EU to mandate public salary information for all job postings [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

EU to mandate public salary information for all job postings [pdf]

europarl.europa.eu

459 pointspimterry383 comments

Discussed yesterday:

Pay Transparency: European Commission proposes measures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30429182 - Feb 2022 (44 comments)

IIRC, this is a proposal. If so, then the submitted title is inaccurate. Please don't replace titles with misleading ones—that's the opposite of what the guidelines call for:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

The meat is page 5 under "The changes the proposal would bring". Highlights:

* Job-seekers would have a right to information about the pay range of posts they apply for

* Employers would be prohibited from asking about an applicant's pay history

* Employees would have a right to ask their employer for sex-disaggregated information on the average pay of other workers doing the same work or work of equal value.

* Employers with at least 250 employees would have to report on their gender pay gap and carry out a pay assessment if the gap exceeds 5 % and cannot be justified.

* Compensation would be available to victims of pay discrimination, with the burden of proof placed on the employer and sanctions for infringements of the equal pay rule.

How does making salary public and not asking about applicants pay history work? If you tell them your title and employer, can't they just look up what you probably got paid?

I don't believe salaries are public but instead salary ranges alongside job postings. Someone please correct me if I am wrong as the former would be a much more valuable tool for labor.

Under the latter the range for SWE could be 40-80K and so a new employer could possibly find that job posting from around the time you say you were hired but still shouldn't have any idea if you were making the 40k or closer to the 80k. I believe this is intended to curb the market behavior of offering someone a pay you think they will accept rather than offering to pay based on the value of a role.

Turning the difference between those two numbers into cream for upper management to butter their bread is the status quo in America at the very least and likely in all of the western world, but leads to systemic discrimination amongst protected groups with weaker negotiating power.

You would only know what a new starter might be offered, not what someone actually received after a period of time. I don't think the problem is organisations basing salaries on what other employers are offering (that's just market testing) but choosing to pay an individual person more or less based on what they personally managed to negotiate elsewhere. If I'm buddies with my department head and I get an extra $10k because of that, why should other employers replicate that when I move companies?

(Note : I don't really agree with this as it's relying on salary secrecy but I think that's the logic.)

No. Individual personal salary is private information protected by law (at least in our country). Starting salary range in job offers is public, that's not enugh information.

Salaries might be private here, but taxes sure aren't. A recruiter could feasibly walk into the local tax office and ask to see my taxable income for 2020.

That’s wild, I can’t believe it. Where is this if you don’t mind me asking?

Finland.

https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/finnish-tax-administration/d...

also true in Sweden

Interesting. Taxes and incomes are private in Slovakia for private persons whether they are employed or self-employed or whatever (unless they are a judge or a politician). They are only public for companies.

In the US (I realize the article is about EU), salary information for a given individual is not public* and employers typically will not share it (when queried by a prospective employer, they will only confirm employment history - "yes, Bob worked here for 5 years as a developer").

Several states have implemented similar rules (CO and CA, IIRC). A job listing would typically list either a minimum salary or range for a position. "Senior Developer, $120,000-$150,000" or whatever.

Two upsides to this approach... First, an employee is not limited by their current salary - they can negotiate on their value. Second, it's widely accepted that women and minorities tend to be less aggressive salary negotiators. Those two things together, applied over a career, can make a massive reduction in lifetime earnings for employees.

* Government jobs are the big exception - you can search for most university salaries because most receive government funding. Same for local government offices.

Eh, salary information isn't posted in a newspaper but if your company has a subscription to Equifax they can look it up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_Number

Large employers already subscribe to services which tell them what you likely got paid at your last job by geo/title/seniority/tenure.

And sometimes exactly what you got paid. Actual data from your own paystubs is often for sale as well.

I wonder if this will be one of the unintended (intended?) consequences? Normally the best way to get a pay increase is to apply for jobs that pay a lot more. Previously you could apply for a job that paid much more than your current role. Your new employer might assume that you were on something similar or a little bit less. Now employers will be able to see what you were paid previously and will probably not offer much of a pay increase, or you'll have to have a really good reason why you think your salary should be doubled.

Yes, but they wouldn't get an exact figure because it's a range.

Anyway it doesn't really matter; you apply for a job, if you don't meet the criteria, that's fine. But if you DO meet the criteria but pay you a little more than your previous job, but less than others with the same job, that's going to be tackled by this legislation.

The best they can do is that instead of underpaying you, they will say "You did not pass the interview process for this job".

despite pay gap shown time and time again to be fiction, government monkeys are still dancing to that out of key tune.

Any external references to back up your 'pay gap shown time[0] and time again[1] to be fiction' claim?

FYI I had to read your comment a few times to try to pick out what you're trying to say without getting distracted by the gratuitous vitriol. It might make you feel better but it's not an effective means of actual communication.

[0]: ?

[1]: ?

It's not fiction, that's hyperbole, but there are factors other than gender by itself that accounts for a lot of the remaining disparity between men and women's pay. Taking a career break to have children, historical 'steering' of women away from STEM subjects in education, some apparent natural tendency for many women to avoid such subjects even when they have a free choice, a tendency for women to not challenge their compensation or push for raises compared to men, women's tendency to avoid overtime compared to men which can affect their advancement prospects. There are a lot of factors that come down to personal choice, and women often make different choices from men.

Nevertheless even controlling for all this there is a remaining gap of a few percent at least, which varies greatly depending on the industrial sector and also by region. Since this thread is about the EU, it's reverent to point out that the gap is particularly high in some EU countries.

https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-a...

> Taking a career break to have children, historical 'steering' of women away from STEM subjects in education, some apparent natural tendency for many women to avoid such subjects even when they have a free choice, a tendency for women to not challenge their compensation or push for raises compared to men, women's tendency to avoid overtime compared to men which can affect their advancement prospects.

I mean, all of those are heavily related to gender. And while you can frame them as "personal choice", that's only useful when analyzing an individual. When a significant part of the women make these choices that hurt their salaries and work prospects, one maybe should think about how society is influencing those choices, and turns out the vector is gender.

Gender is a made-up concept with no sensible definition.

The defining quality is sex. Having children is simply more burdensome and time-consuming for women, no way around it (except artificial wombs in the distant future). I've advocated "child-bonus" before (i.e. paying companies extra when their employees get pregnant and on maternity leave), but I doubt that idea will gain any popularity.

When even in the most equal societies the sex-interest gap (which is upstream of career choice) not only persists, but increases, that is additional heavy evidence that it's influenced mainly by biology, not by society.

I've always thought it's insane that many developed countries' governments fret about their birth rates, then do absolutely nothing to incentivize having children from an individual's career perspective.

It's not unreasonable social calculus to just say "We the government are going to pay you your potential lost earnings, if you decide to have a child."

In the US at least, existing policy is mostly targeted at family units (via tax credits), which doesn't really bear on an individual's opportunity cost and decision to have children or not.

AFAIK Hungary is trying something like that, I am not sure about the specifics but I think that for every child you have the government lowers your income tax and after your third child you don't pay any income tax. There are some other measures too, all of them were implemented relatively recently, let's say 2015 although I am not sure.

