There also a growing list of states that prohibit asking for salary history. Don’t ever give a salary history if asked. Only share if it is going to help in your negotiation. Advise everyone you know who is job seeking to do the same.
This is a very dangerous question to ask because it locks in previous pay discrimination based on protected categories.
For any of us corporate workers, Equifax runs a service called "The Work Number" that has, for a big group of people, every single cent you ever made, who payed it, and when
I only learned about it recently. When I requested a report on my SSN, I saw every bi-weekly payment ever made to me
There is no way they can get actual paystub data from employer or tax return data from irs.
Most likely they use field Annual Income that you voluntarily provide to banks/cc companies when applying for a loan and that number is reported to Equifax. That number is verified by a lender by inspecting your W-2/paystubs when underwriting car/mortgage/other loan.
So you should never voluntarily provide income info to lenders, because every bit of that info will be sold to other companies and can be used against yiu in the future
> Surprisingly, Facebook is among friends. Every payroll period, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle also provide an electronic feed of their employees’ hourly work and wage information to Equifax. So do Wal-Mart, Twitter, AT&T, Harvard Law School, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Even Edward Snowden’s former employer, the sometimes secretive N.S.A. contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, sends salary and other personal data about its employees to Equifax Workplace Solutions.
It's gross but I honestly don't see how you can come to this conclusion? How can you keep wages below market value by sharing actual wages in the actual market?
it gets better. if you ever leave somewhere and HR dont update employment status and dates accurately with theworknumber, future employers background checks may fail, and cause hiring problems for you (it may look like you are working two jobs or lied about your history)
Note that for the purposes of the Free Credit Reporting Act (FRCA), this is just another consumer report and you still have all the same rights you normally would, including the rights to recieve a copy of information in your file, dispute innaccuracies, and sue for damages.
Who says you aren't supposed to share your salary? Your employer? It's legal to share your salary, and illegal for your employer to stop you or retaliate against you in the US (unless you are in management).
It really depends on the intention you have for sharing your salary. I have friends who want to get into software engineering and they ask me my salary history. Compared to industry standard, my salary is average at best, so it's a pitiful thing to brag about (not that money is ever not a pitiful thing to brag about)
If you're at a party and no one is asking, certainly don't share it. Nothing is worse than being at a party with a guy who constantly says "By the way, I make $500k at Facebook"
If for some reason salary is important to the conversation (for example talking about crypto or investing or just money in general) then sharing it can be appropriate.
But the most important thing imo is that you read the room: if it's likely the people you're talking with make less than you, then probably don't share it, and certainly never complain about money or the price of things. If it's likely they are well off as well, then sure, complain about your mid-six-figure salary
Does this work in practice? There are surely lots of subtle ways an employer could retaliate against you that would be really hard to prove as retaliatory actions.
I would have assumed US law has some kind of hostile work environment protection, but according to wikipedia this only applies if the employee has been "treated in a hostile manner because of their membership in a protected class".
I worked in two different countries in European Union, and in both as far as I can tell (ianal) it’s perfectly legal to share salary information. Labor code states what the limits of what you can do are, and also that the contract can not be more restrictive than the labor code is.
However, this myth of illegality of sharing your salary information has been perpetuated by the employers to maintain an upper hand in negotiations. And it’s what keeps down the TCs in Europe, in my opinion.
>However, this myth of illegality of sharing your salary information has been perpetuated by the employers to maintain an upper hand in negotiations. And it’s what keeps down the TCs in Europe, in my opinion.
I don't think that's what keeps down the TC in Europe, because what you are describing is exactly the case in the US as well.
It is 100% legal to share your comp with anyone, and it is illegal for an employer to prohibit that or fire you for it or retaliate in any other way. And yet, a giant chunk of the population lives under a myth that they can get in trouble for sharing their comp info, even when the employer doesn't insinuate so or imply that at all.
I know some small employers might (illegally) try to imply that it isn't allowed (despite it being illegal, but those bosses are either ignorant or threading a fine line with the law), but I've even met some people working at FAANG-tier companies believing that sharing comp numbers is prohibited (despite FAANG-tier companies never even subtly implying that it isn't allowed).
How did you request a report for yourself? Did you create a personal account in order to access your data (via https://employees.theworknumber.com) or did you have a business account with them?
If you created an personal account in order to get your data, what kind of profile data did you have to give them before you could get to what they have?
Information as a two-way street; your employer provides it so that they can, in turn, get salary reports that they can use.
I worked in this industry briefly; it's likely your HR department is providing tons of information to these services and then using the resulting statistics.
You yourself provide this info voluntarily to a bank when applying for a loan. The same bank verifies it by asking your paystubs before giving you a loan.
As a rule of thunb - anything you provide to a bank for credit will be reported to credit bureau and they will sell all your personal info to the highest bidder. Or get it stolen by hackers in yet another data breach
> You yourself provide this info voluntarily to a bank when apply for a loan. The same bank verifies it by asking your paystubs before giving you a loan.
This is really harmful phrasing - blaming the individual.
> when apply for a loan
This seems like general population data, nothing specific to people who’ve taken loans.
I was not trying to blame the individual, sorry if it appeared that way.
Mostly it is the unique messed up american system of credit information exchange where consumers have no control over how their data gets collected/used/sold.
I have never signed up an agreement with Equifax to store my personal data only to get it stolen occasionally. I wish US adopted more european centric models for personal data.
Do you know where I can buy this information? It might be interesting to know how much to expect from various companies. Or do they only sell to employers?
Many employers send their entire workforce's annual salary as a standard data integration field for benefit/workforce system vendors. Equifax/TWN is one of those vendors many employers use.
TWN, in turn, grants these employers aggregate salary range data across companies (helping the company negotiate better deals).
Some of the companies selling this data are the ones who actually process the payroll for employers, and their contract with your employer specifically allows it.
NYC already prohibits employers from using salary information in setting compensation, unless the candidate voluntarily and without prompting offers that information (e.g. when the candidate thinks it will give them a higher offer). NY has a similar law at the state level as well (both apply simultaneously in NYC).
They still can use a service like The Work Number to verify candidate-provided numbers as part of a post-hiring background check, with proper consent from the candidate.
Hello GDPR yes, I know Equifax is in the US and the GDPR does not apply there, but this sort of abuse is why the GDPR exists. Equifax shouldn't even have that data, let alone be allowed to resell it.
I have literally told a HR person "I'm not answering this question" and when told to do or cancel, I cancelled that application with zero regrets.
Remember: Whenever someone in HR tells you "this is a standard question", immediately assume that means "we can get away with asking this, and it's strictly to our advantage, so we always do".
If they're pushy I ask if they want to know so that they can A) lowball me B) because they don't trust their own assessment of my value C) something else (this is a trap: there is no C).
One time an HR drone told me it was policy to ask and he didnt know why. I quizzically asked him why as an HR rep he didnt understand the HR policies of the company he worked for. I even asked him if it was policy for HR to not understand HR policy.
I kind of wished I'd told him that I'd recorded this phone call for training purposes :/
It's amazing how sweet and polite you can be with this line of questioning and how humiliating their answers will be (because there is no good answer).
It's a massive red flag so I doubt ive lost any good jobs this way.
On what basis? Knowing the candidates job history may do so, but what signal does the salary itself give?
The company is highly unlikely to answer the question, "what did you pay the previous employee in this position?"; why should I answer "what did the company that previously employed me pay me?"
That someone else thought you were worth that much.
> why should I answer
You don't have to answer any question you don't want to. But if your previous salary was high, mentioning it will frame the negotiations in a higher salary bracket.
You're looking at this consistently through the lens of someone coming in with an existing high salary who can exploit that during negotiations. But someone coming in from that perspective is likely already in a strong enough economic position to negate some of the leverage that the company starts with.
> That someone else thought you were worth that much.
No, it suggests that someone thought you were worth at least that much. It sets a floor, not a ceiling. If that floor is high, then it may be a valuable signal as long as others corroborate it. If it's low, however, that signal is effectively meaningless. And yet, employers start assuming that a low existing salary does imply a ceiling on - or even accurate measure of - worth, as you seem to be doing.
The problem is, it's not just a signal of your economic value to companies.
It's also a signal of:
* Your past skill at negotiation
* Any past economic disadvantaged background or discrimination
It's also just dirty pool: employers seek to shame / threaten employees to not share compensation data (and, in circumstances where state laws do not prohibit this, terminate employees for discussing comp), and then want to have all the data themselves. It creates a very tilted negotiation field.
If you have poor negotiating skills, hiding your salary history isn't going to help any. What is going to help is making an effort to learn how to do it. A relatively small effort can yield lifetime benefits.
> If you have poor negotiating skills, hiding your salary history isn't going to help any
This is false. If you have poor negotiating skills, and likely a low salary history to go with it - the prospective employer will low-ball your initial offer based on asymmetric knowledge. If they have no idea how much you earned, and are judging you on your skills and experience alone, the initial offer will most likely be a higher number much closer to market salaries. Even if there is zero negotiations and the candidate accepts the first offer, the outcomes are completely different.
That's rather presumptive. If the candidate did not disclose his salary history, the obvious assumption is that it is not a positive, and the candidate will get a lowball offer.
> are judging you on your skills and experience alone
It never works that way. They'll be judging you on what you chose not to reveal, too. Other examples:
1. if you say you have a degree, but are silent about from where, the assumption will be it is not Stanford. The assumption will be it's from a degree mill, or worse, you're lying about the degree.
2. if you didn't submit SAT scores to the admissions dept, the assumption will inevitably be that they are poor scores.
> If the candidate did not disclose his salary history, the obvious assumption is that it is not a positive, and the candidate will get a lowball offer.
I disagree that this is the obvious assumption[1]. Even if I were true,
it seems to me like your prior is all lowball offers are the same. They are not. If a candidate was underpaid, an uninformed "lowball" (from prospective employers PoV) would be much higher than if they knew the candidates previous salary was about half of their budget.
1. My salary is above average, but not an outlier,but I will not disclose my salary history before getting an offer. I will not disclose it after getting an offer, even if it's too low for my liking. The only number that matters is the one I am willing to accept. If you share your salary history, you may be lowballed an not even know it. "Anchoring" is a well-studied phenomenon - anchoring on your past salary may leave you underpaid relative to the rest of the market (or your colleagues).
Yes, but you're saying that even if someone improves, a rational actor will use the signal of the history of poor negotiation to collude with others to pay that person less.
Surely you understand the entire argument, including parts you glossed over:
> It's also just dirty pool: employers seek to shame / threaten employees to not share compensation data (and, in circumstances where state laws do not prohibit this, terminate employees for discussing comp), and then want to have all the data themselves. It creates a very tilted negotiation field.
I have done quite well for myself. But I am concerned that this is one more way that the field is tilted against disadvantaged groups. Past history of being discriminated or of screwing up negotiation stays with you indefinitely, and that's not great. The data asymmetry is not great, either.
Peoples' personal financial information should not be aggregated and shared with employers without their consent.
This is literally a way to suppress folks from the lower class. They can't afford to jump to FANG or some other great job right out of college in a lot of cases, they need to start making money.
Standing firm is a useful negotiation tactic at times, yet no guarantee for success. If companies you want to work for collectively take the stance that you don't deserve the salary you're asking for, possibly influenced by their knowledge of your salary history, then you standing firm means you don't get the job.
Even if it's only some companies doing that, it influences the time it takes for you to find a job that pays what you feel you deserve, increasing the cost of your "stand firm" stance.
"All the person has to do" reads to me as if you're implying it's a guaranteed road to success, or that it comes at minimal cost. If this wasn't intended, I apologise.
Not negotiating means you get low offers, standing firm might mean you get none at all. I think the latter is the worst case result.
That’s it, do or die and if you’re a better worker than bullshitter, then too bad for you?
In a perfect world without discrimination, prejudice, and built-in social inequalities, you might be right. In the real world, there is a massive power imbalance between the HR people and the applicants, and often circumstances make people get a job with a suboptimal salary for a whole lot of reasons.
Because, as shocking as it may seem, the world is not black and white. There are intermediates between “dirt poor” and “billionaire”, as well as “lying, exploitative scumbag employer” and “perfect employer”, and also blind luck.
The simple fact that a significant part of the population is systematically paid less than the other for the same work should tell you that you are overly optimistic.
Half the people will always be better in any metric than the other half.
> The simple fact
Saying it's a fact doesn't make it one. I've run several businesses. In no case did the secret cabal of businessmen contact me with the rundown on how to systematically pay half the people less.
> blind luck
It's necessary for you to set yourself up for luck to find you. Luck will not find someone playing video games in the basement.
Believing one has no agency is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Two days ago I met an Afghan who escaped from Afghanistan safely last summer with his family. They lost everything but their lives. He barely speaks English, but he's already up and running with his own business, and drives a new car.
I think you're confusing me with someone who hasn't achieved things. I'm doing great in life, but I still have empathy and don't assume others are where they are due to their inherent faults.
Turns out I grew up in a shitty family, I escaped, but that doesn't mean I've lost empathy for those who couldn't.
You seem to think that the world is fair (which is ironic because I bet you've told folks "life isn't fair"). It's not, and no amount of pretending can change that. Folks can do their damnedest and still end up on the streets. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, I'm saying we need to be empathetic and stop doing things that work against them.
I do agree that a person should "hunt" a higher reward (money + package) when they can and it's worth the hassle but...
Sometimes they have no choice but compromise to pay their bills.
As a side note: Some do get complacent and don't bother looking anymore, after a while. Stress, fear of rejection, repeated failure being some of the things that bring them down. One needs close to an Iron Will to push ahead.
> Sometimes they have no choice but compromise to pay their bills.
This is America. There are choices. One of them is to choose to upgrade your job skills so you can get a better job. Or upgrade your negotiating skills. Or look at another of the 37,000,000 businesses in the US to choose from. Or start your own business.
