 So, hi. So, we live in a capitalistic society, and in capitalism, corporations have this goal and C-Corps specifically have a legal obligation to make as much money as possible. And yet, for people, we're often told that working hard is our main goal. We need to be good workers and contribute to society and whatnot. But see, there was a politician now close to six, seven years ago, who, no, not that long ago, for like four years ago, who said something, corporations are people. Well, in my mind, if corporations are people, that means people are corporations, and thus really making money should be our main goal, too, if we're in a capitalist society. So, I wanted to talk about this question here. It's a question that often gets asked when you're interviewing for a job, and it is, what is or was your previous salary? And my advice to you on this is avoid answering this question at all possible turn. And if someone says, we require this information, well, then I'm requiring you to do something else. Why? It is illegal for an employer to ask their previous employers for salary information, and they're really only kind of allowed to verify employment dates. So, they can't really get verification on what you said. And then I wanted to talk about a company policy that's in a lot of handbooks, and that is, don't talk about salary. That's illegal within the U.S. According to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, there is explicit language that says that conversations about pay are something that is 100% encouraged and cannot be prohibited by a company. So, with that in mind, I wanted to say that I now have nine plus years. I haven't updated these slides in the industry. I've spoken at numerous conferences. I'm well-read on various industry topics, and actively practice programming as well as going to numerous code retreats. I teach through Grill Developers, and I am a senior web developer at a D.C.-based company, and I make $122,000 a year. That's a really scary thing to put up on a screen. The first time I did, I was terrified, and I asked the rest of the room. This was at Cascadia Ruby last year down in Portland, and I asked the rest of the room to also shout out their title, their location, and their salaries, and got a really good response from it. But I wanted to talk a little bit about why it was so hard for me to do that. The fear of retribution is one huge thing that made me really anxious about talking about this topic in general, and was something that needed to be overcome, in my opinion. I had been working for five years or more making a constant salary, and then when I finally took my own advice and didn't say anything about my previous salary and started lying to people when they were like, we need that information, I saw my pay increase over 200% in two years. That's a little bit of a tell to me how important it is to have active conversations about this, because we need to be able to have realistic understandings of what we should be making for our skills. With that said, when I gave this talk, I found myself in San Francisco a couple of months after this past November, talking with a couple of my friends, and one of the people included was Shanley Cain. I was saying how I needed to turn this into a full-length talk so I could have this conversation with a room full of people, and she jokingly leaned over and was like, I know this woman who has this company or this publication that would really like to maybe publish this type of a thing, and so if you ever felt like making an article, maybe I could get you in touch with her, and I was like, fine, okay, I will write this article. So I wrote the article, and in the article, I made a call to action. That call to action was on May 1st. I encouraged people on Twitter to share their salary information publicly and with their face attached to it in order to break down this taboo of not talking about pay, whether it was due to politeness, fear of retribution or what have you, the law basically protects us talking openly about our pay. So after that went down, there was a lovely woman, maybe you've heard of her, Stephanie Murillo, who stepped in and said that she would be willing to anonymously tweet salaries from people of color and other underrepresented people so that their voices could be heard without fear of retribution that tends to target underrepresented people significantly more. And so because of that, I honestly, Stephanie, I felt a little like conflicted about it because I wanted people to have names attached to it because there's already services like Glassdoor that allow people to share their salary information and whatnot, but there's no names attached to it, and there's no people attached to it, and so when you're looking at a company and you see, oh, there's a salary range of 80,000 to 250,000, somebody who's unsure of themselves, who's suffering from imposter syndrome, who is part of an underrepresented group or something, they will make excuses for why they don't deserve that much. So what I wanted to do with talk pay was really put these faces to things so that you could look at somebody and be like, wait a second, I've worked with you, I know what your skill set is. I know the things that you're capable of, and I'm just as capable, and you make twice as much as me, that doesn't seem right, and so attaching these names was kind of critical to me, but Stephanie brought up some really great points, and I thought to myself, okay, why does this taboo exist, and why are people hesitant to talk about it? And again, retribution is one of the main concerns, but there was a lot of people on talk pay that talked about how they felt like it was uncouth, that they shouldn't share this information because of some moral reasoning that it felt like they were either rubbing it in people's faces or they were ashamed of it, and so I started doing a little bit of digging as I remembered some of my sociology classes in college. Max Weber did a long, in-depth study towards the beginning of the 20th century about Protestantism and capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, and this concept of the Protestant work ethic basically substantiated this idea that we work because work should be its own reward. It is something that when you do hard work, you get enjoyment from that, and so it started occurring to me that potentially one of the reasons why people felt anxious about sharing it for social reasons was because of that attachment that people should be happy about the work that they're doing and that the pay that they're getting is just a nice side benefit, which is complete, not a crap. What this type of social conditioning and projection ends up doing is it causes people who need to talk about these things because they're being treated unfairly by society at large, they're getting paid less, whether that be women or people of color or different religions, these people need to be able to talk about this information because they're