As for the results, I guess it's still early to tell: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

> Having children is simply more burdensome and time-consuming for women, no way around it

Pregnancy is 9 months, the children live for many years. For that second part, men and women could take responsibilities in an equal way (save for breastfeeding, but pumps exists), but usually the burden tends to fall on the women and that hurts careers more than pregnancy.

In most places maternity leave is a lot longer than paternity leave so that's society influence.

Yes that's fair enough, it's a bigger issue than just a pay gap. That's a symptom.

The idea that the average income for men and women isn't the same is not fiction at all, it's completely real.

It is also not the idea that is frequently paraded around when talking about a pay gap, since it can actually be argued against in sensible terms, for example, if women simply ask for raises less often than men, is that really unfair?

What more often than not happens is that the idea of a pay gap is presented as if women were earning less solely because they are women and their employers simply decided to pay them less for that reason. That is fiction and a whole bunch of us are tired of it, exhausted even.

It depends on where you are talking about and what the jobs are. As I pointed out there are some countries and employment sectors in the EU that do have persistent pay gaps that can't be explained away by life choices, and so it still makes sense for the EU to work on this issue, no matter how tired you might be of haring about it.

> it's completely real.

It's also completely real that many women in their 20s and 30s, biologically, tend to not be available for work for maternity reasons. As an employer you have to include that opportunity cost of in the equation. Also, a woman in her late 30s - early 40s with two kids probably has a 2 or 3 year-hiatus when it comes to work experience compared to her male-colleagues.

The pay gap exists. The cause of the pay gap is not due to oppression, but due to tempermental difference between different types of people, and the impact that has on salary negotiation. (Including, male-female temperamental differences).

This is the point of contention.

Maybe pay shouldn't be based on the personal ability to negotiate, which is not a core competency for most jobs, but on a equal compensation for equal work then...

While we are at it, the cost of a product should depend on its objective value, not what the market pays.

My point being that sure, ideally it wouldn't be like that, but any implementation I can possibly think of is not viable at all. Jobs are fairly unique things.

> While we are at it, the cost of a product should depend on its objective value, not what the market pays.

"What the market pays" is the objective value.

The job market is a market, and if the job market dictates that the wage is set in part by one's ability to sell themselves to potential employers, then the (job) market is currently setting objective value (wages).

I'm not making a value judgement of your premise. Just pointing out that your argument works as well against you as it does for you.

From a pedantic economist perspective, yes. From a common sense perspective, if a £40 jacket was sold for £200 to someone, then it's still worth £40 even if this person overpaid for it.

Are people with bad information objectively correct? (Everyone overpays illogically for product because of deliberate misinformation, or whatever)

>Maybe pay shouldn't be based on the personal ability to negotiate, which is not a core competency for most jobs

It is and always was, every day on the marked where you had to haggle for the price you think it's worth for you.

Overall in developed countries the pay gap has largely been closed over the last few decades, but remaining gaps are not fiction. There are still real and unjustifiable gaps in some employment sectors, especially in a region as diverse as the EU. Pay gaps in some Eastern European countries for example still persist.

Isn't Eastern Europe more progressive when it comes to female participation in the workforce?

Also I find it hard to believe there's a significant pay gap for the same position when the workers have the same experience and the same education. Or that that gap is gendered, meaning that weaker negotiatiors get lower salaries.

Unsure about participation, but I know there's been a decades-long trend (since the 60s) where women were outpacing men in tertiary education enrollment growth in many regions, overtaking them in absolute terms sometime in the 70s/80s.

See p77 (PDF p59): https://www.macfound.org/media/files/unesco-world-atlas-gend...

For workers with the same experience, personality traits (there's a big overlap between female and male personality traits), employment history, etc in the most progressive nations the remaining pay gap is just a few percent. Small enough that it's on the edge of the error bars. It's bigger in the US. A lot of the claims that there's no pay gap are based on countries like Sweden, and then misapplied to the US which does have a persistent unjustified pay gap, albeit a much, much smaller one than even a few decades ago.

We are definitely and very clearly moving in the right direction, there's no question about that, but we're not quite there yet.

last time I checked countries like Romania (E Europe) had the smallest pay gap in Europe. the issue is usually in countries like Germany, Switzerland or Netherlands.

It's also important to consider what people mean exactly when they talk about the "pay gap".

Here in Germany, the SPD (social democrats) candidate for chancellor in 2018, Schulz, tried to make the gender pay gap into one of the core issues of his campaign with posters saying women "make 21% less while working 100%"[0].

While this wasn't outright wrong, it used what the Statisches Bundesamt (official state office of statistics) called the "unadjusted" gender gap value (which I saw some people refer to as the "earnings gap"), meaning it calculated the average pay per hour for all women and compared that to the average for men (per sector, region, age group), but it specifically did not try to consider professions, different contracts (e.g. full time vs part time), but does include overtime pay (but not bonuses). It comes with a note that this number cannot be used to compare earnings for women and men in the same or equivalent profession[1].

While this of courses raises questions about why women apparently work more in professions that get paid less on average, and what to do about that (like getting more women in higher paying professions, or adjusting the pay in low paying, undervalued professions that are "typical female" such as child- and elder care or retail), Schulz however ran around suggesting that number shows women get paid a lot less for the same job.

There also is an "adjusted" number (which I think people often mean to refer to when they talk about the "pay gap") that tries to consider things like (equivalent) professions as well, making it a lot closer to "same pay for the same job" metric. That value is then given as the "upper bound" as it still cannot consider some factors such as employment/career breaks[2]. That value was about 6% in Germany in 2018. However, only looking at value alone is misleading as well, as it hides that women on average get paid less for their time (which the unadjusted value points out), among other things. Both numbers furthermore do not consider at all any unpaid work a person may perform (such as raising children), and differences between genders when it comes to participation in the paid labor market.

To bring it back to your post specifically, I found this dw infographic[3] showing that in Romania the gap was a mere 1% to Germany's 21% when using the unadjusted value (2014), but both were around 6% when using the adjusted value.

As far as I know the way to calculate the unadjusted and adjusted numbers is mandated by the EU, so these numbers should be calculated the same and comparable. So Germany and Romania seem to be doing about the same in the "same pay for the same job" metric. But I wonder why there is such a large difference in the unadjusted value? Is it because Romania did away with connotations of typically "female" and "male" professions early (maybe even as a result of past communism), are there huge differences in labor participation rates between both countries, is there less difference in what different professions get paid in Romania, etc, or a combination in some form of all of that?

[0] https://correctiv.org/media/thumbnails/filer_public_thumbnai...

[1] "Aussagen zum Unterschied in den Verdiensten von weiblichen und männlichen Beschäftigten mit gleichem Beruf, vergleichbarer Tätigkeit und äquivalentem Bildungsabschluss sind damit nicht möglich." https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit...

[2] "Es muss berücksichtigt werden, dass der ermittelte Wert eine Obergrenze ist. Er wäre geringer ausgefallen, wenn weitere Informationen über lohnrelevante Einflussfaktoren für die Analysen zur Verfügung gestanden hätten, wie vor allem Angaben zu Erwerbsunterbrechungen. " https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Verdienste/FAQ/gend...

[3] https://static.dw.com/image/47827459_7.png

In slovenia, they just said women earned less (94.1% of the mens pay), but ignored even the hours worked, with the data in the same database.

