This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor
I have little issue with telling people what I get paid unless they ask. I think this juxtaposition comes from the age-old question of nature vs. nurture as I was raised to never talk about money, not even to family members. That’s the nurture. But when I was applying for my first “grown-up” job, I experienced firsthand how difficult it is to negotiate compensation without knowing how much peer employees are paid. That’s … well, that’s more nurture, I guess. Anyway, while I was interviewing for positions, I collected all the information I could find on average salaries for recent engineering graduates. Unfortunately, there was such a huge variation in the reported values that they were useless. So, I decided to break the ultimate wage transparency taboo. I walked up to a person in my graduating year, job offers in hand, and asked if we could chat about salaries.
[Read more…] about The Benefits and Downsides of Wage Transparency
