I applaud pay transparency, but reading the text of my state's legislation regarding it (RCW 49.58.110), all I see is that it says most employers must have a pay scale that is known to candidates. My initial adversarial response as an imaginary business would be to say "okay, the pay scale for this position is between $0-$10000000, depending on qualifications". Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work?
Anyway, with regards to the actual article, I was wondering just what mechanism supposedly made jobs with pay transparency harder to negotiate from a recruiter's perspective. Is the implication that there were no hard salary bands before this, so recruiters could sometimes offer 2x or 10x the salary? I'm sure it happened for exceptional candidates, even though it certainly never came up when I negotiated my salary...
But I'm wondering: did it happen so often that it affects the overall statistics? That would be a moderate surprise to me.
I'm guessing it wouldn't work because it is quite a lot easier to tell when a company is being hostile when they're disclosing information, as opposed to a company being reluctant to disclose information. I mean, given the choice between a job listing stating a pay scale of $0-$10000000 or $75000-$125000 it'd be very optimistic to assume the former will actually lead to a higher offer.
Basically by forcing employers to state a scale you force them to bid against each other not only on the total amount but also the specificity. When there's only a few companies disclosing any information at all this competition has little effect, but this changes when they're supposed to say something (and I think courts will rule that $0-$10000000 is not a real pay grade, one end is below minimum wage and the other is probably higher than can fit in the budget).
Of course is there's no enforcement at all it can still devolve in the same meaningless pay scale everywhere.
> job listing stating a pay scale of $0-$10000000 or $75000-$125000 it'd be very optimistic to assume the former will actually lead to a higher offer.
Well, this is roughly how banking compensation and bonuses work and tons of people play this game because the expected return is higher than eg in the public sector with very well defined salaries. This is an extreme example but I could have said "German engineering company vs Silicon Valley startup".
We're not talking about a probability distribution though, we're talking about a company coming up with a wage offer for a job. If a company can't give you a range that doesn't cover multiple orders of magnitude then they're incompetent or lying, neither really bodes well for your hypothetical employment.
It's still more informative just to see what amount of information the company will disclose in the posting. And in any case, you usually know when you're applying into an industry where TC is wildly out of step with salary and judge accordingly.
Netflix pays above-grade salaries. A few years ago, I interviewed there for a position that was two levels below my current title but paid 2x more than I made.
Netflix pays well because they don't believe in work-life balance, at all. The position I interviewed for was vacant because the previous individual had left. By the time I wrapped up the interviews, the person I would have reported to had left Netflix, and the person who would have been my direct report would have been my boss. By the time I actually declined the offer, that person had also left.)
This still seems orthogonal to the fact that a law was passed requiring them to publish salary bands and they gave the finger to it by publishing a range of $0 to $infinity. Maybe everyone has the title "software engineer" but come on, you are still putting new hires into a pay band based on experience and interview results etc. You've complied with the letter of the law and it should have been written better assuming bad actors. But this childish "gotcha", anti worker behavior is a bad look.
I've never worked at Netflix so accept or disregard my takes as you wish. I do know several people personally who used to work there and left voluntarily because they found it to be a poor work environment on diversity grounds.
My general statement isn't based solely on my experience with applying to Netflix.
I know a number of employees spread across the technical and entertainment sides of the company. They are all overworked, but they're all okay with it because the get paid $$$ for it (and knew that going into it).
only third hand reports on my end, but every account has said that Netflix works you to the bone. But back then they had stack ranking, so I'm not sure if that changed.
I’d expect (hope at least) that the courts would see listing $0-$1000000 as an obviously bad faith tactic to subvert the law. If it became a real thing that companies did, I guess the legislature would just pass another law.
The scale is extreme, but that is what a lot of companies do.
For example, with large accounting firms, having a CPA license boosts salary by 10-25% over a candidate without a CPA (assuming both are otherwise equally qualified and get offers). With law firms, having a federal court clerkship on the resume boosts salary by 25-50% over candidates without a clerkship (at the early stages of one's career), not including a six-figure signing bonus that generally is not offered to other candidates.
Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee you that someone with a degree from Harvard who clerked at SCOTUS is going to earn a lot more than someone who has a degree from a send- or third-tier school and a no name clerkship--at a white shoe law firm, assuming the latter can even get an offer (even before the interview).
