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Discovering that a colleague with the same job title is earning more than you is never fun, though it is quite common. According to a global survey of 1,850 workers by résumé building platform Kickresume, 56% have discovered that someone with the same job at their company is earning more than them, and another 24% have their suspicions. People are much less willing to discuss their salaries than we thought they would betheres still quite a stigma around it, says Kickresumes head of content Martin Poduska, who helped conduct the study. The weirdest thing is that we didnt identify a good reason for it. Poduska explains that compensation is far from a precise science, and that keeping the topic taboo only works to the benefit of the employer. The secrecy that surrounds it prevents organizations from coming up with more effective or more transparent ways of rewarding people, he says. In recent years, there have been efforts to mandate wage transparency in certain cities and states. For example, California, Washington, New York, Maryland, Colorado, and Rhode Island have had pay transparency laws on the books for years, and a handful moreincluding Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Vermontadded them this year. Calls for more robust pay transparency have even gone viral on TikTok, and the Kickresume survey suggests Gen Zers and millennials are much more willing to talk about their compensation than Gen Xers and boomers. With more people sharing salary information, the research suggests many wont be happy with what they learn. Heres what to do when you discover a colleague is making more for the same job. Dont assume the worst Not everyone who found out that a colleague with the same job title was outearning them took issue with it. In the Kickresume survey, about 40% didnt really care what others were making, though the rest did. That includes 45% of women compared to just 33% of men, which may not be surprising given the gender wage gap. But that could be because there are a lot of reasons why two people with the same title may get paid differentlyand that any pay discrepancies could be unintended, or simply reflect nuances in talent and market trends. These reasons could range from résumé points, like education and experience, to differences in their responsibilities, even if they share a job title. Plus, those who are hired in a more competitive talent market also typically have more bargaining power than those who are hired in slower economic periods. I think that people assume that companies have it all figured out in terms of jobs and titles and career paths, but it’s really not that neat and clean, says career coach Caroline Ceniza-Levine. Even if a company doesn’t do it deliberately, there’s so many opportunities for inequities to develop in compensation, and no one’s going to advocate for your salary more than you will. So you might as well pay attention. Take a breath, and do your homework Discovering that someone with the same job title is earning more can provoke a lot of emotions, but a heated confrontation is unlikely to resolve the issue. You dont want to react the moment you find out, says Andres Lares, managing partner at Shapiro Negotiations Institute, which offers negotiation consulting and training services. You want to take some time to digest it, and that also gives you time to find some objective information. Lares explains that those emotions are best channeled into research about market rates for your role. That prepares you to have these conversations from a place of knowledge, he says. The more you do that, the less reactionary and emotional you are, and the more objective you are when you approach [your manager]. Approach with caution While there are wrong moments to confront your managerlike immediately after finding out someone is earning morethere may never be a right time. It can be very easy to stall forever waiting for the right time, and the right time will really never happen, says Lares. There’s always going to be excuses not to do it. If you want to talk to your boss about your compensation as it compares to your colleagues, Lares suggests scheduling an in-person appointment or bringing it up during a regularly scheduled one-on-one. Ask questions Rather than opening the conversation with accusations and demands, Lares recommends starting with questions. Sit down with your boss and ask about pay structures. How does it work? How do you come up with the pay structures for each person on your team? How do I compare in my compensation with others in the role? Where does my performance land compared to my colleagues? What would set me up best to increase my compensation? he says. Not only are you getting valuable information and seeing a more complete picture, but they can see that you’re approaching this with empathy. Test the market, carefully The most direct way to understand what youre worth is to test the market yourself. Even if youre not ready to jump ship, Vivian Garcia-Tunon, founder of executive coaching, leadership development, talent strategy, and advisory services provider VGT People Advisory, says sending out a few applications may be useful, as long as your negotiation doesn’t become an ultimatum. Probably eight out of 10 people will go test the market and see if they can get a job offer and then have the conversation with their manager, she says. It’s a strategy that brings the individual more confidence. But there’s a risk associated with it, which is that if you use it as a negotiation strategy, you have to be willing to walk. That other offer, in other words, may be a card you want in your back pocket heading into the negotiations, but not necessarily one you want to play. If youre seriously considering leaving, you can put that offer on the table, Garcia-Tunon says. If youre trying to use it to get an increase, you can position it in the conversation as another piece of information. Be patient Just because youre walking into your bosss office to talk about a raise doesnt mean youre going to walk out with a higher salary. Those decisions rarely happen on the spot, and may require conversations with other stakeholders, like human resources, accounting, and leadership teams. Sometimes your manager agrees with you, but they then have to go higher up, says Ceniza-Levine. One thing that I’ve actually seen with a lot of people is that they have this initial conversation with their manager, the manager promises them something, and then nothing happens. Ceniza-Levine expains that your salary will never be as pressing to anyone else, and whether intentionally or not, it can take a long time for managers to follow up. Be prepared to have multiple conversations, check in on what is happening, and leave a paper trail, she says. Send an email saying, thank you so much for meeting with me, as discussed youre going to talk to senior leader X about a merit raise for me, and then we can schedule another meeting.
