[HN Gopher] Bill to require job postings to include salaries pas...
___________________________________________________________________
Bill to require job postings to include salaries passes Washington
Senate
Author : caust1c
Score : 289 points
Date : 2022-02-28 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.kiro7.com)
| snarfy wrote:
| You have to start somewhere. That said, I'm pretty sure they will
| just change to Software Engineer Comp:
| 50k-350k d/o experience
| whiplash451 wrote:
| We just shot ourselves in the foot pretty badly with this bill.
| Software engineers are not meat packers. There is huge variance
| in productivity between two people at the same level in the same
| role. Here is what will happen now:
|
| - candidates who get an offer at the bottom of the range will
| take it personally and keep hunting for a job elsewhere
|
| - candidates who get an offer at the top of the range will
| (rightfully) assume that the next significant pay rise is far
| away (basically, only upon promotion)
|
| - the hiring managers will have to shoot a salary range first
| without having seen a candidate, so the range will have to be
| astronomical, else they will miss on top performers on the market
|
| Well done!
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| A candidate with less expertise/experience in the role should
| expect to be on the bottom end of the pay range and a candidate
| who has seniority/expertise in an area should expect to be on
| the upper end of the pay range. I know for a fact that I've
| been on the low end of the pay range when my area of expertise
| didn't quite overlap and expected as much, but I got to learn a
| new technology and expand my field of knowledge.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I don't understand what you're trying to say.
|
| 1. The difference here is that previously (currently), you
| still decline the job if you know the market, or you accept a
| low offer because you don't know the market well. So the
| difference with the new approach is better: at least you know
| to decline or negotiate.
|
| 2. This isn't really different from the status quo. Companies
| can have internal bands of where they expect comp to be for
| different positions, and then they stay within it when giving
| raises. Either they do that, which is the same as before, or
| they give great raises, which they also would have already been
| doing. Not sure how the law changes how raises work in the
| cases where you negotiate a higher salary up front. In either
| case, it's always better to get paid more up front and then
| find a new gig if you aren't getting raises as expected.
|
| 3. The status quo is already this, but no one knows. Clearly a
| great applicant will have a lot of room to negotiate upwards.
| If you know up front the job won't meet your requirements,
| you'll pass. And if you weren't expecting a lot but see the big
| range, you'll think, "ok, how do I get that?"
|
| So I don't really understand why any of that is bad. Doesn't
| seem like any of the things you suggested suppress wages.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| What I am trying to say is that this will induce salary
| depression, because companies will never post the (very) high
| salaries that they pay for their (few) top performers.
|
| Companies will post their 0% - 80% quantiles (in fact, the
| lower number will be slightly lower than the lowest salary
| they give for that level, if only to give comfort to people
| starting at the bottom of the range), so they will post
| something like -10% - 80%.
| MaxMoney wrote:
| golemotron wrote:
| What keeps an employer from posting that each of their jobs is in
| the band of 10K-1M/yr?
| warmwaffles wrote:
| Apparently the low band of the pay can not be less than 90% of
| the top band. If you want that low band you have to make two
| job postings.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| Good, this should be standard.
|
| I don't understand how you can have a labor market where only one
| side has information on what the salaries are for an industry
| through a team that does market research. It depresses wages,
| mostly for internal employees who aren't paying attention bc
| they're content with their jobs.
|
| Price transparency leads to more efficient markets, no reason the
| labor market is any different. A company hiring an employee under
| market rate, because the employee doesn't know what market rate
| is, is a failure.
|
| EDIT: Wanted to add that this hits closer to home for me b/c I've
| personally experienced this.
|
| Went out and jumped companies and got a 300% raise b/c I was
| underpaid at the prev, only know that thanks to levels.fyi. New
| hires at my level were making almost double what I was.
|
| When other engineers at my current company talk about salary, or
| total comp more generally, they vastly underestimate the state of
| the market.
| slg wrote:
| >It depresses wages, mostly for internal employees who aren't
| paying attention bc they're content with their jobs.
|
| It is just wild to me that this is where society landed.
| Imagine you are a business owner. Wouldn't employees who are
| loyal and happy to come to work be the exact people you want to
| keep long term? These are people who know your industry, your
| business, your customers, and your product. They are your
| institutional knowledge. They are drastically more valuable
| than a new hire who has to spend years learning this all. But
| instead of rewarding that loyalty, we use it to squeeze out an
| extra few dollars of profit regardless of the consequences. It
| is bizarre.
| powerslacker wrote:
| If I had to guess, I'd imagine this is the result of perverse
| incentives combined with the Peter principle. Consider a
| manager or corporate recruiter receiving a bonus for keeping
| down costs.
| slg wrote:
| >If I had to guess, I'd imagine this is the result of
| perverse incentives
|
| I think it is simply short term profit maximalization. Why
| give an employee a dollar more than you have to give them?
| Whether giving them an extra dollar now might generate an
| extra two dollars down the road is rarely even considered.
| WalterBright wrote:
| programmer_dude wrote:
| That's a good one Walter, thanks for the laugh.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Do you think that companies don't google salary ranges?
| triceratops wrote:
| Far more likely they use something like:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_Number
| programmer_dude wrote:
| Sure they can but it is not the only thing they do. It is
| well known that companies often collude with each other
| and engage in "salary fixing". For example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
|
| Also they have the money to buy information from various
| information aggregation companies which collect salary
| information from more reliable sources. They do not have
| to rely on (inherently unreliable) self reported figures
| from glassdoor etc.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| We now apparently live in a bizzaro fantasy world where
| legislation is required to spare people the discomfort of
| negotiating a salary or asking for a raise. If a company
| offered to pay you X and you agreed, whose fault is this?
|
| We used to call dealing with these kinds of situations "being
| an adult."
| slg wrote:
| This exact same logic could be used to advocate against a
| minimum wage or really any employee protections.
|
| If I am an adult agreeing to go to work in a sweatshop, why
| is the government stopping me? Because the government
| recognizes that I am only agreeing because the power
| imbalance my employer has over me is a form of coercion.
| triceratops wrote:
| > If a company offered to pay you X and you agreed, whose
| fault is this?
|
| If you were forced to trade stocks for a living but had
| only second-hand access to price information ("My cousin
| bought some TSLA at $200/share last year") while all the
| brokerages share order flows in real time, would you say
| you're getting hosed? Or that it's a fair market?
| pessimizer wrote:
| The company is 100 people and you are one person. If the
| company had a union, it would be easy to call the union and
| get accurate figures.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Googling crowdsourced data like levels.fyi or Glassdoor has
| way more noise and sampling bias than the data companies can
| buy from places like TWN by Equifax. Even if you had access
| to the same data, you don't have access to their business
| information so you have no good way of understanding what you
| would be worth or the value you are expected to generate.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > you don't have access to their business information
|
| And they don't have access to accurate information on what
| value you can generate, either. It's a crapshoot for both
| parties.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is far more of a crapshoot for one party than the
| other.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Not at all. Consider the perennial topic on HN on how to
| accurately evaluate a candidate's suitability for a
| particular job. It's impossible.
| pessimizer wrote:
| An applicant has as much job-related gambling when they
| take a job as the employer, especially when the job can
| just fire you. When applying, you have no idea if the
| management is terrible, if your particular manager is
| terrible, if the projects you're going to work on are
| terrible, if the procedures and standards for working on
| a project within the organization are stupid or will
| penalize your style of work, if the job will have high
| expectations and skimp on resources, whether your new
| company sucks at hiring and all your coworkers are going
| to be terrible...
|
| Calling it a crapshoot on both sides is a pretty empty
| statement. When it comes specifically to compensation,
| the applicant is David and the company is Goliath.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If this was true, then labor prices would not have
| severely stagnated over the past 5 decades, relative to
| the wealth increases for the equity owners.
| Zaheer wrote:
| Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Note that companies struggle
| with data as well. There's dozens of companies that solely
| exist to provide better data to companies around salaries
| (Radford, OptionImpact, etc.). All of these have
| limitations as well (title matching, recency of data, etc.)
| and generally companies subscribe to multiple providers to
| get a better picture of what the market pays. Companies in
| fact purchase data from us as well (the same data you see
| on site but formatted in a way that's easier for comp
| analysts to use).
|
| The reality is that there is tons of nuance that goes into
| pricing a job / candidate effectively. Each candidate has
| unique skills even if two candidates have the same title,
| level, etc. That's why it's almost never a fixed number and
| often a range.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Thank you for the context! I recently discovered that
| many employers share exact salary and level information
| with Equifax and assumed that those kinds of solutions
| were commonplace.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| Snark aside, yeah levels.fyi does have data and so do other
| sites. (Although levels is the standard in tech imo).
|
| Still is incorrect though, b/c those sites are biased against
| older consistent data vs new data.
|
| Example: Look at averages for FAANG engineers that are
| poached from other companies, vs ones with years at that
| company. If you just looked at the average then it wouldn't
| work since you're a new applicant you should probably ask for
| 20-30% more than if you currently worked there.
|
| Also saying Google/Levels is good enough puts aside the
| problem of what market rate is for smaller companies. How
| much should a well funded web3 company pay you? What about
| companies outside of tech where salary sharing is less
| common?