And this is not a category that is so rare that I don't know people in the former one even though I'm not even remotely in law.
No, because there isn't a role for which you pay people 4x others. A grade E and A+ are doing different jobs with different qualifications and requirements.
>Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work?
Maybe that doesn't tell a candidate the actual pay range of the job, but it definitely is valuable information that tells you about how the company operates. I wouldn't want to work anywhere that does that because it shows a contempt for both the law and prospective employees.
That's an absurd example, but you see what I mean. Change it to $150-275k if that makes more sense. That's still a huge range: it probably fits 75% of software jobs in the U.S. The point is that you could still comply with the letter of the law without giving candidates very much actual information.
It does at least save you from the "senior devops engineer with 15 years experience" roles that get you all the way through the interview before dropping "and the salary is $50k".
I have a different reaction as I find this information useful. The lower range tells me if it's even within what I'm targeting. And if I get to an offer stage and I'm at the lower end of the spectrum, I would want to know why.
Is that happening in practice? When I see listings, they're usually in a range of $30k or so. Still a huge range, but sort of in the ballpark, and often enough to know I don't want to read any further because the range is too low.
sounds good to me unless you make 250k and are looking for a 20% pay boost. Someone making 100-130k sees a good minimum, someone 150-200k sees potential for salary and likely ends up negotiating. Someone making 300k wouldn't bother unless they are very sure they can negotiate higher (or are fine taking a pay cut for non-salary benefits).
I think the point here is more that the floor is still a very reasonable salary to live on. Not necessarily for every engineer, but I would not pity someone struggling to live on 150k without dire circumstances.
Which actually seems pretty reasonable assuming a median somewhere around the middle. That's +/- ~$60K which is a fair bit of money but seems like rational range for a given role.
> I applaud pay transparency, but reading the text of my state's legislation regarding it (RCW 49.58.110), all I see is that it says most employers must have a pay scale that is known to candidates. My initial adversarial response as an imaginary business would be to say "okay, the pay scale for this position is between $0-$10000000, depending on qualifications". Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work?
tighten up the disclosure requirements
example: produce the distribution, at 5% resolution with a range 2 SDs around the median
But then you need to run your business with that salary range - if you put it in writing to your hr people or hiring managers that the maximum they can actually offer is $less_than_that, those emails will come out in discovery.
And if the floor of your salary range is lower than that of all your competitors, it will make it harder to attract good applicants to the position; I definitely notice the bottom end of the range when looking at job postings.
Right now, at least in my field there are some companies listing very wide ranges, say $75k-$270k, however, most are not so there is value in knowing that the max a company is offering for a role is say, $160k upfront vs. going through a bunch of interviews and negotiations just to learn that's the ceiling and then turning it down. If more and more companies provide huge ranges then this won't be useful except as another commenter said that you can favor jobs with realistic ranges that actually bracket your desired comp.
Even when there were rigid salary bands, I've seen companies regularly work around it by inventing new roles with new salary bands. At one company where I worked, a specific title could refer to one of several different independent roles with their own salary bands. The headline title was not the primary key of the system.
I would imagine this would increase the risks an employer would face for discriminatory compensation claims. If you're really saying that the range is that varied for the role and you don't have anything like a reasonable distribution of compensation across people in that role...
They should have to produce and justify it on the basis of the previous salary the position required to fill. And I mean this is the sense of them being forced to err on the side of disclosure, I'm sick of this shit where companies always get the discretionary aspect when they need cold, hard, regulation and absolute liabillity. The burden needs to start shiftingto the more facile and natural starting point: the business/hirer. They're running the ship, they need to start charting a legal and practicable course that respects the dignity of the sea of jobseekers.
This whole "based on qualifications" is stupid because there's obviously a base level of competency required for candidates and successfull candidates and at the end of the day, its more reasonable to make the previous salary the baseline unless the position has radically altered. If they lie, charge 'em with wire fraud and swoop in as a lesson to the next jerk who wants to play games with hiring and payroll
Hell crowdsource it and turn the panopticon back on the abyss where it belongs.