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E-Commerce
If you’re in the business of publishing content on the internet, it’s been difficult to know how to deal with AI. Obviously, you can’t ignore it; large language models (LLMs) and AI search engines are here, and they ingest your content and summarize it for their users, killing valuable traffic to your site. Plenty of data supports this. Creating a content strategy that accounts for this changing reality is complex to begin with. You need to decide what content to expose to AI systems, what to block from them, and how both of those activities can serve your business. That would be hard even if there were clear rules that everyone’s operating under. But that is far from a given in the AI world. A topic I’ve revisited more than once is how tech and media view some aspects of the ecosystem differently (most notably, user agents), leading to new industry alliances, myriad lawsuits, and several angry blog posts. But even accounting for that, a pair of recent reports suggest the two sides are even further apart than you might think. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Common Crawl and the copyright clash Common Crawl is a vast trove of internet data that many AI systems use for training. It was a fundamental part of GPT-3.5, the model that powered ChatGPT when it was released to the world back in 2022, and many other LLMs are also based on it. Over the past three years, however, the issue of copyright and training data has become a major source of controversy, and several publishers have requested that Common Crawl delete their content from its archive to prevent AI models from training on it. A report from The Atlantic suggests that Common Crawl hasn’t complied, keeping the content in the archive while making it invisible to its online search toolmeaning any spot checks would come up empty. Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, told the publication that it complies with removal requests, but he also clearly supports the point of view that anything online should be fair game for training LLMs, saying, “You shouldnt have put your content on the internet if you didnt want it to be on the internet.” Separately, Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) looked at how the new AI-powered browsers, Perplexity Comet and ChatGPT Atlas, handle requests to access paywalled content. The report notes that, when asked to retrieve a subscriber-only article from MIT Technology Review, both browsers complied even though the web-based chatbots from those companies would refuse to get the article on account of it being paywalled. The details of both cases are important, but both underscore just how far apart the perspectives of the media and the tech industry are. The tech side will always tilt toward more accessif information is digital and findable on the internet, AI systems will always default to obtaining it by any means necessary. And publishers assert that their content still belongs to them regardless of where and how it’s published, and they should retain control of who can access it and what they can do with it. The mental divide between AI and media There’s more happening here than just two debaters arguing past each other, though. The case of Common Crawl exposes a contradiction in a key talking point on the tech side of thingsthat any particular piece of content or source in an LLM’s training data isn’t that relevant, and they could easily do without it. But it’s hard to reconcile that with Common Crawl’s apparent actions, risking costly lawsuits by not deleting data from publications who request them to, which includes The New York Times, Reuters, and The Washington Post. When it comes to training data, some sources are clearly more valuable than others. The browsers that circumvent paywalls reveal another incorrect assumption from the AI side: that because certain behaviors are allowed on an individual basis, they should be allowed at scale. The most common argument that relies on this logic is when people say that when AI “learns” from all the information it ingests, it’s just doing what humans do. But a change in scale can also create a category shift. Think about how paywalls typically work: Many are deliberately porous, allowing a limited number of free articles per day, week, or month. Once those are exhausted, there’s the old trick of the incognito window. Also, some paywalls, as noted in the CJR article, work by loading all the text on the page, then pulling down a curtain so the reader can’t see it. Sometimes, if you click the “Stop loading” button fast enough, you can expose the text before that curtain comes down. One level up from there is to use your browser’s simple developer tools to disable and delete the paywall elements on an article page. Savvy internet users have known about all of these for years, but it’s a small percentage of all usersI’d wager less than 5%. But guess who knows about all these tricks, and probably many more on top of them? AI. Browser agents like those in Comet and Atlas are effectively the most savvy internet users possible, and they grant these powers to anyone simply requesting information. Now, what was once a niche activity is applied at scale, and paywalls become invisible to anyone using an AI browser. One defense here might be server-side paywalls, which grant access to the text only after the reader logs in. Regardless, what the browser does with the data after the AI ingests it is yet another access question. OpenAI says it won#8217;t train on any pages that Atlas’s agent may access, and indeed this is how user agents are supposed to work, though the company does say it will retain the pages for the individual user’s memory. That sounds benign enough, but considering how Common Crawl has behaved, should we be taking any AI company at their word? Turning conflict into strategy So what’s the takeaway for the mediabesides investing in server-side paywalls? The good news is your content is more valuable than you’ve been told. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be so much effort to find it, ingest it, and claim it to be “free.” But the bad news is that maintaining control over that content is going to be much harder than you probably thought. Understanding and managing how AI uses your content for training, summaries, or agents is a complicated business, requiring more than just techniques and code. You need to take into account the mindset of those on the other side. Turning all this into real strategy means deciding when to fight access, when to allow it, and when to demand compensation. Considering what a moving target AI is, that will never be easy, but if the AI companies’ aggressive, constant, and comprehensive push for more access has shown anything, it’s that they deeply value the media industry’s content. It’s nice to be needed, but success will depend on turning that need into leverage. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