> Pay gaps in some Eastern European countries for example still persist.

Pay gaps exist throughout the EU, some countries may surprise you in a good or bad way: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Sources please

Ideally the people writing the policy could provide the sources that we could scrutinize. I just keep hearing politicians and advocacy groups saying 77% for literally decades now. I'm willing to accept there is a gap. I'm not willing to accept that this number hasn't moved for years.

Here is one saying women (25-34) earn 93% -- apparently not controlling for the actual job at all.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/25/gender-pay-...

Time after time it seems "pay gap between men and women" is conflated with "pay gap between men and women in the same job". Then there are the made up numbers that are the talking points.

Can you cite some sources for your statement please?

I mean once this legislation passes, it'll be impossible (hopefully) for a pay gap to exist for the same job - assuming equal hours worked.

> Employers would be prohibited from asking about an applicant's pay history

Aw, that was one of the fun moments when getting my current job. I moved from private sector to public sector and they're like "You understand that the previous pay you listed is more than our boss's boss, the director of our entire org unit gets paid right?". Yes, yes I do. Which is why when you asked at interview "Why do you want this role?" I didn't say "Because I would like to get rich".

But overall this seems like a good idea. Pay transparency is a known good strategy. I remember years ago working for a huge international corporation I asked about pay transparency at one of those bogus "Ask us anything" board events and the CEO answered and he's like, "My pay is a matter of public record because that's the law here" and I'm like "Yes, and it's fine, you can see that now so why not the same for everybody else?" and of course he just deflected.

How "inability to give a straight answer on anything" and "refusal to make any meaningful decisions" came to be considered good leadership traits is a mystery to me, but I do know how much it pays so that's nice.

The reality is that not everyone brings equal value to an org. Some are rockstars and others are meh. It’s natural, and you should be incentivized to improve.

The reality is I spend time applying for a job which claims a "competitive" salary for a "network architect", and eventually find it's in the 35-45k range "depending on skills"

Those companies then run off to government saying "we can't employ anyone"

Fortunately more and more job listings on linked in are listing ballpark salaries so it's easy to ignore them, there's a few coming up which are reasonable salaries for what they want too IMO, so that's good.

I get why employer's tendency is to withhold pay information. But ultimately, it's a waste of my time and their time if we're not close enough. So disclosure seems win/win.

Employers are still used to an employer's market, where they could string desperate applicants along, then hit them with, "This is the salary, take it or leave it." They're slow to adjust to today's job market.

Not when the objective is to increase the companies Visa quota not to find talent at market rate.

I assume you're not in the USA? As a network architect, even non-coastal jobs are easily had for $120,000 and go up from there...

I don't think that's true at all. If it were so easy, why don't I have one? More people are paid below $110k than above (median).

How big an environment are we talking about? More then about 50 servers, you're underpaid if you aren't making 6 figures.

I'm not a network administrator. I have training in that space. If it were really that easy to find a job paying that, then I would go do it.

You should look around.

I have. Nothing has panned out. Very few things have even look good.

I don't think it's controversial to assume that most non-helpdesk IT staff are being underpaid for the value they bring to their companies.

Levels.fyi Teamblind.com Leetcode.com

study these 3 for 6 months and you will easily get over 200k.

I can't. My family mostly consumes all my free time. I'm also not able to relocate since my wife doesn't want to. $200k would be highly unlikely in my area.

PS I hate how people say 'easily' for salaries that are basically double the median for devs. If it was easy, everyone would have it.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't seem to agree with you: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

They report a median of $116k.

Ok, so it's $6k off. That's still $4k short of the $120k mentioned. Meaning you still have more people making under that amount. Especially when accounting for location (they state midwest).

I've seen decent salaries in the UK advertised, hell I even had an interview for a 2nd line support role, fully remote, for £75k ($100k) - a small pay rise, but far less varied and thus less interesting than what I currently do, so I decided to thank them for the opportunity during the interview and put them in touch with someone I knew.

For an interesting job I could be happy with £75k. In fact in the last 20 minutes I've had contact on linkedin for a pre-sales network architect, which sounds like it could be varied and relatively interesting.

However they only list "competitive" as the salary, which I would assume means £35k ($50k)

Agreed. I'd be happy to see a range, any range, rather than vagueness.

My experience is that once you remove the "rockstar" from a team (and by this I mean that they leave) the other employees take over their tasks and responsibilities without issues, and everything works fine. Which makes me believe the rockstar effect is quite often just a myth.

I have similar experiences. Some people like to be in the forefront. Others, like me, fill in the gaps and don't care about being "seen". When I lead, it's because there's a need for my leadership. I don't micromanage. I do what is necessary for the team to perform. That's it. If someone else needs or wants to fill that leadership role, then I allow them to take the spotlight.

yup, it's easy to "do it all yourself". The real rockstars are the ones who quietly mentor the other team members over and over again until they are up to speed on their own.

I've also noticed a tendency of "rockstar" types to entrench themselves. They'll bury some esoteric process/scripting/infrastructure or combination of the three somewhere knowing that it's a bit fragile but easy to fix. All so they can just say, "I fixed it" after the rest of the engineers have been trying to keep production running for 4 days.

This is a bs argument. If there is actually a "rockstar" and a "meh", they should be at different levels with clear payscale.

Rockstar/meh is perhaps rather untactful or even false way to describe situation. But level thing is not gonna solve the issue because company can't keep too much of difference in level if they both have same "X" years of experience. It will again lead to visible dissatisfaction or even lawsuits.

That's BS. I can't sue my company because I'm a midlevel dev with 10 years experience and an MS, just because a coworker of mine who started at the same time is 3 levels above me in a manager role probably making 2x what I do.

My dissatisfaction has nothing to do with that person's performance. In fact, I was glad they gave him a distinguished rating when we worked together - he deserved it. What I do have a problem with is that the department breaks enterprise policy by mandating a manager pick someone for a bad rating to balance out the high rating. They picked me. My dissatisfaction is solely with the broken policies and not with someone being justly rewarded.

> can't keep too much of difference in level if they both have same "X" years of experience.

This is not true in general.

Why is it that you think that? For a small to mid sized company, developer roles of [Junior Dev, Dev, Senior Dev, Principal Dev, Architect] are not uncommon. In that scale, someone who "is an individual contributor, with the ability to mentor others" fits into "Senior Dev". It is entirely possible to be _amazing_ as an individual contributor... or be just barely able to fulfill the role. But moving up in the ladder isn't correct, since that indicates a change in roles.

For large companies, that distinguish between "role" and "level", sure. But a LOT of companies aren't big enough to do that.

The actual reality is that your salary is not tied to your value, but to your negotiation skills (carried mostly by your leverage when you receive the offer)

Yes, but your ability to negotiate is directly tied to your value to the company. You can't negotiate without any leverage.

This is what most people get wrong in this field. The only relationship between cost of labor and value is the upper bound. Which means no for-profit company would hire someone for less value than what they expect to get in return for that person.

But the actual cost of labor (your compensation) is dictated by market forces just like any other commodity. Why would anyone hire you at $100k/year if they have someone else, just as good as you, that they can hire at $50k/year?

