The awkward part is that you cannot un-know it. The admin collecting the printouts was basically trying to un-ring a bell. The papers were gone but every person in that office had already memorized the number that mattered most to them personally and spent the rest of the day being extremely normal and professional about it while privately reconsidering every career decision they had ever made.
Salary transparency done right is genuinely useful. It exposes bias, rewards people who cannot negotiate, and stops companies from quietly paying some people less for doing the same work. But there is a real difference between a structured, transparent system and one chaotic morning where everybody finds out everything at once and then has to sit three feet apart for the next eight hours pretending they are fine.
Author: Kayitsi.com
