Morning. The number in that offer letter isn't private. It's undisclosed, and there's a difference.
Hiring.
The Pay Comparison
If every salary in your business appeared on a shared spreadsheet tonight, which three people would find themselves sitting below someone they consider their equal — and could you finish the sentence that begins 'you are paid less than them because' for each one, out loud, without flinching? The gaps where that sentence runs out are the ones already costing you.
J. Stacy Adams was a behavioural psychologist inside General Electric's research unit when he published a paper in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963 called Toward an Understanding of Inequity. His claim was that people don't evaluate what they get. They evaluate a ratio — what they put in against what they receive — and then set that ratio beside somebody else's. The comparison person is chosen, not assigned, and the tension that follows has almost nothing to do with the absolute figure. Nearly fifty years later four economists — David Card, who'd go on to share the Nobel in economics in 2021, with Alexandre Mas, Enrico Moretti and Emmanuel Saez — got to run it as a real experiment. A newspaper had put every University of California salary on a searchable website. The researchers told a randomly chosen subset of employees the site existed, then surveyed everybody about satisfaction and about whether they were looking elsewhere. What came back was lopsided. Learning the site existed did nothing at all to the people who then found themselves above the median for their own pay unit and occupation — no lift in satisfaction, no change in anything else measured. It did a great deal to the people who found themselves below it, who reported lower satisfaction with their pay and their jobs and a markedly higher chance of looking elsewhere. The response ran one way only, and that asymmetry is what tells you the comparison rather than the salary was doing the damage. The trap is treating pay secrecy as a pay structure. Secrecy only postpones the comparison; the structure is what has to survive it, and most founders haven't written theirs down.
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