I did express my self poorly there. By "Sometimes they have no choice but compromise to pay their bills" I mean:
Some people will take a low paid job or crazy hours to stall for time until they finish a course or to save money for one. I did that back in the day too. That is why, at least some, I can't blame.
You are right on the second part though. Some people don't want or can't be bothered to try... and some or just tired of it. Either of these categories I don't defend in any way.
Sounds like someone wants to justify their position in the social order XD
Let me tell you, you can make a lot of money (I do), and still have empathy for the situations of others. Believe it or not, regardless of what your libertarian / conservative media tells you, folks are generally working hard and trying their best. Anything else is outrage porn.
That would seem to put your company squarely under the heading of checks notes A) "doesnt put enough faith in own ability to assess talent without it".
If you place a preference on candidates who share the information, your lack of faith in your own ability to value talent is presumably also strong enough that you are willing to forgo the (better) candidates who do not feel compelled to share their salary history.
That's quite the declaration to make to a job applicant.
I agree entirely about the house buying thing. I find the metaphor apt. I like to know. I have never bought a house so, at that, I consider myself an amateur who needs all the help he can get.
No if you do a Phd at CERN or similar tier 1 institutions the pay there is often very low I found that for starting work at a world leading RnD organisation.
My manager told me that when they interview a candidate, they already know how much they currently earn because companies voluntarily share salary data with each other in my country (in Europe). The recruiters still ask candidates for a salary expectation, but they only use that to know how much of a jump the candidate is expecting, or how much extra they expect to get to actually consider a switch... and because positions are nearly never advertised with a salary range, this makes employers have a huge advantage "negotiating" salaries as they have all the information, the candidate has none (it's tabu to ask other people for their salaries, so I, as most people, am almost completely in the dark regarding whether I am being fairly compensated or not).
The only information about salaries I know of is published by the Unions... which is sub-divided into profession, then ranges of years of experience. But because most software developers are not in Unions here, the data they have seems very skewed towards lower pay rates. It's really a nightmare as it seems that when I am looking for a job, all companies pay the same (which you only find out after several interviews to get an actual offer). IT really pisses me off that such an open country as this has this attitude towards salaries.
I wish every position had a salary range and an indication of how much you would expect to earn a certain experience. That surely would be beneficial to employees, who would know whether they could expect to get a better salary, but also to employers who actually want to find the best people and are willing to pay more, I think, as they wouldn't need to pay large amounts of money to join this "secret club" where they share salaries with each other, basically colluding to keep salaries low.
I wouldn't lie with a specific number, but I would answer it with either one of these two options:
1. You're probably more aware of the market conditions than I am and I trust you to make me a competitive offer should we both agree this is a good match
2. I have an embarrassingly high compensation in my current role, and I am not comfortable in divulging it, because very few employers are able to match it and I'm not expecting them to
Both answers put the onus on the employer to put out their best offer possible, and any push back is basically a huge red flag.
One might also be a lie, which I think is problematic. If, however, your second reply *isn't* a lie you might as well tell them to signal your worth. However that's a privilege few emploees enjoy.
One of my former coworkers (whom I'll call Doug) had his boss at a previous job more or less do this on his behalf. Doug had been working for a small company that was acquired. The new owner asked the boss of the smaller company what Doug had been making. The old boss reported a number much higher than Doug's actual salary. The new ownership just said "sounds reasonable" and Doug immediately got a massive raise. Doug said he was a little uncomfortable that a lie had been involved, but he didn't feel he could contradict his boss, so he went with it.
I'm not exactly sure why the circumstances didn't involve the new employer from actually checking his previous salary, but based on my interaction with Doug I'm sure the story is true.
This is the boss saying “Doug was worth more than I could pay him, here’s what he should be getting” which is actually a very nice thing to do for the new ownership because losing Doug soon after could have been devastating. Likely the small company had felt it couldn’t match the actual salary (and likely tried to make it up in other ways).
You don't have to play the game. There are plenty of employers out there who do _not_ ask salary history, or will accept "my expected amount is $x" (which is not based on what you're making right now)
Agree, this is the ideal way. But if my life dependent on one company interview and they ask current salary instead of desired - they will get my desired number as if it was my current
in a hypothetical world where your life depends on one company why would you lie about something that they can easily verify?
in the real world your life is unlikely to depend on the answer to this question. you can always say " i require X" in response to the question and if they probe more decide whether or not your situation requires you to divulge the extra information. i interview people regularly (and i don't ask about salary) but if i found out that someone flat out lied to me in an interview that would be a straight up pass/recommendation to fail a probationary period from me. i don't want or need those relationships on my team.
You can be caught about lying in an interview at any time after the fact. If I interviewed someone and found out they flat out lied in response to a question (side note: I don't ask about salary), it would be an instant no/suggestion to end a probationary period from me.
Because being stuck doing a job that's over your head every single day isn't fun, even if you're getting paid for it. When they say interviewing is a two-way street, they're right.
It’s not a good idea to lie in the interview process. If you get caught, you jeopardize your chance of landing the job.
But you do have ways of presenting a good number for negotiations. For example, you can respond with your total compensation (health insurance subsidies, retirement plan matches, stock-based compensation, transit/parking subsidies, educational stipends, etc).
If you’re changing jobs, and the new employer lacks stock or other forms of compensation, it’s totally reasonable to negotiate from a point of what you’d be loosing by switching jobs.
Agree in general with you that lying is big No in interview process.
However, asking salary is a very delicate question that they are not supposed to ask. Making such question a mandatory to get offer is a very shady and questionable practice. I have no problem in telling employer my Desired Salary number (that I know they can pay) as my Current Salary is just another negotiation trick. The ultimate goal is to get both parties to agree and make a deal. By volunteering your true salary you are just giving up your negotiation edge
I can't imagine any company doing this over that question. It cost them a lot of money to hire and start training you. And it isn't even a capability related question like if you lied about your education.
I've seen it happen. A peer team had found an excellent match and extended the offer, which was accepted. Then during the background check there was some discrepancy in details (not salary, but even more trivial stuff) and HR canceled the offer. Management fought it hard but HR stood firm, offer dropped.
Go one step further and respond with "One million dollars...mmmm"
Asking someone what they made at a previous employer seems like a cheap way to try and pay someone as little as possible. A fun snarky response feels justified.
Best case, they laugh and offer you a fair salary. Other best case, you move on to interview at a better company.
You can choose to do this or to not provide a (false) salary history in the first place, but just understand that typically what you're actually doing is choosing to not accept a particular position.
I'm in a position now where I could afford to do this. I've also been in positions in the past where I needed a job and did (and would advise others in similar positions) to just play the game and provide the damn pay stubs.
I've also had to pee in cups before that. These sorts of degrading requirements should be banned collectively. It's very hard for an individual who needs a paycheck right quick to personally move the needle on this stuff.
I had to take a drug test once for a development job. This wasn't recently but it was after marijuana had been legalized in several states (but not the one I was in at the time). I reached out to the recruiter who basically said "we have employees who are contracted out to the state. It's a state law that we need to drug test our employees. The law does not require that we report the results or even read them."
In general I don't think drug testing for certain jobs is a bad thing. What jobs get tested, how often, and what drugs get tested for is something reasonable people can disagree about.
I’ve had to do it for low tier stuff when I was younger, like telemarketing. It’s an unnecessary invasion of privacy. If I showed up too stoned to speak coherently fire me for being incoherent. I had to do it when working with some heavy equipment too. The argument doesn’t even work there though. I’d not be hired if I smoked pot two weeks ago, but if I took shots with breakfast that would be fine?
I don’t even do drugs and I rarely drink. I just think your performance on the job should be all that matters. If you drink, sleep poorly, etc, and it affects your performance, that should be observable and reacted to accordingly.
I would not have objected to vision tests and reflex tests, that sort of thing, to be licensed to use potentially dangerous equipment.
> The law does not require that we report the results or even read them.
The best move then would be, of course, be to consume a large amount of marijuana the night before you take the test. If they end up not hiring you because of it, well, do you really want to work for someone who will just straight up lie to your face?
Well, I think it's unlikely I passed the test, and I worked there long enough to get promoted twice. I believe that they didn't care about the results and just had to go through the motions.
I've always heard this, but I've had a dozen jobs in the last decade (not a joke), and no one has ever asked me for previous paystubs. They have asked for previous proof of employment, but that came down to "a letter from my company that confirms I work there", no salary information listed.
I’ve had companies ask me to fill out a paper application. After they received my CV, cover letter and telephone interview. They also gave me the take it or leave it. Thinking to myself if this is how it’s going to be at the interview stage I can’t imagine wasting 40-50 hours/week over the next year for even more bullshit. I left and called my recruiter and told her don’t ever do that again.
I have never seen this happen to myself or anyone else. Nor are you required to give them any pay stubs, as they contain your social security number and personal financial information. That's not something you give to a recruiter. Please be very wary of anyone who asks for a pay stub.
You're not required to give anything to anyone. There are just consequences if you don't. In this instance, that consequence is not getting a job.
It's never happened to me but I do know exactly one person who was required to provide pay stubs exactly one time. She complained about it too and they actually told her that it was their policy not to pay more than 10% above what someone was making at their last position. I wouldn't do it, but some people will. That's why it happens.
The legal status is unclear to me (this was in Switzerland).
The tone of the HR person simply suggested "this is a field I have to fill in in this spreadsheet or I can't press the Continue With Application button".
What? "Answer this question or I'm not hiring you." (as long as the question is not one of a lawfully prohibited class of questions) is not coercion it's negotiation. By your reasoning if I went into an interview and flat refused to answer any question they would, what, be forced to hire me? This whole conceptualization is broken.
I believe NYC banned companies from asking for salary history a few years back. I was interviewing at a bank in NYC. I attempted to negotiate a salary about $20k - $30k from what I was making at the time, and the response from the interviewer was positive. I was then blindsided by the interviewer (who would've been my boss) after he asked what my current salary is and I let it slip out because I didn't know that it was illegal in NYC at the time to ask salary history. Afterwards, he said "huh, that's a big clip up, I think $X would be a bit more reasonable."
When I have the opportunity, I talk about this kind of thing with young professionals. They think that sounds like a lot of money, because they don't understand that's a rounding error to a large company. It's really cruel the way as a society we take kids making minimum wage at whatever first job, they get a degree, and then they get thrust out into Corporate America with no idea of what things cost or their own value. Unless they have the right mentors to encourage them to ask for more, they get whatever the company gives them.
I was negotiating a contract recently on behalf of a client and they wondered how much they should ask for - I helped them get a meaningful credit because I knew it was an amount of money the other party would be willing to absorb rather than fight about.
Individual departments (cost centers) often have salary budgets - this motivates some managers to be penny-pinchers - save $10k here, $20k there, in no time you have enough budget for another warm body!
You missed the second half of the quote. It is clear he was talking about a salary 20-30k above what he was already making. Now, you may point out that's still not a lot of money, but it's not a salary in the 20-30k range.
He then said that he answered the question of what he made, was told a $20k bump was to much, and was offered a lower (X,000) bump instead because they assumed that's all they needed to do.
I didn't realize it was the entire state that banned the practice. Good to know.
I wonder, if a prospective employer were to ask you about salary history, what would be a good way to turn them down? I'm sure there are many employers that aren't aware that this has been outlawed.
At the same time, I'm wondering, if you could lie and inflate your salary should you be asked about salary history by a prospective employer, given that they wouldn't be able to legally verify what you told them.
Employers generally fuck us every way they can, then go innovate some more. When it comes to negotiating compensation, use every tactic available, including lies, doctoring old payslips, leveraging offers against each other. I truly do not believe it is possible to act unethically when attempting to extract fair pay from employers.
When asked for a salary history, do you research and give them a list at what salary you should've gotten. A rude question doesn't deserve a honest answer.
Is it dangerous? If a candidate volunteers their pay history, it's likely because it is high. If they don't, it's likely because it is low.
I also don't see why, if an employer demands a pay history, the candidate is obliged to provide it.
(And also, in my experience, nearly all candidates inflate their salary history by about 10%. Employers know this, and discount the salary history by 10%. Back when I applied for jobs, I provided a pay stub along with the comment that I wasn't lying about my salary.)
Not having a clue about what a candidate formerly earned means risk for the employer, and risk always means that the offer will be lower to account for the risk.
> Not having a clue about what a candidate formerly earned means risk for the employer
It really doesn't. An employee brings their employer some amount of value. The exact amount of value is completely unrelated to that employee's salary at their previous jobs.
The _only_ "risk" here is that the employer might not be able to lowball the candidate as much as they possibly could.
> I'm aware of many people who were hired who brought negative value. A salary history of low wages is a red flag for such.
Is it really? If someone's bouncing between jobs, doing a terrible job at each of them, why would their salary history be likely to reflect it? A given company might fire them, but lowering someone's pay to indicate poor performance is not common.
> Just try hiring a minimum wage worker as CEO for your next company, and see how well that works out.
That has nothing to do with what they were paid and everything to do with their experience. No one's discussing not talking about experience.
When you work for a company, do you never see a correlation between what people are paid and what they contribute? Really?
As for me, I've gone to the boss and said my work XXX was valuable to the company, so I want a raise, and I'd get it. If I hadn't done XXX would I have gotten the raise? Of course not.
(Of course, government and union jobs are different, where your pay is based on seniority, your degree, and job category.)
That would be a CEO without a golden parachute to bail them out when they run things into the ground... so I wouldn't be surprised if it works out better than average.
California is one of those states, yet as a state employee, my compensation history is a public record. Anyone who wants my info can find it with a simple search online. I can understand the good in disclosing this info for public figures, but for everyone? It seems a little hypocritical.