|
| All of the info available to the candidate on Google also
| pales in comparison to the asymmetry of one person versus an
| entire department of people who make these deals for a
| living, and have actual research on what's going on with the
| market instead of randomly reported crowdsourced data.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Pay transparency is great for business owners and other large
| employers. It makes it much easier to compress pay.
|
| > Recent decades have witnessed a growing focus on two distinct
| income patterns: persistent pay inequity, particularly a gender
| pay gap, and growing pay inequality. Pay transparency is widely
| advanced as a remedy for both. Yet we know little about the
| systemic influence of this policy on the evolution of pay
| practices within organizations. To address this void, we
| assemble a dataset combining detailed performance, demographic
| and salary data for approximately 100,000 US academics between
| 1997 and 2017. We then exploit staggered shocks to wage
| transparency to explore how this change reshapes pay practices.
| We find evidence that pay transparency causes significant
| increases in both the equity and equality of pay, and
| significant and sizeable reductions in the link between pay and
| individually measured performance.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01288-9
| corpdronejuly wrote:
| Then those of us able to get more might be pushed into taking
| the risk of making our own company and competing against the
| major players who are currently controlling the market by
| paying more than God to keep talent focused on selling ads
| instead of creating value?
| allturtles wrote:
| > Pay transparency is great for business owners and other
| large employers.
|
| If this is true, why aren't large employers already
| publishing salary data? i.e. why do they have to be forced to
| do it by law?
| pid-1 wrote:
| I'm also not following this argument.
|
| Understanding job markets requires leg work and is
| definitely part of the competitive advantage of many
| businesses.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Because they screw people over. See my other comment in the
| thread.
|
| I spent most of my career as a public employee, most years
| salary are searchable on the internet. It's nice because it
| eliminates a lot of drama about salary, who has what formal
| title, etc.
|
| When I was in sales, the smart salespeople were following
| their peer/competitors performance. The notion that
| "professionals" are above such things as compensation is
| just stupid.
| awill wrote:
| I think it's an all or nothing thing. Company-1 wouldn't
| mind doing it, but only if company-2 does it also.
| burkaman wrote:
| Your reference doesn't seem to be relevant to your claim.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I worked for a software company many years ago that also
| operated call centers for customers who didn't want to run
| their own.
|
| My colleague was an immigrant who had moved up the ranks from a
| call center agent to a senior technical role.
|
| I found out when fixing a technical problem that she made $25k,
| while I made $65k. Basically, they gave her a 25% raise from a
| call center supervisor to be a Unix SA, and in lieu of raises
| "gave" her comp time for 24x7 on-call.
| rapind wrote:
| Yes, the biggest impact will be on cheap companies who relied
| on a candidate's ignorance of their worth. We don't even need
| most states to pass bills like this (would be nice though). We
| just need some of them and the cat's out of the bag.
| bitsnbytes wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Also with all the talk of racism and sexism in the work place ,
| especially by the Big Tech companies, they should have done
| this long ago.
|
| Well they would have if they had truly cared about minorities
| versus creating a bigger labor pool to drop pay rates or create
| faux PR for their companies and industries.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Salary numbers should also be available through a standard
| API in a machine readable format.
|
| Data could be sorted by years of experience, education
| levels, race, gender and so on.
| twblalock wrote:
| I assume it's not illegal to negotiate a salary that is higher
| than the range stated in the job posting.
|
| Hopefully companies don't start using the job posting as an
| excuse not to negotiate higher salaries, otherwise it could
| depress wages for highly qualified applicants.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| If the applicant is highly qualified, wouldn't they be able to
| get offers from other companies that are higher?
|
| I see this as a personal issue: you gotta apply to jobs you
| don't think you're qualified for and be okay with being told
| "no" sometimes. If you don't test the upper-bound, you'll never
| find it.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Why not pay everyone correctly rather than forcing your future
| employees to fight hard to get their valid wage?
| twblalock wrote:
| "Pay everyone correctly" is a loaded statement. So is "valid
| wage." These things are determined by the market and what a
| candidate brings to the table -- not just by the job itself.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Realistically, companies try to pay their future employees
| as low as possible. Someone comes along that chooses to be
| a so-called "better negotiator" and they get paid more. Why
| should people have to play the negotiation game?
|
| "What a candidate brings to the table" is likely defined in
| a leveling guideline. If they bring more to the table,
| maybe they should be in a different bracket.
|
| If someone is so special (and 99.9% of the people aren't),
| then maybe give them their own special role with special
| titles; but we're not talking about exceptional people
| here, we're talking about an average developer at this
| company, which I hope has an average relative skill level.
| Sure, one person may be better at X or Y and worse at Z
| than another but that's why we have several people:
| distributing load and specialization.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I'm very curious what the net effect on culture and salaries
| would be if everyone knew everyone's total compensation.
|
| On one hand, it's already possible to know how much most people
| bought their house for and what their rent is, on the other hand,
| the data is relatively obsfucated and not directly relevant since
| most people bought their house in the past and aren't new
| homeowners)
|
| Would all businesses simply price discriminate if there were a
| very easy way to determine someone's salary?
|
| I feel most of modern personal finance is basically just taking
| advantage of information asymmetry.
| henrydark wrote:
| How do you know rent?
| brianwawok wrote:
| There is no reason to guess, this is already the law in at
| least 1 western country.
|
| Haven't heard stories in a while, but I think it made some
| interactions awkward and in general lead to more equality.
|
| One wrinkle is that it's not anonoymous in Norway to search,
| which skews it a little
|
| See https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
| divbzero wrote:
| I wish the _not anonymous to search_ feature were applied to
| home addresses and home purchases too. I see the benefit of
| the data being publicly available but wouldn't want it abused
| by the wrong parties.
| subpixel wrote:
| > "Since 2014 it has been possible to find out who has been
| doing searches on your information," explains Hans Christian
| Holte, the head of Norway's tax authority.
|
| > "We saw a significant drop to about a 10th of the volume
| that was before. I think it has taken out the Peeping Tom
| mentality."
|
| This is just genius. And yet I'm imagining some simple ways
| around this that would inevitably pop up were this a thing in
| my country.
| whyenot wrote:
| Because I am a public employee, anyone can go online and look
| up my salary. I've often wondered who might be doing that. Of
| course, where you live and if you own your own home are both
| publicly available and already pretty good proxy measures for
| income. I know for a fact that I pay more for certain things
| like help with gardening, an electrician, plumber, etc. based
| on where I live.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| Functionally in tech that already exists with levels.fyi (At
| least for larger companies.)
|
| Generally I find that younger people I meet with are very open
| to talking about salary, assuming you're working in the same
| industry.
|
| Definitely a sharp contrast to HR policy on the subject.
|
| Just try asking what salary bands are at companies and you'll
| get shifty bullshit.
| vmception wrote:
| > Functionally in tech that already exists with levels.fyi
| (At least for larger companies.)
|
| Note, the data there is getting better but it is not perfect.
| As they accept both offer letters and W-2's, which can be
| wildly different as share prices move.
| hammock wrote:
| Knowing the salary of a job posting is not the same as knowing
| the salary that is eventually offered to whoever fills it.
| kidfiji wrote:
| Amazing. I wonder what the implications are as I'm aware of jobs
| many jobs intentionally avoid posting in Colorado due to the same
| issue; but the sheer size of tech talent in the greater Seattle
| area is unavoidable.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Also NYC now. I imagine we are either at or near a tipping
| point where it will be pointless to try to avoid.
| windows2020 wrote:
| Or, it will become another reason to exit New York.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| and Seattle and Denver and wherever is next?
|
| Seems like an ax to grind fantasy.
| phaistra wrote:
| Why not? The U.S has more than three states and its not
| like the they have a monopoly on talent.
|
| But I agree, at some threshold it becomes an untenable
| position.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I don't believe this will be meaningful at all. Supposedly the
| same thing is going into effect in NY, and I've seen plenty of
| postings with ranges then all sorts of caveats about
| "experience," or flexibility in the role, or whatever else, that
| make it clear that the real range and the published range may be
| quite different. This, of course, to speak nothing of the
| distinction between salary and total compensation, which can be
| quite different.
| awill wrote:
| I think this is great.
|
| I've worked at several places that say 'we pay at the market
| rate', and it's very hard to verify. It leads to gossip, or
| interviewing and getting offers etc.. This should make it easy.
| If you work in an area with multiple competitors this is going to
| be great for employees.
|
| When is this likely to go live?
| glerk wrote:
| A similar bill passed in Colorado and resulted in many employers
| stopping hiring in Colorado to avoid having to comply. I hope
| this won't have the same outcome.
| Victerius wrote:
| Amazon and Microsoft are both headquartered in Washington. This
| law could transform the industry, or Microsoft and Amazon might
| move out of Washington.
| beembeem wrote:
| > Microsoft and Amazon might move out of Washington.
|
| I highly doubt Microsoft would up and leave over this one
| piece of legislation. See multi-year spending on new campus
| which isn't open yet: https://news.microsoft.com/modern-
| campus/
| beeboop wrote:
| I think I've only seen a single job ad that explicitly stated
| no colorado in the past few months of my job search. Most just
| have a link you can click that buries "$60k to 190k" somewhere
| in fine print.
| Victerius wrote:
| "$25k to $999k"
| Osiris wrote:
| It doesn't work like that. The law requires that the ranges
| to be sane. I don't remember the exact details but I
| believe it has to include existing employees with the same
| job and can only be some band above or below that.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Colorado's law has language about "good-faith" and
| "reasonable" ranges. I forget what the penalties are but
| it's fairly easy to report companies/listings to the
| state that do this.
