Company: How dare you talk about money.
Also Company: Everything we do is 100% driven by money.

If a company doesn’t understand that money is a big part of why people work, then they don’t understand people, and you shouldn’t be working for them.

A company should be paying you what you’re worth. They should be proactive about making sure you’re getting paid fairly if you’re making too little (and not exploiting your lack of aggression and/or awareness). They should be giving you fair raises that outpace inflation.

If you’re an employer, you *need* to be paying people enough that at a minimum, they aren’t worried about money. That is, they shouldn’t worry they’re underpaid. They shouldn’t be under constant pressure to pay the bills. The best amount you can pay them is the amount when they just don’t think about money anymore.

But money is intrinsically a part of work. It is a critical motivating factor – often THE motivating factor for a lot of people, and that’s just reality. It’s not an indictment of their passion for the job or their personal integrity or whatever to talk about money. It’s a necessity.

If your company doesn’t like people talking about money, the thing you should be asking yourself is why? Because you’re worried there’s unfairness in the system? Because you can’t justify the CEO’s 100x multiple on an IC’s salary? Because there’s a huge gender pay disparity? Because some n00b is making 2x what your 10 year vet is making due to circumstance?

Just fix your problems, and let people talk about money if they feel the need to. If you feel a need to enforce secrecy, that should be a big honking red flag to all your employees. And is probably something they should talk to each other about.

But yeah – money’s part of work. Talking about money is part of work. Needing to get paid doesn’t make you a bad employee. If you could work purely out of altruism and love, that’d be great. It also wouldn’t be a *job*.