Edit: just have a simple test like how much does the least qualified yet acceptable candidate demand and work your way up from there if they have your "special magic abillities"/quals.
> They should have to produce and justify it on the basis of the previous salary the position required to fill.
This leads to some ambiguities, ex:
1. How would that work when a company is adding totally new positions? For example, a small company adding DevOps, or where the previous worker was a contractor?
2. How does anyone reliably distinguish moved/renamed positions versus ones that might be dropping an old position and adding new one?
3. For similar titles but very different business-areas, does the "Team Lead" of a new business-analytics unit inherit the past salary of the "Team Lead" for janitorial services?
Can I ask legit what is the current deal? Do people go into interviews completely blinded as to what the position is minimally and maximally worth? It seems so insane to me as someone who's been out this game for so long now.
optimistically, pay comes up in the recruiting call or even in the application. There's an entire psychology to what number you put or if you even give a number at first, but it should be discussed before a hiring manager comes in.
Pessimistically (or for entry level positions) it comes at the end in an informal offer letter before negotiations open up. you'd need to do general research on the position and gleam salaries from Glassdoor to minimize surprises. or be ready with counter offers to negotiate.
Ya, unless there's a "price floor" you know is at least satisfactory (to say nothing of optimality or actual worth) that is immediately apparent before you even get to the apply button, thats complete bullshit. Time is money and companies need to stop treating people like theirs is worthless and thus not deserving of being able to zoom! by seeing the going rate immediately and not even having to doll up and go out to meet them tete-a-tete.
Edit: also, on the conjectural side, the fact we need to use words like "optimistically" and "pessimism" or the like/speak in these superlatives is indicative of how hokey all this is. It should be the most natural thing in the world, like a restaurant menu with [gasp] prices, instead there's this Apple culture of secrecy which is compelyely inappropriate for at least a public labour market. It really is bullshit and ripe for harsh regulation taking out the biggest bullshitters and beneficiaries of the current system.
But the story seems to suggest that the net effect isn't especially pronounced. For the candidate, more information is good I guess if it keeps you from wasting your time. On the other hand, the story also seems to suggest that it's maybe leading to more "take it or leave it" offers. (Though probably hard to factor out from overall hiring levels.)
The problem with the added benefits is that you don't get their true value until after you have started working. To say that the employer covers your cost for health care might sound great until you see the level of HC they offer, or we cover PPO but not HSA. We offer 401K but no matching, or 1% matching, or ...you get the idea. So these perks can be misleading and you may turn down a higher base thinking you are getting a better overall package when in fact the opposite is true.
100% of job offers I've had over the last few decades have come with access to information like "we cover PPO but not HSA" and "but no matching, or 1% matching".
I would never even consider a job offer until I received information on benefits, so I knew pretty much all of this ahead of my job acceptance. I don't think I've ever had an employer push back on sending this once they got to the point of putting in an offer.
Not in the US, so the specifics are different, but 1) my offers have always included the details important to me either from the start or after I've pointed out what I want confirmed, 2) what really matters is the contract, and my assumption is that anything not in the contract doesn't exist.
It's fine if they don't want to put something in the contract or the offer, but if so I tell them straight up that I will pretend it doesn't exist when evaluating how their offer stacks up.
I do that because I agree perks can often be misleading, and the solution is to make clear you'll err on the side of caution. If their perks are actually really good, odds are they're prepared to promise them in writing.
Typically information about things like matching are available up-front and pretty easy to value.
Medical, including things like disability is the major benefit that's hard to value. Even if you get all the information, it's hard to know how good or bad a given plan is and the value of various options for your specific situation. How do you even value disability plans. (There are market actuarial rates I guess but still doesn't say what the plan is worth to you personally.)
I looked at some job listings in last week’s whoishiring thread out of curiosity. Saw one company listing a salary range of $1K–1M on one job and $10–100K on another.
This kind of malicious compliance is what everyone said would happen, but to be fair most companies with any sense are too risk-averse to give that wide a range, and they actually give you a realistic idea of what the role will pay, with the low end being their lowest CoL location and the high end being SF/NYC/etc. YMMV of course...
this is really not "malicious compliance" it's just regular old non-compliance. publishing an absurd range doesn't satisfy the requirements of any pay transparency laws.