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| I got a recruitment email _this morning_ that said
| "unlimited sick leave!" then in fine print at the bottom:
|
| "If applicant lives in CO, they will receive paid sick days."
|
| Labor laws in this country are nutty.
| 72f988bf wrote:
| As an employer, stopping in Colorado is only cutting you off of
| 5.8 million talent pool.
|
| Stopping in both NYC and WA state would cut you out of 16
| million, so the equation becomes a bit different.
| mattwad wrote:
| we just need more states/cities to get on the bandwagon. New
| York City is enacting their own version of it this year, for
| example.
| cryptonector wrote:
| https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/
|
| Was on HN recently.
| chadash wrote:
| As a candidate, I _hate_ applying to jobs only to get a lowball
| offer at the end. So I appreciate bills like this.
|
| As a hiring manager, I see that this is actually not so simple.
| You give someone a range, say $100-150k. I ASSURE you that they
| are thinking they are closer to 150k than 100. So good luck
| giving an offer for $100k, even though that might be what that
| particular candidate is worth to you.
|
| It's never gonna happen, but what i'd rather see is an option to
| instead give current median total comp on the team i'm
| interviewing for, plus maybe the 25-75 percentile range. That
| gives me a sense of what I should expect, plus what the salary
| growth path might be.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > You give someone a range, say $100-150k. I ASSURE you that
| they are thinking they are closer to 150k than 100. So good
| luck giving an offer for $100k, even though that might be what
| that particular candidate is worth to you.
|
| This comes across as whining that you won't enjoy the same
| unfair advantage in negotiation as you previously enjoyed.
| Interviewees are almost universally expected to give a single
| number ( _not_ a range), sometimes in the application process,
| even before the interview. If I can put a single number on what
| I 'm looking to be paid with incomplete information about the
| position, you can put a single number on what you're willing to
| pay with incomplete information about the candidate.
|
| Also, a range as broad as $100-150k tells me that you either
| don't know what candidate you're looking for, or you're trying
| to snag a $150k candidate and only pay them $100k. There's no
| way I'd apply for that job as anything other than the lower end
| of that range.
|
| A healthy business relationship starts from understanding that
| both interviewer and interviewee should have the same goal,
| trying to match an appropriate candidate with appropriate work
| and appropriate pay.
| jjav wrote:
| > If I can put a single number on what I'm looking to be paid
| with incomplete information about the position, you can put a
| single number on what you're willing to pay with incomplete
| information about the candidate.
|
| To be fair, that's not true. One person interviewing can say
| what number will make them happy to consider a move.
|
| The company though, is open (usually) to all kinds of people
| who might fill the role. These people may range from a recent
| graduate to someone with tons of experience. Just depends who
| shows up and how good of a match they are. Open positions are
| hardly ever so statically fixed, there's always room to make
| the scope (and pay) smaller or larger, depending who shows
| up.
|
| Software roles are fairly open-ended on what the person will
| ultimately end up doing, so it'll depend on their experience
| and interests. It's not like hiring someone for a widget
| factory where I know in advance they'll be stamping widgets 8
| hours a day. In such cases, the pay can be predicted easily.
| sneak wrote:
| > _Interviewees are almost universally expected to give a
| single number (not a range), sometimes in the application
| process, even before the interview._
|
| I think a better description of the situation is "prompted"
| or "demanded", not "expected". As many interviewing advice
| sites will happily point out, providing any salary
| information prior to an offer is not usually a hard
| requirement (though employers like to make it seem like it
| is).
| WalterBright wrote:
| > As a candidate, I hate applying to jobs only to get a lowball
| offer at the end
|
| 1. Before you go to the interview, let them know your expected
| compensation
|
| 2. Counter with your desired compensation. If you're worth it,
| you'll get it.
| gowld wrote:
| That doesn't solve the problem of "I can't afford to spend
| all my time interviewing", but corpo can afford to spend tiem
| interviewing everyone.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of course it does. If the company isn't going to meet your
| salary requirements, why would they waste time interviewing
| you?
|
| > corpo can afford to spend tiem interviewing everyone
|
| This is very untrue.
| sokoloff wrote:
| In my experience, #1 does substantially cut down on the
| time-wasting.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Why not? It's super lucrative. If you play that game for a
| year or two you'll be in a top salary band.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| Note that letting companies know your expected compensation
| is only beneficial when you _know_ that it 's extraordinarily
| high and you wish to no waste time in many interview
| processes. Less senior engineers should refrain from leaking
| salary expectations - there's no reason to lowball
| _yourself_.
| freedomben wrote:
| Good point, if your number is _lower_ than what they would
| have offered, don 't tip your hand because most likely
| (there are some exceptions) they _will_ offer what you 're
| asking.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I think it's a waste of everybody's time to enter
| negotiations _before_ an interview.
|
| It seems that another way of solving this is for candidates
| to add their desired salary in their CV.
| SamWhited wrote:
| If you do that and it's less than what the company would
| otherwise offer, they'll offer that instead. By putting it
| your CV you've effectively given away all negotiating
| leverage whereas the company having to list a range still
| means there is room for negotiation, but they can't be
| sneaky and pay some people significantly less than others
| for the same work (except however far they can get away
| with that _within_ the range).
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| You are correct, and I should have noted that it was a
| poor attempt at sarcasm.
|
| Given that the job market is already asymmetric and
| skewed in favour of companies, job seekers shouldn't be
| the ones giving away any signals, although, in reality,
| it is how it already works.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Not necessarily. Hiring is expensive and low balling
| candidates means they are more likely to consider other
| options. Recruiters often lead with pay, most candidates
| are going to be bombarded with linked in messages showing
| their "market value".
|
| If those recruiters hook one of your low-balled
| employees, your recruitment costs have doubled, your
| projects have lost a productive team member, and the next
| person might ask for even more money.
|
| My I low-balled myself on my first real job. The hiring
| manager flat out told me that the roll started at $15k+,
| and offered me $20k more than I asked for, which happened
| to be exactly the same salary offered to other members of
| my cohort.
| dheera wrote:
| I don't understand people who give ranges.
|
| If a company gives a candidate a range, of course the candidate
| will pick the highest end of the range.
|
| If the candidate gives a range, of course the company will pick
| the lowest end of the range.
|
| Just give one number and then negotiate.
| brushfoot wrote:
| Think of it as a symbol of what range of experience the
| company is willing to accept.
|
| Example: A .NET shop uses Oracle. The salary range is
| $100K-$150K.
|
| - Candidate 1 knows .NET but is new to Oracle. They know
| RDBMS concepts so they can be brought up to speed, but they
| start closer to the $100K end of the range because they're
| less valuable to the company initially.
|
| - Candidate 2 has a long track record of .NET and Oracle
| work, has spoken at conferences, writes about it on their
| blog. Candidate 2 is closer to the $150K end.
|
| The company may want a Candidate 2 more than a Candidate 1,
| but Candidate 2s are in short supply. The range acknowledges
| that the real candidate may not match the ideal.
| dheera wrote:
| "Candidate 1 knows .NET but is new to Oracle"
|
| "Candidate 2 has a long track record of .NET and Oracle
| work"
|
| These should be two different JDs with different stated
| salaries.
|
| Or explicitly say "+$50K for candidates with a long track
| record of .NET and Oracle work".
| jjav wrote:
| > These should be two different JDs with different stated
| salaries.
|
| But I'm only hiring one person. Ideally, the one with all
| the perfectly matching experience. But I'm not going to
| wait around forever for the unicorn to show up, so I may
| likely settle for someone promising who doesn't quite
| have the experience.
|
| > Or explicitly say "+$50K for candidates with a long
| track record of .NET and Oracle work".
|
| That's the same as giving a range.
| dheera wrote:
| Not the same, because giving a range allows you to
| discriminate on race, gender, and other things. The
| reality is this actually happens, and that's why this
| discussion is happening in the first place.
|
| If it's an objective function of qualifications that's a
| lot more clear-cut.
| ThalesX wrote:
| > - Candidate 1 knows .NET but is new to Oracle. They know
| RDBMS concepts so they can be brought up to speed, but they
| start closer to the $100K end of the range because they're
| less valuable to the company initially.
|
| How long would the ramp-up be? Are we talking an increase
| from $100K to $150K over a year, two, three? I've yet to
| encounter an employer ramping me up at even a remotely
| decent market rate, whereas I can give myself tens or
| sometimes hundreds of % increases every 2 - 3 years by
| shopping around.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| If I have to publish a figure before I've even talked to
| anyone for the job, how can I avoid giving a range?
|
| When we get to the point of an offer, I'm not going to say
| "@dheera, would you prefer to be paid X or 1.25*X? It's up to
| you."
| dheera wrote:
| What that realistically mean?
|
| "If you're a white male you'll get 1.25X and if you're a
| black female you'll get X?"
|
| More specifically, why can't someone who meets the JD get
| the stated number? If they interview and don't demonstrate
| the ability to meet the JD then don't give them an offer,
| it's that simple.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Do you think that all salespeople are equally productive?
| Do you think that all waitstaff or customer service
| people are equally productive? Do you think all software
| engineers (at a given level) are equally productive?
|
| I think there's large spreads of productivity in many of
| those types of workers and if you pick a single number
| for a range of possible productivity, you either overpay
| some people or you cut yourself off from the most
| productive workers. (Some people argue that there's a 10x
| spread in SWEs, others that there's a -10x spread, but I
| don't think anyone thinks there's realistically less than
| a 2x spread at a given level among competent SWEs.)
