Ex-Googler says she exposed company-wide pay inequality with spreadsheet
The issue with pay was always a thorny one for me at Google. Not what they paid me, I thought that was fine, but that there was so much enforced secrecy around it.The entire goal, as far as I could ascertain, of that secrecy was to keep people who had been mislead about how they were being paid, from being able to prove or disprove that Google was actually paying people what it said they were paying people.And what had been presented as a really performance driven, no discrimination, reward metrics, was perceived to be yet another 'management beauty contest' where managers could swing bonus dollars toward people they liked (regardless of their performance) and away from people they didn't care about.And to be clear, I was ok with that, it's how a lot of bonus systems are set up, but it bothered me that it was presented as something else. And while I didn't start a spreadsheet, I did get advised by HR that my questions were not helpful :-).It was suggested that if it bothered me that much maybe I didn't really want to be working there, I thought about that and agreed with that conclusion.