Pay transparency: which states have laws and do they work?
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It's actually saved me a lot of time and led to several high-quality conversations with recruiters since then, which I would have missed out on otherwise.
It also ends the BS of recruiters who don’t have any listings at all and just want to have engineers they can blindly pitch to companies, hoping they can score a low-effort placement.
I can’t comment on how working internally in Oracle is, but between many of its products and how they do business, they tend not to be well liked in the tech scene and people will voice their discontent. See also: Facebook/Amazon and defense contractors.
s/Oracle/Google
Between the frequent cloud outages, product cancellations and rollbacks, secret government deals (project Maven) and the creepy privacy aspects fundamental to their bottom line. IMO, Big G takes the cake!
My googler friends except those totally cuffed by golden dollars have largely already moved (now xoogers).
(Anecdotally, they also broadly seem happier, less stressed, and more fulfilled post-/gpart-um.)
Ours differ and that’s ok.
I know a lot of people that work at Oracle, and by all accounts they enjoy the environment and have quality peers. I also have been involved in dealing with renegotiating an Oracle contract at a customer of Oracle's. After that experience not only will I never work for Oracle, I will never again do business with Oracle as long as I live. No other company I've ever engaged with has brought lawyers to a sales conversation, but Oracle loves their lawyers.
In my (limited) experience hiring Colorado employees remotely, we had to make several different job postings with various ranges to make sure we didn’t exclude any possible applicants for having too high or too low salary bands. If someone applied for the $200-$300K job description but didn’t have the right experience or performance during the interview, we could offer for them to “reapply” to the $150K-$200K job title and pick up there. It felt like a lot of formality with no real benefit to either side.
The Colorado law also doesn’t stop at the job listing. You have to follow specific procedures for various things after the employee is hired, too. I could see companies excluding Colorado just to simplify their operations and avoid opening themselves up to another state’s different employment laws.
Surely there has to be a limit on the ranges for salaries posted, otherwise what's stopping an employer from just posting a range of $10k - $1M, at which point the salary information becomes as worthless as having no information.
Because we’re hiring good candidates at various experience ranges.
If someone shows up with the most impressive resume and portfolio I’ve ever seen, I don’t want to lose them simply because our job description doesn’t have a salary high enough to convince them to join.
Likewise, if a college grad shows up with a potentially impressive but short resume then we might want to take a chance on them, but not if we’re forced to pay them senior engineer money because that’s what we put in the ad. If I have to pay senior engineer money, I’m going to wait until a senior engineer applies.
We basically keep job listings limited to "we're writing cloud software using Angular, Spring, and relational data". We're a large company, so other teams do it differently, but my team tries hard to not put ceilings or floors on experience or skills. We've hired everything from summer intern to Principal (Staff) Engineer using the same job req. We also don't limit the listings to a specific functional area - we might hire Ops, Front or Back End, Full Stack, Test, Autimation, etc, using the same req. We also actively look for skills we don't currently "need", on the hope they will widen the practical experience of the team.
Honestly, truly, does all that extra detail around experience, "job duties", micromanaged required skills, etc, actually add any value to the listing? Does "Agile experience preferred" even mean anything?
Nope, but the "x years of experience" does. IME teams that have the wrong balance of experience tend to go way off course. I worked on a team with a lot of juniors that put out a similar advert (HR snafu) and we were flooded with even more. It was a struggle to mentor those we had let alone do actual work.
I probably would apply to such jobs if I were really desperate but if salary is left out I assume it's a lowball negotiating ploy and ignore them. I believe absolutely that in spite of all protests to the contrary that it absolutely is in all cases. No shame in that either. You might score somebody senior for cheap.
There are plenty of roles these days that are up-front about what they are, though.
If you pick the salary without leveling first, then it's not based on their qualifications, and that's the type of discrimination these laws are trying to counteract.
Otherwise, if you allow that situation to happen, well, you allowed it to happen.
Last time I interviewed at Square, for example, after passing the interview for a particular group I met with several engineering managers within the group to understand my fit within their teams. That matching was a result of what teams the group thought I might be a good fit for based on the interview.
You know a high performer from a low one. Anything in between is anybody's guess.
Salaries are reflections of the negotiation market, which reflects merit, but only barely.
