Quote Originally Posted by early morning View Post
I actually asked this because I DON'T understand how people see or don't see their own conditioning/past experiences play out in their/our daily lives - and I include myself in this. (yeah that's a pretty tortured sentence, sorry...) Sometimes I react to things and later wonder WHY I had the reaction I did.

I still don't understand why you felt someone who was not more talented or more productive than you should have a higher salary, just because they had one before and therefore "cost" more to entice into your facility. That, to me, makes no sense. obviously, ymmv.
Have you done any hiring? I hired many people over decades.

For each position, I had a salary range to work with. There is not a single standard salary amount for each position. The flexibility helped me hire in needed people.

I probably committed the crime of offering a lower salary to an incoming hire who was more qualified than someone else hired into the same position at a higher salary. This is how the real world works, hiring salaries are not a perfect science.

DEI goals didnt come into my hiring decisions, but it was often a conflict when hiring new people that their starting salaries didn’t exceed those of people who had already worked there for a while. That was my real problem as a hiring manager.

I believe you come from a public school background? From what I understand of that world, salary scales are regimented based on number of years of experience plus educational degrees and certificates. Concrete criteria with no flexibility. I may be wrong about that, but perhaps this is the lens in which you are viewing this.

And finally, salaries are negotiated in my (former) work world. I could have negotiated for more, but that salary represented a nice bump up for me, so I didn't and besides, I wanted the job. Salary was secondary.

edited to make sense, hooefully.