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Comment by eecc | Hacker News Reader

So it' s basically a corporate boycott against labor laws favorable to employees?!

I guess this will be first time a boycott won't be broken by a police charge and perhaps even becoming successful! /s

> favorable to employees

Is it really though? Complete transparency in salary ranges also means that every other employer can see exactly what their competition is offering. I can't help but worry that this will lead to a sort of "price fixing" that will actually drive wages _down_.

It worked for CEOs. Their salaries were disclosed due to a new law, and their salaries skyrocketed.

Competition is good, not bad.

Competition is fairer, not so much good nor bad.

but fairer is considered better, all things being equal.

Fairness is an objective good to most people.

I would disagree with that, because the requirements for fairness typically disadvantage a majority in favor of leveling the field for a minority. Ergo, most people will gripe about the actual policies, even if they agree with the abstract end goal.

The alternative also has a name: The "Tyranny of the Majority".

Fairness is better than tyranny, don't you think?

I would in the abstract.

But then in the specific I would also tend to support policies that are good for me, even to the detriment of others.

And since I'm a member of many majority classes... well, there you have my point.

That stance is also known as, "Fuck you, I've got mine."

I personally, despite also being in a number of majority classes, prefer to avoid being an asshole because of an accident of birth.

Be that as it may in your case, are you arguing that most people will act contrary to their own best interests?

That seems a shaky foundation to build policy on.

That depends on how 'fairness' is defined. Your definition of fairness appears to exclude a set of concepts which you see as unfair.

It's not a good rhetorical tactic to cede the concept of fairness; better to argue "that thing being done in the name of fairness, is actually unfair".

I would define fairness as equality of opportunity, for every person.

Hence the previous comment's tautology that fairness will not be an objective good for most people, because (a) most people prefer their own self interest, (b) the status quo provides majorities advantages that minorities do not share, and (c) objective fairness will thus come at the expense of the majority (who are by definition more numerous than the minority).

It's interesting most people are interpreting my comment as a preference, vs an observation.

Can things that happen to CEOs be extrapolated and applied successfully to regular workers?

Companies already buy salary information from brokers. So they already know what the competition is paying and generally try to keep in line with that. And that's pretty much a type of collusion. If everyone seeks to pay "market rates" based on these salary reports, then everyone will aim to pay about the same amount.

If wages were going to be driven down by this then corporations would not only be all for it, but would probably lobby to make it a law everywhere.

Good luck in a competitive field like tech.

Companies might not advertise salary ranges at a few big tech companies, but the vast majority of recruiters tell you the salary range as soon as you talk to them (or you name your price and they say "that will work"). I already totally ignore the bottom 75% of salaries.

The problem tech companies have is that many of them can be disrupted by a few motivated individuals, and there are always new opportunities for them. If you pay enough, you benefit from them. If you don't, somebody else does, or worse, they become new competition.

>The problem tech companies have is that many of them can be disrupted by a few motivated individuals

I'm convinced a primary motivation for hiring in mega-tech companies is to keep people from making startups to dethrone them. You can't legally compete with Google, etc if you've signed a non-compete.

Non-competes are unenforceable in a lot of places. And even if they weren't, the time scales for a startup to evolve into a serious market mover is longer than most non-compete contracts last anyway.

A founder of a now-popular startup worked for Google eight years ago, so what? Let's say Google remembers and decides to pursue action. They'd spend another 3-4 years suing a person who has a mountain of plausible deniability to hide behind. And for what? There's no real gain to Google for this.

The point is they go to and stay at Google instead of starting their own company.

You can once you leave - just don't take the piss like the self driving car idiot did.

more like they bribe potentially competent founders with a high salary and “perks”, which effectively raises the opportunity cost of making a competing startup.

in this hypothesis most people working for google are actually not needed, but employed there primarily to waste their time

The existence of levels.fyi doesn't appear to have hurt Total Comp thus far.

This already happens. If you look at most job postings, many will say "market value," for the salary. They are typically horrendously low.

Then said remote employees could go work for companies in other states. Or the companies that are actually willing to pay above the market because they need the talent. Which will cause more people to pay and that level and then eventually we are in the same situation we are in now where swe salaries are very strong in general.

Corporations (at least mid-size and large corporations) already have a pretty good idea of what their competition is offering.

There are companies that survey employees for salary information, collect all that knowledge, and then sell it to corporations.

Medium and large businesses already have a very good understanding of the job market and what a competitive salary range is.

Exactly, the problem is that they keep lowballing it because these ranges are somewhat not so much public knowledge

Cartels are illegal ask the companies in SV that got caught.

This is quite common. Corporations know the long game and are willing to pay in the short term to get it. Another example is those grocery stores that closed last year after hazard pay was mandated at the height of the pandemic, citing unprofitability. Unprofitability! Of a grocery store, one of like three places where people were spending money in 2020!

Volume doesn’t matter if your margins are negative. Grocery stores typically run on very slim margins (3% or less) so it’s pretty reasonable to think that raising employee pay significantly would make them lose money.

Maybe I'm not thinking about this right, but if they are getting way more business because of the pandemic and their costs have more or less stayed put, it's practically impossible that their revenue hasn't gone up considerably. Despite thin margins on their product, if they sell more of it they should be making more money (eliding some growing pains which should be surmountable). In that light, I have to say I kind of doubt their margins would be negative if they offered more pay during the pandemic.

Surely, it’s easier to believe that than that some non-chain grocer is protesting paying more by shutting down entirely.

Would it be fair to say that the ones shutting down are not the ones receiving more business during the pandemic? Or are you saying that their new found success has actually killed them? Because the claim by the original comment here is that volume doesn't matter.

Well, I suspect they're saying volume increases are coupled with margin decreases to zero. Certainly I find it more believable that people are closing honestly because they can't make money rather than people are closing to protest hazard pay.

The latter seems unlikely. If the business is viable, the business owner is going to want to run it. It's his baby and his life, he won't kill it just because he disagrees politically.

They didn't close all locations with the hazard pay increase. They closed a few locations that were already struggling to be profitable, and had now become even more unprofitable.

Yes, that's what they said. There is no way to verify that. Punishing certain communities by withdrawing service to scare off future such wage increases is another explanation.

What are you arguing happened instead? That they closed still-profitable stores just to send a message?

Absolutely. Corporations do things like this all the time. Amazon orders a crash-halt to office building construction projects whenever Seattle threatens to tax them, for example. As I said in my original comment - corporations can afford to play the long game and take the hit.

Why would they close profitable stores instead of unprofitable stores?

Not a boycott, it's perfectly explainable as just companies acting in self-interest.

A boycott is a more planned, deliberate thing and usually punitive (i.e. boycotting usually has a cost to the boycotter, but greater cost to the one being boycotted)

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