Let’s talk about it. (Uhnnnnn)

Say “don’t ask, don’t tell” to young-ins these days and you may be greeted with a blank stare. Well, regardless of what you say you might be greeted with a blank stare but they certainly don’t get what all the shushing is about when it comes to matters of money. It may come as somewhat of a surprise to the money-grubbing readers of this website, but there used to be this unspoken rule among old-ins when it came to talking about salary (yes, ironic for a country obsessed with it).

These days, such rules are antiquated when it comes to the young and not-just-bankers-and-laywers-set (NJBAL), where explicit salary talk is downright common, reports the NYT, even among the shockingly low paid.

Take Arielle Green, a 22 yo publicist in Manhattan who makes $30,000. “There’s just more of a feeling of openness in discussing what you make … in this generation, it’s important,” says Green. Or Jin Wang, 27, who can name what his 30 friends — yes, this strikes us as a bit excessive — make “within a bandwidth of $5,000.”

Nevertheless, there are still some rules that govern this area of conversation. While bankers thrive on sharing numbers with colleagues, both young people and old alike seem to think it’s a bit taboo to talk salary with immediate coworkers. And of course there’s also the problem of how to share salary when you’re talking with friends who you know get paid drastically differently than you do.

Since junior bankers and lawyers are compensated in a lockstep fashion, and since jobs share similar characteristics (comparable firms, very structured programs of learning and promotion), it makes sense that there would be a lot of sharing in these industries — they’re commodities, highly valued commodities, but commodities, in a sense. We wonder, however, whether these same readers share their salary info with friends not in the same industry (especially those that are certainly paid less).

So, do you?

We’ve found that in Manhattan, it’s possible to triangulate income through innocent enough conversations about what one did on the weekend. Though one problem is the heavy spending/aspirational nature of much of life in New York. We also find that talk of living circumstances — renting vs owning, various neighborhoods — also is pretty much a stand in less for income and net worth.