> I was shocked to see that our CEO had the highest salary (5x to 6x) for the job he did.

At my previous employer, the CEO was doing roughly 20x the average entry level salary. There's a reason why companies don't want employees talking about salaries: because most people would be outraged to hear just how much some do.

I'm in a very similar situation - I have been working for many years, and seen both extremes of salary transparency, but am still unsure about the best approach.

I started out in a very small but rapidly expanding software company, where the founders encouraged everyone (including themselves) to be very open about salaries. This didn't work too badly because most employees were recent graduates and no-one was earning much money. However it did generate some dischord when it became apparent that those from less prestigious universities were getting paid slightly less.

A few years later I was working in a very large corporation, where (like you), HR hadn't secured their data very well, and I got to see details of many thousands of salaries and bonuses, including those of some of the highest paid people in the UK at the time. Without going into too much detail, the remuneration disparities were staggering. I think it is fair to say that it was the sort of company that was prepared to pay as much as necessary and as little as possible. If the scale of inconsistencies were widely known, I would imagine it would have created a fairly toxic working environment.

So in the end it might come down to company size and culture. I can't imagine why a small coffee shop, like in the original article, would want to keep it so secret though.

Well, do you know what has a bigger impact than seeing your coworker's salaries?

Seeing how much the customers of your company are billed for the job you do.

Generally, agreed, at least the first time. I was being paid.. $17/hr and being billed out at $100/hr. I moved to a company starting at $22/hr, being billed out at $150-$175/hr.

The 'hourly' was just a breakdown of salaried - sometimes worked more than 40hrs, never paid for it. And I also get that people aren't 100% billable, you have to build in downtime to the salary, etc. I get it. But I do know in one year I billed out about 1600 hours at at least $150/hr - asked for a $10k raise, and was denied. So I left.

In some situations since then I appreciate the 'team' model a bit more - that's what I was pitched in my 'no raise' reply. "We're a team, etc" But in this particular project, I was doing 95% of the work. I trained my replacements during my notice, and a month later the client moved over to me anyway, because I literally was the project.

Note to agency companies - don't ever let one large project become the sole domain of one employee. For various reasons, this is not good business.

I bet that was a nice raise too.

Well... it was decent, but it was mostly maintenance at that point. Actually, we rebuilt the system in a different platform that was much easier to build and easier to maintain, so within a year there was far less work to do. Worked myself out of a gig, but had a happy client...

And even more fun when you hear about a competitor billing lower, and paying higher salaries than your company.

That used to bug me. Now I see it as I'm willing to accept less because I don't have to deal with all the business, networking, advertizing, schmoozing, negotiating, etc. Stuff I have no interest in doing.

In other words, yea, I could make 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x more but I'd have way more stress and doing all kinds of stuff I really hate doing. Sometimes it bugs me but then I think am I really willing to put in all that extra effort doing stuff don't want to do and almost always the answer is "no"

What do I gain by sharing my salary with others? What does it cost me? For me, there are moral answers, economical ones as well as hedonistic ones to these questions.

But I know this:

Information is king and it helps to be flexible (abillity to move for a job, ability to start there quickly, ability to be out of a job for weeks/months ...).

I try to do this: advise colleagues that I think should earn more, what to do, what expectations are ok, without destroying team morale and my (selfish) status (knowing that I earn top).

Was the CEO a shareholder?

Sometimes CEO/CTO/COO salaries are distorted (e.g. artificially high or low), depending on if they are a significant shareholder and if they are getting dividends or capital gains from stock.

He was a major shareholder claiming that he did not care about his salary at all.

At the end of the day, that money would most likely flow back to him in dividends (or through a capital gain) at some point in the future.

You can't compare the salary of a CEO who is also a major shareholder, with a plain employee salary.