Your ability to negotiate is tied to your leverage, which more often than not is competing offers (including your current job). That has absolutely nothing to do with value, other than the upper bound I mentioned above.

"The reality is that not everyone brings equal value to an org. Some are rockstars and others are meh. It’s natural, and you should be incentivized to improve."

I agree. But that's not incompatible with transparent pay. If this other person is producing more value and getting paid more, great. But show me how that value is twice my own. Those measurements should be going on in performance reviews. Largely, nobody cares to do this in a just way. It's basically just opinions, which are easily biased.

The way to do this fairly and transparently is piecemeal pay. Just like how instead of paying a factory worker £x per hour you can pay £y per widget. If superstar Bob ships 10x widgets he gets 10x pay and everyone will agree it is fair. Note CEO total compensation is usually £x per y% increase in share price or revenue. Salespeople get x% for each sale, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

You could always make things easier with min wage regs etc by giving a low living base wage and then a generous bonus based on what you ship.

right but most people don't actually want this unless base pay already covers all their cash flow needs. quality of life is much better with a consistent $80k salary than making $100k on average but with huge variance.

The performance measures for software dev are already extremely subjective. "Widgets" only work if they are the same. Each software functionally is vastly different in scope and complexity. The quality is very subjective too. Did they build it to be extensible/future-proof? Maybe that's good, or maybe that's a waste by your manager's opinion.

And the reality is that wages don't follow the "rockstarability" of employees but whatever crap the employer could get away with at the time of hiring. Lying and misleading included in that.

Not quite the same, but when asked by a State agency what it would take for to go on full time I gave a number and was told that is more than the Governor makes. My response was well he also gets a house! We had a good laugh together.

Well I looked my Governor up and he makes $175k. California’s Governor makes the most at $201k.

I toyed at the idea of some Federal government IT jobs. An agency was trying their best to pay well and the level was similar to a civilian who has a PhD or MD doing federal work but still only a little more than the median software dev salary.

Usually government contractors can do well since they don't fall in the government pay grades. I interviewed at one paying something like $110-150k, which would be a substantial increase for me.

Most government jobs aren't attractive anymore. I think the COLA was like net -2% last year. Pensions are mostly gone. Politics are raging lately.

I sometimes regret not pursuing the FBI out of graduate school - it was a strong offer. Would have been a very different career path with its own rewards. Now even if I wanted to go that direction I've aged out of joining that agency and State-level agencies would be a crazy substantial pay cut. Though nationwide LEOSA priv is worth something.

Depends on how much you travel. Depending on your state, you might be able to be a deputy constable in addition to your primary job.

The FBI postings I saw were way low. I'm already paid pretty lowly, so they are definitely not competitive ($75k was what I was seeing).

No this was a federal FTE job with the civilian DOD pay scales and pension.

The response should be "sure, but it's a lot less than what the football coach at the state university makes". This perception that it's a government job so it cannot pay competitive wages needs to end. Only then will the quality of services provided by the state improve.

This is weird because it's such an easy question to answer.

"Performance management isn't an exact science and if everyone knew everyone else's pay, it would be total chaos and nothing would get done."

If everyone knew everyone else's pay, we'd end up paying everyone more money, since those overpaid will complain, and those underpaid will shut up.

Such a system will encourage rigid pay schedules (ie. all engineers with 5 years experience get X, non-negotiable). Rigid pay like that advantages poor performers, and good people leave.

The end result is a company giving pay transparency ends up either with a much bigger labor bill, or staffed by poor performers.

Governments requiring pay transparency though is a weaker effect - since it affects all businesses equally, and then there won't be anywhere for those good performers to jump to - although they may just leave the country.

The workaround is to formally give good performers a different job title with accompanying higher pay.

Or have discretionary bonuses

I guess that's a good way to get around the restrictions. However, that will undermine the intent at transparent pay fostering equality/fairness.

Information asymmetry favors those that have the info. That would be your employer not you.

> The end result is a company giving pay transparency ends up either with a much bigger labor bill, or staffed by poor performers.

I think that a system based on secrecy and/or asymmetry of information won't last long, and in fact I think the current "chaos" happening in the labor market suggests that a majority caught on to what their "true" market value is despite salary secrecy and companies will have to deal with a bigger labor bill no matter what.

Market value << supply:demand

When it comes to salary pricing. Companies respond to "We need employees but can't find any" much more quickly than "Our compensations seems off market averages."

This sounds like a pay optimisation for high performers. After all, good people aren't leaving for Mars but to an employer that pays them fairly(since they know what's their fair pay).

Besides, salary is not the only thing that keeps people or makes them leave. High quality management, pleasant work environment, office location and many other things are also part of the decision making.

In fact, hiding salaries is a welfare scheme for low performing businesses. It will eventually degrade the quality of the society since it's not meritocratic and only sustainable due to information disparity between employer and employees.

The margins of a company shouldn't be coming from the employees tricked into working for less than they can get.

In companies making a good profit, salaries may go up in cases like this. But some companies may not be able to pay everyone the same they pay the best performers.

If such transparency is mandated throughout a region, the best talent can react in a number of ways: 1) They can leave the region. 2) They can all work in the same few companies, either those requireing top talent or consulting companies. (Or go solo.) 3) Employers can find alternative ways to compensate them. (Generous benefits, plenty of approved overtime, generes travel refunds or any other compensation that does not require reporting) 4) Top employees can scale back their effort, and either have more free time or do side hustles. Employers may even encourage this, as it may be preferrable to those people leaving.

Most of the above will make it harder to run highly innovative companies (presumably those that require top talent), and in the end, I suppose this will drag the economy of the entire region down.

My go to answer for that question has become "not enough to keep me there". Worded a bit nicer usually, though!

"Performance management isn't an exact science and if everyone knew everyone else's pay, it would be total chaos and nothing would get done."

How's that work for the GS structure then? Or for union jobs in various sectors?

The only reason chaos would ensure is if there were extensive unexplainable and unfair practices.

My experience with union guys is that the contractors know who is good and who isn't, and the bad or slow workers get a lot less work or get returned to the hiring hall in favor of a different worker.

It depends on what you mean by "unfair".

In plenty of companies I have worked for, you pay quite a lot more than you want for a particular hire not necessarily because they are worth it but because you are desperate and they are nearly good enough. You generally don't get away with putting people's salaries down if they don't perform and if you did, they might leave ending with you being back in the mess.

This might be magnified in smaller companies but it could easily squew salary figures and depending on their sex, it could also make the figures look really wrong.

This might be "unfair" by one definition but it definitely happens and is one reason why it is hard to be transparent about wages. It can also create resentment if others knew that someone was overpaid.

'It depends on what you mean by "unfair".'

Can it be explained on the basis of value? If so, then good. If not, then it's likely unfair.

"It can also create resentment if others knew that someone was overpaid."

How can they be overpaid? The salary was set by the market. If the others are underpaid due to lagging the market, then they might just leave anyways. Their value has changed during their tenure and the company has not adequately adjusted for that to stay competitive in the market.

bingo, I've gone from about $56k to $130k in about 8 years by changing companies. I know another guy who stayed with one of the companies for about 30 years. He was making less then me when I got hired, but about $15k and now he's at about $70k.

