[HN Gopher] Pay transparency: which states have laws and do they...
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Pay transparency: which states have laws and do they work?
Author : mikecarlton
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-11-22 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (money.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (money.com)
| luxuryballs wrote:
| For our entirely remote company it has only been a hassle, I'm
| sure many places will just skip Colorado entirely. These kind of
| stupid laws always backfire in such a way. Like not interviewing
| black candidates for fear of a lawsuit if they don't get an
| offer.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| I think pay transparency is a good thing. Companies should say
| pay rates. Other than irritating companies because they can't
| hide their pay rates, what is the problem with the colorado law
| in your opinion?
| sokoloff wrote:
| For one, the law is ambiguous and seems to be written to
| cover the case that people are paid mostly hourly or in
| salary and requires numeric figures there but permits
| "general description" of bonuses, RSUs, and the like. If a
| company genuinely seeks to comply but their "general
| description" is later found to not be specific enough, are
| they on the hook for damages (or even defending against a
| frivolous lawsuit)? That one seems fixable by the CO
| legislature.
|
| Two, whichever state pioneers here risks making it just
| risky, uncertain or a pain in the ass enough for companies to
| nope out of hiring in CO. This one isn't easily fixable
| except by a many-state compact, but being first will hurt
| some of your state's residents.
|
| Three, what range would I post for lead singer of rock band?
| My high school buddies (also decidedly Not Sammy Hagar) play
| dive bars for $100, unlimited wings, and three buckets of
| beer, while Is Sammy Hagar commands significantly more. If I
| can post a range that's wide enough to cover my expected
| range, which reflects the expected range of productivity of
| programmers, does it really tell anyone anything that they
| can't get quicker from levels.fyi than from scanning my job
| listing? If the law changes to require me to post a tighter
| range per position, then I need to manage multiple listings
| and still nobody learns much of anything they don't already
| know. (Assuming you think there's at least a 2x spread from
| the least effective but employable SWE and the top SWE. I
| think it's well over 5x, but surely at least 3x.)
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Such a shame, but expected, that Texas does not have any such
| law.
|
| I work for a big corporation in Texas, and have found myself
| trying to determine what will my next steps be. Employees have a
| tool to browse the job openings, and the responsibilities of the
| positions, but again, salaries are given in ranges, so wide
| indeed, there is no real answer to the question "would my wages
| be raised if I switch jobs inside the company", which is
| ridiculous.
|
| I could also find myself making less money than someone who
| technically is on a lower leven in the hierarchy, even if we both
| are doing the same job.
|
| So every year, when my supervisor asks me where do I want my
| career to go to, I'm stuck between what I want to do, and how
| much more I want to earn, which is not great.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I find myself cross-referencing salary information on
| Glassdoor. I'm thankful people share this info on Glassdoor but
| it does seem like an imperfect kludge for simply demanding an
| answer from HR that they just refuse to give.
| wikibob wrote:
| Glassdoor is utterly useless for tech industry jobs.
|
| The data is many years out of date and drastically under
| market.
|
| Check levels.fyi and teamblind.com instead.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this, thank you.
| nitrogen wrote:
| The Robert Half recruiting agency's salary guide can also
| be useful when making the case for a raise or CoL
| adjustment, especially if you're in a market that
| levels.fyi doesn't have data for.
| dhd415 wrote:
| Frankly, you should just ask your manager what the comp change,
| if any, would be if you switched roles. This is a normal
| question in all but the most dysfunctional companies.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| In many big corps, managers, or more accurately, middle
| managers, do not completely understand how level
| compensations work. At the end of the day, they manage
| people, but they have little control over wages, which are
| determined by other managers and non human factors.
|
| I'm guessing it is done that way so there is little room for
| favouritism and/or nepotism.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Agreed. As a manager, I'm acutely aware that you are working
| here because we pay you. So am I. We can talk about non-
| financial benefits and how we're making customers' lives
| better, but at the end of the day, if I stop paying you,
| you'll quickly stop working.
|
| Why there's so much taboo/avoidance of talking about money I
| have no idea, but if you need some information to contemplate
| a career change in our company, I'll do my best to get it for
| you.
| psim1 wrote:
| At this point when I receive a note from a recruiter, I let them
| know I need to know the name of the firm (not "top firm in your
| field"), the full job description, and the compensation range. If
| they do not provide that, we are wasting each others' time and I
| will not correspond further. I understand that third party
| recruiters don't want to give away some information so that
| applicants won't end-run and apply directly to the firm. But,
| look at the job market. Games are not going to work right now.
