Sorry for replying to myself, but I wanted to share a couple more anecdotes about pay.

One, at my current job, I offered my employer a sliding scale of 25 to 50 euros an hour, depending on what they paid their other median staff and what they thought the kind of work I'd be doing is worth (primarily dev support with a bit of documentation and coding). They chose the higher end of the scale. I greatly appreciated this, because it would be enough to help me go back to school without getting another part time job.

Sliding scales are a tool I've used several times in the past, and I like them because it favors mutual respect and relationship building rather than profit maximization for either side. I'm also grateful for the other professionals who've offered this to me in the past (lawyers and mental health professionals), and wanted to do the same.

Another anecdote: I once got a freelance gig by meeting another developer in a bar. They connected me to their employer, who offered to pay me $195/hr to make some WordPress templates. I thought this was ridiculously overpriced. I immediately negotiated it DOWN, but the person who introduced me was adamant that I not go too low because it might deflate their wages too. I wanted to charge $30 to $50 for this work, which was about market rate at the time. We ended up settling for $90/hr, which was still a ridiculous amount of money for adjusting CSS pixels in WordPress. Their client went bankrupt not long after (couldn't guess why lol).

The whole experience left me feeling so disgusted I went to work for a nonprofit shortly thereafter. I earned 3x less there, worked much harder being a full stack dev and a sys admin on the side, among other things, but I had a phenomenal team and was 10x happier. That was the job that led to the salary transparency initiative, where we discovered the nonprofit was cyclically exploiting young women new to their careers after their master's degrees, burning them out, and replacing them. On average they made less than $40k, sometimes much less, to my $65k as a dev. There was no real upward mobility there, while the CEO made more than half a million dollars and wasn't even in the same state much of the time. It really revealed unfair pay gaps and helped fuel the movement towards unionization. As one of the highest paid self reported staff there, I felt it was part of my community duty to help my colleagues earn what they're worth. All in all that was probably my favorite job ever, and I would've stayed forever if I could've.

After that I went to work for a Fortune 1000 for profit company who was dabbling in renewables. My salary went up by 50%. And through a less formal salary transparency effort (as in casual lunchtime chats), I learned that I made more than people who'd been there longer and were better coders. I just happened to enter at a better time (during covid). This helped them negotiate for better pay later on.

Anyway, this is all just to share different scenarios that can happen when people are forthright about their pay.

For context, I consider myself maybe a slightly above average frontend developer in the USA. I have twenty years of on and off experience, but often more off than on, and no formal CS schooling. Tech was never really my passion (renewables is), but it helps pay the bills. I grew up in a more collectivist society, consider myself a leftist economically, and favor small egalitarian and cooperative workplaces rather than the typical American model of cutthroat capitalism that primarily pits workers against each other, and against management, in favor of unseen anonymous shareholders or owners.

I want to be paid a fair, livable wage in exchange for hard work. I want others around me to be able to do the same. I don't want to be paid an exploitative wage that's either too low or too high. Too low and I'm starving. Too high and my employer is fueling a bubble that skyrockets costs of living and destroys communities. I don't want a gilded society with the ultra rich and the servant classes. Would much prefer a community where people all made enough to get by and could float between careers that they're good at or needed (teachers, vet techs, medical assistants, nonprofits, career civil servants), etc. Salary transparency helps with all of that. The only people secrecy helps are those who are either overpaid for their work or who own labor and want it to race to the bottom. I would much rather we move towards something like government GS pay scales with clearly defined levels and requirements.

Anyway, thanks for reading.