re: Why are people so secretive about their salaries?

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Companies don’t pay everyone the same and shouldn’t have to imo.

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Most of the time, salaries are based on the market conditions when you’re hired.

If it’s slow in your industry, you will probably be underpaid because there are more people looking for work. If it’s extremely busy, they will have to overpay to get people to fill their needs.

During yearly raises, most corporate people will dole out 4-5% pay raises on average.

So, if, say, you’re hired at 50K in 2015 during a down time in your industry, and get 5% bumps each year, you will be around 64K now. However, if work has picked up tremendously in your sector, and they need people, they may offer someone 70K or more to someone with lesser experience than you to get them in the building. You then have salary discrepancies across the company.

You may have a good boss that realizes this and keeps you where you should be salary-wise, but most of the time they won’t proactively do this.

I once came across my group’s salaries and it was comical on what some people were paid for what they could (or could not) perform.