That was me! I can say without a doubt I quickly learned to only work for small companies where I reported to the owner directly. This enabled me to get 50% raises YoY when starting out - where my corporate job was limited to the typical "well, that wouldn't be fair to the rest of the group" style politics.
I would say it's vastly more important to the hypothetical vulnerable high-performer than the guy graduating MIT or Harvard working for Google. They start at an extremely high salary and will do fine no matter what. The high performing high school dropout needs rapid massive raises just to eventually get to par with the other group - assuming similar performance.
I can almost guarantee you that if salaries were transparent it would have been a huge scandal in a few of the companies I worked at since I was making 2-3x the wages of those next to me. It would have been untenable for those managers to pay me that, even though/if I were worth it - they'd have done nothing but deal with politics and fallout from it. I still believe I was underpaid in most of those positions compared to the folks they had working there.
Egos are easily bruised. When that 19 year old high school dropout is making more than the 45 year old with a degree people start to complain. Loudly. They don't even look at work output or performance - it's utterly irrelevant to most.
I see both sides to this, but I'm relatively certain salary opaqueness helped me through the start of my career. Now? Maybe not as much. It's much harder to stand out at an exceptional level once you reach a certain point.
That was me! I can say without a doubt I quickly learned to only work for small companies where I reported to the owner directly. This enabled me to get 50% raises YoY when starting out - where my corporate job was limited to the typical "well, that wouldn't be fair to the rest of the group" style politics.
I would say it's vastly more important to the hypothetical vulnerable high-performer than the guy graduating MIT or Harvard working for Google. They start at an extremely high salary and will do fine no matter what. The high performing high school dropout needs rapid massive raises just to eventually get to par with the other group - assuming similar performance.
I can almost guarantee you that if salaries were transparent it would have been a huge scandal in a few of the companies I worked at since I was making 2-3x the wages of those next to me. It would have been untenable for those managers to pay me that, even though/if I were worth it - they'd have done nothing but deal with politics and fallout from it. I still believe I was underpaid in most of those positions compared to the folks they had working there.
Egos are easily bruised. When that 19 year old high school dropout is making more than the 45 year old with a degree people start to complain. Loudly. They don't even look at work output or performance - it's utterly irrelevant to most.
I see both sides to this, but I'm relatively certain salary opaqueness helped me through the start of my career. Now? Maybe not as much. It's much harder to stand out at an exceptional level once you reach a certain point.