New York City will make it mandatory for companies to post salaries on job ads
forbes.com
forbes.com
This is a very dangerous question to ask because it locks in previous pay discrimination based on protected categories.
Very true.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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".
1. We value work life balance
2. We value diversity
3. We care about our people
4. We pay fairly and reward efforts
Are one of the biggest lies I have heard from corporate HRs and recruiters
"I've never heard of a job interviewer needing my tax records..."
"I heard on the news that job applicants have been victims of identify theft lately, sorry I can't share my personal information like that..."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jul/05/keith-gille...
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.
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.
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
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.
If you lie and they verify it later after an offer (which they probably will during background check), you'll be fired for the lie.
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.
Your first reply is a good option for msot of us.
Was this in a location where asking is prohibited? They shouldn't be able to demand and answer "or cancel".
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".
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.
Just like when you buy a house, knowing the house's sale history helps you avoid a big mistake.
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.
What's he got that you don't have?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The "no choice" thing is just an excuse.
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.
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.
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.
It's not negotiating that gets you a guaranteed worst case result.
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.
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.
> 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.
No, it isn't.
> or even accurate measure of
I didn't say it was accurate. I said it wasn't meaningless. Nobody is dumb enough to think that it's exact.
> employers start assuming
You're doing a lot of assuming.
But at least you kinda sorta agree now that it is a signal, so, progress!
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.
> 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 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.
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).
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.
What's remarkable is not what you told the person, but the notion that you are compelled to answer any question an employer asks.
At least in America, you are not compelled to answer anything you don't want to.
> be forced to hire me?
Forced? Of course not. They're not holding a gun on you, and you're not holding a gun on them.
> you are compelled to answer any question an employer asks
Nobody is "compelling" anyone in this situation.
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 have also sacked an agency over this and they are on my personal "Call First" list so if I am recommending agencies they wont be getting a call.
I only learned about it recently. When I requested a report on my SSN, I saw every bi-weekly payment ever made to me
https://theworknumber.com/solutions/industries/pre-employmen...
> Talent Report™ Income and Employment Provides verification of employment plus verification of a candidate’s income
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
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.
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.
Yes, the employer. They give data and they get access to data.
TWN, in turn, grants these employers aggregate salary range data across companies (helping the company negotiate better deals).
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.
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
Depends on your employer. Per https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and...
> 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.
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?
Even capital gains?
Kind of funny that you aren't supposed to share your salary but your employer does.
It’s less of an issue with younger generation, but still important to be careful.
If you’re polite about it, it not a huge issue.
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
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).
Which is freaking hilarious.
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.
It covers salary history and much more, all of it useful.
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.
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.
> The exact amount of value is completely unrelated to that employee's salary at their previous jobs.
Just try hiring a minimum wage worker as CEO for your next company, and see how well that works out.
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.
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.)
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.
Until then, punish that behavior by job hopping ever year. If they want to play a game, we can play it too
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.
only monopolies can set fixed prices and it leads to inefficiencies
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Open to ideas
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.
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.
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.
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.
I too always sell immediately as I prefer to be diversified (but I also don’t work at an extreme high growth company)
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).
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.
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.
Turbo Tax seems to take this approach, at least when I filed last year.
You can do the above and also send the IRS a copy of your 1099-B too, along with your 1040. I don't know if you can do that and e-file.
This isn't a small company problem either - both Google and Microsoft had this issue (though only on ESPP shares at MS)
It accounts for more than 50% of my total compensation.
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.
I am not seeing where the positive interest is here.
Your employer won't do that with salary.
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.
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.
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
The example shown on the site you quote has a 56.53% effective rate - don't forget you pay NI as well
As I said very poor I paid zero tax on my two share saves and my current EMI is at the 10% rate.
Update the 56.5% rate is after you put 20k into pension the actual rate is just under 70%
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 = $346k TC
Without any kind of raise or refresher grant you're making 15% more total in year 4 than when you started. When the stock vests, you pay tax as if it were ordinary income, and you can sell immediately for cash.
That example was for a stock growing at 10%. Now consider if that company was Alphabet.
Stock price for GOOG on Jan 1, 2019: 1116
Stock price for GOOG on Jan 1, 2020: 1434 (+28%)
Stock price for GOOG on Jan 1, 2021: 1835 (+27%)
Stock price for GOOG on Jan 1, 2022: 2753 (+50%)
2018 price. 1170$, 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.
But you should be looking at RSUs as a funny money kind of thing.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't want to be getting RSU's at IBM for instance :)
You can play all those games with stock just by using cash given to you to buy stock.
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.
I do tolerate RSUs, but it’s not the allocation I’d make given the choice.
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 should check out Netflix. Their pay is all in cash, and it is very competitive.
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.
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)
Take a look here. [1]
Rackspace was the company doing it when I posted an example, but I know it happens elsewhere too. Was it SpaceX? I forget.
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.
It sounds like they will be incentivized to provide those details or lose candidates to jobs posting higher salaries or detailed numbers.
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
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.
Numbers right now are already sticky, I'd argue.
a) method of colluding to depress wages
b) PR for "high wages" using jobs they don't intend to fill
c) ...
There are likely many different outcomes and each isn't likely mutually exclusive.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Posting wages might make it easier for companies to match their offers to others, leading to a sort of collusion, and salary stagnation.
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.
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.
As if that hasn't already happened
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
On a separate yet related note: do you trust free markets?
