Stefan Hayden

A List Apart says never discuss your salary:

"Never discuss your salary with coworkers. Sharing salary information is not only inappropriate, it can lead to real trouble in the workplace."

Really? I’ve heard this many times before but never really thought much of it. Lot of people do find talking about financial stuff uncomfortable but is that normal?

So far at the jobs I’ve worked at most every one was fine talking about salary. A List Apart says you should negotiate a salary that you should “feel comfortable with your financial arrangement”. And if you are comfortable then you should not be upset by what other people make.

If you work in a place where your co-workers of similar skill level and position make a salary that is a significant different then that does not sound like an honest work place. You should not be shocked by your co-workers salary. It might be different from your own but not to a shocking degree.

There are many types of jobs where salary are public knowledge. Sports stars and government officials are well aware what their co-works make and so is the general public.

So you should be careful about talking about money with anyone. But if a conducive work environment can only be achieved when salary is kept a dark secrete then something is wrong. If you are happy with your own salary then you should not care what others are paid. And if you are paid tens of thousands of dollar different from your peers then there is some thing wrong with how your company compensates it’s employees and you should know.

FireFox 3 RC1 has some small but good updates from the beta 5 version. One of the biggest eye sores was fixed in the auto complete url bar. The typography and color make it much more organized and easier to read. The little design changes always make me happy.

History Of The Color Wheel. very in depth.

I’m glade a lot of these attempts at data portability from google, myspace, and facebook have been getting bad press. They are at best halfhearted attempts at data portability with the data still tethered at the original site.

I am at best a modest programmer and as I build Books I Am Reading (BIAR) I am looking for different ways to add features that are fully integrated with out needing to reinvent the wheel. If I could add a friends module I would love to. But they are not giving out friends data, just links to friends on other sites. I don’t need links to myspace. I need links to other profile on BIAR.

Recently I put a lot of thought in to adding Disqus comments to the site. I was excited about not needing to build a comment system for a few days. Disqus has a good comment module with great features.

But it is just not able to integrate enough to truly feel part of a site. If I log in there is no way to also log you in to disqus forcing people to log in twice. Most likely most comments would end up being anonymous. There is also no easy way to associate a comment thread with a profile and have the person emailed. Perhaps disqus was not meant for this application but it illustrates a common problem with how social modules are being built.

These will not meet the requirements of data portability until all these modules can freely talk to one another. The question is how much of Books I Am Reading will I have to build before these easier options become available? Hopefully the data portability wars will force it to happen sooner then later.

“Teens are far more competent than we assume.” I never know what to do with these kind of articles. It all makes sense but I don’t know how to navigate what should be done and the society that disagrees.