| larrik wrote:
| Why do you need to know the firm name at that phase?
| sokoloff wrote:
| For me, in case it's Oracle. For others, they have other
| companies they'd rather not work for. Some here don't want to
| work at Amazon; others not at Facebook; others not at
| Google...
|
| It also ends the BS of recruiters who don't have any listings
| at all and just want to have engineers they can blindly pitch
| to companies, hoping they can score a low-effort placement.
| rshsdgsdgdsgdsg wrote:
| What is wrong with Oracle? I have worked here for almost 20
| years and love it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Everyone has their preferences.
|
| Ours differ and that's ok.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Probably ethical reasons.
|
| I can't comment on how working internally in Oracle is,
| but between many of its products and how they do
| business, they tend not to be well liked in the tech
| scene and people will voice their discontent. See also:
| Facebook/Amazon and defense contractors.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Anecdotally, I have heard horror stories of people
| running up huge sums of licensing fees without realizing
| it, and they getting charged/sued later.
| chucksta wrote:
| So I can look into the company myself before I see if it's
| worth wasting either persons time
| arxanas wrote:
| Recruiter emails are so generic that you can do this
| automatically! https://blog.waleedkhan.name/detect-recruiter-
| spam/
|
| It's actually saved me a lot of time and led to several high-
| quality conversations with recruiters since then, which I would
| have missed out on otherwise.
| [deleted]
| willvarfar wrote:
| How much people pay in income tax is public information in the
| Nordics, meaning it's trivial to compare yourself to coworkers or
| the names of people you interview with etc. Or neighbors, and so
| on.
| kelnos wrote:
| That only works if these people only have one source of income,
| though, right? If people hold more than one job, or have a
| part-time side gig, or have investment income, that would
| inflate their income tax paid, and you wouldn't know what
| portion of that is paid against the salary for the primary job
| that you're curious about.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Which means it works for 99% of employees in tech and most
| other sectors and the other 1% are easily spotted.
| caskstrength wrote:
| > Which means it works for 99% of employees in tech and
| most other sectors and the other 1% are easily spotted.
|
| Why? You don't give mere engineers RSUs in the Nordics?
| zuhayeer wrote:
| One of the reasons why listed salary ranges for a role may be
| very wide initially is that interview performance can determine
| your level and hence your compensation. So you really have to
| wait until after you interview to know your true compensation
| range. Many companies usually don't disclose level outright when
| you are applying, it's usually a more general application you
| fill out initially (you'll almost never see an "L5" job listing).
| Once you know the specific level though, you can get much tighter
| ranges (by looking at sites like Levels.fyi - disclosure: I'm a
| founder). But even then, there are also out-of-band offers that
| companies can give out if you're a really strong candidate or
| have a valid enough reason (ie to buy out your unvested stocks
| etc), so should this be reflected in the range too? Then the
| range listed would become even wider and can misdirect people's
| expectations since not many people would actually get to that
| high end.
|
| But then again even knowing that range is super helpful
| regardless, and the Equal Pay Act has been instrumental in
| helping candidates not get lowballed. And before that, employers
| basically always asked what your current salary was, which is
| still unfortunately almost a required question candidates have to
| answer in other parts of the world. So all steps in the right
| direction, but there is some level of nuance where job listings
| as they are today are slightly divorced from the actual role /
| level / team that you end up at.
|
| We're working on building a job board specifically to help solve
| this. We plan to have roles within specific levels of experience
| and with much tighter ranges using the leveling standard we've
| developed as a backbone: https://levels.fyi/standard/
|
| We're also hiring! And we list our salary ranges here:
| https://levelsfyi.notion.site/Levels-fyi-Careers-969edc750f1...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Companies usually exclude Colorado from remote job listings so
| they can post a separate Colorado-specific job posting that
| complies with the laws in that state. It doesn't make sense to
| post the Colorado-specific pay range and job posting to every
| other state, especially when salaries vary so much between
| locations.
|
| In my (limited) experience hiring Colorado employees remotely, we
| had to make several different job postings with various ranges to
| make sure we didn't exclude any possible applicants for having
| too high or too low salary bands. If someone applied for the
| $200-$300K job description but didn't have the right experience
| or performance during the interview, we could offer for them to
| "reapply" to the $150K-$200K job title and pick up there. It felt
| like a lot of formality with no real benefit to either side.