I was asked by a recruiter one time. I answered with what my salary requirements were. This caused him to grow quite angry, explain that it didn't matter what my requirements were, and hang up on me. Mostly, I was amused. This was before that question was illegal in California.
> The laws were drafted, in large part, to help close the gender pay gap.
HIRED’s annual recruiting reports found that a significant driver of this were
candidates asking for far lower than other peers. Many times,
companies would then offer that candidate a greater salary, which was still below the bolder or more comfortable peer. The candidate feels like their company is doing them a favor.
So, this aspect should illuminate that many people are not aware that their own company is contributing to pay gaps. Any individual may in fact think the opposite, that it must be some other company with the proverbial bigoted shadow men in a board room disenfranchising everyone that doesn't look like them. When that picture isn't whats happening or isn't necessary, when candidates exacerbate this on their own.
Could it be that the candidate has experience being turned down when asking higher rates? Perhaps.
Could it be that the company doesnt even realize that they arent getting a deal with the candidate, but really just exacerbating pay gaps? That the candidates asking lower may be disproportionately certain genders and ethnicities?
New York City is reducing this to anti-discrimination, making the penalties inherit discrimination frameworks without regard to the circumstances leading up to it. I think thats a great remedy, given how opaque and nuanced the reality really has been.
We don't need to tweak candidate behavior or gradually retrain companies to notice gender and race to conditionally adjust, instead just make the salaries apparent for all.
I don't get why companies play such games when paying someone. I've been interviewing with companies and even after doing well on the on site, they keep trying to skirt the issue of compensation by asking weird questions like "so how do you think you did?" Its like you know that i did well, otherwise you wouldn't even be talking to me, you are just gauging my confidence level so you know how much i'd be willing to bend when it comes to compensation. I wish they just had standard incoming compensation based on titles or something, its exhausting trying to duke it out with HR when all i want is to be paid fairly and write some code. They aren't doing anyone a favor to underpay because when when people find out, and they will find out, their work quality will decline if they feel they are being used and they will most likely not care about ditching the company for better compensation.
It allows both sides to negotiate. If you can convince them you’re worth a premium, you can command a premium relative to your new coworkers.
But if you come across looking like a bargain, employers will gladly pay a bargain to have you.
What it boils down to is agency: standardized wages is just another way to fix the price of labor. People that believe they are worth more also believe they should get paid more, and they can use their individual agency to test that theory on an open job market.
Wouldn't workers better be able to negotiate if salary information were public? Like if you think you're worth more than person X, and you know X is being paid Y, it gives you a floor to ask for.
Why wouldn’t you? As a person with a job, are you ashamed of how much you make (either too much or too little)? Or is it a violation of your privacy? If you were a person looking for a new job, you want to know how much people are making in that company (or others in the same market) so you aren’t being undercut for the same job.
No reason why my coworkers should make more or less than me if we have the same title. Making salary information public either through averages per title or ranges (upper and lower) should naturally even out the salaries per title. As things stand, some people are privileged in all sorts of ways when it comes to a company’s undisclosed salary ranges. For example, in my last role I had a friend in the company who could confirm two separate salaries for the role I was applying and I was offered 10% lower than those two salaries. I can ask for a 15% increase in my counteroffer and be confident this is a valid number. If I didn’t have friends who were in the industry that weren’t comfortable sharing salary ranges, I’d have to stick to the Levels FYI site, but my last company wasn’t on there.
When I left, I learned new hires, who were new to tech, earned less than I did when I was at their title. It may be awkward socially to have people know how much I make (or even within a range) but it’s better than the economic disadvantages that unconnected applicants face in today’s job markets. Hope that offers some insight.
> No reason why my coworkers should make more or less than me if we have the same title.
Of course there is. You wrote a book and they didn't. They have more relevant experience than you. The hiring manager really wanted you but you had a competing offer and they didn't. They are young and wanted more equity and you wanted higher cash.
There are a whole host of reasons why people in the same title can make wildly different salaries - they're not all nefarious.
All the reasons you gave are really bad reasons! Do you really think that it's fair and normal that someone gets a much higher salary than you while doing the same exact job (and let's assume, performing at the same level) just because she had another offer at the time of hire?? That's ridiculous. It goes even against the interests of the company itself as it's logical to think they might have other candidates like you who are happy to accept the salary offer and won't be able to leverage it to get another, better offer (if that happens often, clearly the company is just underpaying, but for the discussion about whether the difference in salary is justified by only the circumstances of the candidates, we assume that's not the case).
It's very unlikely both people are performing at the same level. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
Whether I think it's fair or not is irrelevant, it is normal/standard practice that getting multiple offers simultaneously will increase your compensation across most or all of those offers.
And how is it against the company's interests to pay its employees a salary they'll accept?
Seriously. I'm not saying it should necessarily be public information, but "I don't wanna" isn't a good reason for anything. What damage is done to you because someone knows you make $45k vs. $145k vs. $445k? You are not harmed in any way. But the people making $45k while all their coworkers are making $95k have some information that they can use to objectively improve the lives of them and their families.
I say this as someone who is the highest paid person on my team. I stand to gain basically nothing from having salaries published, whether anonymous or not. But I still think it could be done in a way that helps underpaid and underrepresented people.
Well you said why would you want to and I gave a handful of valid reasons. You don't have to engage if you don't want to but that's sort of what this place exists for.
Not the person you are responding to. He seems not keen on engaging with you here.
I agree to most of what you say.
Having said that, trying to answer your question:
> What damage is done to you because someone knows you make $45k vs. $145k vs. $445k? You are not harmed in any way.
Many people believe, probably not incorrectly, that the salary line item in the budget is a fixed one. Hence, it is a zero-sum game. If their colleague negotiates better pay, their own pay will be negatively impacted, in this world view.
It could be agency... but it's just a circus. Do you do the same negotiation for a burger? maybe haggle with wendy's over the number of fries in your order?
Those aren’t equal. I “haggle” for burgers by choosing the restaurant that will serve me a burger I will be satisfied with for a price I will not be dissatisfied with. For me that’s a local chain that’s fairly consistent and fairly good for more than I will pay at McDonald’s for the same type of dish, but less than half the price of a “better” burger somewhere else. This “haggling” happens before I even enter the store, and influences my choice of stores, but at the end of the day we’re talking about dollars for burgers and fries.
Prospective employer-employee negotiations are an exchange of time into work product in exchange for dollars and benefits measurable in dollars. Time is more valuable than dollars, and I want a good price for it, commiserate with what I think my time is worth, and informed by what I’ve been able to receive in compensation for it in the past because I’m taking a risk by taking the job, including leaving my old job. The employer is also taking a risk, onboarding new employees is costly in both time and money, and they want some idea that you will be worth the money they spent because they expect to make more money than they put into you, so if they can get away with paying you less, of course they will. That’s what makes this a market. I’d rather have a bad lunch I paid too much for and a good employer than a good lunch for a good price and a an employer that doesn’t pay me a compensation I am satisfied with.
That + if the price of the burger is gonna be locked at that number for at least a year, and you would be locked-in from purchasing burgers anywhere else for that duration.
all expensive items in US have no fixed price and vary based on negotiation outcomes: car, housing. Negotiation is actually a sign of a healthy and competitive market, because there is always a spectrum of talent available, and demand for such talent.
only monopolies can set fixed prices and it leads to inefficiencies
To be fair on the hiring side, reality is that many job postings are open ended on comp depending on who shows up. Even at large (>10K people) companies, certainly in startups.
The posted job might be for a senior engineer, but if an extremely promising recent grad shows up maybe I'll take a bet on them instead, but they'll start on a lower salary. Or sometimes an extremely experienced person shows interest and they're a perfect fit so they end up getting hired at a distinguished level which wasn't the plan but the stars aligned.
It's not useful to post the job with a range of 50K-400K, but it's sort of what the range really is.
Which is what "standard compensation based on titles" would solve. If you come in for a senior position but you get your hypothetical star college grad you say, "we don't think you're ready for the senior position but we'd hire you as a mid."
Titles are incredibly malleable and don't always line up to comp. And situations are almost always complicated by external factors. Not all employers are enormous Microsofts/Googles either, where there's a line out the door of candidates.
E.g. Imagine you have a software business with < 20 total staff. What would you do in this situation:
Candidate is interviewed and we think they would be a good fit for the role, say it's a mid level role. We're desperate to fill it as we have xyz project to complete. The candidate has an offer somewhere else that is 15k higher than the usual mid-level title compensation. They say "I'd love to work with you, but money is important to me right now as I'm saving to buy a house".
Do you...
1. Offer the standard, lower mid-level amount, lose them to the other offer and allow the business to suffer a larger impact.
OR
2. Match the other offer and undermine your "standard compensation based on titles" rule.
Either option is problematic and compounded by pay band/published salaries rules.
If you overpay them and then can't give them a raise for a while because they were hired above their pay band, then they will be annoyed/offended and may leave. "Sorry we overpaid you when you were hired so no raises for a while until you can progress to the next title"
If you overpay them and everyone's salaries are published internally, then their peers will be annoyed and demand the same salary, which your business can't afford.
If you don't hire them you are letting a hiring rule affect your broader business strategy and risk missing out on opportunities that would benefit the whole team.
This has been my experience. Yes this is quite one dimensional, and money isn't always the driver. But sometimes it is, and I think "standard compensation based on titles" is a one dimensional solution.
If you think they’re worth it you pay them for the next title up and you give them raises commensurate with the position. If not, then find another person. Seems simple to me. It’s not the rest of the team’s problem, it’s the problem of the business to solve. You’re making it sound like you’re doing anything other than caring about profits, as if the rest of your employees care about your problems. If your business of 20 employees will fail due to an extra 15k a year, you’re fucked anyways.
If you're looking to hire someone for an Engineer position, and they're demanding Senior Engineer pay, and their skills are worth the money, then why not just call them a Senior Engineer and be done with it?
And worst comes to worst, if they end up not actually being worth the money, you can always fire and replace them once you no longer have a project deadline breathing down your neck.
I don't get why companies play such games when paying someone.
Because (some of them) are narcissistic jerks and play games with others on general principle, just to test their mettle. Or to separate the wolves from the sheep, as it were.
its much more clear in larger companies where you can see how much people get for a certain role, it is not so clear in smaller startups with not so much public information. In such cases HR do things like "So whats your number".
I live in Colorado. The similar Colorado law about posting salaries is probably great for jobs that don't give RSUs, but given how much bonus / RSUs affect tech pay, it doesn't really help SWEs much - they give a salary range of ~$30k and then mention that this position is eligible for bonus and equity/incentive plan without giving any details on amount.
For remote jobs that hire in CO, there's also some pay discrimination depending on location (one rate for Boulder, another for Denver, and another for "everywhere else").
Lastly, there's a lot of companies that don't follow it if the job is remote across the US, either because they don't know or because the violation is only a couple grand and relies on people reporting the posting in a way that's verifiable or it still being up when enforcement gets around to looking. I will say that I haven't seen any postings that exclude Colorado, even from companies that originally did (DigitalOcean for one), leading me to believe it was more of a temporary measure to immediately comply than a permanent change.
I have a strong distaste for the emphasis on RSUs—I’d be happy having a company pay me more in fiat without the stock even if it’s potentially less overall. I do get that it’s supposed to be incentivizing, but the incentive doesn’t work for me. I just turn it all into cash as soon as possible, and when I leave, I feel no pain whatsoever for money left on the table.
Maybe this is not my absolute best choice option, but it doesn’t matter much to me because I’m not trying to maximize my profits.
One benefit of RSUs that you should consider is that you are granted them at your start date even if they vest years out. This gives you a ton of “time in the market” and they generally appreciate quite significantly if you’ve picked a good company. Salary will never match that.
My friend joined Square in February 2021 right when they were at the peak. His RSUs he got are now worth almost half.
Edit Time in the market is usually used for index or broad funds, not for individual stocks due to diversification giving better chance of appreciation.
Using Amazon as an example. If you were given a 10k grant (bear with me here) in 2018 and held on to that until now (when it all vested in 4 years)....
2018 price. 1170$, say 10 shares so 11700$
Right now its worth once you get it lets say 3260$ a share.
So you got over 300 percent return. If you are saying "just give me the 11k in cash and let me buy my own stocks. Well they could, you'd get probably taxed more for that though. (depending on how you handled it, where you lived, et cetra)
That tax difference when you are talking 100ks of stock is entire lower class people salaries for a year.
You can also play some interesting financial games with that much stock. You can put up 100k as collateral for a loan that will have very compelling interesting rates if its a stock that is seen positively and low risk like Amazon stock. And the tax that money is handled tax wise is also interesting.
If you receive stock from your employer and it does not do well, that will probably harm your salary/job as well and you'll lose twice.
If instead you receive the cash value of the stock and invest elsewhere and your employer's stock tanks, taking your salary/job with it, your investiment elsewhere won't be affected.
Using one of the companies that did well over time as an example isn't really fair. There's lots of companies where those stock options would be worth a moderate amount, and even more where they would be worth nothing.
I think it'd be rare for RSU's in a public company to be worth nothing. These aren't options, but actual shares. The only way they'd be worth nothing is in the event of bankruptcy.
I agree. You "probably" want to get paid in straight fiat money 9 times out of 10. But if you are looking to move out to a different position and have already established your financial means, RSUs have some things about them that become attractive.
But you should be looking at RSUs as a funny money kind of thing.
I really don't get this. If you give me the money I can just buy the stock if I want to and then it is identical. But the option to do something else with that money has value. So it is always more valuable (to me) to just receive the money.
I think RSUs are more valuable to companies, which is why they do things this way. And that's fine. But it doesn't mean they are more valuable to me.
If you have other capital gains, then its less of a gamble because then you can use the loss if it goes sideways to offset your other gains. But for the vast vast majority who get RSU's yes its not preferred.
