I'm also in my 50s and recall when it was completely taboo. Except I worked at a startup a few years back where I was told going in that we were all making the exact same pay from engineers to CTO. We all knew it was below-market pay, but it was supposedly so the company could bootstrap. One day I was having a conversation with a Russian co-worker (on an H1-B, I think) and I said something along the lines of "we're all making $XK/month which is about 25% below market, but hopefully we'll get some funding and that will change soon...". The look on his face told me that something was wrong. "You're making $Xk/month?!" he said. "Yeah, you are too, right... right?" "No, he replied, $2K/month less." I was really surprised because this guy was doing pretty much all of our hardware development and he was pretty brilliant. Shortly after he went to the CEO and (rightly) demanded parity.
At my first US startup the CTO told me that all engineers are making the same slightly below market salaries and receiving same options. A few months later I found that most actually made almost twice and had way more options. I fix this quickly but i still don’t understand how people seem to think that it’s ok to blatantly to somebody
It doesn't even have to be a hand-to-mouth startup to blatantly lie to folks, it can be a multi-billion-dollar multi-national corporation. For instance, when I was a manager at Microsoft I had more than one newly-hired report tell me that their onboard training said there was no stack ranking, which we all now know wasn't even remotely true in the early 2000s.
(New hires would mention this, because one of the first things I'd tell new hires on my team was how stack ranking worked, amongst other parts of the performance review process.)