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Perhaps, but you won't know their productivity before you
| hire them
| sokoloff wrote:
| Why spend all that time interviewing and reference
| checking then?
| frumper wrote:
| That's a great question and the answer is probably why a
| lot of companies don't spend a huge amount of time
| interviewing and reference checking.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I always give a range, I've never gotten an offer at the
| bottom of the range. Generally, it's the top of the range, or
| very close to it, or top of their budget (which is below the
| range).
|
| Granted, I tend to interview for roles I'm already
| demonstrably good at. So less experienced/suitable people
| might have different experiences. But this kind of
| negotiation clearly doesn't follow the "obvious" path.
|
| Remember, hiring managers are spending their own money _and_
| people do get excited for candidates. When you spent 20 hours
| interviewing people, and you finally get that unicorn,
| everyone is going to push for them.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| As a candidate, if I'm giving a range for salary, it means it
| depends on other factors, like insurance, 401k, paid time
| off, family leave, etc. I may be willing to take the lower
| end of the range if the other benefits are attractive.
| plorg wrote:
| The way I have seen this addressed, in a way that seems fair
| and forthright to me as an applicant, is to create titles with
| job descriptions and requirements and minimum salaries for
| those titles, and advertise that you are looking to fill a
| position with one of the titles. Tell the applicant which
| title(s) they are interviewing for, and you both have a much
| better idea of what to expect.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Right, totally see both sides.
|
| Every single time I have ever given a range as a hiring manage,
| the candidate pictured themselves at the top end. But like you
| could have self taught 2 years of experience vs PhD and 12
| years of experience for a similar position - there is no way
| everyone is at the same spot comp wise.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > But like you could have self taught 2 years of experience
| vs PhD and 12 years of experience for a similar position -
| there is no way everyone is at the same spot comp wise.
|
| If these are really similar positions, then you don't need
| the PhD candidate with 12 years of experience--you're wasting
| money paying someone that overqualified.
|
| The fact is, these probably _aren 't_ similar positions, and
| that's why they aren't at the same spot comp wise.
| learc83 wrote:
| >2 years of experience vs PhD and 12 years of experience for
| a similar position
|
| Why would you hire those 2 people for the same position? If
| the PhD with 12 years of experience is worth 50% more, then
| why not give them a better title?
| [deleted]
| jjav wrote:
| When you initially post the job listing you can't predict
| you'll get a reponse from these two people, so you need to
| be flexible.
|
| Sure, they wouldn't ultimately get hired into the same job
| level.
| learc83 wrote:
| Then you post 2 different job listings. It's not hard.
| You'd write 2 very different descriptions for someone
| those 2 hypothetical candidates anyway.
|
| You also don't need put $50k-$5,000,000 just in case John
| Carmack applies. If he does happen to apply to your
| junior engineer position, you instead interview him for
| another position with a higher salary band.
| kempbellt wrote:
| In the real world, companies can't go down to the local
| "Employee Store" and order up a 12 year engineer with a
| PhD whenever they want, even if that's what they would
| prefer.
|
| In many cases hiring is an organic process where a
| company weighs options based on what candidates are
| available to them at the time, their budget, timeframe,
| and goals.
|
| A 2 year junior dev may be able to accomplish the same
| goal as the 12 year one, but much slower due to lack of
| experience, and you don't know if you'll find either
| until you start interviewing.
|
| This is why many job postings fairly say "Comp: DOE" or
| provide a salary range.
|
| More transparent comp is great for avoiding lowballing
| and discrimination (which both suck), but sometimes one
| employee actually is a more valuable contributor than
| another even if they have the same title. This is why I
| personally find the idea of a "salary range" completely
| fair, but also welcome to be ignored during the offer
| phase.
|
| If John Carmack and a junior dev both apply to the role
| of "Software Engineer", I see zero reason why a company
| shouldn't be allowed to offer him a substantially higher
| comp due to his experience. He'll likely accomplish the
| same goals more quickly, more efficiently, with better
| code practices in mind.
|
| Having to put it under the guise of "a different
| position" is just befuddling to the process. It's the
| kind of unnecessary legislation that pushes companies to
| find shady ways of solving problems.
| mandevil wrote:
| If your employees find out that there is a 50% difference in
| their salary's for the same official job title I suspect that
| they are going to be very upset, unless you've been open and
| clear with them up front. Shrink your salary bands and break
| this out into different jobs, as a suggestion.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Does everyone at your company with the same title create the
| same value? Plenty of people at my office with the same title
| create double or triple the value.
| CPLX wrote:
| I'm the person hiring. I used to have this problem a lot and I
| solved it.
|
| I started just deciding what the pay for the position would be
| in advance and posting it. I don't negotiate, if that comes up
| I say we give very aggressive raises and promotions to people
| who exceed expectations (which is true) but I understand if
| that's not something you can rely on. As an exercise in
| transparency we're posting the actual exact starting salary and
| this is what it is.
|
| Feedback has been across the board positive. Presumably some
| people look at the pay and feel like it's slightly too low and
| we don't get them. That's fine, it's a reasonable tradeoff for
| eliminating the confusion and bad feelings created by not being
| transparent. There's nothing stopping us from posting a similar
| position as well (perhaps with a slightly more senior title)
| with slightly higher pay.
|
| I think the whole kabuki dance of not telling people the actual
| comp is inefficient and pointless and I'm fine if it goes away.
| mywittyname wrote:
| See, I like good raises (10%+ per year). The main reason to
| start looking for new jobs is that 2% annual raises are
| quickly outpaced by the 10-20% increase in market wages.
|
| Plus, I feel like jobs that give double-digit raises also
| have better processes in place for performance reviews.
| Places giving out 3% a year almost always just go through the
| motions on performance reviews, since each manager can only
| give out one or two "good" raises. Even if you did a great
| job, they are kind of forced to hand over their one 5 star
| review to the person who always gets them.
| mattnewton wrote:
| A 50% difference in salary sounds like a slightly different
| role / level with different expectations. Why not put up two
| job postings, one for 90-110k for the junior devs and one for
| the senior devs at 140k-160k? Why are you dangling 150k in
| front of junior devs if they aren't worth it to your company in
| the first place?
|
| If they are the same role and the difference really is 50k
| based on interviews and negotiations alone I am of course going
| to shoot for the full 50k.
| toast0 wrote:
| Sometimes it's not so much the same role, but you need
| someone to work on X and do the other things; depending on
| experience and interview, the compensation and the other
| things will vary, but you're not going to hire more than one
| person to work on X, so having two open positions will
| confuse HR.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Now that these laws are passing, HR will have incentives to
| correct this kind of situations. It might be as simple as
| having one job posting with pay bands associate with
| levels. So having a single job posting with Levels
| 1,2,3,... and the expectations/salary bands for each. That
| way, candidates asking for top-of-band should expect to be
| interviewed at the appropriate level.
|
| I feel like a lot of companies already do this: interview
| candidates, then grade them at a specific level based on
| their performance.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Why are you hiring a $150k candidate to work on X if a
| $100k candidate can work on X? That's a waste of $50k.
|
| It sounds like you need to figure out what X is worth to
| you.
| toast0 wrote:
| Because if you can get a $150k candidate, they'll work on
| X and Z, but a $100k candidate may only work on X and Y
| or maybe just only X. Y and Z are nice to have, but only
| X is worth hiring for; whichever candidate gets through
| first gets the position.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > Why are you hiring a $150k candidate to work on X if a
| $100k candidate can work on X? That's a waste of $50k.
|
| i think that's the point. X takes an engineer who's worth
| $100k. if an engineer worth more than that comes along,
| you want to let them do X for $100k, but since they'll
| get it done easier/faster either you're only letting them
| work part time (silly restriction to _force_ on them), or
| you let them help out around the org in general for extra
| money. hence, you advertise the role as $100k (for doing
| X) - $150k (a rough judgment of how much extra capacity
| the company could easily absorb from a candidate that
| tackles X quickly).
|
| that seems... pretty reasonable to me.
| learc83 wrote:
| Or you could just give the more qualified person a
| different title/level since they are clearly in a
| different role. A role that might be superset of role x,
| but a different role nonetheless.
| altairprime wrote:
| This is how the US Federal Government does it, with 15
| 'levels' (Paygrade) and 10 'levels' within each grade
| (Steps). Salaries scale up by 20-30% by Step, and a GS-1
| step 10 makes more than a GS-3 step 1.
|
| > _The General Schedule (GS) payscale is the federal
| government payscale used to determine the salaries of
| over 70% of federal civilian employees. An employee 's
| base pay depends on two factors - the GS Paygrade of
| their job, and the Paygrade Step they have achieved
| (depending on seniority or performance)._
|
| -- https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2022
|
| The job's pay grade range (from step 1 lowest to step 10
| highest) is what would be published to comply with
| Washington's laws. What's missing in the private sector
| is, at most employers, any communication whatsoever on
| which 'step' one is at; while HR often has this data, it
| is almost universally withheld except upon request, and
| often gated behind an HR conversation and verbal-only
| replies.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| > Why are you hiring a $150k candidate to work on X if a
| $100k candidate can work on X?