RSUs are taxed as income at the time they vest. If you were given the exact same amount as a cash and then used that cash to buy that exact same amount of stock, then the tax treatment would be identical.
Of course nobody would actually do that with the cash, because most other things (like buying an index fund or stock in one or more competitor companies) would be a smarter thing to do with it.
Be careful with this... if we're talking about diversifying your risk, there's a good chance that the stock values of your employer and of its competition in the same industry are positively correlated modulo some market events. Better to buy stock that is likely to be independent of the industry that derives your primary salary.
This isn't true because you need to pay income tax on both RSUs and salary, but if you were given more salary to invest yourself, then you'd also be subject to capital gains tax. There are no capital gains on RSUs prior to vesting.
Except no company is going to give you the equivalent of 4 years of salary upfront. That’s the part you’re missing; companies that give 4-year RSU grants are effectively giving you an (illiquid) advance on your pay that grows until you vest and cash out.
That _can_ grow. Everyone here is riding the tech stock wave, where anywhere else in the world you are essentially betting your future salary on the stock market. Whats the tried and true advice? Don't trade your own stock.
But if you were just paid more salary, you would perhaps invest that excess in the market, and you would have equal time in the market. Also, you need to pay taxes on the market value of RSUs at vesting time so it isn't like you can get away with some kind of pre-tax investment scheme.
This isn't right because you're granted the stock when you start, and can sell when you vest vs with your salary you can only invest it after you receive it. Here's an example. Let's say you get hired today with a package that amounts to $200k salary + $100k/yr RSUs over 4 years at a public company. Let's also say the stock is increasing at a rate of 10%/year.
Year 1: $200k salary + $110K stock = $310k TC
Year 2: $200k salary + $121K stock = $321k TC
Year 3: $200k salary + $133K stock = $333k TC
Year 4: $200k salary + $146K stock = $346k TC
Without any kind of raise or refresher grant you're making 15% more total in year 4 than when you started. When the stock vests, you pay tax as if it were ordinary income, and you can sell immediately for cash.
That example was for a stock growing at 10%. Now consider if that company was Alphabet.
Then its exactly the same as if your salary were 110K higher each year, so its no longer a better deal, but its not a bad one unless the stock (significantly) underperforms whatever your normal investment mix would be.
It's less about getting away with not paying taxes and more about the fact that RSUs are basically a big negative-interest loan to invest in the company's stock, which can be incredibly lucrative in the growth sector.
It is only negative interest if the stock goes up. It is positive interest if the stock goes down. So you could call it a variable rate loan to invest in the company's stock. I would not choose to take out such a loan against the growth rate of the company I also rely on to pay my salary.
I would actually like RSUs more if they granted me shares in a basket of stocks of competitor companies. At least then it would hedge my already high exposure to the fortunes of the company I work for.
If the stock goes down, you can walk away from the arrangement without being on the hook for anything. If it goes up, you collect a salary while having exposure to the company stock without having to put up any of your own capital.
I am not seeing where the positive interest is here.
But with RSUs, you lock the purchase price in at the time of hire. So if you are granted a four-year grant in 2022, you get RSUs of stock in 2026, but at the 2022 price. So if you're granted $1k/month of RSUs, and the company stock doubles in that four years, each month you get $2k worth of stock.
As you say your getting a much better tax advantage and can use capital Gains to reduce the tax rate.
Though compared to the US the UK has much better treatment of "employee" share schemes. The most common Sharesave is effectively a risk free investment at a 20% discount.
I am surprised if the Google union hasn't got fairer treatment of stock options on its agenda and I do mean for all employees.
> As you say your getting a much better tax advantage and can use capital Gains to reduce the tax rate.
This isn't true. RSUs are taxed as income at vest time, so if you're granted 100K in RSUs in 2020, and they vest in 2023, come 2023, if the stock has increased 25% to 125K, you'll be taxed on 125K of income. No capital gains involved anywhere.
HMRC Approved schemes only from Share Save through EMI (the gold standard)
If you get RSU's in an American parent company your screwed its just income there's some calculations on the relevant redit r/UKPersonalFinance - basically its treated income and you also don't get the legal protections
While many of the replies in this thread adequately explain why I dislike stock grants (taxes, needing to setup autosell or manually sell in a trading window, etc.) the one thing that I think is also important is that I really am not trying to get rich. If I’m at an established company, the gains or losses will probably be modest with some exception, and if I’m at a startup, it is undoubtedly very risky. But while I would never work towards making less money for the sake of making less, I would like to optimize for quality of life, simplicity, saving time, etc. and I feel base salary is often reasonable enough to handle most of my needs. If I wanted to invest, I’d rather do it myself. I don’t usually invest much, though.
I do tolerate RSUs, but it’s not the allocation I’d make given the choice.
One benefit about cash is that I have it upfront and I'm not taking a risk with part of my "salary". Stocks are something akin to an IOU that may or may not be paid in the future.
If I wanted time in market with that particular stock, I could use the cash you give me to buy that stock and leave it in the market. I don't need to be forced to do so.
companies have terrible vesting periods like 5% the year 1, 15% in year 2 and so on, while working you to death, effectively hoping you'd quit before your entitled shares vest. This also assumes stonks only go up.
This is a very abnormal vesting schedule. I've never interviewed with a company that has a schedule like that. The most common schedule is 25% per year, over 4 years, vested per month, except that the first 25% comes as a lump as the end of the first year. Most companies provide refreshers every year during the comp cycle. Normally during times when stock prices are low for a company, they'll take that into consideration during the comp cycle and give larger bumps.
They're all different.
Amazon pays you cash up front with backloaded vesting.
Google is experimenting with frontloaded vesting where you get the bulk in the first couple years.
That's amazon. The company I'm at is 25% after year 1, then 12.5% every 6 months. Once you get a few years in it's pretty much just a rolling part of your salary.
> This gives you a ton of “time in the market” and they generally appreciate quite significantly if you’ve picked a good company.
I think you can rephrase that to in this stock market boom tech market stocks are appreciated to crazy high levels. It wont happen again in the next decade.
You kinda got it kinda technically right, but also not entirely right overall.
You get it all in cash, and then you can decide on your own which proportion of it you want to spend on stock and literally anything else (just like you would with any cash in general). But the bottom line is, you got your entire comp in straight cash, and it is up to you how you want to distribute it.
If nothing else, it's more pain when it comes time to file my taxes. With autosell and RSUs vesting monthly, filling out my stock sales takes as long as the rest of my return combined.
People learn this the hard way. These companies that pay you in 50% stock should probably have some checkbox on the employment agreement that says "I agree to get a licensed accountant to do my taxes every year, and I realize that I will be paying for this out of pocket."
The most complex tax disaster I got into cost $700 to resolve, and that is a tiny tiny fraction of what they pay you in stock, so just do it.
I’m not a tax expert. but if I’m understanding the directions on Schedule D and form 8949 correctly, if everything on your 1099-B was reported to the IRS (box A or D checked) and you don’t need to make any adjustment to basis, you can just put the grand total on Schedule D, without reporting each transaction on Form 8949.
Turbo Tax seems to take this approach, at least when I filed last year.
I don't have to do anything, I get a single form (1099? Don't remember) per source with gains and that's it. Don't even have to send in those forms with the return anymore. Is there some number where you have to fill out stock sales?
Now that I'm more than halfway through my working life, my walls are papered with worthless equity grants. I've never seen a penny and I'm under no illusions that I ever will. I no longer consider them at all when negotiating compensation. I interpret their very mention as a trick to get me to devalue myself.
That's different from a publicly traded company RSU, where on each vest date you are employed you will get a % of your initial grant (+ refreshers) - tax withholding distributed to your brokerage account.
It accounts for more than 50% of my total compensation.
Vesting has upsides. Your company essentially fronts you free capital on the stipulation that you invest it in the company's stock with specific lockups.
Essentially it comes down to two choices: do you think cash over the course of your vest cycle will perform better than the company's stock. If you believe cash will do better, then RSUs are worse than cash bonuses. Otherwise the RSUs do better.
Because it creates instability in someone's life and easily causes folks to work for hours just to have no paycheck if they didn't sell a car (for example). Another example is a cleaning service: I knew someone that worked for one. She got paid a percentage of the cost - she had a schedule, but folks cancelled and other such things. It wound up that she was stuck at work in between jobs, couldn't go home, yet wasn't getting paid.
In other words, it creates a job environment that easily exploits people.
I'm not absolutely offended by bonuses and commissions, mind you, but base pay realistically should make up the majority to most of the salary and be fairly consistent from week to week. Pay based on tips can do the same thing (and you can cause this to happen to tipped employees with scheduling).
you can just not apply to work there if that is your opinion.
plenty of other people have different opinion.
no need to shame, this cancerous cancel culture must die
as someone whose job is made (much) harder by coworker churn and coworkers slacking off, I'm glad my employer cooks some long term incentives and performance based pay into our compensation structure
> I will say that I haven't seen any postings that exclude Colorado, even from companies that originally did (DigitalOcean for one), leading me to believe it was more of a temporary measure to immediately comply than a permanent change.
Colorado passed a law/clarified the law that writing "we exclude people from Colorado" wasn't sufficient to avoid the salary postings. They can probably only enforce it for companies that have any presence in Colorado, but a single employee is sufficient. It would be worrisome that companies would terminate all Colorado operations (if relocatable), but the addition of NYC makes that unlikely.
But that's probably why they stopped using it. It means as much as "NOT MY COPYRIGHT, USED WITH LOVE" in the description on YouTube.
Meanwhile, they should definitely fix the law so that bonuses/RSUs are included (RSUs have a known market price that could be listed)
Part of the issue is you're in a small (relatively) market. In markets that are large enough that ultimately shift corporate behavior everywhere, you'll actually see this improve as a result of what NYC is doing. Imagine how many companies are HQ'd in NY, or have sizable presences. It's a shocking number.
Similar to how California's emissions restrictions are implemented everywhere in the US vs making a separate California-only car, HR will start posting NYC compliant jobs everywhere vs figuring out whether or not they're required. Especially true if LA or SF hop on the bandwagon.
"...they give a salary range of ~$30k and then mention that this position is eligible for bonus and equity/incentive plan without giving any details on amount."
It sounds like they will be incentivized to provide those details or lose candidates to jobs posting higher salaries or detailed numbers.
I can't find my prior comment, but I have seen multiple job postings saying "remote work is available in..." proceeded by every US state but CO and HI.
Rackspace was the company doing it when I posted an example, but I know it happens elsewhere too. Was it SpaceX? I forget.
Let's take this nation wide. Why was everyone's time and interview hoops for jobs that don't pay competitive rates? Why should loyal employees stick with pay rates that are less than new hires?
N'ah. Let states test it out first and work out any wrinkles. When/if >50% of them are successfully employing it, then it might make sense to adopt it nationally.
Why bother having the states roll it out? We can fix it once in a federal law and avoid 50 different hard to undo implementations that are all inconsistent, so HR needs to run a "oh, you're applying from NYC, that means I need to include Health Care premiums but not RSUs" filter vs. "Oh, you're applying from California, so I have to include RSUs at an additional 0.0154% of calculated benefits and..." etc.
Laws (in my opinion) are a lot harder to get right than they are to get wrong. Laws are also (IMO) quite sticky in that once they are passed, they are difficult to modify and or adjust. It takes a strong political will to pass any federal law and once that political capital is spent, adjustments can be unpopular.
People may disagree, but I think that the distinction and separation of state/local/federal law is great. one size often does not fit all and having different methods of laws experimented with and seen "in production" is useful despite downsides and the inherent difficulty in having 50 states have a different policy on something.
Congress is really slow/bad at updating laws. State legislatures tend to be a lot more nimble (not as partisan, as there isn't as much focus on them. Plus many states of super-majorities, so it is easier to pass things if all members of a party agree).
I'm fully for most laws being tested at the state level before the federal gov gets involved at all (unless it's interstate commerce). Honestly, I prefer the fed staying out of most things and letting states handle it.
Right? 50+ different sets of rules are why it's so difficult to get consensus on anything and administrators have so much power in US society.
'But it's by design, federalist papers' ...are ~250 years old, and while they contain much wisdom, also contain much that is obsolete. We should be moving towards a sort of wikiocracy and away from bureaucracy.
Just let the states do state things, having the federal make laws is typically unnecessary. If it benefits business, then companies will do it. If it benefits states, then states will do it.
I'm pretty confident posting wages will suppress wages
Genuinely curious: Why are you confident it will suppress wages?
I think it'll be the opposite. When _everyone_ is posting the wages, it lets companies at the top end use it as a recruiting tool, putting pressure downward to be more competitive on salary, rather than it being a blind negotiation.
There will be lots of companies that will have trouble recruiting, because they just aren't wage competitive.
This seems logical to me, whats the counter to that?
The same mechanism you see uncoordinated price fixing, companies set their numbers by copy+pasting from their competitor +/- a little depending on the details.
I think noncompetitive companies will be forced to increase wages initially to compete but after that initial spike the numbers will become much more sticky.
this is wrong take, once higher paying companies find out they could pay less due to competitors, they will.
also it is possible to advertise higher wage for senior level, but then downlevel employee after interview and offer less and some would still accept that (Google is notorious for doing it)
> this is wrong take, once higher paying companies find out they could pay less due to competitors, they will.
Companies already functionally share compensation information via companies like Radford. You pay a hefty fee and provide your company's info, and in return you get descriptive statistics of the market.
Google and facebook don't scour job boards when determining pay scales, they pick some percentile of the market per these surveys and set compensation at that level. As a result, the companies already have transparency, employees do not, so they can only really gain.
Companies all know what other companies are paying for positions. They provide and collect this information from services that aggregate these details. The information deficit is entirely on your side.