As I write this my 6-and-a-half-month-old daughter is sitting on my lap in my home office, where she spends an hour or two each day. Despite all the toys Ive laid out for her, the thing she typically reaches for is my keyboard, occasionally leading to the odd typo. Ive been a freelance journalist for about 12 years, but never has this work-from-home, choose-your-own schedule arrangement been so valuable. Last year I was able to be with my wife at almost every doctors appointment, ultrasound, and blood test before we became parents in April. Since our daughter was born, I have enjoyed the flexibility not only to make it to every pediatrician appointment and give my wife a helping hand during the day but also to be a part of important milestone moments. I couldnt imagine having to walk out the front door each morning, only to return a couple of hours before bedtime in the evening, but of course that is the reality for most working parents. That is perhaps why solopreneurship is so popular among those with kids, especially women, and particularly those stepping away from extremely demanding careers to start or grow their families. Studies in Australia and Canada have found that many workers make the transition into parenthood and self-employment at the same time, and research even suggests that self-employed mothers outperform those without children. Being more present at home and work When her first child was born, Fernanda Chouza went in the opposite direction, taking on a more challenging role at a fast-growing AI startup in San Francisco. Over time Chouza says she earned the respect and leeway to take time off to care for her kids, but then she got laid off in 2022, when her kids were 2 and 4 years old. As I looked at hyper-growth companies, I realized I would need to put in, like, two years of elbow grease to get to the point where I can take a week off for my kids, she says. The idea of starting from scratch was too hard. Instead, Chouza started a one-women marketing agency called the Launch Shop, offering fractional product marketing expertise to software companies launching new products. Previously, Chouza says she spent many hours at work feeling guilty for not being home with her kids, and many hours at home worrying about whether she was dropping the ball at work. Now I have full flexibility. I don’t have to be constantly apologizing for stuff, and I only show up when I’m at the top of my game, she says. When I’m off, I’m fully off; I don’t have anxiety on the weekends, I don’t have anxiety at night, and I can be a lot more mentally present with my kids. Though she doesnt enjoy the same kind of equity-payout potential, Chouza says her salary is about 50% higher than her previous earnings, while providing significantly more time off. Previously, she said she could take two or three weeks off a year but was expected to be responsive on email and Slack during that time. Thus far this year, Chouza has taken a week or more off from work on eight separate occasions for reasons ranging from her kids eye infection to a two-week trip to visit their grandparents abroad. In corporate, I would have had to grovel and apologize for any time off, she says. It felt like I was being penalized for being a mom and they think of me as a liability, like Were always making so many accommodations for Fern. A side door to new career opportunities Perhaps one of the most unexpected benefits are the kinds of clients Chouza has worked with as a solopreneur. She says most companies are hesitant to hire executives in the current market but still need short-term support, making a contractor with corporate experience a viable option. By being fractional Im actually punching so far above my weight, she says. I would have never had this exposure if I was just trying to go through the front door, but Im coming in through this side door and getting these amazing logos on my résumé and this amazing experience. That is perhaps one of the most surprising benefits for those who step away from the workforce to start an independent venture while raising a family. Though many choose solopreneurship for the flexibility, they often discover that it can also offer a bridgeor even a ladderback into the traditional workforce. You can think of it as not necessarily I’m going to build a startup that’s going to pay me a lot of money, but Im going to write a story for myself that professionally fills those years, explains Kyle Jensen, the director of entrepreneurship programs, and associate dean and professor in the practice of entrepreneurship at the Yale School of Management. I created something new, I operated it, I ran it, and through all of this I developed all sorts of executive acumen and business sense, and maybe some software skills. Professional benefits aside, Jensen also says part of what makes solopreneurship so appealing to parents is the ability to trade some of the financial rewards for time. With this manner of entrepreneurship, you can treat your human capital as a luxury good, and you can choose different distributions of time that allows you to enjoy things that are important but not necessarily prioritized in our societylike parenting, he says, adding, The only person who’s going to remember that you worked extra hours are your children.
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E-Commerce
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