When You Find Out What Other People Earn

You are good at your job and you fully intend to be paid properly for it. So when a colleague lets their number slip over lunch and it turns out to be bigger than yours, for work that looks a great deal like yours, the useful thing to know is that you have just been handed something valuable. Most people go years without a single reliable data point about what their work is actually worth, and you got one for free, over a sandwich, from somebody who took a small risk to say it out loud.

The feeling in your chest is real and it will pass. The number will not, if you write it down. What happens next is a procedure rather than a mood, and it starts this afternoon rather than in three weeks, when the sting has faded and nothing has changed.

A colleague earns more than me for the same job. What should I do first?

Write their number down, today, along with their title, their years of experience and the date. It is now the first point in a range you are building, and a range is the thing you eventually ask against.

Do this before you do anything else, because the number is perishable in a way the feeling is not. In a week you will remember that it was more, and you will have lost the digits. On paper, next to a title and a date, it becomes evidence. In your head it stays a grievance, and grievances do not survive a compensation conversation.

Write down what you know about the shape of their job as well, in one line: what they own, who they report to, how long they have been doing it. You are not building a case against anybody, you are building a comparison that will hold up when somebody senior pushes back on it, and vague comparisons do not hold up.

Then close the notebook. You are not making a decision this afternoon. You are collecting.

How do I get through the rest of the afternoon?

Get up and walk somewhere for ten minutes, breathe out for longer than you breathe in, and do not send anything to anybody. Researchers at Stanford tested that exhale-heavy pattern for five minutes a day across a month and found it lifted mood more than mindfulness meditation did, which is a large return on a very small physical instruction. The feeling is a comparison response, it is loud, and it fades if you refuse to feed it.

What you are protecting yourself from is the reactive version of this: the message to a friend that gets screenshotted, the cold reply to the colleague who told you, the resignation drafted at four in the afternoon that you would take back at nine the next morning. Nothing you send today is better than the same thing sent on Monday, and quite a lot of it is worse.

Being told what somebody earns also tends to land as a verdict on how you have been doing, and that reading is wrong on the facts. Salaries are set by when you were hired, what you asked for at the time, which team had budget that quarter, and how the market was moving in the month somebody signed a piece of paper. Another person's salary is data about the market, and it is not a verdict on you.

How do I turn one number into a range worth asking against?

Get two more data points for the same role and rough location, then take the top of the three as your target. One number is an anecdote, two is a coincidence and three is a market rate you can say out loud without your voice moving.

Where the other two come from, in the order that actually works. People you already know who do your job elsewhere, asked plainly, because most people will tell you if you tell them yours first. Public salary bands in job listings for your role, wherever employers publish them, which is the least awkward source there is. Recruiters, who will give you a range in one phone call and are being paid to know. And any published pay data for your own occupation and country, which is free to read and will at least keep you from being wildly out.

Then set a date. The single most common failure here is not getting the wrong number, it is getting the right number and doing nothing with it for a year. Put the ask in a specific week, in writing, before the feeling fades, because the feeling is the fuel and fuel does not keep.

What if there is a real reason they earn more?

Sometimes there is, and finding out is a good outcome rather than a bad one. They may have a scope you do not have, a market rate for a scarcer skill, or a negotiation they ran better than you ran yours, and each of those tells you exactly what to do next.

A field experiment published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that people hold large misperceptions about what their managers earn and smaller but real misperceptions about their peers, which cuts both ways. The gap you are imagining may be smaller than it feels, and it may be considerably larger. Neither is knowable from one lunch.

What is worth doing, once you know which of those it is, is asking the question that turns it into a plan: what would I need to be doing for my number to look like theirs. If the answer is a scope, ask for the scope. If it is a skill, book the course. If it is a conversation, have the conversation. Every version of that answer is actionable, which is why finding a real reason is better news than finding none.

There is also the honest possibility that you have simply never asked. That is worth saying without any shame attached, because it is the most fixable version of this story. People are not paid what they are worth, they are paid what was agreed, and the agreement was a conversation that somebody started. This year you get to be the person who starts it.

Be the person who says the number out loud

Somebody told you what they earn, at some risk to themselves, and it is very likely the most useful thing that happened to your career all year. The accurate feeling toward that person is gratitude, not comparison, and it is worth registering that before the afternoon closes.

Then do the reciprocal, because it is the fastest way to raise the range you are measured against. The people who know what work is worth ask for more, get more, and pull the band up behind them. The people who do not know accept the first offer and hold the band down for everybody. Which of those happens in your workplace over the next five years is decided by whether anybody says a real number out loud, and you are now somebody who can.

Two rules make it a move rather than a mood. Give your own number and never somebody else's, because the second one is somebody else's to give. And give it to the person it helps, quietly, rather than to the room. Research on information avoidance shows that people will decline useful, free information when it might carry a verdict, so the offer often has to come from you rather than be requested.

There is no obligation in any of this, and no guilt for keeping quiet. You have had a hard afternoon and you are allowed to spend it on your own numbers. But the range you will be asking against next year is being set right now, by people talking or not talking, and one plain sentence from you moves it further than any amount of hoping the market notices.

Sources

• National Bureau of Economic Research, How Much Does Your Boss Make? The Effects of Salary Comparisons
• American Economic Association, Journal of Economic Literature, Information Avoidance
• Stanford Medicine, 'Cyclic sighing' can help breathe away anxiety