> I'm pretty confident posting wages will suppress wages
What makes you confident about that? I only see evidence to the contrary. Having workers able to see what other jobs are paying might encourage them to make moves to increase compensation.
Hiding the numbers makes it less obvious if one is being taken advantage of, which is a reason employers have made it taboo to discuss pay.
Couldn't it work just as easily the other way? Especially with tech in such high demand.
Posting wages might make it easier for companies to offer higher than others in an attempt to attract talent, leading to competition in the market, and salary inflation.
Sure, it could; I was just describing one way that posted wages could lead to stagnation.
I suspect that different things will happen in different markets. It seems (to me) that software development may be unaffected, administrative workers might benefit, and unskilled workers may suffer.
Considering I hear every company boasting of "competitive wages" which hasn't lead to any sort of massive wage race, I would expect they must have some understanding already. If anything this just removes the information asymmetry between employer and employee.
This is a very naive statement! You are implying that the benefits of businesses and states are somehow exclusive to each other, but I believe there is plenty of historical precedent of situations where the "benefits" to a business prompt (in)action by states! The "benefits" to a state are so nebulous of a concept that I would argue that it is impossible to pin down any meaningful definition which we would be able to quantitatively use as a predictor for (in)action, except a cynical case where we define the "state" as "the groups/individuals in charge of governing a state," at which point it becomes trivial to reason out what the "benefits" to that "state" would be.
It's telling that the only parties that they're considering the benefit for are the state and businesses, with no mention of workers, who are the clear beneficiaries of this policy.
I don't think it's that simple. Letting people work remotely benefits business, yet some businesses are still hesitant on letting people work remotely. I think same applies with disclosing salaries. Lots of companies still have an old-fashioned view that it will not benefit them. And they still stick with it, even when there's evidence it will benefit them
>If it benefits business, then companies will do it. If it benefits states, then states will do it.
And if it benefits only workers, and you happen to live in a state controlled by corporate interests, screw you I guess?
The point of labor regulations is that businesses will routinely do things that give them an unfair (and often already illegal) advantage in negotiations. The whole concept of "state's rights" was invented by the segregationist ring-wing, and that legacy is apparent every time it's brought up.
There are benefits to consistent laws across the USA. It prevents every company needing to hire a lawyer from every state to check everything complies with the law in that state.
In fact, more consistent laws across 300m people is often pointed out as a big reason for the success of the USA compared to say the EU which in many areas is still a patchwork of laws.
Or, the federal government could say, hey here is an idea, here is some money to study it, let’s have a few states test out a couple implements, and then roll out a national plan later?
If you toss out the status quo bullshit, cleansheeting public policy becomes workable!
I can't think of a way this law could be implemented in a way that hurts anyone besides businesses that want to unfairly underpay a portion of an equally qualified cohort of workers.
YMMV but I'm asked for my salary expectations withing first 10 minutes of the first phone interview. Usually it's immediate "no, we don't pay this much" and process don't go any further.
Sounds like a time-saver on both sides. I don't agree to even talk to a company beyond the initial contact without some sense that there's a possible zone of agreement on compensation. Why waste my time (or theirs) on an employment discussion that can't possibly end in employment?
Being at the expected salary level where you even have input on salary already makes one more privileged than the supermajority of workers this would affect; the readers of this board are largely not who this law is for.
You know how capitalism ensures prices are correct by a process of negotiation, and supply and demand? This is exactly that, in labor form. This process of negotiation, over many many many people, is what determines wages.
If you block that process "companies can't negotiate with you, they have to give you a rate and that's it", you will cause a lot of unintended consequences for the labor market.
>If you block that process "companies can't negotiate with you, they have to give you a rate and that's it", you will cause a lot of unintended consequences for the labor market.
What you are describing is the current status quo for the supermajority of workers, except it's the workers who can't negotiate. The company simply gives them a number and they have to accept it. Allowing the companies to hide the number behind the sunk costs of the interview process only tips the scales further in businesses' favor.
This law brings salary negotiation closer to actual supply and demand, not further.
Uh, what? In what other commercial exchange is the value to be paid hidden from one of the parties? I can't think of one. It helps companies to hide it, it's why they do it. If they thought for a second it would be in their interest to disclose it, instead of bragging about "competitive wages", they would.
In this case, companies will need to "negotiate" with each other, by outbidding each other for top (or at least in-demand) talent. That will set the rates, instead of the current system of imperfect information that works mostly against employees. Let management be the one that worries about offering attractive salaries, rather than the much-less-powerful job seekers.
Some extra laws might be required, such as forbidding and heavily fining companies that are shown to be acting like a cartel when setting salaries. At the very least, if salary offers are public, salary fixing conspiracies (of the type several Silicon Valley companies were fined for) will be much harder to pull off again.
How do you figure? They quote a price for labor, and if we don’t like it, they can’t buy labor. If I don’t like the price of a sandwich, I don’t pay for it.
> You know how capitalism ensures prices are correct by a process of negotiation, and supply and demand?
This is true if and only if one defines adopts as the definition of “correct” something like “at whatever levels the particular variant of capitalism in question sets”.
"An applicant would be forced to interview with more than three to six people for up to six months."
Forced? Don't be absurd.
"After the culmination of an arduous, emotionally draining interview process, an offer could be made that is far below the expectations of the eager candidate."
There's nothing whatsoever preventing the candidate from, at the beginning, saying: "hey, before we spend a lot of time on this, what kind of salaries are we talking?"
And at the end, if the candidate gets a lowball offer, there's nothing whatsoever preventing him making a counteroffer.
Those of us who work in tech operate with a lot of privileges compared to many many other workers.
All of these options technically exist, but make a lot of assumptions that aren't true for my non techie friends who are looking for work. It's not unusual in a lot of industries for companies to not continue to interview someone who doesn't let them decide everything about the process.
> It's not unusual in a lot of industries for companies to not continue to interview someone who doesn't let them decide everything about the process.
To put this into perspective, some companies and agencies do group interviews, where there are a few dozen applicants for a role in a large room that are whittled down and told to go home if they don't fit some criteria. Then whoever is left is hired. There's no room for negotiation, literally or figuratively.
Many candidates interview with multiple companies. Then they whittle the list down, and break off negotiations with companies that don't fit some criteria. Then they accept the offer from whoever is left.
I don't know any employee that has company owners show up to their auditorium and then raise their hands, respond or leave in response to the requirements the employee starts listing. I also don't know any employer that will starve, become homeless or be unable to see a doctor if they don't hire someone at the employer's desired salary. A job is necessary to live, while a new hire is a luxury that will help you become wealthier. I wouldn't say those situations are comparable.
In your reductive view of the world do you hold the distinction that one is a person seeking meaningful employment while the other is a business seeking to fundamentally change xploit someone's labour?
If more people simply said "no", that wouldn't work for companies. Even so, I doubt that employers can afford to be that picky. If they could, everyone would be getting minimum wage. Everyone getting above minimum wage obviously has leverage.
Just say "no"? And do what? Lot's of folks are supporting others, or need to support themselves.
"Sorry my sweet daughter, no cancer treatment this week, I said no to that job."
I have 0 clue why you think picky === minimum wage. It just means suppressed wages, which is highly documented. Even the big tech companies had agreements not to "poach".
That's why they organize into political groups and manipulate wages on the nation-state policy level.
Owner vs. worker power struggle is always all about who can better coordinate collective action. Owners have an inherent and mostly dominating coordination advantage.
> Cartels try to deal with this by making compliance required by law.
That's what I'm saying.
Except you have the wrong idea about stability, because the law itself is the cartel, and very stable.
> It's not a power struggle. It's supply and demand.
It's not supply and demand because it's about which side coordinates better!
Supply and demand, the labor market, and markets generally, exist within parameters determined by political collective action. The big owners generally get their way but there is some democratic pushback.
I'm not thinking of things like non-poaching but things like tuning the level of social benefits in order to control the supply of labor.
If the workers get too powerful, they starve them one way or another.
Back in the early 20th century the socialist radicals had ideas about making one giant union of all the workers. If they could coordinate every industry they could negotiate for everything!
The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (aka Taft-Hartley) made all such ideas quite simply illegal.
If unions get too powerful, unions will be hobbled.
If the market fails to deliver exploitable labor, the market will be fixed.
Do you have family that struggles financially, or lacks the education and training for anything more than Walmart or if really lucky a mechanic?
The world you live in is nothing like the people this law was designed for, where labor exploitation is rampant and worker desperation so high that you don't have the luxury to wait for new opportunities because you can't feed your family or risk being evicted.
To be really honest here, New York City's labor market is famously exploitative of creatives and depending on the employer the same job can pay $200k or be an illegal internship with a metrocard stipend.
I know an animator who was "interning" full-time for 12 years before someone intervened and made them speak up for themselves to demand a paying job.
Good copywriters are worth every penny you can pay them, but I see loads of legitimate businesses trying to pay minimum wage for fulltimers.
> legitimate businesses trying to pay minimum wage
Of course. This is how supply+demand works. I'd bet every worker wants to be paid $$$$$$. The two parties then negotiate!
After all, when you buy a car, do decide you're going to add $10,000 to the asking price of the car so Cratchet's commission can buy Christmas presents for Timmy? Or are you going to get the best price you can?
Everyone tries to get the best price - employer, employee, salesman, customer. That's how markets work.
Yes, but thankfully markets aren't completely free and the government sets a floor on the price of your labor and things like price gouging are illegal.
And if we all had to negotiate our salaries from a minimum wage it would be an epic waste of time for both employers and job-seekers, so what point are you actually making here?
I was quite directly saying that employers in creative spaces in NYC are taking advantage of salary information (or even labor law) inequality in order to exploit the people they hire. NYC has quite-rightly decided to make this illegal and is leveling the playing field somewhat.
I've hired people for non-tech, no-skill jobs. They can and do often turn them down. They also walk off the job, never to be seen again, whenever they feel like it. I was paying above market rates, too.
I mow my lawn myself because I can't get anyone to do it for less than $400/mo., and that was 5 years ago.
Old people are notorious for exploiting informational asymmetry against the young and innocent or the naive. All of human history shows what a problem this is. Making things more transparent and fair is good for everyone except malicious old people.
> There's nothing whatsoever preventing the candidate from, at the beginning, saying: "hey, before we spend a lot of time on this, what kind of salaries are we talking?"
True, but futile.
Any* enterprise will answer that with "What are your expectations for the role?"
No* enterprise will tell you a number until making the actual offer unless legally obligated.
This is HR 101, where risk aversion informs policy handed down to hiring managers. (In six figure job cases, often hiring manager isn't even allowed to say a number, there's a separate comp team.)
I get informed all the time on HackerNews that I cannot negotiate certain things. But I can, and do it all the time. All these futile attempts are not so futile at all.
For example, I've negotiated price with doctors and dentists. I negotiate with auto shops. I negotiate with employers. I negotiate with department stores.
I used to think like you. Then I had a friend from Iran. He'd haggle everything with everyone. I was shocked he did that. I was further shocked at how successful he was at it! And so I learned.
P.S. There's nothing more mutable than a policy that some business will tell you is non-negotiable. It's all negotiable.
I have a friend who's contract is coming up for renewal. The company says things are tight, and said their best offer was a 5% decrease in the amount they'll pay. My friend told them his expenses have risen, and demanded a 7% increase.
Ya just gotta know how to do it, and have the stones to follow through.
> I get informed all the time on HackerNews that I cannot negotiate certain things. But I can, and do it all the time.
That's different, and yes, you should absolutely negotiate! Their policy has them offer you below what they are happy to pay, well below what they are willing to pay. Do some research first, pick comps like a realtor picking houses. Understand you're on the sell side, so pick defensible and high comps.
Most likely, they didn't really pick comps, because the people who set their pay bands don't know that the consultant market data about tech jobs includes your uncle's other nephew that fixes computers at home, and a lot of other classes lumped in by job classifications, so the numbers they think are true are .. half? .. what you could make at a good shop. So again, choose well and defensibly.
Now the tables are turned, information asymmetry is in your favor. If they were lowballing, they'll come up easily. If they were stuck in a pay band, you're enabling them to get unstuck, which helps them and you. You have a valid pay scale, it's not about whether they evaluated you well during interviewing, its about whether the company is hiring well. In this situation the hiring manager probably has gathered their HR team is trying to make them under-pay, you're probably the nth candidate asking for more than they were told to offer -- but you're the first to bring them the proof points. They now go have an internal fight, better armed, and get you paid. Maybe.
But to be clear, YES - NEGOTIATE. :-)
For what its worth, this also works of course at the car dealer, but also at, say, BestBuy, or retail clothing stores, or most anywhere incentives can become aligned.
PS. Contrary to your characterization of my thinking, I never thought like you used to think (wink), as I came of age in Africa myself. All prices for anything in both directions were fluid and dynamic. So I came back to the US and just said "here's what I'll pay" and it worked.
A general comment to the people who replied to me:
There are many books on negotiation you can buy. They aren't hard to find, and are easy reads. Invest a few dollars and a couple hours reading them. It can change your lives for the better. Even a modest effort here can pay off handsomely with $$$ in your pocket. The government isn't going to do it for you.
My interest isn't in wringing the most possible out of my negotiation with a company. I don't want to "win". I want to get what I want (even if that means that I'm not getting the most possible).
More importantly, unrelated to how much I get, I prefer things be fair. I think it is stupid that your ability to negotiate has a larger impact on your compensation than your proficiency in many cases. Reading a book on negotiating doesn't fix that, but getting the law changed does.
> I think it is stupid that your ability to negotiate has a larger impact on your compensation than your proficiency in many cases
Nobody in my long life has ever called me handsome. It's unfair. I can't fix that. But I can find other ways to succeed.