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.
Because there's no guarantee it'll work right the first time and that there won't be some tweaks that need to be made.
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.
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.
How is teleworking across state lines not interstate commerce?
'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.
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.
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.
Be very very careful making such changes.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
"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".
Cartels like that are unstable, because each party has a massive incentive to cheat on it, and the advantage accrues to you.
Owner vs. worker power struggle is always all about who can better coordinate collective action. Owners have an inherent and mostly dominating coordination advantage.
> Owner vs. worker power struggle
Oh phooey. Negotiation is inherent to a free market. It's not a power struggle. It's supply and demand.
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.
Cartels on non-poaching are not enforced by the law.
> it's about which side coordinates better
That's what supply and demand is.
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.
That's the context in which negotiation occurs.
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.
Old people are not like what you just laid out.
That's why god invented google. There's no reason you can't find out what people in your position are paid these days. Or use Bing if you like.
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.)
* For 80/20 by-and-large values of "any" and "no"
Try it sometime before quitting in advance.
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.
Ya just gotta know how to do it, and have the stones to follow through.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course. This is how supply+demand works. I'd bet every worker wants to be paid $$$$$$. The two parties then negotiate!
After all, when you buy a car, do decide you're going to add $10,000 to the asking price of the car so Cratchet's commission can buy Christmas presents for Timmy? Or are you going to get the best price you can?
Everyone tries to get the best price - employer, employee, salesman, customer. That's how markets work.
And if we all had to negotiate our salaries from a minimum wage it would be an epic waste of time for both employers and job-seekers, so what point are you actually making here?
I was quite directly saying that employers in creative spaces in NYC are taking advantage of salary information (or even labor law) inequality in order to exploit the people they hire. NYC has quite-rightly decided to make this illegal and is leveling the playing field somewhat.
It's not easy to compare, but we're paid 30-50 times more now.
There are many books on negotiation you can buy. They aren't hard to find, and are easy reads. Invest a few dollars and a couple hours reading them. It can change your lives for the better. Even a modest effort here can pay off handsomely with $$$ in your pocket. The government isn't going to do it for you.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
This is already required for H1-B workers through the prevailing wage determination process.
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?
Colorado: 5,773,714 people, GDP of $318.6 billion.
I mean, yeah, sure, they can do that, but it's dumb and their competitors will profit from that.
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.
So if you are overqualified and confident in yourself, apply and negotiate.
> because companies advertising a job with high salary will have to wait longer
I think you have this backwards
> now they're able to openly collude
That's not a very stable equilibrium. I think they would instead openly compete
It's not even close to an even playing field. Companies have vastly more information than the average job applicant.
Effectively equivalent to x = x + 1
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 dare the government define what '3rd degree theft' means! My liberty to define that myself has being stolen!
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).
Edit: To be clear, I did not mean to accuse you of fear-mongering; I think the politicians are dressing this policy up to make themselves look better.
It also allows me to pay you less because you're not a critical thinker. But yeah, it's probably discriminatory. We don't want to hurt your ego.
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).
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".)
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).
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.
-> capitalist that wants to underpay people and justifies it through a lengthy verbose convoluted articulation
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
-Upton Sinclair
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because both of you are parties in a deal and have your own best interests in mind
Can you imagine why many others cannot or do not want to negotiate like this?
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.
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.
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.
Employers can easily get around this by using ad copy saying "Starting salary between $15k and $50k yearly depending on experience blah blah blah.."
You still wouldn't know whether others with 8 years experience and a MS or whatever, make more or less than you do.
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’d bet heavily against that being the point of convergence.
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.
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.
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 would I ever hire someone that lives in SF/Cali/NY?
In fact, why would I hire someone that lives in the US?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
They have just as capable devs as we do.
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.
You also don't have to commit: it just has to be "in good faith." Here's the text of the bill: https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3...
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?
You described two different positions with two difference experience requirements and two different salaries.
Jr cat_plus_plus Technician:
Minimum to no experience required.
$15 to $20 a hour
Sr cat_plus_plus Technician:
Atleast 5 years experience required.
$40 to $50 a hour
And that's before even getting to the RSU situation that others are commenting on.
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.
Similar could happen if a person got some better offer from an other company and the would like to match it.
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.
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.)
"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.
It would be great if it's solid.
It's hard enough for small companies to get high quality candidates, this will only make it worse.
It’s happening in Colorado, where there’s a similar law. > https://www.9news.com/article/news/investigations/job-postin...
Quick, someone buy https://www.newyorkexcluded.com/
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 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.
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.
But the costs for a law like this are not prohibitive
ps. I do not live and have never lived 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.
That sort of lucky accident would likely not occur after this law. But on balance, it's a great idea.
> 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.
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.
There are public and private databases of this info.
Glassdoor is public, but you can also buy salary data from the credit bureaus.
Every large company can easily find out what a single applicant has made in the past and/or get aggregated data regarding a particular title.
"Hey you said this job paid 300k, what gives?"
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.
And if you are right and that becomes a problem, well, shit. Back to the drawing board I guess.
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.
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.
Will opening a petition or a lawsuit, make any difference?
"I'm sorry, we don't think you are a cultural match for our company".
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.
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.
"You responded to our listing that said $40k/year, so how much higher do you want to go?"
Mechanically, I am curious how this will change even good faith "All Levels" job postings.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-york-city-employers-wi...
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.