags: debt law conservatives)
• Why are carrots orange? It's political.
  (tags: food funny)
• High-Speed Rail in China. WANT!
  (tags: china trains)
• Republican Space Rangers
  (tags: video gta halo funny)
• A Case for Salary Transparency
  (tags: feminism jobs money women)
• Linking to P2P content declared legal in Spain
  (tags: p2p spain law)
• Different treatment for children in Berlin and Paris
  (tags: France germany children)

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

A Case for Salary Transparency

Of course that doesn't actually make any case in support of you broadcasting your salary to your flist.

Not that I care, particularly. I'm just commenting.

[andrewducker]

Kant's Categorical Imperative - act as if you were following a universal law that you'd want to exist.

So, if I think the world would be better with a rule that everyone should have their salary information public, then I should make mine public.

It doesn't work all of the time, but it's a rule I'm very fond of.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I don't really understand what the reasoning is behind a rule that your salary be made public outside of your own workplace, however.

[andrewducker]

Because my salary is benchmarked against industry norms. The various pay scales move depending on what people are getting paid at other institutions. I'm not just comparing my salary with the person who sits next to me, but the one sitting at RBS, or at other companies throughout the UK.

Knowing what people are being paid elsewhere lets me know whether my company is treating me fairly. It also lets me know whether the industry I'm workign in is well or badly paid. And sure, you can do some of this with industry averages, but that blurs out a lot of useful information (because you lose the ranges that people's salaries cover).

I had no idea, for instance, when I worked at a small software developer in Glasgow, that (a) they were paying less than most and (b) even if they were paying higher I'd have been better off moving to a different industry sector to get paid better.

More data, of course, also means better data mining. Having open data means that researchers (both amateur and professional) can trawl through means that you can sometimes find unusual hotspots. Someone turning up that people with Polish-sounding names have 17.4% lower pay for the same positions, on average, would be a fascinating thing to pop up.

I do think that the case for complete openness is greater the further you get from the original place of work, but in general I'm a fan of transparency.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

In addition, I think it would have the added benefit of opening up a much wider debate about equality and fairness in society.

[andrewducker]

Yes, that too :->

[broin.livejournal.com]

"when I worked at a small software developer in Glasgow"

The one where you played Quake a lot? Might have balanced out. ;)

But yes, I remember the wages for you there were dire.

[andrewducker]

Doom, twas (just) too early for Quake and the machines wouldn't have been able to run it :->

And everyone there was on dire wages except the sales people and the MD. Which should tell you something :->

[broin.livejournal.com]

No, I'm sure it was Quake. :D Would have been about 1997? Can't remember for the life of me what the company did, but I remember it being low paid and you disliking the commute.

[broin.livejournal.com]

You're dead right. I just remembered the difficulty we had getting Quake to run in LandMaster.

[andrewducker]

Actually, you're right. I just remembered playing Quake at that company. I think we started off with Doom and then moved to Quake later on! We must have upgraded the PCs or something.

[broin.livejournal.com]

"System requirements

66 MHz Processor
8 MB RAM
80 MB Hard disk space
1 MB Graphics card"

Hardcore.

[andrewducker]

Not to mention - originally under DOS, so we had to set Soundblaster IRQs to get sound :->

How 1337 were we?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Different treatment for children in Berlin and Paris.

That read like a piece of absurdist flash fiction.

[andrewducker]

I know! Some places are very weird.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Rogue Tory kills debt relief bill

Wow, it is like the US.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the cite to the Carrot Museum. I've been growing variously-colored carrots for the past two years (still prefer the tastes of the orange Dutch/French cultivars) and hadn't stumbled upon this fascinating historical information.

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

I feel a bit comflicted about salary.

On the one hand, I stay in touch with a group of people in similar roles who I've known for a long time. We're pretty upfront about salary, having at one time or another worked in the same team. This has been useful for me & gave me a kick up the backside to pursue reward more aggressively when discussing roles.

The flipside of this, is that I often don't want to share my salary details with my friends & family outside of work, as I have experienced this backfiring spectacularly with people who earn significantly less.

(As an aside I suspect I prioritise earning more highly than a lot of my friends (though probably less than say, someone who's willing to work 100hrs a week as an investment banker). This in itself can make people extremely uncomfortable.)

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I can understand the wariness from other people being uncomfortable. I'm sure that would pass for most people, but there'll always be some people who can't get over their unease with (even minor) inequality.