I know many proficient people who are bitter that nobody recognized their talent and they consistently get overlooked. They ask me for advice, I give it, they ignore it and get even more bitter.
Nobody is going to toot your horn for you. You're gonna have to do it yourself. Want to know who was a master at that? Steve Jobs. He never sat around waiting for someone to notice his brilliance. How about the Kardashians? The same. Pick any celebrity. Same story.
> I know many proficient people who are bitter that nobody recognized their talent and they consistently get overlooked. They ask me for advice, I give it, they ignore it and get even more bitter.
This has nothing to do with salary negotiation. Tooting your own horn might help you get the job, but it won't help you when you're trying to haggle over your compensation. And generally speaking, knowing how to advocate for yourself is a far more useful skill than salary negotiation, and yet the second will often have a greater impact on your compensation which is my point.
The other half of my point is that me getting paid more doesn't fix discrimination. And you saying "yeah but people should learn how to not be discriminated against", isn't the best response. Yeah, sure, it might help some people, but not everyone will be able to take the advice, so instead of making people bootstrap themselves up, I'll advocate for the social shortcut of changing the law.
I think what would be more effective is to require companies to publicly post salaries for their existing positions, once every 6 months, like:
Support Executive - 30K - 45K
Marketing Manager - 50K
etc. It would reveal someone's salary if there's only one person working at that title in the entire company but I do not see any disadvantages to that.
I think it would enable all employees to negotiate a fair salary, and job seekers to find a fair compensation easier.
In terms of range - why could not the law say "max cannot exceed 130% of min"?
There are many jobs where the range of productivity is higher than 30%. Entertainment and athletics are obvious ones, but whether you think programmers of a given title/scope could be 10x different from each other, it seems like most people would agree that there's at least a 1.5x spread. Same would seem to be true in sales, modeling, acting, music, athletics, writing, film-making, and other fields involving significant creativity or where performance varies greatly.
Think about what this means in practice -- 2 things will happen. (assuming companies have to honor exactly the salary that is advertised)
Companies will:
1) Advertise lower salaries than you're able to otherwise negotiate (if you're a high performer) because they have to advertise this to everyone. People who could've earned more will lose some potential earning due to this measure, or they will not apply to suitable jobs for them that might have paid more on negotiation, and/or
2) Jobs will go unfilled for longer, and people who could've been hired for less will go unemployed or unhired for longer, because companies advertising a job with high salary will have to wait longer until the right person comes along for exactly that salary.
On the other hand, I could also see this becoming to the companies' advantage, as now they're able to openly collude and set standard (lower) wages for certain jobs, that no applicant will be able to negotiate above.
All to say, this is not the slam-dunk policy that you (or those policymakers) think. Lots of unintended consequences that I don't think that they even know yet.
---
And I'm being downvoted for, what, stating reasonable opinions that don't make people feel good?
As always, the cobra effect will be in play and the market will find get its way.
I don't actually think lawmakers are stupid enough to not realize this; it's just that they are not playing the "helping people" game: they are playing the reelection one.
I think you're being downvoted because your assumption is wrong. I'm pretty sure you can negotiate a higher total compensation than the advertised salary. Would love to know if that's wrong though!
I think you're conflating the ability to profit from a region with the ability to hire from a region. You can still get your chunk of that GDP by selling services/goods there even if you don't have employees there.
If you sell goods and services in Colorado and you write "not open to people from Colorado" on your job posting instead of a range, you can get sued in Colorado. Colorado's law makes it clear that you have to post the range for jobs if you do business in Colorado and you can conceivably have the job done by someone in Colorado (aka all teleworking).
> The bill, which passed with a 41 to seven vote, states that employers who fail to list minimum and maximum salary ranges for New York City-based roles are engaging in discriminatory practices.
How is not disclosing a salary range in itself discriminatory? I can see how it could enable discrimination, but cannot connect the dots about how it is, in itself, an act of discrimination.
> How is not disclosing a salary range in itself discriminatory?
It's discriminatory as a matter of law because the law defining it says so.
It's practically not inherently discriminatory, but it's a technique which increases the opportunity and difficulty of proving arbitrary discrimination, including on prohibited grounds, and which serves no other purpose other than enabling difficult to certainly identify (by the target) discrimination (both on prohibited grounds and otherwise).
If you don't post a range it makes it trivial to make lowball offers since the candidates can't know the difference. This is discriminatory since it allows radically different offers for the same position without the applicant or anyone else being able to check the behavior.
If "critical thinker" is part of the job requirement, you need to be able to measure and screen for that quality/capability.
If you can't figure out how to design your screening to objectively measure, sort, & select for that desired criteria, you have no business discriminating pay rates based on it.
And if you CAN & DO have a screening system that does so, you can prove you are not discriminating by making offers strongly correlated to scores in your screening system, e.g., "Strong candidates get offers $X-$Y, Exceptional=115% of Strong, Good=85% of Strong, Acceptable = 75%, lower=no offer" (presuming your screening system doesn't also include other explicitly/implicitly discriminatory criteria).
This is me arm chairing a bit, but I feel like the term "discriminatory practices" and not "discrimination" is the key here. One is a legal definition, and the other seems to represent something like "leads to discrimination" but not discrimination itself.
I would guess the important thing here is "it is subject to the same penalties as the things we previously said enable discriminatory practices, and so we get to reuse that abstraction," not so much "we believe, as an abstract political argument, that this is in fact discrimination."
It's like how a pidfd is a file descriptor. Is Linux saying a process is a file? No, but it's saying that the usual things that apply to file descriptors - how you pass them around, how you name them, etc. - also apply to pidfds, and anything that works with file descriptors in the future should probably also work with pidfds. It's not saying that OS professors should teach "Really, a process is a kind of file." In the same way, philosophy professors should not, on the basis of this law alone, say "Really, refusing to post salary ranges is discrimination."
(And a "discriminatory practice" is a specific abstraction separate from but usually connected with "discrimination" in much the same way that a "file descriptor" is a specific abstraction separate from but usually connected with "files".)
You can also think of it as code reuse. There is already a law that says “if company X engages in discriminatory practices, then apply penalty Y”, so now that can just be reused
It's discrimination because the government says it is discrimination. Changing the definition of words to fit the government's goals is becoming increasingly common (and usually with cheers from the majority of HN posters).
Isn't defining words a major goal of legislation? Every code of laws I have read has a glossary with definitions of words written by the legislature to give clarity.
How dare the government define what '3rd degree theft' means! My liberty to define that myself has being stolen!
Well yeah, but definitions should still make sense. They could define murder as including selling plastic straws, but it would still be a fair question to ask how it is.
as already noted, it doesn't say "discrimination". It says "discriminatory practices".
If you wanted to pay people who wear purple scarves less, the first thing you'd need to be able to do is make sure that the purple scarf wearers and non-wearers had no easy way to compare salaries.
That's why this is a step against discrimination: it bans a practice that can be used to discriminate (though it may not be used that way).
I actually disagree with this on the premise that all aspects of hiring are a two-way street. I've worked at quite a few different companies in different roles, and now I'm in a senior management position. I feel that these types of rules tend to place companies in a negative light - like their primary goal is to focus on company profits and screw over anyone that might be getting in their way. In my experience, this just isn't how it works. When I prepare an offer, I take into consideration a lot of factors that center around how much worth someone brings to the table (expertise, self-learning ability, attitude, flexibility to juggle diverse tasks, etc.). I then work out a range I'm comfortable offering. I then typically offer closer to the lower end of the range because I'm open to a counter offer (so long as it doesn't exceed the max rate I calculated).
I then fully expect that person to counter, because I feel that it's on them to do the market research to determine how much they're worth. That's what I've done through my career and I've been happy with the result.
I see applying/hiring as a game where the company is trying to find a way to afford as much talent as possible AND ensuring they can continue to pay that rate when times get tough and projects are cancelled/postponed. I also factor in annual bonuses for other employees, R&D budgets, etc. At the same time, applicants should be prepared knowing what they're worth. That takes some research, but it's not overly difficult. As they determine what they're worth, they also gain an understanding of a skillset they can work toward to reach the next rung of the ladder.
At the end of the day, I really believe that the only person someone should compete against is himself. If comparing rates is THE issue, then I think the focus is misaligned. If rates are a concern, then start a dialog with your manager. Most managers are willing to go to bat to help out an employee if they really feel they deserve a higher wage. Just be prepared to make your case if you do that, explain WHY you deserve a higher rate - and it should be more than "well so and so is paid more than me." If in the end you're still unhappy with your rate/benefits, then consider a move, but be prepared to grow in your skillset if that's what's needed to reach your financial goals.
Handle it professionally and communicate... Those are my thoughts.
I think you're ignoring the massive power differential between employers and applicants. It's a game of incomplete information when the applicant doesn't know the possible salary range.
Your company might be benevolent, but it doubt most are, and when companies use information asymmetry to pay less, it hurts the very people they will turn around and pretend to care about, culture, "we're a family!", all the corporate platitudes we all know.
> At the end of the day, I really believe that the only person someone should compete against is himself.
This just isn't true. Should, in an ideal fantasy world, maybe. In the real, "I need to make money to eat and pay rent" world, you're competing with every other person applying for the same role. If you don't get a job, it's your life on the line. If a company misses out on a good applicant, well better luck next time, nothing really changes.
Bottom line, keeping pay bands secret/undisclosed only hurts individuals, and helps companies. Given the inherent power differential between the two, there's no good reason to tilt things even more in favor of employers.
> I think you're ignoring the massive power differential between employers and applicants. It's a game of incomplete information when the applicant doesn't know the possible salary range.
This is repeated all over the thread, but makes little sense. You don't need to know this to come to agreement. All you need to know is what you want/expect to be paid, and the lowest number you're willing to accept. The company, in turn, doesn't know this information, and wants to discover it. You're equally matched. You both have exactly 50% of the information required to come to agreement.
Moreover, the company has invested a great deal of time and money to get you to the point in the negotiation where it actually matters what you're willing to accept. You have power!
The one thing that this does is (maybe) savesyou the effort of interviewing when your salary expectations are wildly out of line with the employer's willingness to pay. But that rarely happens, in practice. When it does happen, it's at senior levels, where your value to the company is disproportionately large. If you're at that level, you can usually tell going into the interview if the company has properly identified the value you believe you bring.
Stupid example: if you have 20 years of experience as a software engineering lead, manager, senior engineer, and so on, and you're interviewing for "Javascript Developer 1", then maybe you should be worried about pre-filtering on salary expectations.
You're missing that the company has the same information from a pool of other existing employees or candidates, and you do not. The information is not 50%, because you're in the dark about the state of the market - you're highly likely to be leaving money on the table. It's similar to why insider trading is illegal: one party is playing with non-public information.
No, I'm not missing that. First, you're not "dark" -- it's pretty easy to get a sense of what the market will pay. There are tons of resources. The average company is not getting better information than you are about regional salaries, which is all you really care about. If nothing else, you can find this information by just going out and negotiating a few times.
Second, the big companies will (sometimes) pay for salary data, but this information falls in the "what the company is willing to pay" bucket. Again, that's 50% of the information to make a deal, and you don't need to know it. From your perspective, it doesn't matter if they got their salary band by consulting a survey or a magic 8 ball. Maybe it affects the level of faux outrage they show when you ask for more, but then you're just back to negotiation.
Said differently, if you know you're worth $X, and the company believes that the statistical average human cog in Barnsville, Nebrahoma is worth $Y, what do you care why they believe that? Your job is to find the highest number between $X and $Y that they will accept, based on your unique value. Their job is to convince you to join, and maybe get that number closer to $Y. Their justification for $Y is not your concern.
My first question to any recruiter is "what is the salary range for this position." It's not worth investing my or your time if the range does not work for me. THIS is the reason why posting the range is so important. Withholding the range means that I would be putting in lots of time to interview, only to find out that you were never going to pay me a standard market rate with little benefit. Maybe you'll find some people that are desperate for work that way, since they'll be seeing things as a sunk cost? At the end of the day, you get what you are willing to pay for.
As an applicant, I understand that whatever you put at the low end is what you are going to want to offer me assuming I just minimally pass your bar. To get the higher end requires negotiation. However, if you are willing to pay my x+5, why bother with the games at all? Just make your best offer and let's get things off on the right foot. Why do we need to feel like we each "got the better out of each other?" It also levels the playing field for people that just aren't good at negotiating.
I'm an engineer, not a sales negotiator. What does my ability to argue for a higher salary have to do with my ability to build product. Probably nothing. And if you think this is some coded way of measuring ability to convince people in a discussion, maybe you should explicitly be asking that during your interview process instead.
> I take into consideration a lot of factors that center around how much worth someone brings to the table
This is the heart of the matter. It's pretty well-studied that some less-represented groups are systematically underpaid for similar work than more-represented groups of employees. Empirically, that "worth" calculation is not objective.
> I then work out a range I'm comfortable offering
Employers frequently pretend they do not have a range in mind by saying comp is "DOE." But it usually isn't solely DOE, it's f(abstract role, person in role). So a entry-level data entry role isn't going to be worth $800k annually no matter how much experience. The employer has a range in mind before they see a single resume. I don't see the issue with publishing that range as part of the job description.
I actually think there will be a follow-on benefit to companies in reduced turnover (the hires that jump too soon because the job doesn't really pay enough but the candidate was too invested in the process to back out by the time comp was discussed) and reduced load on recruiters (by having people self-select out before the interview process). Every company aims to do these things when marketing offerings to its customers, I fail to see how it would be a bad thing to do when marketing to potential employees.
> I then fully expect that person to counter, because I feel that it's on them to do the market research to determine how much they're worth. That's what I've done through my career and I've been happy with the result.
Can you imagine why many others cannot or do not want to negotiate like this?