Wouldn't argue it's a "superstar" position, but this is exactly what happened for me. I applied to a role where the range was too low but I figured I could negotiate it up, they told me they couldn't for that role, but that they had something else in mind that would work.
This is also a plus of people listing ranges: You know when you can have a realistic shot of overshooting it. Asking for 20% above the top if your experience is valuable is not unreasonable.
I've gone over the top of the top listed range several times over my career.
(A bonus of trying for that, incidentally, is that you often stand out relative to other candidates and talking up salary and convincing people it's worth upping the seniority with you as only one of few candidates that experienced can work out well - aiming for a "I didn't realize we could get someone this experienced for only a little bit more" effect...)
My current role, they just ended up creating a position for me. (I had sort of a non-standard background and they wanted to hire me.) It wasn't that the comp was especially spectacular but it was a lot better than what I was making and I wouldn't have fit neatly into posted jobs at the time.
What I heard recently is that a given job req is posted with two or three levels associated with it to have flexibility to secure a candidate. How the levels and bands break down for the specific role are obscured however. There are target percentiles to onboard someone into one of those bands though, 50-70th percentile allegedly.
I don’t think this will fly legally in the end even though it is a very common practice.
It seems like there would likely be an LCA violation since there is a prevailing wage for a specific role if the company utilizes foreign labor (for example h1b) … but one is federal and wage transparency laws are state based so dunno how it’ll play out.
The states themselves might be irked by the loophole as well. I think, if a major employer who also hires h1bs does this it would be worth challenging in court. I guess the state att general would bring it vs an individual but maybe a person who is down leveled could as well.
Here’s a job posting with an interesting clarification applied with respect to the band
> The Redwood City, CA base pay range for this role is $190,000 - $285,000. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process. Pay ranges outside Redwood City are adjusted based on cost of labor in each respective geographical market. Your recruiter can share more about the specific pay range for your location during the hiring process.
Need to pay someone more in order to hire them? New job title - "Staff Software Engineer, Algorithm Design". Wow I just created a new pay band that's no longer bound by whatever was set for "Staff Software Engineer".
Be aware that the titles people actually use day to day may not match their official HR titles. Not that I really use business cards any longer but I have basically never used the official title that's in the computer system. (Obviously, you shouldn't just make yourself a VP or whatever but I've always had a lot of latitude to change the title I use within reason.)
> “I think many of them are kind of patient and prepared to hold out for those candidates prepared to sort of suck it up and accept what they’re giving,” she added.
Certainly. A person gets released without much warning and needs income. Quickly. They'll suck it up *temporarily*.
But how long will they stay? How long before they look for the situation they actually want? Probably not long. And now the employer (and team) is back looking for talent.
Moral of the story: Companies that favor bottom-fishing to save in the immediate are likely risking more over the probably not so long term.
Most companies still don’t necessarily list total compensation. For base salary though, these ranges are quite helpful and has definitely caused some “good” trouble increasing baseline wages among competing companies.
At higher levels it’s still ambiguous what ranges truly are since job postings can span multiple job levels (which is why some ranges can feel dubiously wide). Ended up writing a bit about this phenomenon here and what contributes to it: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/notes-on-california-transparency...
It's unfortunately because the employee risks being retaliated upon (be it management or peers) instead of peers focusing down on management for better pay. It's also just general financial practice to never flaunt your cash around, so that spreads to the workplace. I'm more than happy to confide in anyone who asks privately, or to anonymously say my salary online. But I don't have much to gain sharing it with immediate co-workers.
The way modern tech companies are (outside of entry level) makes it less reliable anyway. My immediate coworkers in my last two jobs were at least 5 years more experienced than me; I gain less from asking them and they never asked me.
It's great to have transparency. It's bogus that they're able to get away with junk like $1000-1,000,000; that should be a violation of the transparency.
Heaven forbid companies have to compete for talent!
The problem is that this captures just salary compensation, it doesn't include bonuses or equity which is a huge factor for many jobs(and soon I imagine more due to this law).