|
| The Colorado law also doesn't stop at the job listing. You have
| to follow specific procedures for various things after the
| employee is hired, too. I could see companies excluding Colorado
| just to simplify their operations and avoid opening themselves up
| to another state's different employment laws.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I'm glad CO passed this law, but this post really shows how
| hostile employers are to job seekers and employees. It also
| highlights why we really need federal action on this to provide
| the intended benefits to them.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Which part(s) were showing hostility towards job seekers and
| employees?
|
| If an employer has a need for a level 3 software engineer
| (whatever that is for them), should they post in Colorado the
| salary range for that role in Colorado? Or the range for that
| role in Elbonia on the low end and Palo Alto on the high end?
| Would the latter pass muster with CO?
|
| If someone aspirationally applies for that role and the
| interview process places them as a promising level 2 software
| engineer, what should the company's answer be? "We regret to
| inform you that we will not be making a level 3 offer." Or is
| the candidate better off if they then continue to say "we
| invite you to apply for consideration for a level 2 role by
| clicking this link: xxxx"?
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Why not just make one post, say "salary range $150k-$300k,
| dependent on location, experience, and interview performance"?
| Seems like you're making multiple posts in an effort to have
| your cake and eat it too, and then blaming the laws for the
| extra effort required for the deliberate choice you made.
| Which, let's be honest, is a very anti-employee choice.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Why would you have such a wide pay range of $150k-300k for a
| single position? Seems like such a range enables the kind of
| thing these laws are trying to prevent, i.e. underpaying
| employees, or gender/racial gaps in pay. That, or just a
| massive bait and switch.
|
| Surely there has to be a limit on the ranges for salaries
| posted, otherwise what's stopping an employer from just posting
| a range of $10k - $1M, at which point the salary information
| becomes as worthless as having no information.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Suppose I only have one level of employee and they're all in
| CO.
|
| To keep the math and my HR processes simple, I pay them all
| $100K/yr and grant them all initially $200K in shares plus
| $100K/yr in refresher shares, vesting over 4 years. Someone
| who just joined will make $150K in the next 12 months.
| Someone who joined 2 years ago will make $200K in the next 12
| months if our stock is UNCH since they joined. If it doubled
| since then, they'll make close to $300K in the next 12
| months.
|
| Bam, my range is $150K-$300K/yr and I have the fairest, most
| equitable pay structure I could imagine. Layer on top of that
| complexities of people actually having different levels of
| productivity, different amounts of unvested stock
| appreciation, and you can have even wider spreads. Add to
| that having had to "buy out" someone's unvested shares or
| bonus at another company to get them to switch to yours and
| the spread gets wider.
| the-pigeon wrote:
| I thought the Colorado law was about base pay?
|
| Personally I don't care about stocks on a job posting. I
| consider stocks to be worth 0 when considering offers
| unless it's a public company with all the information
| available for me to evaluate the company.
|
| This is because statistically the startup will fail. And
| there's no way to make a fact based evaluation if it will
| fail or not until after you are working for them. If you
| are one of the initial hires it's basically blindly
| gambling on the founders. The exception being if the
| founders have previously founded successful startups, in
| which case you are betting on their experience.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > I thought the Colorado law was about base pay?
|
| That's not the way I read it:
|
| Employers must include the following compensation and
| benefits information in each posting:
|
| (A) the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range
| thereof) that the employer is offering for the position;
|
| (B) a general description of any bonuses, commissions, or
| other forms of compensation that are being offered for
| the job; and
|
| (C) a general description of all employment benefits the
| employer is offering for the position, including health
| care benefits, retirement benefits, any benefits
| permitting paid days off (including sick leave, parental
| leave, and paid time off or vacation benefits), and any
| other benefits that must be reported for federal tax
| purposes, but not benefits in the form of minor perks.
|
| RSUs are benefits that must be reported for federal tax
| purposes.
| nitrogen wrote:
| B and C say "general description", while A says "rate" or
| "compensation"; has the exact meaning of those been
| figured out yet, w.r.t. what goes in the number and what
| goes in the text?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Why would you have such a wide pay range of $150k-300k for
| a single position?
|
| Because we're hiring good candidates at various experience
| ranges.
|
| If someone shows up with the most impressive resume and
| portfolio I've ever seen, I don't want to lose them simply
| because our job description doesn't have a salary high enough
| to convince them to join.
|
| Likewise, if a college grad shows up with a potentially
| impressive but short resume then we might want to take a
| chance on them, but not if we're forced to pay them senior
| engineer money because that's what we put in the ad. If I
| have to pay senior engineer money, I'm going to wait until a
| senior engineer applies.