To keep the math and my HR processes simple, I pay them all $100K/yr and grant them all initially $200K in shares plus $100K/yr in refresher shares, vesting over 4 years. Someone who just joined will make $150K in the next 12 months. Someone who joined 2 years ago will make $200K in the next 12 months if our stock is UNCH since they joined. If it doubled since then, they’ll make close to $300K in the next 12 months.
Bam, my range is $150K-$300K/yr and I have the fairest, most equitable pay structure I could imagine. Layer on top of that complexities of people actually having different levels of productivity, different amounts of unvested stock appreciation, and you can have even wider spreads. Add to that having had to “buy out” someone’s unvested shares or bonus at another company to get them to switch to yours and the spread gets wider.
Personally I don't care about stocks on a job posting. I consider stocks to be worth 0 when considering offers unless it's a public company with all the information available for me to evaluate the company.
This is because statistically the startup will fail. And there's no way to make a fact based evaluation if it will fail or not until after you are working for them. If you are one of the initial hires it's basically blindly gambling on the founders. The exception being if the founders have previously founded successful startups, in which case you are betting on their experience.
That’s not the way I read it:
Employers must include the following compensation and benefits information in each posting:
(A) the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range thereof) that the employer is offering for the position;
(B) a general description of any bonuses, commissions, or other forms of compensation that are being offered for the job; and
(C) a general description of all employment benefits the employer is offering for the position, including health care benefits, retirement benefits, any benefits permitting paid days off (including sick leave, parental leave, and paid time off or vacation benefits), and any other benefits that must be reported for federal tax purposes, but not benefits in the form of minor perks.
RSUs are benefits that must be reported for federal tax purposes.
My feeling is when people say location shouldn't matter then mean as long as the location is in their country.
"As little as they can get away with, not how much value you create" sounds like a recipe for exploitation and dissatisfied employees. Which I suppose is exactly what we have.
It would also seem to create a strange incentive for people to move to places where the cost of living is higher.
If you are in say NYC and a company is trying to hire specifically in NYC you can expect to be paid enough to live in NYC. It doesn't matter that the company could get the work done for 1/4 the cost if they were OK with the work being done in Smallville, Kansas. You aren't competing with the Smallville programmer. Your only competition also demands NYC level pay.
When the company doesn't care where the work is done other than broad limits like "should be in the US" then you are competing with the Smallville programmer for the job. And with some dude in Hooterville. And in Lake Wobegon. And in Mayberry. You are in a market with a lot of people who will accept less than NYC salary.
Actually this isn't all that different than how companies handle pay within metropolitan areas now. For example a company in downtown Los Angeles isn't going to have a different pay scale for their employees that live in Compton and the ones that live in Malibu.
If everyone goes remote-first someday, market rates everywhere will equalize, but this hasn’t happened yet.
This is because FAANG refuse to benchmark against finance, because it would cost them too much money. Like they wanted me to move from Dublin to London when I was at one, but the salaries were identical, but the living costs definitely were not (salaries were the same, but a FAANG salary in Dub puts you much closer to the top of the local income distribution than one does in London).
If they're from a real poor country, maybe this practice will help their economy (not that that's a reason to do it necessarily).
If an employer has a need for a level 3 software engineer (whatever that is for them), should they post in Colorado the salary range for that role in Colorado? Or the range for that role in Elbonia on the low end and Palo Alto on the high end? Would the latter pass muster with CO?
If someone aspirationally applies for that role and the interview process places them as a promising level 2 software engineer, what should the company’s answer be? “We regret to inform you that we will not be making a level 3 offer.” Or is the candidate better off if they then continue to say “we invite you to apply for consideration for a level 2 role by clicking this link: xxxx”?
Isn't the intent to benefit third parties though? I thought the point of pay transparency is to provide information to people who don't have the connections to know what the "real deal" generally is, so they can negotiate on an equal footing as other applicants when they have the opportunity.
1: https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1395818629657149445.
2: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/careers/coloradoifsseniormanager.h...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28875365
Summarizing here: Google listed salaries from 125,000 to 250,000 (excluding one presumably mistaken entry), for roles from L4 (L3 is new grad, L5 is Senior) - L8+ ("Director"). These don't include bonuses or equity. Bay area salaries would be something like 10-20% higher.
Facebook listed salaries from $111,000 (E3, new grad) to 239,000 (Director, E8?). Similar caveats to Google.
Microsoft listed $115,700 - $224,500 across a number of roles, again salaries higher in the bay.