No. I really think that people aren't taught to do this, or they feel that they're not allowed to. If someone brought this concern to me, I'd tell say: it's your life, define your goals and determine how you're going to reach them. Don't rely on an employer or anyone else to get you to where you want to be. They can't read your mind. If you're uncomfortable asking for more, then tell a future employer that you're uncomfortable asking for more, but you'd really like to discuss that possibility. Honest communication is key in those situations.
> I feel that these types of rules tend to place companies in a negative light - like their primary goal is to focus on company profits and screw over anyone that might be getting in their way
Assuming that "screw over" includes staying within the bounds of the law, isn't this approximately correct? Companies try to maximize profits and not get in any legal trouble.
I don't think companies are black and white like that. Even the big ones. Sure management focuses on profit and loss and they keep an eye on legal hurdles. When I hire someone, I want their skillset (otherwise I wouldn't be offering them the job). My goal is to be fair with their rate while being mindful of the fact that I need to pay my other employees, and give enough room to hand out raises, pay for benefits, file for new patents, order parts, etc, etc, etc. I know that the person I've just interviewed is capable of getting a job elsewhere and may have other offers on the table, so it's in my best interest to give a fair offer that's within my comfort zone.
Having said all that, business does boil down to a lot more than just profits. Those are important but so is the livelihood of the employees, along with their expertise and tribal knowledge. I know those feed into profits, but I'm thinking beyond that. It's my job to ensure that my employees are able to take home the pay they've earned. Often, I have to put on more of a social worker hat and help out some of my employees with personal issues. That may be loaning a car at no charge, or giving a low interest loan to buy a house. In the past, I've paid for weddings and funerals. All of that goes with the job of being an employer. That doesn't mean every employer has to do those things. I'm fortunate to be in a position where I can help out in those ways, so I take advantage.
I think this highlights the point I'm trying to make: too many people focus on businesses trying to maximize profits and they push to enforce rules to help out the little guy. If businesses do that, then that's too bad. If you work for one of those businesses, then talk to your manager about it and if necessary, find a company that shares your outlook. Not all businesses are like that though - in fact, a lot of them aren't. Most businesses really do try to be fair and understand there's competition out there that may be trying to lure in some of your star employees.
There is an information asymmetry between a prospective employee and employer, which favors the employer. It is sensible to even the playing field a bit by forcing the employer to be the first one to throw out a number to anchor the negotiation.
I agree with that. When I've interviewed in the past I approached it from two ways. First, I asked them to throw out a number - normally that didn't work and they threw it back to me b/c the person I was talking to was really just trying to fill out a field. So then I went on to my next step (which required some research before talking w/ the person). I threw out a number that was two brackets higher than the one I was applying for. I knew it was too high, but I figured if they wanted me that badly, they could give me that price or show their hand and tell me what they're willing to offer. That tricked worked every time.
Can I ask how you know how much expertise, self-learning ability, attitude, and flexibility to juggle diverse tasks a person has before they work for you? How you're able to tell how they _really_ work versus how they happened to do on the day you interviewed them?
I'd also love you hear you how prevent allowing unconscious bias to slip into your evaluation of this person when you're deciding how much money to give them.
Yeah that's a good question and like most things in life, things aren't black and white. In terms of unconscious bias, I'm not sure how to answer that. I look for talent, professionalism, and attitude. That's it.
In terms of what a person can do vs how they happened to interview - that's a fun challenge. I tend to be extremely honest with a candidate, letting him know exactly who we are, what we do, and what types of challenges to expect. As I'm talking through that, I can usually tell if they have that engineering spark. If I really have a tough time trying to decide if they know their stuff, I'll draw a problem on the board and see if they can solve it - usually a problem we've recently solved ourselves. I also call references, which sort of helps. Hiring is a gamble and fortunately in my case, it tends to work out. It's rare, but every so often I misread someone and find out after they start that they aren't as far along as I thought. When that happens, I provide them with a mentor or offer to be one myself - or I relearn their skillset and then write proposals that highlight their abilities. In the extremely rare cases an employee can't/won't grow, I'll have an honest and polite conversation with them and then part ways.
When an employee starts here, they join a "work family." We look out for one another and push each other to learn. I tend to focus on my employees interests and skillset, then design customer solutions around those. That has worked really well for decades now and customers keep coming back!
Think what you will, but like I said, it's served me and my company well over the years. We're still in business, employees are happy, morale is high, I give bonuses/raises when possible, and customers keep coming back. Am I a capitalist, sure! I want to innovate and offer the best product possible to try and convince a consumer to buy or invest in that product. When a customer is happy, they pay their bills. When they pay their bills, my employees get paid. After all that happens, I get paid. Any extra is applied to future projects. That's how it works.
I don't really see how this has an effect on anything. Companies will just make up positions depending on the salary ranges they expect. You'll interview for Software Engineer III, but they won't want to pay you that much, so they'll offer you a job for Software Engineer II.
I always had the feelings that FAANGs did this. I saw a lot of people come into Google at Staff level because their past job had a similar salary range (but not responsibilities). No proof, of course, but generally they find the level that fits your salary expectations.
The law has a "good faith" provision. More importantly, perhaps, if you post unrealistically low minimums you won't attract candidates. If you post unrealistically high maximums, your workers will be upset that they are underpaid vs what you say you pay.
In tech jobs the same job posting could just have a range that goes from basic engineer all the way to the highest possible principal engineer pay, since the posting is for the domain area not the specific level of experience. Govt jobs are often like this too, giving a range of levels and a big range of possible salaries, especially when they include the possible geographic variation in pay.
You still wouldn't know whether others with 8 years experience and a MS or whatever, make more or less than you do.
Interestingly, this hasn't happened in places where pay is required! Companies split up their postings by title/level to make sure candidates know their time won't be wasted at their level.
I think I'd still prefer to know what the upper range is. I sometimes get emailed jobs where the upper range is 30% lower than my current salary for the same work with worse conditions (usually longer hours with less holidays). These are a waste of time for everyone involved so when they're coy about it it's doubly irritating.
I love how all the objections to this are freaking out because people won't be able to get job offers above the salary range (which isn't even true anyway), as if the biggest problem facing workers in this country is being offered too much money and this law would stop that.
I wholeheartedly support this - and if you support free markets you should support it too. Markets are free when information asymmetry is reduced, and currently there exists one.
The whole idea of free market of labour is that you will sell your labour to someone whose compensation you think is the best. Having more information obviously will increase your idea of how the market actually is, and allow a more informed decision - a freer market.
I’ve been working on a salary share site for accountants[0] recently and this is great news. More people need salary transparency. I think the site will be obsolete if every state does this though…
Employers are just butthurt they might not be able to do geographic arbitrage anymore. This was always coming in a globally connected world, but they’ll fight it kicking and screaming like always.
What do you think is different now from how offshoring has been done for the past 20+ years in the tech sector? Or 50+ years in manufacturing? My employer has thousands of engineers in India, and yet they are still hiring as many US based engineers as they can at the moment. Of course some organizations will do more offshoring as remote work becomes more common, but I don't see the shift to remote work resulting in too many organizations suddenly moving all their tech jobs to Vietnam in the next few years.
I'm sure they're hiring anyone they can in India too. If they could completely cover their technical staffing needs there (both in terms of numbers but also the higher skill levels that are hardest to find) you'd be in trouble.
I have worked in niches in the past that are now almost completely handled in India. And I had to move on to doing something new, despite the fact that my employer still has tons of tech staff (in fact most of it) in the US too.
Having people in approximately the same time zone and without language or cultural differences makes managing work much easier. Offshoring is very hard and if you are not careful very inefficient.
The cognitive dissonance I see on this issue is wild to observe. “Basecamp pays San Francisco salaries no matter where you are; I’m sure that’s what everyone else will decide to do…”
I’d bet heavily against that being the point of convergence.
It's very unfortunate that the Covid-anxiety many people have about returning to an office is driving them in the direction of always-remote. Fear is the mind-killer, as they say.
For years people around here have been clamoring for more remote work flexibility, along with near-universal objection to a now-forgotten annoyance that previously plagued this industry: the tyranny of the open office.
Sure there may be people who don't want to go back because of the disease, but many in tech likely don't want to go back simply because they've now realized two of their long-ignored objectives.
Why indeed? Is this supposed to be a dunk? If you're paying based on value derived from their work, what does it matter where they live (assuming remote work is acceptable, of course)?
> If you're paying based on value derived from their work
You're not. You're paying based on how much it would cost to find somebody to do the work. You're paying for time, not value. Profit comes from the difference between the two.
Unless you only ever hire people for extremely short periods of time, this is absurd on its face.
The cost of finding somebody to do with work is always going to be tiny compared to the cost of paying someone to do the work.
If their work does not have a value at least as high as what it will cost to pay them to do the work, you're not likely to hire them. If their work does have a value equal to or higher than what you will pay them, you have a reason to hire them.
The cost of finding an employee can be significant, but pales compares to the actual cost of paying them.
The entire argument of "There shouldn't be different pay scales based on where you live" is often given by, say someone who lives in Florida. And a rather big hole in that argument is "If you think Florida should make SF money, why don't we just skip both and get someone out of China/India/Russia"
I'm not sure how that counts as a hole in the argument. Sure, get someone out of any country if they can do the job. That's the promise of the public Internet, connecting folks around the world. Seems like that would be a net benefit.
Yes. Cost of living should have nothing to do with it. Do we pay people with kids more because their CoL is higher? Payment should be based 100% on work.
The market, as experienced by an employer, is “who are the people who are capable of doing this work, how much do they require to work for me, and if I pay them that amount, do I create value on net?”
If someone else appears equally capable and willing to work for half or a quarter of what you are, it doesn’t matter much what the work is worth, they’re going to get the job much more often than you will.
Employees want to get the most attractive compensation they can from an employer. Employers are not that different in this regard, in the other direction.
“Do we pay people with kids more because their CoL is higher? “
In a sense we do because they (sometimes but increasingly) get paid leave and also drive up health insurance costs. As far as health insurance goes it never seemed fair to me that spouses and children get their health care subsidized by the employer.
No one deserves anything, they deserve it if they can convince an employer to pay them that much. Theres no rule stopping SF employers from paying 50k for software engineering positions in the area.
If they live in the continental U.S., one can argue that higher wage is at least based on not having to deal with annoyingly scheduled meetings because of disparate time zones.
From my experience just being in the same time zone delivers a lot of value. For certain tasks it’s fine to have people in a time zone 10-12 hours off but in many other cases it causes a lot of communication delay and overhead.
When employers want to justify high pay for executives they always say it’s about the value you bring. If they want to justify low pay they say it’s because you are in a cheaper area.
"So your position is a company should pay the same $ for the same job, no matter where the person lives?"
Yes, no one should get paid less for the same work just cause they live in a cheaper area. Not to mention living in SF, NYC gives you way more opportunities than living in a low col, people don't seem to ever think of that point.
Suppose that company X wants to hire me, and they want me to move to NYC and I say "there's no way I'm living in NYC unless you pay me an extra $30k a year to be based in that hellhole". They really want to hire me because I'm the best candidate, and they believe I'm so good that even with the extra $30k compensation, it is still in their best interests? Should they be allowed to do this?
Conversely, company Y wants to hire me but are fine with me continuing to live in rural NM where my cost of living is relatively low. They offer me less than the a Sausalito-based employee doing similar work for them. I dispute this, and they point out that I don't even pay $3k a year in property taxes. I think about it for a while, and realize that my quality of life/disposable income will at least match if not exceed the person in Sausalito. I decide to accept the offer. Should they prevented from doing this?
The salary that the company is willing to pay you depends on how much you are worth to them. In the scenario where you move to New York because they require your physical presence, your value to them depends on location so they would pay you more for being in New York. In the scenario where you work remotely, your value to them doesn't depend on location.
Far too simplistic. Companies have quite a lot of wiggle room in what they pay people. They might merely "prefer" my physical presence in NYC rather than require it, and prefer it sufficiently to pay me the extra. They might prefer that I was in the SF bay area too, but in that scenario, not so much that it's worth paying me the extra. It's gray zones all the way down, baby!
Many jobs (mine included) frequently involve sensitive information where my clients / regulators have rules that work must be done onshore.
And go ahead and hire someone in a high CoL area — if your pay bands are flat across all people working a position and the job is remote, it’s honestly easier. Any variable comp for performance / seniority can be handled with a bonus structure.
You don't understand why people hate being paid less than someone else for the same work? Guess Upton Sinclair was correct that it's difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.
There are situations where two people of equal ability and output are worth differing amounts to the company. If you're in a vastly different time zone that makes work coordination difficult or the company has reason to need in-person collaboration, paying someone more to conform to those location constraints make sense as those people are more valuable to the company. But thinking a company should pay a remote worker who chooses to live in a high rent area more than a person who doesn't even though both have equal value to the company isn't logical. In the end, the people in the low rent areas will be picked off by competitors who see their value rather than their location.
I don't understand the parental model of employment that seems to be all the rage these days. Employees aren't the company's children and the company aren't the employees' parents. It's weird how often people bring their personal choices and needs into the compensation discussion and often elevate it into a moral issue. If you have six babies you don't deserve to get paid more for the same work as someone who is childless but that seems to be a common way of thinking now.
Like they say: "In the end, average temperature in the hospital is approaching room temperature."
For arbitrage to be entirely fair, if a company can easily hire from 2 places, workers should be able to move between those places just as easily. So subunits of the same country if fair game, but countries must not be, unless both countries have effectively open borders with each other.
So forget about paying an old guy more for experience that provides more value than anticipated when job is posted? Also that high school dropout that I will have to train for a year before she is of any use? Hard pass, since I committed to a certain salary I might as well keep looking for my money's worth.
Why is the highly experienced "old guy" and high school drop out woman (you called them a she) both applying for the exact same position but for different pay?
