Interesting Links for 13-01-2015

[andrewducker]

• Finally, a guide to successfully interrogating terrorists
  (tags: terrorism interrogation psychology )
• We have experienced anarchy like this before. We should not over-react to it
  (tags: liberal anarchy terrorism violence law politics )
• £300 for a job reference is the latest outrage in the exploitation of interns
  (tags: work OhForFucksSake

Comments

[major_clanger]

The point about not apologising for what you earn got my attention as I've recently realised that I am self-censoring my online posts - even friends-locked ones - because I find myself feeling uncomfortable even alluding to the fact that I have, by most of my friends' standards, a relatively high income. So many people I know are eking out a hand-to-mouth existence, or are commenting that they are (for example) no longer attending conventions because of lack of money, that I've begun to feel awkward about making posts that indicate that I have a disposable income because so many people I know don't.

[andrewducker]

I also get embarassed about that. I earned around £50k last year, which is well above what most of my friends earn - and knowing that some of them are existing on much lower amounts of money does trouble me.

But self-censoring doesn't strike me as an answer to that - that seems to lead to people not having open discussions about why the situation is as it is, and what can/should be done about it.

[bart_calendar]

Yep. Once in a while I'll post what I made on a given freelance job. And one of the reasons I do that is that many people are trying to get into online freelance writing and have no clue at all what kind of money they can ask for - so they end up asking for much, much less than the market will actually bear.

I've found this out through people messaging me "A potential client is offering $50 for xxx, is that a good deal?" and me being like "Um...no...the industry standard for that is $350 and some clients will pay up to $500."

[octopoid_horror]

I think some of the awkwardness around salaries is because, in the UK at least, they're somewhat personal.

What I mean by that is that my salary relates directly to me - someone else in my department doing the exact same job gets a different salary because of factors like how much budget there's been in years when they've got a raise, what salary they were brought in on, whether their team as a whole did well, how long they've been with the company. The salary is related to them, not the role, in effect. What someone else in the same role earns has little impact on my salary.

I would be more comfortable if salaries were widely known, and very closely tied to the role (possibly with a % increase for length of service although I'd argue length of service doesn't really equate to skill) but bonuses of whatever kind were not public and were the more individual part of this

[major_clanger]

I'm in the odd position of going from one extreme to the other

[andrewducker]

I would as well. I suspect that we'd go through a transition period of people being stunned by things they didn't know, and then we'd get used to it.