This should really end. Job hopping should not be necessary to get a decent wage.

Good job reaching for a maybe "acceptable" edge case. In reality we know it's the drunk sales guy with 3 divorces who needs to pay child support and is buddy-buddy with the CEO skewing the figures.

Word about salaries gets around via the employee rumor mill. The new highly paid employee will tell their co-workers over drinks, or accidentally leave a pay stub on their desk, or someone in HR gossips with their friends. Trying to keep secrets never works when there are no real penalties to prevent it.

In the US at least, employees are explicitly allowed by federal labor law to discuss compensation with each other. Employers generally can't retaliate against them for doing so (although like all labor laws that one is occasionally broken).

In other words, mushroom farming: "shovel them with bullshit and keep them in the dark."

It's rather suspicious that any company I've seen that was this evasive, the pay levels did leak eventually (and the speculations about who is paid what for what reason did bring total chaos) - and surprise! It turned out that performance management is not an exact science, but rather a game of "who's friends with the boss", completely regardless of performance.

The problem at least in France is that prospective employers will demand your pay slips from your previous job. If you are early in your career, they will use this to depress your wages as much as possible, making arguments like "well, we can't just give you a 40% uplift". So if your first employer screws you, the ones that follow can as well.

Personally, I would just forge one with a much higher pay level - but most people who play by the rules get screwed royally.

good grief, that is shocking (and presumably legal)! well, i guess not for long, assuming that FR adheres to such rules.

"but most people who play by the rules get screwed royally."

That's some universal truth right there.

That's absolutely shit, and that practice will end once this legislation passes.

It has not been my experience in 15+ years. It seems it's not prohibited though.

Well, I entered the workforce in 1996 and I have never seen or heard of that practice here in France.

I never have either, and this would be an immediate red flag in my book. If an employer has such bad practices when they try to recruit you, I can't imagine that working for them could be anything one would want.

French here, never seen that. I have been asked for my previous salary but not for pay slips.

Reminder: forgery / use of forged documents is forbidden in France, as per article 441-1 of the penal code.

A man was recently sentenced to 4 months of jail time because he lied about his salary to rent an apartment. [0]

[0]: https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/un-locataire-conda...

There used to be another country which made resumes into a legal document: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitsbuch#/media/Datei%3AA...

Well and all the communist states too. Your personal ID was a small booklet that contained all your employment info. Police frequently checked it and told your workplace if you did anything out of the ordinary.

The fact that someone can ask you for your salary before renting you an apartment is not equivalent to what you point to.

I would prefer this system to the Equifax's panopticon to be honest.

The best system would be to have a third party insure your rent. So you would only communicate these kind of information to the third party of your choice with which you would have a legal contract including a privacy clause.

in France you're asked for your last pay slip(s) and last year's tax statement. the tax statement has a code that you can input to verify the authenticity of the document. https://www.economie.gouv.fr/particuliers/authenticite-avis-...

That would make renting even more expensive and it is almost always a bad deal for anyone under a certain income.

You have to legislate that away or legislate heavy property tax for real estate that is not used for personal living. Which might be sensible and necessary anyway if you look at price developments.

Still kind of a common practice, at least to rent in Paris.

Also he only got caught because he wasn't paying the rent.

French here, never heard of the practice.

Closest I've had is current job, a global company, asking me first and last payslip of my previous employment, from which I was allowed/encouraged to retract information. I figure all they really wanted to check was employment and job title.

Photoshop to the rescue!

It never happened to me in 20+ years of working in France.

I've also almost always lied about my previous pay when asked (which recently has been less than before for some reason) to better match what I was seeking.

I once took a break from software and applied to be a cashier at Barnes & Noble (just to get out of the house). It was entertaining to watch the manager hastily scan the application for a $7/hour, 10 hours/week job and then pause and try to find a polite way to break it to me that they weren't going to meet the $180k I made at my previous job.

I worked a second job at Lowes one summer/fall. Similar story there - tons of questions from coworkers and customers about what I'm doing working there.

Indeed, when I told friends/peers I was working at Barnes and Noble they almost universally assumed I was building their website.

Haha yep. I had one customer tell me I should go to work for him in construction or go to school instead of working at Lowes. The look on his face was kind of funny when I told him I have a masters and work as a software dev. Then it stopped being funny when I realized how shitty it is to be working 40-50 hours at my main job plus 16-20 hours at Lowes and nor even make $100k. Masters degrees are such a waste of time.

Did you get the job? For a lot of jobs like that they will deny you for being overqualified. I know a guy who had a double doctorate, couldn't find a job anywhere for nearly two years due to being overqualified.

He should write Jail instead of Yale when applying.

I did, and I really enjoyed it! It was not a sustainable financial option for me (I spent far more than I made there due to the employee discount) but was successful in that it gave my life a bit of cadence while I recharged for a few months. I almost did the same thing during my last hiatus, but as a parent I was not inclined/allowed to drift off into endless video game marathons.

My limited/indirect experience on both sides of the "overqualified" thing is that it's usually a result of the employer feeling threatened this person will supplant them, or the prospective employee coming off as entitled or non-serious. Having a doctorate doesn't impinge on your ability to mow lawns, but if you're making sure everyone knows you're meant for better things, that's a problem.

Hahaha I got this once - I was working for a startup in the Bay Area remotely from my place in Oxford and then wanted to see what interesting jobs existed in the local area. There is a small cluster of space startups nearby so I applied to one of those through a recruiter. He didn't seem to understand why I was looking to go from a job paying ~$200k to ~$50k (Oxford does not pay developers well at all!) and saying "Because I want to have my code go to space" didn't seem to be a good enough answer.

If you're still looking to do that I can definitely recommend a company in the same timezone! Alén Space is hiring and I can tell you it's a great team (I used to work with the founders).

I absolutely would love to still deploy code to space but I now live in the Bay Area! And am waiting on my EAD so currently unemployed for ~3 months :) If you know of any open source projects that go to space I have an abundant amount of free time!

Check out https://nexusaurora.org/

I read somewhere pay transparency just lowers the amount of pay for disagreeable people who try to earn more. It makes things cheaper for businesses in general because it's harder to get a rise.

Nobody has ever been able to define what equal pay for equal work means because every human being is different (skills, work ethic, ease of working with them, timeliness, negotiation skills, assertiveness, leadership ability etc. etc). So I can understand businesses playing it safe and just paying everybody less than trying to keep people who are good but more demanding of higher salaries.

>I read somewhere pay transparency just lowers the amount of pay for disagreeable people who try to earn more. It makes things cheaper for businesses in general because it's harder to get a rise.

Then wouldn't you see businesses fighting for it instead of against it?

What people think will happen is often different from what actually happens.

Who knows what’s going on, maybe we should just pay everyone the same and let the state decide what goods need producing and how resources should be allocated. It will be fairer right?

business arr run by people and each individual person would like their salary to be as high as possible so no if this is true then no individual has an insentive to support this and it so business would not support it

How do you know whether businesses are in favour or fighting it? Or what if they appear to be fighting it while they're secretly lobbying for it with their EU contacts?

A trend I noticed from all the EU regulation concerning business: you can be certain it will look like it's doing good for people and bad for business but it will just end up screwing common people and small businesses in favour of big businesses.