|
| Because the world isn't black and white. There could be
| soooo many different reasons why you're willing to pay
| one person a lot more than someone else to do a job.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I mean, the ones that come to my mind are variations on
| the market rate being closer to $150k and you are trying
| to get a deal lowballing people. Which of course every
| business is going to do, I don't think they are wrong to
| negotiate down, but I think being upfront about the range
| is more honest to candidates and results in a better
| hiring experience for the hiring company overall.
|
| Forcing them to be upfront about the requirements for
| more money results in candidates better aligned with the
| requirements I would think. And leaving that to some
| negotiation without those requirements seems like it just
| opens the door for bias. I want to hire engineers and
| keep them based on their qualifications, and negotiating
| abilities is usually not one of them.
| learc83 wrote:
| It's also very easy to just give the higher paid person a
| different title.
|
| Surely if they are worth 50% more, you can give them a
| better title to go along with it.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I haven't worked with HR at small companies before, so
| maybe this is completely out of touch, but why would it be
| so hard for HR to handle two postings for the same
| rec/headcount? They already presumably have this problem
| with multiple postings on different platforms? And if they
| can't handle that to avoid the effects of large ranges on
| negotiations then the effects must not be worth that much
| to the company.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Because depending on the candidate that walks in the door I
| might need them, but I know they will require a lot more
| handholding.
| mattnewton wrote:
| If you need them but they won't apply for less than 150k, I
| think the problem is not that your range is 100-150k making
| them negotiate for 150k, it's that the market rate has gone
| up to 150k. If it is worth around 100k to you with
| handholding put a range closer to 100k in the description,
| and a separate job posting with all the additional
| requirements to make it to 150k, imo.
| jayd16 wrote:
| If you want to low ball, why not just always post a full
| range and hit every candidate with "we're not sure you're a
| fit but we do have another position at $50k less"?
| neogodless wrote:
| Perhaps you have to choose the number that best fits what
| you're prioritizing.
|
| If you're looking for "entry-level", then perhaps "starting at
| $100k", but if you really need someone with the experience or
| skillset pre-loaded, "up to $150k".
| learc83 wrote:
| Instead of having 1 role with such a huge gap. Why not multiple
| roles.
|
| If you find a candidate who you really think is worth 50% more
| than the average salary for Role X, then obviously that
| candidate is qualified for Role X + 1.
| stickfigure wrote:
| The logical conclusion of this is a long chart that looks
| like this: ... Role #125,798 -
| salary $125,798/yr Role #125,799 - salary $125,799/yr
| Role #125,800 - salary $125,800/yr ...
| plorg wrote:
| The exercise of putting together job descriptions and
| requirements should be enough to narrow it down to probably
| fewer than 3 Roles.
| hedora wrote:
| Last I heard, Microsoft had 100 levels, and a dozen-ish
| tracks, which all had different (and sparse) mappings
| from level to salary.
|
| Also, hiring managers sometimes invented additional
| tracks.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Why is that the logical conclusion? That doesn't make sense
| to me at all.
|
| Internally managing that many positions and requirements
| and putting up that many job postings is a nightmare. For
| applicants, I'm going to almost immediately leave a page
| with that many listings and look at other companies.
|
| It's only "logical" if you ignore all other pressures to
| job postings and are only trying to game these laws, which
| I presume have some baked-in preventions for this. I know
| Colorado's equivalent law does.
| lscdlscd wrote:
| It doesn't have to be that granular. If one engineer is
| getting (deservedly) paid 50% more than another in the same
| role, the company owes it to that engineer to give them a
| title/role that reflects their merit/contributions, at the
| very least for their career progression.
| kempbellt wrote:
| Requiring titles and pay to be interchangeable doesn't
| solve any of the real problems trying to be solved here.
|
| Instead of offering to pay you less, company suggests you
| apply for a less valuable role (or demotes you), and then
| pays you less.
|
| Instead of offering to pay you more, company suggests you
| apply for a more valuable role (or promotes you), and
| then pays you more.
|
| If a company is trying to lowball or discriminate,
| they'll just do it by title _and_ wage, instead of just
| wage.
|
| If a company is trying negotiate in good faith, it's made
| the process needlessly complex.
|
| I don't see what problem this solves.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > You give someone a range, say $100-150k. I ASSURE you that
| they are thinking they are closer to 150k than 100. So good
| luck giving an offer for $100k, even though that might be what
| that particular candidate is worth to you.
|
| This is exactly how markets are supposed to function. If you
| feel that a candidate isn't worth what they're asking for, then
| you have every right to pass on them. Keeping a lid on the
| salary range is a dark pattern that benefits employers at the
| expense of workers.
| jjav wrote:
| > As a candidate, I hate applying to jobs only to get a lowball
| offer at the end. So I appreciate bills like this.
|
| These bills are nice but I don't feel very strongly about it
| because whenever I talk to a recruiter, the very first
| conversation is where I'll give my comp expectations. If they
| want to proceed, great, if it's too much then fine.
|
| Proceeding through interviews and waiting for an offer to see
| if they can match your expectations is not a good use of time.
| romanows wrote:
| I guess you're saying that putting the 150k number in the
| candidates head is going to make the eventual 100k offer sound
| worse than it otherwise would have? Can't you have a
| conversation with the applicant, walk through your reasoning,
| explain their path to 150k in the company, and covert at least
| some percentage to candidates that accept? I would almost
| appreciate that more than believing that I'm being taken
| advantage of by a single number offer.
| lscdlscd wrote:
| Totally agree. My first job out of college, there was a range
| for the position of $75 - $105k. I got the offer, and the
| salary offer was for 75. I asked for $90 and we settled on
| 85, as the 105 range was for 2+ years of experience, and I
| was a new grad. I thought it was very fair.
| tjridesbikes wrote:
| Almost literally me. Before I graduated, I applied for a
| job, got offered $80k, negotiated up to $90k, and have seen
| significant increases in salary since then. I'm being paid
| area-average salary for interesting work, great work-life
| balance, and insanely great non-monetary benefits.
|
| Another job I applied to before graduating offered me $60k
| and told me I couldn't negotiate. Guess who didn't even
| bother responding to them?
| lscdlscd wrote:
| Nice, I'm interested in what your non-monetary benefits
| are? I now get paid better than average, but that's
| essentially my only compensation.
| asdff wrote:
| If your range is that wide commiserate with experience, what
| are you even shopping for? All this bill asks is for hiring
| managers to be less flippant about what they are buying when
| they are entering the job market and shopping for talent. If
| they are wanting a candidate with experience they value at
| $150k, then put that as the posted salary. If they can get away
| with a candidate with experience they value at $100k, put that
| as the posted salary. If you want both candidates, post both
| listings. If you only want one of the two, take the other
| listing down when you have your first candidate. It seems
| simple to me.
| jjav wrote:
| But that approach means opening something like four job
| postings for every role (junior, mid, senior, principal) and
| suddenly closing the other three when you find someone. I
| don't know if this might fall foul of any job posting rules?
| Since basically three of the four postings are "fake" in the
| sense that you're only hiring one person. It's just that
| nobody knows ahead of time which of the four postings will
| end up being the real one.
| learc83 wrote:
| Companies do this all the time. There's generally no
| problem with it. We have an opening for an staff engineer
| at work, but we'd settle for a senior engineer.
|
| We definitely wouldn't hire an unqualified person as staff
| and just pay them less.
|
| Or an overqualified person as senior and pay them way more.
| That just doesn't make sense.
|
| Companies also routinely have permanently open positions
| without exact numbers of positions.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Don't give them the chance to stretch it out. Ask up front or
| tell them what you want, again up front, ask for what the
| "standard package" is for the position (trust me they have
| one). Judge them by their response and how sincere they seem.
| Some HR won't necessarily know up front but they can find out.
| nunez wrote:
| Honestly I don't see what this will accomplish. Employer posts
| salary. Candidate interviews. Actual salary will be higher or
| lower than the salary dependent on perceived experience. Equity
| grants boost TC to the stratosphere.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| this is one of those ostensibly good ideas that has some
| downsides which are often not discussed - the main one of which,
| is salary depression.
|
| Forcing employers to publish salaries on job ads will inevitably
| lead to wide salary bands (lets see how absurd they get) with a
| low ceiling on the upper tier. Employers know that if they
| publish a high number, job candidates are naturally going to want
| to shoot for it, and would be disappointed if they got
| significantly less than the maximum advertised, compromising
| offer acceptance rates. Hence employers will set a lower
| 'maximum' salary than they might actually pay if the salary was
| hidden.
|
| See UK public sector for evidence of this; salaries must be
| published, maximum is always significantly lower than equivalent
| job in private sector.
| diob wrote:
| On the other hand, I actually always see folks claim the
| downsides are greater than the upsides, so it's strange you
| feel the opposite.
|
| Honestly, I'd rather we try it and see what happens.
|
| In the case of the UK public sector anecdote you've shared, I'm
| guessing it hasn't actually depressed salaries at all. It's
| likely lifted the bottom, and perhaps squeezed some high
| positioned "high ceiling" folks down. But I'd need to see
| evidence of an actual drop compared to the "hidden" times.
| Otherwise it's just speculation.