The vast majority of jobs do not have equity, even in tech. Also bonuses are discretionary and aren’t guaranteed, so there’s no easy way for employers to mention an amount they can stick with in the job posting.
slightly off topic: but I pretty much wont even apply to jobs not listing salaries anymore. Especially ones in CA/NY where the company has > 250 employees, but even then having a pay range is a great way to filter out some of these lower paying companies that seem obsessed with wasting my time.
good pay transparency: quoting pay in public listing
less good: showing a range
poor transparency: big range
worse: none at all. instead just doing one-off probing via per-candidate quotes, on phone, tho non-commital
worst: asking each candidate what they want. thats a financial privacy violation, esp since almost always the asker is a stranger whose true motivations are unknown
and its asking for a fact about their current financial situation. instead an employer should only either publish a public number. or make a concrete offer in good faith
this is esp important as the gov/corp/criminal surveillance state seems to be accelerating out of control in the last few years
Pay transparency only helps the employer in the long-run. It essentially allows every employer to collude on how much they will pay a candidate. It also allows the employer to take most of your negotiating power away.
It might work right now because not every company is transparent, but if these laws were in place everywhere, it will be a different story.
"Pay transparency in some ways moves the competition away from salaries, away from wages and toward non cash benefits, or toward equity comp, toward flexibility,"
This puts more of the risk on the employee with very little control over how the company is run. Equity often forces you to stay at a poorly-run company or with a terrible manager because you won't be able to cash-out for at least a couple of years (if at all).
I would much rather have the money up front and invest as I please.
Why would this reduce negotiating power outside of cases where one *shouldn't* have leverage in the first place?
Someone who just happens to be a smooth talker shouldn't be earning more than someone else. If they actually bring more to the table, that is why they should earn more.
In a company with transparent compensation you have access to what everyone else is making so you can demonstrate you bring more value to the company than other people making $X.
> Someone who just happens to be a smooth talker shouldn't be earning more than someone else. If they actually bring more to the table, that is why they should earn more.
I love this mindset, in my experience it's a hard problem to solve.
Smooth talkers tend to fall into a few different categories that give them a leg up in negotiations - being part of a majority (usually straight male in engineering) or narcissists. (And yes, I'm oversimplifying things here just to get my point across.)
Everyone else? Some will be able to advocate for themselves, but others (especially under-represented groups) can easily downplay their worth. I've seen multiple times when women especially are trying to please the hiring manager/company and 'be flexible' in what they take. Other times it's from people outside of the U.S. where cultural expectations are different. To fix this we need people to have enough self-worth/self-esteem/trust to push on what they are worth and/or the company needs to act as an advocate on behalf of the employee. I've seen both be pretty tricky to figure out over the years.
I agree it's a hard problem to solve. And pay transparency alone won't solve it.
But it helps, as not only do you know what other people are making but they'd know what you're making. So people who manage to talk their way into some extra bucks on the way in, well now their coworkers know. And if that person isn't performing at a higher level, they'll start complaining.
And then yes, there are problems with the above. But my larger point is this puts more information in the hands of more employees, which can only be a good thing. The set of employees it hurts are the one set of employees who I think shouldn't be getting ahead in the first place.
Employers already had a form of pay transparency in market research. Typically business pay to receive compensation ranges in return for money and for data.
>I would much rather have the money up front and invest as I please.
Find a company that offers the pay you want then, simple. If that ceases to exist somehow, change your skills for those positions or prove your worth with your own product.
That's another thing that makes startups attractive, they have no equity to offer. So more cash upfront.
Employers already can pay for this data through companies that literally provide this. Employees do not have access to the same data due to cost (unless you count stuff like levels.fyi or Glassdoor). How would making this info more public help employers more than employees?
Glassdoor doesn’t count. It’s all self reported and full of biases. Taking a look at the median salaries for a few positions in SF and it’s grossly too low. Plus a lot of people might have the same job title as you but it doesn’t mean they do the exact same job as you
Anyway, with regards to the actual article, I was wondering just what mechanism supposedly made jobs with pay transparency harder to negotiate from a recruiter's perspective. Is the implication that there were no hard salary bands before this, so recruiters could sometimes offer 2x or 10x the salary? I'm sure it happened for exceptional candidates, even though it certainly never came up when I negotiated my salary...
But I'm wondering: did it happen so often that it affects the overall statistics? That would be a moderate surprise to me.