Think about VATMOSS: great, now Amazon can't charge Luxembourg VAT to customers in France BUT small businesses need to keep track of every EU country VAT, apply it and retain 3 pieces of evidence of the customer location. In practice, small business killed their eCommerces and moved to Amazon or just swapped their payment processors for Paddle (which charges way more but handles VAT for you).

Think about GDPR: it was a money transfer from people to lawyers and businesses are still doing whatever data transfer they need just by adding more text to their EULA which nobody reads.

We'll see how this one goes - but it makes sense that more transparency will have a chilling effect on the cost of high performers who know how to negotiate.

GDPR, like its predecessors for many years, has a substantial compliance requirement which of course costs businesses money. It also however creates a level playing field, most well-run honest businesses would want to comply with these rules (e.g. customer phones up, you have their address wrong, you fix it) but GDPR makes it an obligation for the shady outfit they're competing with too.

> "You understand that the previous pay you listed is more than our boss's boss, the director of our entire org unit gets paid right?"

My response to this comment/question is always "it's not my problem you're underpaying everyone else."

Of course it would be my problem if the employer is underpaying everybody. In fact one of the things I consider when accepting pay offer - as I explained during that step of the process, is whether this would be a reasonable amount to pay other people who might be able to do the job. Taking jobs which don't pay a living wage undercuts their ability to negotiate a reasonable price for their labour.

It's true that it's also necessary to confirm that the job pays enough that it doesn't actually cause me hardship to work there, but of course the advertised range for the position was comfortably more than that. My operating costs are in fact slightly lower than the calculated "Cost of living" in this country.

From your entirely selfish point of view I'm sure being paid less than half as much as before would be totally unacceptable, but it wasn't a big concern for me. It's just a number. Good luck achieving happiness by making your number go up more.

>How "inability to give a straight answer on anything" and "refusal to make any meaningful decisions" came to be considered good leadership traits is a mystery to me

I mean, it's fairly obvious that those are traits which contribute to building the social capital for obtaining a leadership position (which, from everything I've heard, tends to be more important than actually being a good fit for a given leadership role)

see also: Taxes / redistribution.

Some amount of subsidizing "[economically] useless" people is a matter of society taking care of their lowest. Disabled people, people with IQ < 100, people who took good chances and had bad dice outcomes etc.

You act like being an investor is like a secret society where everyone is making easy money and the workers are the fools. Investing is a major risk and sometimes fails spectacularly.

I agree the gender wage gap is generally an issue at the aggregate level due to individual choices.

I disagree with the language you use later in the comment (fought, won, given). Negotiation skills shouldn't drive compensation. Value to the company should. If someone is doing the same work and making the same value, then they are earning their salary. Differences in pay can be explained by documenting the difference in value that is produced - something they should already be doing in performance reviews.

These steps could help anyone negotiate. I'm not a woman and I was lowballed out of college due to a market downturn at the time and my salary has suffered ever since.

I'm a poor negotiator and started my career with a pretty middling salary at a big company in the Midwest. I also tend to get comfortable in roles and don't advocate for myself well or jump jobs often. What this adds up to is that I'm now mid-career and doing fine, but not making anything like the startling salary numbers you sometimes see mentioned here. But I don't blame anybody for it. Nobody owes me more money. Nobody was ever obligated at any point along the way to offer me more money than I was willing to take. I don't feel an injustice has occurred that needs to be righted by legislation. I don't believe I "should" be given more or that I deserve it in some kind of cosmic, abstract sense.

The status of my salary has an easily articulated and understandable explanation. Nobody did anything wrong and nothing needs to be done to correct it (by anyone but me).

You're right. But you're discussing a separate issue. This issue is not about comparing yourself to the starting salaries at other companies. It's about how your pay compares to that of your coworkers, and if the pay practices take advantage of labor (specifically by gender). Are the current new hires at your company making more than you? Even if it's explainable, does that make it right?

What I'm saying is that I object to the "pay practices take advantage of labor" framing. I very well might be paid less than some of my coworkers. If that's true, it's still not the case that anybody took advantage of me. I mean, not in any sense greater than when you buy something you think is worth more than you paid for it and feel like you got a deal. We all "take advantage" every time we buy something for a price less than the maximum we'd be willing to pay.

I recognize, for what it's worth, that this is not a popular intuition (even though I maintain that it's the correct one). People get similarly outraged when they learn about price discrimination schemes, which I find entirely unobjectionable.

The difference is the power imbalance due to the company keeping information secret. When information asymmetry exists, the party with less information is at the mercy of the other.

Your example of products being purchased is a completely different paradigm due to many reasons. The consumer information is available to the company through many avenues such as market research and affiliates. The company generally conceals the cost of producing an item. The scope and duration of the transactions are also majorly different. Let's also remember that the price for the object is the same for everyone, yet you are offering different pay for the same value to the company. That's the problem.

If we really want to go full capitalist libertarian and let markets decide everything, then let's do away with all the protections. I don't want to live half in one system and half in another. Why should we have protected classes or offer accommodations for disabilities? I think you'll find the answer also supports other workers rights, such as the ones being discussed/proposed here.

> Negotiation skills shouldn't drive compensation. Value to the company should.

What percentage of the per-employee revenue do employees deserve? Negotiation is the way of establishing this, and 'value' is only one part of the equation.

Similarly: price of products on the market are not established based on how valuable that product is to the buyer. That's only one factor.

I understand the appeeal of what you're saying, but we don't have many good examples of it working well.

Perhaps the best way to do raise is through collective bargaining - a union.

Yup. Why do you think there is such hostility to them?

A lot of them are really corrupt. In slovenia, unions are very friendly with some political parties and unfrieldly with others, and the "other" one proposed a tax change, which would basically lower the income tax by raising the zero-eth tax bracket level (progressive taxes, 0% for first X eur, then 16% for the next bracket, 26% for the next,... X was to be raised). This would mean that someone earning minimum wage would pretty much pay zero income tax... the unions were against the proposed change, because this would mean that the government would get less money.

That's fair. Unions can be corrupt in the US too. If they get greedy, they can take down the company (manufacturing can only compensate up to a certain point depending on international compensation).

I have started believing in unions more over the years because I work for a company that is well known for doing the right thing and caring. Yet, I've repeatedly seen the company break its own policies and screws people over. So I feel the issue is pervasive if this is really a "good" company.

It could be that contracts without a union could fix my main complaint - not consistently following the rules. But the only way to force this is through legislation or unions. Unions seem to be more feasible.

We were a communist country (yugoslavia) and there were always unions here... but as with everything, all the union leaders were in the party, and did what the party wanted them... same with the company directors... so yeah.

But it's funny, because a lot of left parties here (even the ones with the red star in the logo) are always saying that we should tax work less, and tax capital gains more... but then the "other party" does that, and they start protesting (probably because they hope to be in the government after the elections, and want the money to steal for themselves).

Basically, the only solution for our government is to take them on a vacation with a plane somewhere, like with the polish politicians - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster

I remember hearing about a union in China and thinking the same thing - how the union is basically government run instead of run by the members.

In the US, for years the corruption was organized crime controlling the labor unions to extract money for themselves mostly through "protection" from them starting strikes.