|
| Also, while you say the maximum is always significantly lower
| than the equivalent job in the private sector, I would then ask
| "Is the median higher than the equivalent job in the private
| sector?" because if so, that's a win. It's not much good to
| folks if a single individual can make boatloads of cash.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| Thanks for your reply. I must say, I did not say 'not try it'
| - in fact, I'm pretty much pro salary transparency.
|
| The point I am making is that there 'are downsides to
| ostensibly good ideas', which are worth pointing out and
| discussing. This bill will likely pass regardless of any chat
| we have here, so this is all in the spirit of exploring the
| topic.
|
| That candidate salary expectations will be elevated by
| transparent pricing is valid speculation given that it
| comports with what we know about pricing psychology - we see
| two numbers and typically go for something in between and to
| the right. It does not take a huge leap of empathy to
| understand that a candidate who knew the top salary and ended
| up being offered half that would be more disappointed than if
| that candidate never knew what the numbers were until the
| offer was made.
|
| Another reason why salary suppression will occur is simply a
| lack of agility compared to employers who don't have to
| declare. Once you publicly state a salary band, you probably
| wouldn't be able to go above the maximum or below the
| minimum. This constraint won't apply to employers who don't
| need to declare and hence they will inflate overall market
| rate, leaving the public salary employers behind.
|
| I think this is basically what is going to happen. Good
| things will too - but I trust these have already been made in
| the bill about to be passed
| _3u10 wrote:
| Public sector salaries are about the bennies / low pressure
| work environment, like startups are about the equity. No one
| is working there for the wages.
| ekanes wrote:
| You might be right, but the UK public sector isn't evidence,
| private sector almost always pays more, everywhere and no
| matter what industry.
|
| One could make a case the other way - that companies won't
| lower public salaries, because _they need to hire people_ ,
| often desperately. In my experience, the lower the salary, the
| less response you get to your role, and certainly from people
| who are in-demand.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| > UK public sector isn't evidence
|
| kind of is some sort of evidence, but yes not absolute proof
| of causality.
| beeboop wrote:
| This same law exists in Colorado, and I'm frequently seeing job
| postings that just list $60k to $190k. Anyone who sees that
| obviously knows they're not listing that range in good faith
| and takes nothing from it other than that it will be at least
| $60k. The ones I've seen I'd probably estimate to actually
| around $80 to 90k
| hunglee2 wrote:
| they might eventually evolve to be hyper specific, numbers
| calculated to formulae. This will be an evolutionary response
| to these bad faith bands!
| hwers wrote:
| I wonder if there's a way to cheat it by like giving a raise
| within like 3 months for high performance talents.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| yeah there will definitely be all sorts of ways to do it, a
| lot of which will need to be 'off the record', which
| obviously then becomes corruption. I remember supplying
| candidates (was once a recruitment agent for the public
| sector in the UK) and off the top of my head, two such work
| arounds were a) a promise of guaranteed promotion at first
| bat and b) fail the interview, hire back as even more
| expensive contractor.
|
| Well meaning legislation always produces outcomes like this
| voakbasda wrote:
| Corruption is endemic everywhere. This kind of law just
| plays whack-a-mole, shifting the corruption elsewhere, but
| not actually eliminating it. Since the fish rots from the
| head, we are unlikely to ever see changes that eliminate
| corruption at its true source, imprisoning the people in
| power that profit from it.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| no truer words.
|
| could be we need to rethink 'corruption', seeing as it is
| endemic in any system we make. It could be considered a
| form of hacking, which most ppl here wouldn't bat an
| eyelid at. Perhaps we need to 'build in' expected corrupt
| behaviours in systems design, seeing as we cannot
| eliminate we might as well manage it, maybe even make it
| work in the systems favour
| shagie wrote:
| I worked at a company that kept all the employees as non-
| exempt. This meant for computer programmers, we had an hourly
| wage of not more than $27.63 (
| https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-
| co... ).
|
| However, there was also profit sharing which was based on
| your W2 earnings (side bit, the profit sharing went _into_
| your W2 earnings for next year and became a sort of compound
| interest growth). Additionally, there were "goals" and
| "bonuses" which could, again, give a substantial boost to the
| total pay but _wasn 't_ part of the stated compensation.
|
| So, yes, there are _certainly_ ways to work around the posted
| salaries.
| flir wrote:
| > Forcing employers to publish salaries on job ads will
| inevitably lead to wide salary bands
|
| Lower number cannot be less than 90% of upper number. Thus
| 72k-80k or 27k-30k.
|
| If you want a wider range than that, advertise two jobs.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That's an absurdly narrow range, IMO, even for a company
| advertising entirely in good faith. Most companies internal
| ranges are at least twice as wide as that for a given
| track/level.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| is that in the legislation? Good move if they did, they saw
| the most obvious workaround
| flir wrote:
| Doubt it, but it should be.
| freedomben wrote:
| It would be nice if you edit your original comment to
| note that you are not talking about what _is_ in the
| bill, merely what _ought_ to be. It 's misleading as is.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > Lower number cannot be less than 90% of upper number. Thus
| 72k-80k or 27k-30k.
|
| This doesn't seem to be in the bill today. [1]
|
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5761&Initiativ.
| ..
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > See UK public sector for evidence of this; salaries must be
| published, maximum is always significantly lower than
| equivalent job in private sector.
|
| I'm not the only one who sees the obvious lurking variable
| here, no?
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| There is still competition for labor. Companies can post lower
| salaries at the risk of attracting less desirable candidates.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > salary depression.
|
| You mean like the salary depression when Google and Apple
| illegally co-ordinated the supression of worker salaries?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Do you have evidence for this?
| hunglee2 wrote:
| no I don't mean this. Suppression is probably the better
| word.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I've posted my fears in a past thread: I'm concerned it will
| push down salaries to lowest common denominator.
|
| Very few of us wake up and think "I'm not a top performer; I
| should be paid less than some of my colleagues".
|
| So once a bell curve of salary is published, everybody will
| demand to be paid the same, and it'll very unlikely be the top
| performer's salary.
|
| Or maybe we'll have massive reshuffle until all teams are
| equally performing - so we have a team of slackers in company
| A, team of solid performers at company B, and team of fantastic
| rock stars at company C.
|
| Maybe I'm cynical and pessimistic in my old age; maybe we can
| employ coaching techniques and use the transparency to say
| "Fatima is getting $15k more than you because of this, that and
| the other thing. If you do those you'll be awarded the same".
| Maybe the person will accept that and be motivated. Maybe we'll
| even be accurate and honest about the reasons. Maybe those
| reasons won't include "because that person is 20 years younger
| with no family, responsibilities and life and works 90hr weeks
| on average" etc. Maybe it won't all backfire horribly.
| diob wrote:
| I think this is too cynical, yes. To me, this is just the
| free market. If folks can see Bob gets paid way more and see
| he doesn't do anything, they can leave. Right now they just
| keep trucking with blinders on.
|
| The thing is, even if someone demands to get paid more, it
| won't necessarily happen. It's still going to be a
| negotiation. This is basically a shift to give workers power
| again, since most unions are gone. It's a lot easier for me
| to point to a stellar performance review AND salary band then
| negotiate blind.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If folks can see Bob doesn't do anything, why wouldn't they
| walk already? Whatever money Bob is siphoning away from the
| company is hurting them whether it's more, less, or exactly
| the same as what they make.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Or maybe it gives the workers less power, as their offer
| will be limited by the salary range top end.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm not worried about the situation where Bob the slacker
| is getting top dollar. I agree that market can and should
| solve that (if it doesn't already).
|
| My cynicism is other way around:
|
| What happens when Bob the slacker, and also all the people
| along all parts of bell curve, demands to get same as
| Fatima the rock star? Or worse, make aspersion and
| assumptions that she is in fact Bob the slacker?
|
| In other words, my cynicism is specifically focused on my
| perception of our general societal lack of, and interest
| in, self-awareness :-/
| triceratops wrote:
| Bob the slacker can demand it. But unless Bob is unable
| to find another job that pays him what he demands, he has
| no leverage over his current employer.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| > demands to get same as Fatima the rock star?
|
| Fatima likely gets promoted, and you get transparency
| into paths to become someone like Fatima. In the case of
| Emily who toils away tirelessly holding up the backbone
| of the company, but isn't as visible as Fatima, now Emily
| has a clear path to advocate for higher compensation and
| if the company decides she isn't worth it, she can leave
| and that company will immediately feel the pain.
|
| I don't really follow the logic that this pushes salaries
| to the bottom of the bands. Companies want to push them
| to the bottom, employees want to be at the top, if in a
| single instance a company and employee can't agree
| there's a more transparent market for the employee to
| explore. If they apply for jobs in a certain band and
| have zero success, they will need to adjust their
| expectations to find a job at all and should search out
| lower-bands or improve as an asset or be out of the job
| entirely.
| cryptonector wrote:
| These kinds of laws tend to come with severe unintended
| consequences. Or, perhaps, they might be intended, just not
| ostensibly. Either way, from the public's perspective, there
| are unintended consequences. We must always be mindful of
| those. Unintended consequences aren't always easy to predict,
| so we have to see how it's gone elsewhere. Consider
| https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/ .
