1) It promotes mediocrity.
2) Creates a political cesspool.
3) Ties the hands of hiring team.
1 - Excellent people want to go places where they can make more. When excellent people learn about public salary postings the first thing they will worry about is the perception of other employees. I suspect they will just avoid conflict and work somewhere else. Really think about the current open salary systems: state governments, federal systems (cia, fbi..), school teachers, college systems, military..
2 - Will you help the "next" person above your salary grade? Why? Your goal is to be higher than he/she - so this promotes extremely bad behavior. This is how yahoo is setup. People will be trained to create little moats to protect power, inflate budgets, hide data, hurt other employees.
3 - Really want that new hire? Well, now you have no negotiation power. If you pay this employee salary X. Anyone who gets less than X (Call this Y) will be pushed down in the employee chain. So now, instead you want to minimize Y. Sublimity, you will hire less and less capable people to avoid conflict with the current team.
1. Government and schools sit under enormous political pressure to keep salaries low, as part of a larger agenda to 'drown it in a bathtub'. This pressure keeps school salaries so low relative to the amount of responsibility and regulation that one has to be a bit crazy to choose teaching as a profession. Universities get to take their choice of the PhD students they produce; their hiring problems are more a problem of funding than worker supply. And the military I know little about.
2. Businesses need to ensure that their workers are focused on product quality over internal politics. That's a failure of culture, full stop. These internal politics, if not focused on individual salaries, can instead focus on project head count, building fiefdoms, etc. In short, if you fail to manage internal politics, you'll have these problems regardless of whether employees know what they're getting paid.
3. Yeah, capitalism's a bitch, huh? Funny how all of the 'power of free markets' rhetoric dries up as soon as it's turned back around...
Somewhat more seriously, this mainly shows that you need to peg employee salaries to a minimum of market rates, so that they aren't unhappy when that new market-rate hire comes on, and then go above this minimum based on performance. It's not that hard.
> Excellent people want to go places where they can make more
The issue with engineers is that we don't do that and are bad at negotiations. Once at job people rarely look out unless they realise that they are grossly underpaid.
This may be true for other job profiles like sale/biz-dev etc where the day to day jobs hone their skills for best deal extraction.
You are totally correct. They avoid conflict. If engineers are told at the interview - "Your salary will be this, it will be posted online for all the other employees to see"
1) It promotes mediocrity. 2) Creates a political cesspool. 3) Ties the hands of hiring team.
1 - Excellent people want to go places where they can make more. When excellent people learn about public salary postings the first thing they will worry about is the perception of other employees. I suspect they will just avoid conflict and work somewhere else. Really think about the current open salary systems: state governments, federal systems (cia, fbi..), school teachers, college systems, military..
2 - Will you help the "next" person above your salary grade? Why? Your goal is to be higher than he/she - so this promotes extremely bad behavior. This is how yahoo is setup. People will be trained to create little moats to protect power, inflate budgets, hide data, hurt other employees.
3 - Really want that new hire? Well, now you have no negotiation power. If you pay this employee salary X. Anyone who gets less than X (Call this Y) will be pushed down in the employee chain. So now, instead you want to minimize Y. Sublimity, you will hire less and less capable people to avoid conflict with the current team.