| pydry wrote:
| I'm struggling to see how you could write a job ad that
| both a college grad and a 15+ years' experienced lead would
| both apply to. It would have to be ludicrously vague.
| gopher_space wrote:
| I won't even know what I'm actually applying for until
| the "five minutes at the end" sometimes. The whole
| process is broken.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Were you kidnapped or otherwise taken to an interview
| against your will?
|
| Otherwise, if you allow that situation to happen, well,
| you allowed it to happen.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Further, why is pay tied to location anyway? Just because I
| chose to live in a cheaper region doesn't mean I can't
| produce the same value to the organization as someone in,
| say, SF. Are we to believe that employers are paying more in
| HCOL areas out of the goodness of their hearts?
| bennysomething wrote:
| The company is paying you the market rate, i.e as little as
| they can get away with, not how much value you create. Your
| location is one of the variables in calculating your market
| rate. Who knows , with remote work this may disappear, but
| I doubt it's what workers in the USA would want. I live in
| the UK, salaries in the USA are way higher. Then look at
| India.
|
| My feeling is when people say location shouldn't matter
| then mean as long as the location is in their country.
| musicale wrote:
| > The company is paying you the market rate, i.e as
| little as they can get away with, not how much value you
| create
|
| "As little as they can get away with, not how much value
| you create" sounds like a recipe for exploitation and
| dissatisfied employees. Which I suppose is exactly what
| we have.
|
| It would also seem to create a strange incentive for
| people to move to places where the cost of living is
| higher.
| sokoloff wrote:
| People have been moving to the Bay Area chasing higher
| tech job pay since at least the late 90s. This doesn't
| seem like anything new; companies have to pay you enough
| that you take a deal that's better for you. You have to
| take low enough that the company still thinks it turns a
| profit by employing you.
| kelnos wrote:
| With remote work becoming more common, I'd expect to see
| companies that embrace it refuse to hire remote-only
| workers who live in HCoL areas, or at least cap the
| number they're willing to hire.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| By all means, if my employer can find someone in another
| country that they think can do as well as I do for less
| money, they ought to hire them. It would be foolish and
| (frankly) shitty to feel otherwise, especially for folks
| like me that are in the US purely by luck of birth.
|
| If they're from a real poor country, maybe this practice
| will help their economy (not that that's a reason to do
| it necessarily).
| jstanley wrote:
| It's probably not a single position. They're probably just
| after developers generally and can fit them in at any
| experience level.
| throwvirtever wrote:
| > It felt like a lot of formality with no real benefit to
| either side.
|
| Isn't the intent to benefit third parties though? I thought the
| point of pay transparency is to provide information to people
| who don't have the connections to know what the "real deal"
| generally is, so they can negotiate on an equal footing as
| other applicants when they have the opportunity.
| tlofreso wrote:
| I was excited about Colorado's law, though for the most part
| there's very little value. Companies either exclude candidates
| from that state [1], or provide cop-out salary range information
| of $x - $3x/yr [2]
|
| 1: https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1395818629657149445.
|
| 2:
| https://www.pwc.com/us/en/careers/coloradoifsseniormanager.h...
| joshuamorton wrote:
| I'll repost an old comment of mine on the colorado law:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28875365
|
| Summarizing here: Google listed salaries from 125,000 to 250,000
| (excluding one presumably mistaken entry), for roles from L4 (L3
| is new grad, L5 is Senior) - L8+ ("Director"). These don't
| include bonuses or equity. Bay area salaries would be something
| like 10-20% higher.
|
| Facebook listed salaries from $111,000 (E3, new grad) to 239,000
| (Director, E8?). Similar caveats to Google.
|
| Microsoft listed $115,700 - $224,500 across a number of roles,
| again salaries higher in the bay.
|
| Amazon, surprising no one, listed a range from 122,000 - 160K
| (their cap on salaries outside of the bay, where I think the cap
| is 175K).
|
| Lyft and Uber didn't list roles. Stripe, Netflix and Dropbox
| listed remote roles but without salaries, probably violating the
| law. Salesforce had really low ranges. Oracle wanted me to email
| them, which I think also violates the law, but also I didn't want
| to do that.
|
| As far as I know, the Colorado law has been interpreted (or at
| least theirs claimed intent by the Co legislature?) that you
| can't refuse to offer a remote job to Co employees to get around
| the law, although this only matters if you _already_ have Co
| employees, in which case other provisions of the law also apply,
| so it 's tricky.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Maybe Colorado should just outlaw unintended consequences.
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