| ska wrote:
| > See UK public sector for evidence of this
|
| I don't know about the UK situation specifically, but in other
| areas I'm more familiar with public sector salaries lag private
| sector for lots of reasons (job stability, pensions, old tech,
| etc.) which have little or nothing to do with the posting of
| ranges.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| yes fair enough, multi-causal of course
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Agree with you overall, except for the public/private sector
| differences. The difference is due mostly to the job security
| in the public sector, which has a price.
| hintymad wrote:
| Does salary in this bill include RSU or stock options? If not,
| then it may not be that relevant to tech employees? For instance,
| anyone L6+ in Amazon received 160K in Seattle area and 180K in
| the bay area.
| shetill wrote:
| Just wished they did this in Europe
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I dig this, more transparency is sorely needed.
|
| I recently asked the pay band for an upcoming promotion and was
| treated by HR like I had just shot their dog in front of them.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| > Additionally, for internal transfers to a new position or
| promotion, the employer must provide the wage scale or salary
| range.
|
| Nice. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first bill to
| mandate this; all other bills simply mandated that external job
| postings include a salary range.
|
| I hope this bill includes language that forces the advertised
| salary range to reflect the actual range. Otherwise, companies
| will just say that the range is $50-$500k.
|
| I would still like to see a bill go one step further and mandate
| that everyone's salary be public knowledge to everyone else
| within the same company. If this generates resentment, it means
| the company is poorly managed. The company would therefore either
| be compelled to fix their pay discrepancies (thereby allaying the
| resentment) or risk losing resentful employees to other
| companies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > forces the advertised salary range to reflect the actual
| range
|
| All that means is the candidate won't get the offer if he's not
| worth the bottom end of the range.
|
| > pay discrepancies
|
| Some people are simply more productive in the same job as other
| people. Why shouldn't they get paid more?
| t-writescode wrote:
| If an engineer is doing *so much more* that they can't exist
| in the same pay band as their peers, why don't they get a
| promotion?
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| > All that means is the candidate won't get the offer if he's
| not worth the bottom end of the range.
|
| How is this different from the status quo? If you don't get
| hired for a specific position, it means the company didn't
| think you were worth the salary for that position, whatever
| that might be.
|
| > Some people are simply more productive in the same job as
| other people. Why shouldn't they get paid more?
|
| They absolutely should, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
| I meant "pay discrepancies _that would foster resentment_ ,"
| i.e. undeserved discrepancies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > How is this different from the status quo?
|
| The company will not be able to adjust the salary to one
| more appropriate for the employee, so both parties lose.
|
| > undeserved discrepancies
|
| People in the same company will always have different views
| on what is deserved and what isn't. This is not fixable.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| > The company will not be able to adjust the salary to
| one more appropriate for the employee, so both parties
| lose.
|
| Got it, you are concerned that this wouldn't allow the
| company to hire someone as the lowest paid member for a
| given role. This is easily solved by either (a) forcing
| the company to publish two ranges: the range they're
| willing to pay, and the actual range of current
| employees, or (b) making the published range nonbinding.
| If the company decides to lowball the job candidate, it
| is up to the candidate to take or leave the offer,
| knowing that it is indeed a lowball, which without a
| salary transparency law a candidate currently has
| limited-to-no way of knowing.
|
| BTW, I prefer the latter approach: the law ought to be
| focused on mitigating salary information asymmetry
| between the company and candidate, not heavy-handedly
| enforcing a specific salary range.
|
| > People in the same company will always have different
| views on what is deserved and what isn't.
|
| Of course, but this has no bearing on whether salary
| information ought to be transparent or not.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > Some people are simply more productive in the same job as
| other people. Why shouldn't they get paid more?
|
| The fact that most people would get a pay bump by just
| switching jobs, disproves any hard relationship between
| productivity and wages.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Then keep switching jobs. What's the problem that needs the
| government stepping in?
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > What's the problem that needs the government stepping
| in?
|
| I think it's quite obvious.
|
| There is an imbalance in the job market, and those
| offering jobs do not have any incentives to resolve it.
| In fact, they usually take action against any corrective
| measures, e.g. by suggesting employees that discussing
| their wages is unsavoury or even illegal (it is not).
|
| "Just switch jobs" is not a solution, because sometimes
| there isn't even a choice.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It seems highly improbable that the day one was born, out
| of 200,000,000 jobs in the US, one happens to find the
| one and only job they could ever have.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| That's not what I said. Yours is too a quite narrow-
| minded position.
|
| Also, screw companies doing this. The job market is
| completely asymmetric, and it shouldn't be. It's tiring
| and disappointing to have to blindly negotiate with
| recruiters, and akin to the car buying experience.
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment of Open Salaries.
|
| > If this generates resentment, it means the company is poorly
| managed.
|
| You can't honestly hand wave away human nature like this
| though.
|
| "You are paid 20% less than Bob because you are 20% less
| valuable to us."
|
| Even if that was 100% true, and it was obvious to everyone,
| there would still be envy and resentment to contend with.
|
| Still I'd rather have it that way, than how it is today where I
| have to have private text messages with my coworkers to figure
| out who is getting screwed by management...
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > Even if that was 100% true, and it was obvious to everyone,
| there would still be envy and resentment to contend with.
|
| we had open levels at the previous company i worked for
| (70-ish engineers). if you asked certain seniors at the
| company, you could trivially get the mapping from level ->
| annual compensation salary/ISO grant.
|
| positive experience IMO. it forces managers to "get it right"
| when it comes to performance reviews more often than what i'm
| used to at other companies. being a not-too-large company,
| the easiest way to get a higher level is to take on more
| responsibilities (not to just output more code within your
| team). that might differ from your own goals or expectations,
| so it's great that you can look around and see for yourself
| what behaviors _actually_ correspond to level /salary raises!
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think many people would rather be paid fairly but invisibly
| less than a higher-performing colleague than to be paid that
| exact same amount and know that a higher-performing employee
| was making 25% more than them. Even if "fair", it's likely to
| generate resentment.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| That's fair, although I think way more people would rather
| know that a lower-performing colleague is making 25% more
| than them and use this as leverage to ask the boss for a
| raise.
|
| While some people might resent others' well-deserved
| successes, far more people resent others' undeserved
| successes.
| nickpp wrote:
| Salaries closer aligned with the productivity in our field will
| massively increase inequality.
| jonjon10002 wrote:
| In case anyone's curious about California's law on this:
|
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
|
| This was changed in 2019. Employers must provide a salary band,
| but it can be after an initial interview, and is not required in
| job postings.
|
| The same code prevents employers from directly asking a candidate
| about their salary history, or relying on salary history to make
| a hiring decision.
|
| (Employers can ask about a candidate's salary expectation,
| though. And the law doesn't say anything about benefits or non-
| salary compensation.)
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| I personally think the ideal is combining WA's and CO's
| requirements about salary bands in job-listings and CA's law
| about excluding previous compensation in hiring decisions.
|
| Previous compensation matters to the employee, it's only a
| wage-suppression technique from the employer's side.
| lmilcin wrote:
| The trouble is, if you post salary range from X to Y, most
| candidates will expect getting Y and will be permanently unhappy
| with their new position if they get closer to X. It is simple
| psychology.
|
| Then what about the candidates that are so good that you want to
| pay them more?
|
| I fully expect that best candidates will still be able to
| negotiate better than the official salary range.
| joegahona wrote:
| I am curious what prevents companies from including a "range"
| such as: "From $1 to $10,000,000 annually."
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| I've seen this comment many times before, in Colorado and more
| recently in New York City.
|
| Laws can be passed to make this painful for companies.
|
| Department of Labor, either at the state or federal level, can
| enforce companies trying to play a game with their numbers.
|
| Also the collective pressure of the market would have a
| mitigating effect. Game theory comes to mind, would _you_ apply
| to a job listing like that? Would you apply if every other job
| listing has a more "honest" range posted, or would you spend
| your time applying to companies that are cooperating with the
| state government?
| joegahona wrote:
| Agreed, the example I gave was absurd, but finding a
| threshold will be interesting. What's _not_ absurd? $50K?
| $75K?
| sharkweek wrote:
| Yep, I would 100% look at a company trying to skirt a true
| range like that and think "absolutely no way I want to work
| there."
| datavirtue wrote:
| Same here. In business you learn to stay away from price
| sensitive people (cheap asses) real quick. It signals many
| bad things. They are going to be difficult to please.
| Perhaps litigious. They probably feel entitled and are
| willing to exploit. Totally unprofessional. Perhaps the
| business is on the rocks. In any case, they are oblivious
| to the signal they are sending...which is a clear indicator
| that the above mentioned possibilities are more likely.
| gigel82 wrote:
| I suspect this is mostly useless for tech folks as you said;
| but it might be interesting for lower wage jobs that bait
| people with "Mcdonalds hiring for $20 / hour" and a tiny
| asterisk hidden there etc.
| madamelic wrote:
| Prospective employees balking.
|
| If I see a company that specifically excludes Colorado
| residents, I already know the company is going to be doing all
| kinds of unethical shenanigans to employees and is likely a
| bunch of fools not worth bothering with.
| htrp wrote:
| I've actually seen that as well....
| 1270018080 wrote:
| At least that would keep Tim Cook from applying
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| No one will take them seriously. They are unwittingly now
| participating in a reputation market.