I mean.. technically the unions here are independent... but we all know which way they lean. If it was an organic movement, voulounteers and all that, then sure. But with the amount of money they get, and the amount of work they (don't) do, for me personally, it's not worth it.

>What percentage of the per-employee revenue do employees deserve

While this may vary from company to company and even job to job surely all employees doing the same job deserve the same per cent.

You wouldn't give one salesman twice the commission because he's a 'superstar'

> less likely to ask for higher salaries and raises.

Of all the apologetics around pay gap, I think this is the one that many people could agree is the least fair. The company knows you're worth more, they can feasibly pay you more, they pay someone similarly skilled and talented more. But they do not simply because of a conversation at the very beginning of accepting a role (and once a year). Talk about an abusive angle. That's like saying to a child "Oh you could have got a PS5 and a game for your birthday, but you only asked for a new game for your ps4"... Employers should be seeking ways to retain talent and underpaying is a ticking timebomb.

The cost of rehiring is MASSIVE:

ad/promotion cost for the role(indeed), at least 100 hours of interview time (across candidates), 1/3rd the salary to the recruiter, 3-6 months of gradual training before they're "highly productive", losing 1-3 months of adopting team's productivity to training that person, losing the institutional knowledge of the outgoing person. Losing the opportunity of having a tenured person to promote into a higher level that is even more expensive to hire for. Not to mention the opportunity cost of the work that could have been done (eg if instead all those resources made your product better)

It's asinine to think someone would risk losing an employee over $20k when those costs above easily amount to 10x that.

> The company knows you're worth more, they can feasibly pay you more, they pay someone similarly skilled and talented more. But they do not simply because of a conversation at the very beginning of accepting a role (and once a year). Talk about an abusive angle.

is this abusive?

the company is not your friend, it is always going to pay you as little as it can that still keeps you working there happily.

agreed that companies tend to fail to adjust comp to actually keep people happy & working there, and in many places this leads to people leaving, but this I would say is exactly because the company doesn't know you're worth more

> the company is not your friend, it is always going to pay you as little as it can that still keeps you working there happily.

You're right it's not a friend, however this model sets up all kinds of terrible ethical games. Am I also going to happily work for as many employers and fake as little work as possible to collect many pay checks? See the arms race we're setting up by choosing to play entirely selfishly. (Which economics would call rationally)

From the discussions I've heard among C-level executives at a <500 person company, it's simply accepted that tech people will move to new jobs after a year or two. There's nothing they can do about it, they say, so we just have to scale up our hiring efforts! The thought that maybe they should do something to retain people is not taken seriously. No matter how many times I expressed concern about the potential loss of specific individuals with specialized (won over many years) knowledge of the codebase and the product, my concerns were always met with plans to scale up hiring—despite how little luck they'd had with those attempts so far. Last I heard, they decided to offshore, but assured us they would only accept the best of the best from [foreign country]. I ended up leaving also, so it's no longer my problem. :)

But negotiating is a part of doing any business. Lets say your roof starts leaking... you're willing to pay a lot to have it fixed because the consequences will be very bad very very soon... but you still call around, ask a couple of companies/tradesmen for the price, and choose the best price/performance one, while hoping there wont be any heavy rain before they're able to fix it.

If all of them said twice the price, you'd still have to pay... three times the price too. If it's something you're unable to do by yourself, and if not doing it makes it even worse, you basically have no choice. This applies in the same way to job openings.

The no-negotiating theory would just mean that employers would be fighting for women employees if they were indeed cheaper for the same work output, until the competition would bring the prices up to the men levels.

Where does contracting fit into all of this? If you leave the formal structure of employment and don't fit into the set job titles of a company (or within, but as a contractor and so a different pay band), then can you effectively work around this?

If so, then will those currently getting paid more move into contracting? They'd probably end up with more pay (even than they get now) if they did, so will we see a decrease in the statistical pay gap within categories based on formal job titles, but an increase in the real world pay gap between those that are actually earning more and less under the current system?

So, it looks better on paper, but - if you care about the difference in pay - it gets worse in reality.

Do we see this kind of thing already in the public sector in any countries? They often have public pay bands, but, as I understand things[1], in many places contractors, consultants, and such like can make better money by working outside of this system. So, transparent and formally equal, but actually less equal.

I wonder, if we'll one day read about this in the economist. How there is a growing real pay gap, and how it differs from the formal pay gap. How legislators are trying to respond, but businesses and contractors are fighting back.

[1] based mostly on anecdote and hearsay, rather than real knowledge, so please correct me!

Edited for styling.

It doesn’t fit in. This is employee protections.

For contractors the rate is already negotiated up front IME. Either the recruiter will mention the offered rate along with the role details, or you as a contractor will mention what your rate is.

Honestly, it’s going to be embarrassing with these low salaries when we socialize with non EU colleagues!

like whom? americans? londoners? africans? indians? but you're right that 60000 INR sounds like a lot more than 3000 EUR, because, uh, the number is 20 times (!!!) bigger.

It's all relative to cost of living.

Yes,

though you also have to look into details.

Like as far as I can tell the "actual" cost of living in the US diverges quite a bit from the "surface level" cost you might find when googling ad-hoc.

As far as I can tell this is because (but not limited to) factors like the health system being prone to having high hidden costs, or also small things like you being required to have a care in many metro areas or thinks you are "socially expected" to strive for like owning a house or a more expensive car.

I'm pretty sure similar things apply for other countries, too.

Also don't forget that many people in some countries start in the negative with student loans, which is relatively rare, and when present at much lower rates, in the EU.

… until you take into account everything covered by welfare states.

to simplify this statement: until you take into account that your taxes are used to provide important government services.

> … until you take into account everything covered by welfare states.

You mean the services that barely work half the time?

The salaries are lower before taxes though.

No, they are lower, and on top of that, they are taxed more.

There ain't no welfare state on heaven or earth that makes enough of a difference for new grads to earn 14-18k yearly (before tax). Good afternoon from Spain.

Ha, I actually have an Italian colleague who moved to Easter Europe(Slovakia) which I found surprising at first but then I discovered that Spain and Italy are comparable on salaries but have higher cost of living.

Spain salaries can be ridiculous, there has certainly been a boom and some startups are paying well for senior roles as competition heats up, but I consistently get recruiters pinging me with 30-40k openings for senior positions.

I used to think this (as a euro), then I met an American and he explained that he ended up better off in Europe on a "lower" salary because he hadn't considered the hidden costs of living in the USA.

He claimed (though I'm certainly no expert) that you have to do your own taxes and set aside money for that; he also claimed that "sales tax" had local, state and federal taxes applied, so while it varies from state to state and city to city; it generally ends up being about 18-20%, which is in-line with VAT in most Euro countries.

He made a lot of comments about certain mandatory insurances and the fact that there were no "cost saving" systems, like heavily subsidised childcare or decent enough public transport that meant you didn't have the burden of a car.

Though he said he couldn't imagine living without a car in the US, as it turns you "back into a child". (his words.)

I'm not sure, I don't know everything, but after talking with him I didn't feel bad for being a "poor euro" anymore, because while the absolute "amount" of money he earned was much greater, the amount that he could actually use was lower.