not being fairly compensated, and having this in place basically allows people to say, well, obviously you're not a hard worker because you don't enjoy the work that you're doing. You feel like you deserve more, you feel like you're better than the work that you're doing, and so this ends up kind of reinforcing these terrible beliefs about minority groups or underrepresented people saying, oh, well, they're lazy, or oh, if they're working for less, they must be undocumented, or oh, they don't have the same scruples as we do. We can rationalize away why we shouldn't give these people a fair shake basically. Another thing that I wanted to talk about here, because this is open source and feelings, I figured I'd start bringing in some discussions about how free work in particular ends up harming underrepresented groups. In particular, a lot of companies now, because of how many people are starting to go into the tech sector, are now almost requiring open source contributions and requiring or encouraging open source contributions or discouraging people that don't have open source contributions, is a really part of the language, but it's a damning concept because the people that tend to be able to contribute to open source communities are those that have the resources in order to afford their own computer, afford their own internet access, afford people that are able to help with childcare or cleaning services, people that just have someone else helping out like a spouse or what not, they're not like an only parent. All of these things affect whether or not we can contribute to open source, and for a company to say you can't work here because you don't have enough open source contributions, is another way we end up keeping people out that want to get in. Another thing that particularly bothers me about the open source community, and it's not really the community so much as what happens afterwards, is people pour in all of this effort and train skill to produce software that can be used by anyone and what ends up happening is companies then use that to make substantial amounts of money, but there's no compensation that flows back to the open source community for devoting that time to developing these software solutions and strategies that companies are then profiting off of, and so that further excludes people because of the fact that there's, if you are already struggling to make ends meet and you are encouraging to do free work, that's a devaluing of your ability to make ends meet because you're spending time doing this instead of helping with childcare or doing your normal hourly job or what have you. So having these companies basically take open source contributions and make money off of it but not giving back to the community in a tangible way is problematic in my opinion. One kind of stunning example in my opinion is Randy Harper's work on the Twitter block bot. She developed this strategy that allowed groups of people to cultivate lists that would block people on that list, and Twitter had been bothered, it seems like they were bothered but they could have been taking it seriously but I doubt it, but Twitter has been, sorry, Twitter has been pushed by a lot of people in the community to develop strategies to prevent abuse on their platform, and so after years of not responding to that, Randy went ahead and developed this with other people and Twitter ended up basically just kind of taking the entire idea in implementation and saying, here we did this thing, and then didn't pay her for anything. It's like this was developed for your platform to meet a particular use and user base, but you didn't compensate somebody for the work that they did. That, to me, seems terrible in the case of a company that's making a substantial profit. That person helped to improve the quality of your platform and you didn't pay back anything. And the last thing that I wanted to talk about is something that I've seen quite a bit in tech in general. How many people here have worked at a company or currently work at a company that pushes them to contribute more hours per week, say 45 hours per week? Raise your hands. How about 50 hours per week? 60? Anyone? Oh, there we go. 60 hours a week regularly you're being paid 50% less than what you should be. For those who work 50 hours a week you're being paid 25% less than you should be. 45, 12.5%. You are working at this company on a contract that says that you work 40 hours a week except in certain special circumstances. But when that becomes regular they're basically committing wage theft of a sort. They've broken their end of the contract and they are taking money from you. They're taking time from you and not compensating you in recompense. Maybe they'll pay for pizza every once in a blue moon and make you feel a little special that you got a free meal from them or maybe they have beer at their office. That's great and all but beer is not a 12.5% increase in my salary. This also ends up contributing to a phenomenon that I've seen and I have previously been guilty of it. I have a story that I, at my first job, was working on a project and I wanted to take off that Friday and was told that the project that I was working on needed to be completed before I took off. I ended up working 37 and a half hours over a 48 hour period and I thought that made me like a superhero for a while. I thought this was great and I often hear people comparing these war stories as if they're like a badge of honor. When in actuality this is 100% horrible abuse and wage theft. I worked 37.5 hours in a 48 hour period when I was being paid on the basis of working 37.5 hours over an entire week. They got like 30 hours extra out of me that week just in those two days and that needs to stop. We can't put up with this. Deadlines and these arbitrary constraints that are placed on us are just that. They are completely arbitrary. Most deadlines can shift. If you're being told, oh, this needs to get done because we're having a meeting with the founders but the founders have a regular meeting set up, it's okay if it slips. It's not the end of the world. We cannot, like the problem with this push to rush us to work hard and cause these burnouts and not compensate people adequately will never end because the deadlines will continue to not shift and people will continue to feel like they need to put in those hours and then continue to not be compensated for that time properly. And we need to be able to talk about these things. We need to be able to have these conversations on a wide scale and we don't need to feel shame about it. We are like legally protected about talking about this type of thing. Yes, there are implications where people will make up an excuse about why they're letting you go that aren't related to pay or to discussing salary or discussing work conditions. But the more that we do it, the more that that will be seen as a behavior that isn't punishable. And that's why we really need to continue to talk pay. Thank you.