|
| Granted, status and prestige are intangible assets. The hiring
| manager will find themselves in the position of spending brand
| status for financial flexibility. I can see a handful of
| companies getting rolled on social media for this as the game
| gets started and then less of it as things settle down. Long
| term, I'm more interested in seeing how companies optimally
| size spreads in order to signal to the labor market "you
| should" or "you shouldn't" work for us. Job search toolmakers
| are in a fun position bc they can set the stakes on metrics
| like 10% spread and influence the labor markets in powerful
| ways.
| sfe22 wrote:
| More bureaucracy probably
| hammock wrote:
| The law
| joegahona wrote:
| I read through the bill and didn't see this mentioned. Can
| you share what the proposed law is on salary ranges?
| hammock wrote:
| The bill will be passed, then the state department of labor
| will issue rules regarding its enforcement. That's how
| government works.
|
| When Colorado did the same thing, the Colorado department
| of labor issued rules that required employers to use a
| "good-faith and reasonable* estimate" of the salary range.
| You can expect the same of Washington.
|
| *"good faith" and "reasonable" are legal terms with
| specific tests and judicial precedent around them
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Socially: No one will take it seriously.
|
| Regulatory-wise: Colorado's equivalent law has language about
| "good-faith" and "reasonable" ranges and you can report
| companies that do this sort of thing to Colorado's state
| government to face fines and such.
| ausbah wrote:
| why not require companies to post salary ranges of already
| employed workers in same or similar roles? seems like it could
| circumvent the absurd range issue
| cryptonector wrote:
| https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/
| dustractor wrote:
| Now we need laws restricting a specific job-posting tactic where
| a few employers spam their same jobs over and over, multiple
| times daily, so you have to scroll past or filter out redundant
| listings. DoorDash is a prime example. Truck-driving jobs belong
| in a separate category altogether, but they are also prime
| offenders.
| TimPC wrote:
| I'm curious if anyone else is concerned about the downside to
| this. Once they post a range they have to follow it because of
| the legal implications. Many companies are willing to bend the
| budget for an exceptional candidate at the very top end. I worry
| that some of the senior roles that could have negotiated above
| the top end of the range will now be hamstrung by it. I know of
| several situations where a company thought the top of their range
| was somewhere around $260K and went up to $275K after seeing a
| candidate they really liked. They aren't likely to post the role
| with the extra $15K in it since if they post a role from
| $200K-$275K then most people are going to want $250K+ which is
| near what they thought the top of their range was.
| MithrilTuxedo wrote:
| I didn't know it either, but this bill mostly just moves
| forward when that information must be disclosed. Current law
| requires it to be disclosed upon request after a job offer has
| been made.
|
| The bill is _really_ short.
|
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5761&Initiativ...
| [deleted]
| nightski wrote:
| I went freelancer a while back and now just don't worry about
| it. Let those who enjoy being part of a system with ranks,
| levels, titles, and politics deal with it. It was rough going
| at first but I've found steady clients now which I've been able
| to work with for over a decade and they aren't going anywhere.
| jppope wrote:
| rock on. how do you find clients though?
| t-writescode wrote:
| If the candidate is as great as you're saying here, why not put
| them in the higher ranked position?
| cryptonector wrote:
| There was a story on HN recently about something like this in
| Colorado. This link stuck out:
| https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/
|
| Unintended consequences suck.
| naruvimama wrote:
| This might actually depress tech salaries in non-tech companies.
|
| As is the discrepancy in titles is significant.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| No it won't, because companies are paying what they need to pay
| for talent.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Eh, but it will at the margin though. Like, you are
| undoubtedly correct, but part of the effect of this is piss
| off people in the rest of your org when they see the tech
| person you hired makes more than people think they should.
| This essentially causes the value of the high-performing tech
| person to decrease for you, since along with their wonderful
| skills you are now also hiring a tiny amount of resentment in
| your firm. At equilibrium, if you believe this effect, it
| would cause the worth of tech talent to be lower for your
| firm, and the equilibrium salary would reflect that.
| asdff wrote:
| Its good for employees to know the salaries in their org.
| Why is this only a consideration for private orgs too? I
| worked at a public org where you could look up each and
| every salaried person's compensation. It doesn't breed
| resentment to see your boss is compensated exactly $437k
| this year, it sets a target for yourself and your career.
| The sky isn't falling at that org because salaries are
| public.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Fair enough, but very small difference.
|
| Maybe at the margin it'll lower the salary of non-tech
| employees, since they are also bringing resentment with
| them.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Do people resent doctor and lawyer salaries?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I certainly resent doctor salaries, given that they are a
| cartel. Not lawyers.
| datavirtue wrote:
| True.
| t-writescode wrote:
| So you're saying a few people making way more than the rest
| of their peers will be pulled back in line with the rest of
| their peers while their peers make more money?
|
| Honestly, I'm okay with that.
|
| If someone was making 500k and their coworkers were making
| 100k, maybe their coworkers _should_ be being paid 150k or
| 175k and that 500k worker should be either promoted or
| pulled back to like 250k
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| You can read the bill text and find its current status here:
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5761&Initiativ...
|
| Note that one of the bill's sponsors, Sen. Joe Nguyen,
| coincidentally my state Senator, is a Program Manager at
| Microsoft.
| tr33house wrote:
| I had no ideas state senators could hold an additional job.
| Good work!
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| They don't have a choice. Washington's legislature only meets
| for 2-3 months per year[1], and they're paid about $56,000
| per year[2], which sounds pretty good for 2-3 months of
| work...except that they're actually working behind the scenes
| all year long to get legislation lined up, and then falling
| over each other to get things done in a short time window
| every January. It's not an efficient or particularly
| effective system.
|
| [1] https://leg.wa.gov/legislature/Pages/Overview.aspx
|
| [2] https://lmtribune.com/northwest/washington-senator-per-
| diem-...
| warmwaffles wrote:
| Texas does the same thing but every 2 years.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| The state legislature in WA works part time of the year, from
| Jan to later March I believe.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| In some states, like New Hampshire, state legislators'
| paychecks are a token amount like $100/year or nothing at
| all, and _must_ hold an additional job.
| freedomben wrote:
| Most state legislatures are only part time, so when not in
| session they have full time jobs. That's actually how the US
| founders wanted it to ensure that politicians stayed "of the
| people" and couldn't escape the effects of their governing.
| "They will never vote a rod against themselves" (can't
| remember who said this so take with a grain of salt but it's
| stuck in my memory). At some point though the Federal
| legislators decided to give themselves full time jobs. At
| this point now most probably make enough money insider-
| trading stocks (yes the same thing that gets a normal citizen
| jailed), so they probably wouldn't have to work when out of
| session anyway.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That's actually how the founders wanted it to ensure that
| politicians
|
| ...were always rich men of leisure, with appropriate class
| sympathies guiding their decisions.
| [deleted]
| humanwhosits wrote:
| I imagine future 1-liner replies to recruiters: "salary range too
| low"
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Most meaningful compensation comes from stock and discretionary
| bonuses.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Only if you live in the bubble that is the tech world.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Pretty soon every job will be a tech job.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Ditches need to be dug. Pretty soon, CoPilot v54 will
| assure that there are only five or six programmers left
| anyway.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I've been hearing this for the past decades.
|
| Where are all those robots who would have replaced people
| flipping burgers ten or fifteen years ago?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yes. That fantasy is really closer to 75 years old than
| 15, and there are as many burger-flippers now as there
| ever were.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| For a very select few in the managerial class, yes. I think a
| lot of legislation like that is written with jobs that don't
| have that kind of comp in mind. However, I do think that an
| outcome of legislation like this is to simply create more
| compensation of this sort that doesn't have to be figured into
| "salary." There will be a greater incentive to use those
| instruments to the extent that you still want to keep total
| compensation less transparent.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I dunno the specifics of this bill, but my former HR person said
| in most cases, this is easily bypassed by giving some absurd
| range.
| Osiris wrote:
| In Colorado the standard is "reasonable" so if the range is
| clearly absurd that is still a violation of the law and can
| result in a fine.
| rripken wrote:
| Sure, candidates can also easily skip companies where HR plays
| silly games.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| These bills are mostly useless if they don't include bonus and
| stock compensation, and this bill only requires a "general
| description" of other benefits.
|
| Companies that don't want market transparency will simply
| restructure compensation packages -- "bonuses" doled on on a 24
| pay period amortized schedule are an option even when equity
| isn't.
|
| In tech, salary being mostly useless as a measure of total comp
| is already the status quo... if someone tells you that their
| salary is $160,000 then could be making $160,000 or they could be
| making >$1M. Expect to see similar behavior but even at the
| $60K/yr jobs.
| joelbondurant2 wrote:
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| So now all job postings are going to be "Salary range between
| 50-300k, depending on experience."
| jll29 wrote:
| The European Commission has recently announced mandatory salary
| transparency in a similar vein:
| https://ec.europa.eu/info/policies/justice-and-fundamental-r...
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| How would this be applied/enforced for remote positions?
| Osiris wrote:
| If the job is available to people in the state then the law
| applies. So if I'm based in Texas but advertise a job publicly
| to remote workers, then I have to comply with (in my case
| Colorado) law about wage transparency.
|
| I've also read that just including the line, "not available in
| Colorado" is not a valid legal recourse to skirting the law.
|
| Law makers are generally pretty good at estimating people's
| willingness to try to get around laws like this and include all
| kinds of gotchas.
| golemiprague wrote:
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