Amazon, surprising no one, listed a range from 122,000 - 160K (their cap on salaries outside of the bay, where I think the cap is 175K).
Lyft and Uber didn't list roles. Stripe, Netflix and Dropbox listed remote roles but without salaries, probably violating the law. Salesforce had really low ranges. Oracle wanted me to email them, which I think also violates the law, but also I didn't want to do that.
As far as I know, the Colorado law has been interpreted (or at least theirs claimed intent by the Co legislature?) that you can't refuse to offer a remote job to Co employees to get around the law, although this only matters if you already have Co employees, in which case other provisions of the law also apply, so it's tricky.
I work for a big corporation in Texas, and have found myself trying to determine what will my next steps be. Employees have a tool to browse the job openings, and the responsibilities of the positions, but again, salaries are given in ranges, so wide indeed, there is no real answer to the question "would my wages be raised if I switch jobs inside the company", which is ridiculous.
I could also find myself making less money than someone who technically is on a lower leven in the hierarchy, even if we both are doing the same job.
So every year, when my supervisor asks me where do I want my career to go to, I'm stuck between what I want to do, and how much more I want to earn, which is not great.
The data is many years out of date and drastically under market.
Check levels.fyi and teamblind.com instead.
The Robert Half data is very significantly under market for the skills that the majority of readers here have.
https://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guide/specialization/techn...
Why there’s so much taboo/avoidance of talking about money I have no idea, but if you need some information to contemplate a career change in our company, I’ll do my best to get it for you.
I'm guessing it is done that way so there is little room for favouritism and/or nepotism.
Which means it works for 99% of employees in tech and most other sectors and the other 1% are easily spotted.
Why? You don't give mere engineers RSUs in the Nordics?
Two, whichever state pioneers here risks making it just risky, uncertain or a pain in the ass enough for companies to nope out of hiring in CO. This one isn’t easily fixable except by a many-state compact, but being first will hurt some of your state’s residents.
Three, what range would I post for lead singer of rock band? My high school buddies (also decidedly Not Sammy Hagar) play dive bars for $100, unlimited wings, and three buckets of beer, while Is Sammy Hagar commands significantly more. If I can post a range that’s wide enough to cover my expected range, which reflects the expected range of productivity of programmers, does it really tell anyone anything that they can’t get quicker from levels.fyi than from scanning my job listing? If the law changes to require me to post a tighter range per position, then I need to manage multiple listings and still nobody learns much of anything they don’t already know. (Assuming you think there’s at least a 2x spread from the least effective but employable SWE and the top SWE. I think it’s well over 5x, but surely at least 3x.)
But then again even knowing that range is super helpful regardless, and the Equal Pay Act has been instrumental in helping candidates not get lowballed. And before that, employers basically always asked what your current salary was, which is still unfortunately almost a required question candidates have to answer in other parts of the world. So all steps in the right direction, but there is some level of nuance where job listings as they are today are slightly divorced from the actual role / level / team that you end up at.
We're working on building a job board specifically to help solve this. We plan to have roles within specific levels of experience and with much tighter ranges using the leveling standard we've developed as a backbone: https://levels.fyi/standard/
We're also hiring! And we list our salary ranges here: https://levelsfyi.notion.site/Levels-fyi-Careers-969edc750f1...
There are many reasons a company doesn't list salary ranges on job descriptions. Hell, most companies don't even know the damn law exists—they're just hoping to hire good people to do good work.
Yes, the hiring process at a lot of companies is not awesome. Yes, recruiters are useless, and technical interviews suck. But there are a lot of great companies out there that pay really well and care about their employees. If you want to talk about salary, put in a good application, make a good first impression, and you can talk money early on in the interview process. I've hired a lot of people throughout my career. These days, I'm absolutely dumbfounded by the amount of applicants who don't seem to care about anything at all—sloppy résumés, half-assed and poorly written cover letters, days go by in between scheduling emails.
You want to make $200,000 a year? Become a better writer and don't be a fucking idiot during your interviews. Stop swaying in your chair, and playing with your hair, and reprimanding your dog. Fix your lighting and your audio, put a clean shirt on—take things seriously. You might be "qualified" for the role on paper, but no one wants to work with unthinking slobs who seem completely uninterested in actually getting the job.
The longer people whine and complain about "pay transparency", the longer they'll remain unemployed.