Why don’t you like sharing your salary with coworkers? I tell people exactly what I am paid if the conversation comes up. It helps to know where you stand, i.e. if you’re being under paid or if you should ask for more in the next review cycle.

Sadly, we live in a society that values people by their wealth. Thus, people are afraid to say how much they make for one of two reasons:

1) They think they don't make enough and are afraid to be regarded by their peers as less valuable.

2) They think they make enough, but they are afraid to be envied (or even hated) by their peers, or to be told that they should be working harder for what they're getting.

However, the only ones benefiting from our silence are our employers. So much so that a company I used to work for in the UK contractually prohibited us from telling anyone how much we made. Unsurprisingly, this company has been proved to pay the lowest average salaries in the UK semiconductor industry.

So, people, let's start talking about salaries all the time. Transparency can only help us! There are too many people working for less than they could be making, but afraid to ask for more because they don't know how much our employers are able or willing to pay.

@acz0903 I worked for a company (before leaving them after just over two months of being there) that has the same “not allowed to share salary” thing stipulated in the contract. That was a red flag. The company was very top heavy, the devs were under paid.

@52cal in the US, even if a company has a policy against sharing your salary, you have ever legal right to do so. Now, you can't share someone else's salary, but you can share yours.

Sadly, most people in the US don't understand that, in general, if a contract is in violation of a law, it cannot be enforced. I'm a little surprised other developed countries allow it honestly.

This is a big reason why I left my last job. I assumed all frontends devs just didn't make much. Eventually the other frontend developer told me how much he was making. He was making 50k more than me a year. Mind you, we both have the same responsibilities and worked on the same projects (if not all the time, most of the time). He'd been there a year long than I had. When I left management flat out told me the salary they gave me was because I was a "new grad", even though I worked full-time as a developer for my entire college career.

After I left, so did half of the other developers because I told them what I was making. Turns out the server devs who had been there for 3-5 years were making almost exactly what I was making.

EDIT: Worth mentioning that when I left I was spending maybe day doing frontends stuff and the rest working on the backend. I asked for a raise and was basically laughed out of the office.

I'm not sharing my salary with those losers! I earned it. Let them earn their own fucking money!

@platypus Not funny, platypus. :(