I realise that cultural differences will play a part, here, as will generational change, but I just spent the evening hanging out with my cousin’s friends, roughly 5 years younger than me, and this was the main topic of conversation…
How much they earn, for how little they actually work. How “easy” their work is. How they can afford shit like house deposits, shitty anime subscriptions, and drugs… Seriously, their main topic of conversation aside from “how much I make” was fucking drugs, and how much they hate various portions of humanity that aren’t like them…
Growing up, I was taught that this sort of shit is to be kept to yourself. Discussing salaries/earnings was a massive no-no, and don’t get me started on the drugs shit…
Especially around strangers, which I was, for most of them…
I just find it a wee bit sad that such “social norms” have become forgotten, in an era of sheer narcissism and braggadocio…
Then again, these people were also arseholes, and scumbag druggies no less, so selection bias is of course at play…
But I just find it jsrring, I guess, that something as simple as “You don’t ask, or discuss, salaries, unless it is relevant”, has fallen by the wayside, seemingly, amongst “hype”-obsessed zoomers these days…
Discussing pay being good or bad depends on your worth and amount you're paid.
If you're the one doing 2x the work and getting paid 2x as much your coworkers are not going to say "oh he's getting paid the right amount for the work he's doing" - that's just wishful thinking - they demand equal pay or they resent you for getting paid more and sabotage your career. If you know your value and demand pay that you're worth then discussing salary only hurts you.
Same thing with stock options. If you have 10% ownership, 10% of their work is your work. It doesn't matter to them if you joined the company when it was 4 people and it was your years of working for peanuts and risk that even made their safe job possible, they'll resent you for reaping the rewards of that risk.
So ironically the more fair and reasonable your employer is the less you want to talk about salary, because fair, merit-based differences in salary always creates strife.