My feeling on this is that I don’t feel that rates should necessarily be publicly broadcast, but I see no reason why individual members shouldn’t be able to reveal their rates if they want to.
There are traditional ‘taboos’ involved with discussing conversation, some of which are just the desire for privacy and others which have likely come from less savory places, but there are some practical reasons as well.
There are a few things to consider here:
- We all are human. Compensation can be difficult to decouple from feelings of worth. Seeing another worker who has a higher rate than you when you feel you do comparable work can cause friction. This isn’t necessarily bad, as if your understanding of your abilities is correct then you know what you may actually be worth to the company.
- Your rate is a single number combining a host of factors that may not apply to other members of the cell. Cost of living is the biggest one I can think of-- one GitLab’s page talking about using ‘local rates’ is how they handle it, looks like.
- This is the biggest one. Information is best when it can be acted upon. Let me elaborate…
The way we handle pay increases isn’t by individuals going to Xavier and asking for a raise. It’s done by looking over the numbers at the end of the year and then bumping the team by a percentage amount. This is actually very nice for a number of reasons-- it’s a way to ensure that everyone benefits from the company’s improvements without having to do individual negotiations for each person, but if our response to this information is to go renegotiate our rates, then we’re changing the deal. We probably won’t be able to use the ‘everyone gets a percent-based raise’ method anymore, because each person will be doing their negotiations individually.
That might be good for some of us who can negotiate well. It could be bad for those who aren’t. It might also mean some feeling of competitiveness will rise up among us, since at that point we are all sharp enough to realize that if we aren’t the developer who gets the marginal increase, someone else will be. I can be a very competitive person when I’m incentivized to be, and I like that I don’t have a reason to compete against my coworkers right now. Since any individual can be an epic owner in a given day, it could wildly change the dynamic if we were in competition.
If we aren’t willing to transition to individual negotiation or some sort of collective bargaining, then if we have this information, we’d just have to live with what it reveals.
What I think it would reveal is less ‘what is someone worth to OpenCraft’ and more ‘what was the intersection of this member’s negotiating ability and OpenCraft’s willingness to part with cash when they joined?’ @antoviaque asked me my rate. He didn’t tell me what OpenCraft was willing to pay. In fact, the first time I joined OpenCraft, I was asked to reconsider the rate I gave because Xavier thought it was too low! He absolutely could have gotten away with letting me pick that lower number.
So for an organization that has one point person making those decision, I could scarcely think of someone who is more mindful than Xavier about how the compensation structure works and making sure each person is treated fairly. BDFL is an appropriate title here ;)
The question does bring to mind one thing which I always felt was interesting about OpenCraft, which was that I feel like it runs more like a model cooperative at times than a normal private firm, since it’s so flat and every member takes part in its governance and management-- and the profits are even made to ripple out in the form of calculated across-the-board raises. However unlike other cooperatives, workers don’t have ownership in the company itself and these raises aren’t dividends. I don’t have any inherent issue with this, of course, I just always thought it was kind of neat, since I’ve not seen it anywhere else.
Anyway, those are my (probably more than) two cents. :)