Why isn't the person who requires a year of training applying for a Jr. position and the person with a lot of experience applying for a Sr. position?
The problem today is that you have to interview to find out what rate they’ll offer. If you’d have to interview to find out what “level” or “title” they’d offer, and that would determine the rate, nothing has really changed.
The positions aren’t really separate. They will invent a $20–$30 title and a $30–40 title and a $50–$75 title and use whichever one should convince you to join after the interview.
This is some progress but it's not as much transparency as it sounds. Companies will just list their low-balled official salary ranges for each position. That's just what the employee gets if they don't negotiate. The official salary ranges at my friend's employer are significantly below the local market rate and their base salary is actually significantly higher than the high point of the range for their level. So the situation of naive or disadvantaged employees making less than others will continue uninterrupted, but at least this will help the candidates who are so naive that they would otherwise ask for a salary less than the bottom of their level's range.
And that's before even getting to the RSU situation that others are commenting on.
Won’t strong candidates see the low range and decide to apply elsewhere to places that are honest about offering higher pay? Applications and interviews are exhausting. I’m not going to waste my time applying somewhere hoping that their listed salary range is inaccurate. This seems like a problem that will sort itself out over time.
Edited to add: I agree that RSUs (and I will add cost of benefits) are an issue. It would be better if companies were required to list a range for total compensation.
What happens if a company want someone BUT after he is informed about working conditions and the tasks, he wants more than the max sallary. Do they break the law by offering it?
Similar could happen if a person got some better offer from an other company and the would like to match it.
What is the training for the HR people that decide salaries/comp? I know there's glassdoor & co, but before that, HR people must have used some sort of methodology to figure out what the top & bottom range of a position is, no?
They collude, more or less. Although indirectly via third parties (such as Radford[1]) so it stays legally kosher.
"Neutral" third parties conduct salary/compensation surveys. Many companies (HR departments) participate in these surveys and disclose their information to the third party.
The third party then packages it up into an anonymized 'market compensation analysis' that companies can subscribe to/purchase.
So companies can get a good read on how much is enough for their market, without ever directly revealing their hand to anyone except for the neutral middleman that's washing all the data.
A lot of HRIS (HR Information System) companies and payroll companies also package up and sell aggregate analytics on compensation figures. And the companies using those vendors are pretty complicit about their employee data being used in this manner, because at the end of the day they're the same ones buying the end result and peeking at the aggregate data to ensure they don't offer any more or less than they have to for a role.
the weird part is these surveys undershoot by 20-30%, so HR gets to come up to you and say "we'll based on our extensive research we think this is a good number"
There are organizations that try to collect this data, I know my company currently uses one of them to determine what a competitive wage would be for hiring. I forget what they are called though, and their data does seem to be in favor of paying less (maybe outdated data, maybe trying to side with the employer, who is their customer, that they don't need to increase pay, idk).
There are several salary study firms (some old school like Radford, some new like levels) and the answer you can buy from them depends on the question you ask.
If you want an answer to “what’s the median base salary for SWEs in the US?”, they can sell you the answer. If you want to know “what’s the P75 SWE salary?” or “what’s the P90 SWE salary?” or “what’s the P75 SWE total comp in the cohort of these 12 top employers of SWEs?” those are all also available, but numerically quite different from each other.
You could call any of them a “market reference point” with a straight face.
I don’t know how it scales for different size companies, because firms like Radford do some significant inquiry and processing on your data as well (as inputs to the system) and I wasn’t involved in buying that data.
Levels has a data feed service they sell that’s an initial dump of N months of history and then a daily dump of additional ones. That was modestly priced (I think that was low 5 figures per year, but in any case it was quite inexpensive relative to running a software operation).
As an individual or small employer, I think levels is an amazingly valuable service (for free). When you get larger, buying these products makes more sense. (We’re remote-first and even still spend more on soda and coffee in a year than on salary data; I’m sure the salary data does more to attract, motivate, and retain than the soft drinks do.)
It's definitely bypassable, but it sets the floor. Not only do employers have to post hard numbers on ads, it's possible to see what other companies are paying too, so if you manager is trying to short change you during hikes you have a lot of ammo to counter argue. And you could just leave if the grass is actually greener elsewhere.
This isn't about helping employees. This is about large orgs avoiding competing with smaller ones. Salary is one of the easy to filter and sort by metrics of a job. If your comp is anything other than base salary (working hours per week, work life balance, equity, non-standard benefits), then your job posting will now be ignored more often.
It's hard enough for small companies to get high quality candidates, this will only make it worse.
Colorado is 1.7% of USA population and can be easily excluded; Colorado+NY is already 7.7%, and eventually you reach a large enough critical mass that can't be ignored without consequence.
However, I presume that the main target of this law is not megacorps advertising remote positions but rather local businesses hiring local workers - which can't get around this requirement.
If Colorado passed legislature requiring cars to have better emission requirements, nobody would sell cars in Colorado.
If California passed that same legislature, every auto firm would update their cars to meet those emissions standards.
Which is exactly what happened.
When you're a big enough market, the cost of dropping you isn't worth the benefit of non-compliance. NYC is huge, and has a lot of jobs that people commute in to - which would all be affected by this.
NYC is also a terrible source of remote workers for other jurisdictions: high salaries, taxes and onerous business regulations. Most Canadian companies somehow make out OK excluding all of Quebec (and it's ~22% of the population), so I don't see excluding NYC from your pool of potential remotes being a big deal for all but the most specialized US companies.
Quebec has a history of being a separate economy, and speaks an entirely different language from the rest of Canada. While in theory, everyone is expected to learn cereal box French, in practice, most anglos don't bother.
NYC has an economy five times the size of Colorado, and tons of already established firms already operating in it, which would have to comply with this law.
This thread keeps talking about remote workers, when remote work is an incredibly tiny minority of all employment. It will follow employment trends - when in-office job postings start having clear salary statements, remote will follow, if only to remain competitive. And all it will take to make this happen is a few metro areas passing laws to this effect.
I understand some companies attempting to exclude CO in order to not post salary bands, but if we're talking about tech (or especially finance), good luck avoiding hiring in NYC.
NYC is home to a ton of tech talent, and that amount seems to be increasing (exodus from SF) since the pandemic started. I'd wager it contains more tech talent than any other city. I can't imagine a competitive tech company not accepting employees from NYC, unless it's an actual top earlier-stage startup like Notion that can afford everyone to colocate in SF.
Absolutely, classic case of “Tell me the incentive and I’ll tell you the outcome.”
People love these interferences without thinking of the real consequences.
NY is really trying to lose relevance and get rid of talent.
That must be why the NYC housing market is experiencing a major post-mid-pandemic boom. All that loss of relevance and departing talent is just killing them!
To play devils advocate, there is a cost associated with enforcing this law and this is effectively paid for by the tax payers. There is a cost for complying with the law, this generally disadvantages small and new business. If only CA(and CO and NYC and CT) have this requirement it makes them less desirable places to start a new business, to hire additional employees.
But the costs for a law like this are not prohibitive
Years ago, when I was living on the West Coast and interviewing for a job in NYC, the hiring manager misunderstood me, thinking I was asking for more money, upped their offer by $30k. I did not make the hiring manager aware of the misunderstanding.
That sort of lucky accident would likely not occur after this law. But on balance, it's a great idea.
It may not bode as well for workers as the article thinks it does. For example, an employer may find out they're routinely overpaying their workers. An employer may find out, when interviewing a person, that they'll need to pay more than the maximum they were forced to advertise - so they can't pay more.
No employer "routinely overpays" for workers without knowing it. It's a strategy, not something you stumble into by accident.
> An employer may find out, when interviewing a person, that they'll need to pay more than the maximum they were forced to advertise - so they can't pay more.
This makes no sense. The interviewee would simply not apply in the first place.
> No employer "routinely overpays" for workers without knowing it.
There is no secret database of what is being paid. They don't know any more than the employee does, or can find out with google.
> The interviewee would simply not apply in the first place.
Both the employer and interviewee find out things in the process. The employer may want to ensure the interviewee doesn't take one of the other jobs he's looking into.
Gov overreaching and micro managing gone mad. Welcome to NYC. Cant wait for it to collapse into chaos like it did in the 70s and 80s when it was actually an affordable and cool place to be. Its been a gentrified yuppie suburb for close to a decade now..
Does anything need to? Imagine you are looking at two job postings that are identical except for the salary range. One says 30K-300K DOE and the other says 150K-180K DOE. Are you going to trust the first one? I sure wouldn't.
And if you are right and that becomes a problem, well, shit. Back to the drawing board I guess.
If I wouldn't consider moving for anything less than $250K/yr, I’d consider the first one and not the second one.
I'm not sure I'd trust a company who thought that software engineer value creation only varied by a maximum of 20% either. Tight ranges cut against companies differently than broad ranges.
> I'm not sure I'd trust a company who thought that software engineer value creation only varied by a maximum of 20% either.
But hiring is not evaluating a software engineer in general, rather it's to find a person for a specific role and a specific set of work to be done, a tighter range could mean better estimation.
1. If someone has 10 years of experience and gets offered $150K, they know they're at half the earning potential. That's not a good way to come into the job.
2. Employees may monitor the job postings of their own company, then ask for a raise closer to the $300K ceiling, especially if they know they're valuable contributors.
Human reactions to being lowballed prevent that. Putting that bottom on a role that pays up to 300K will sour your candidates and is INCREDIBLY costly to hire for as a result.
I hope cities would also make it mandatory for companies to share interview feedback with candidates. They are getting away very easily for far too long.
Will opening a petition or a lawsuit, make any difference?
Oh, there’s no way any HR department would approve including the word “culture” in the interview feedback boilerplate! Not as bad as literally referencing a protected class, but still too many ways it could backfire
So if the range is published, can you take someone to court for offering outside the range? What if you ask for the high end and then the firm decides the job is no longer available?
It really just depends on what the final law is. Probably will just be something pretty simple that requires them to publish the salary and then everything else will be worked out in court. In lots of cases like this, there's just no incentive for people to go through a lengthy legal battle to try and sort it out unless it seems like blatant and provable discrimination was at work.
But, in my experience in the nonprofit industry in the U.S. where there's been a concerted effort over the last few years to force employers to publish salaries up front (many places where jobs are shared, like email lists, job sites, etc. now require it), there's nothing stopping the employer from offering HIGHER than the range, and why would a job candidate balk at that? Nice surprise!
The intention here is to stop employers from forcing people to go through a long hiring process only to end up offering them an absurdly low amount. In a market where employers hold the power and there's always another candidate waiting in line to take a job, this kind of behavior harms job seekers by wasting their time and demoralizing them, which hurts everyone.
Yeah. Also by forcing all firms to do it the "we don't want to be disadvantaged" argument for the firms falls away. Could end up being net positive for both sides.
Out of curiosity: Why do such laws happen at state-level and not at federal level? Most jobseekers would be looking at jobs all over the country, correct?
> Most jobseekers would be looking at jobs all over the country, correct?
Inside the HN tech bubble possibly. But outside of that the overwhelming majority of jobs are not in white-collar/remote-friendly work (and people change jobs far more often than they're willing to relocate so moving to a new state, or even city, for each new non-remote job isn't common either).
So no the majority of jobseekers are not looking for work "all over the country" - most are looking for jobs within a reasonable commuting distance of where they live.
Probably because the United States Congress is completely off the rails. Or, somewhat more charitably, there's no way in hell any bill that shifts the balance of power away from employers would make it through the Senate.
In some specific cases it will, but basic game theory shows that the person setting their starting position is more likely to be at a disadvantage in negotiation. Today you can get ranges from 3rd parties (recruiters, former employees, etc)...so it will be the same as today except the starting salary will ALWAYS be a floor from the employer.
This is partially stupid. You're worth how much someone is willing to pay you. What about raises? Do NYC also want to know what raise everyone is getting? I like the minimum requirement but not the maximum one. My guess is that companies will really inflate the maximum number to leave the option open when hiring a super star.
This info is already public with things like https://levels.fyi and https://h1bdata.info/, at least for tech roles. And it seems like it's been fine, not sure what the downsides are.
Mechanically, I am curious how this will change even good faith "All Levels" job postings.
Really hard to generalize. I think people get such varied offers, and depending on what year they’re on & how their vesting schedule works it could be higher or lower. Companies also change vesting schedules and such, and I assume levels.fyi data would get stale too.
I’m pretty liberal. I support unions. I generally distrust corporations.
At the same time, if this passes, my company will just stop hiring in New York. It’s not worth the risk of getting sued by every person who gets an offer lower than the maximum.
This has been a law in California for years. Do you not hire there? This law is very similar. You're required to post ranges. They can be relatively wide. No one is suing for not getting the maximum, because this law doesn't make that a requirement.
Colorado has already passed this. There’s been some fallout, people have reported job postings that say “remote anywhere except Colorado” but it’s hardly been catastrophic for their job market. NYC is an even bigger draw than Denver.
The article links to another article [0] with the following quote:
require that employers disclose a salary range "from the
lowest to the highest salary the employer in good faith
believes at the time of the posting it would pay for the
advertised job, promotion or transfer opportunity" on all
job advertisements for positions located in New York City.
So it'll be great to see employers offering an SDE salary position from 10k to 999k/year in good faith.
Without reading the actual law, I will say that all Colorado (similar law) postings I've looked at have made an effort to present a realistic salary range (90-120k depending on experience, etc).
I used to go through a bunch of H1B paperwork and the salaries listed there were indeed something like $100k-$250k.
I'm pretty sure these numbers were correct: a "senior developer" can be anything from someone who just have hatched form juniors and still struggling to find the way around to a guy with a zero bus-factor who holds the skies in the company.
This is a very dangerous question to ask because it locks in previous pay discrimination based on protected categories.