But he also never had any stock grants or anything.. and those are not incredibly common in Europe. So you could be better off anyway. Who knows?

Colleagues of mine in the US work a lot more hours as well. I think our effective spending power in Europe is much better just on that point as well.

This is often an underestimated point. I get 9-5 no overtimes plus 38 vacation days per year (and an ability to purchase more). It would take a lot of money - more than I am likely to get - to convince me to switch to a US working schedule.

> plus 38 vacation days per year

Well, most of my programmer colleagues get 20-25. And they are also in Europe!

36 days here and that's on top of public holidays.

Correct, in fact I would say that for the higher salary you are also giving up a lot of legal rights as well. The idea that you can be fired for any reason at anytime in a lot of the country is an incredibly stressful concept for a meaningful part of the population.

It does make it easier to get hired since hiring doesn't carry as much risk for the employer. Some companies do offer employment contracts that restrict their own ability to fire as well. Both options are available.

> I used to think this (as a euro), then I met an American and he explained that he ended up better off in Europe on a "lower" salary because he hadn't considered the hidden costs of living in the USA.

This is going to be very situation dependent, but usually the math works out in favor of the US. The EU will generally, but not always, have higher taxes, lower salaries, and a lower total cost of living. However, the difference depends a lot on which region you're looking at. Of course, there are also going to be varying quality of life differences that can't be easily quantified, which is where many parts of the EU come out better.

> He claimed (though I'm certainly no expert) that you have to do your own taxes and set aside money for that; he also claimed that "sales tax" had local, state and federal taxes applied, so while it varies from state to state and city to city; it generally ends up being about 18-20%, which is in-line with VAT in most Euro countries.

He was likely self-employed. Income taxes in the US are almost always withheld by the employer. Sales tax does vary depending on the state and local government, but it looks like the maximum sales tax at the moment is a little over 10%.

> Though he said he couldn't imagine living without a car in the US, as it turns you "back into a child".

This is true in most areas. It's possible to live without a car in some of the larger cities, such as NYC and DC. However even then it's preferable to have one (which is also true from experience in Europe as well).

The big ones are healthcare, public transportation, and perhaps childcare (my understanding is that this varies a lot from country to country in the EU). Needing health insurance and a motor vehicle for transportation effectively functions as an additional tax on many people.

Consumption taxes in the US generally top out at around 10% (San Francisco's is currently 8.625%) which is noticeably below European VATs. Sales taxes also generally do not apply to services at all, and most places exempt certain basic necessities such as groceries.

Swiss VAT is lower than that.

Yeah, none of that is true. There is no federal sales tax, and sales tax in most places didn't ever come close to 10%, let alone 20%. In many states it's 0.

Filing your taxes is free. Maybe you can spend $30 if you want to use turbo tax to do it for you.

Any job with these salary differences provides great health care and benefits.

Cars exist in Europe, I know many software developers there that have them. Why people pretend nobody has them if beyond me. And just like in the US, the closer and more convenient to the city center you are the more expensive it is to live there. Cars are also not as costly of a burden as they are in Europe. Also, most European tech jobs are in cities (London, Amsterdam, Dublin) that have similar cost of living to US cities which you don't need a car in (SF, NYC, Seattle). So it's mostly a moot point anyway.

Finally, we get to a point where there is a REAL cost difference: taxes. The overall burden of taxes will be 10-20% lower in the US, which is a substantial difference as it's a percentage on gross, not an additional fixed fee like many of the above expenses.

If you want to pretend all of that justifies a 6 figure salary difference, more power to you. I've looked into making the move many many times with actual figures and it never even comes close to being close.

Have you ever filed your taxes by hand? The system is set up to basically force you to use a tool, and many tools aren’t free, especially if your income is above a certain amount.

While not every point in the parent is fully accurate, dismissing all of them does a disservice to the point that the hidden costs do add up and generally you aren’t as well off in USA as you would think based on salary alone.

My American boss says he does taxes for himself and parent and it's no biggie.

For most people it will take ~4 hours to do on their own with free software.

If you have a regular job and maybe simple investments like a retirement account or stocks, can follow written directions, and use a calculator, it's really not that hard to do your taxes by hand.

Yes. I file by hand every year using Free Fillable Forms.

Am I saying it's a good system? No. Would I ever factor it into compensation when moving abroad? Also no.

Even if you hire an accountant, it's what, $1000?

This reminds me of the argument (always given by people in HCoL areas) that it's not bad to earn less in LCoL areas because you might get paid 50% less, but also rent is 50% less. Forgetting that most other expenses are the same, and even if all living expenses were 50% less, that's only equal if 100% of your income goes towards expenses.

Salaries in tech in the US are so far off the rest of the world that a few more expenses really don't matter.

Curious you left out Berlin in that list! I would certainly choose 30 days of paid time off, parental leave, good healthcare etc over having to live in the US.

And I would (and have) certainly chosen to retire 10 years earlier over a few extra days of vacation. 365 days of vacation beats 30. But hey, if you enjoy that €30,000 salary, more power to you. You can certainly eke out an existence, while you share that bathroom with your flatmates.

This comment is reddit levels of stupid and mean. Is there a reason you're such an ignorant cunt? Keep malding:)

Yeah, none of this is true. There is federal and state income taxes with 7(?) states not having income taxes. 3(?) states do not have sales taxes. My states sales tax is 2%, but the locality has a 6% tax, so total sales tax is 8% and is higher on thinks like alcohol.

Filing your taxes is free, but depending on the financial moves you make (selling stocks, rolling over a 401k, etc) you may need to set aside money throughout the year to pay the bill.

In most non-tech jobs you will pay hundreds per month for health/dental/vision/life/etc insurance. Among of required insurances, home/renters/car/etc can be a couple hundred per month.

Agreed on cars - in major cities you may not need them, but they are required everywhere else.

I don’t know anything about net differences so you are probably correctly that earning more in the US is still worth it, but I don’t think your characterization is accurate.

> so total sales tax is 8%

GP was comparing to European Union by stating sales tax in the US "generally ends up being about 18-20%, which is in-line with VAT in most Euro countries"

Most countries in the EU have 20%+ VAT indeed [0], however the average combined sales tax in the US is 7% [1] - a third of that.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/value-added-tax-2021-vat-rates-in-...

[1] https://www.aarp.org/money/taxes/info-2020/state-sales-tax-r...

> but depending on the financial moves you make (selling stocks, rolling over a 401k, etc) you may need to set aside money throughout the year to pay the bill.

isn't this true everywhere in the world? That taxable income from something like selling stocks has to be paid, and money may need to be set aside for it?

>He claimed (though I'm certainly no expert) that you have to do your own taxes and set aside money for that;

Unless you're a contractor, small-business owner, or some other sort of self-employed, no. Taxes are deducted automatically from your paycheck by your employer from every paycheck. At the end of the year you need to file a tax return, and you can do this yourself for free. But even most paid tax return services usually only cost ~$50-$150 for the average worker.

>he also claimed that "sales tax" had local, state and federal taxes applied, so while it varies from state to state and city to city; it generally ends up being about 18-20%, which is in-line with VAT in most Euro countries. And, as a general rule, a state with higher sales tax will usually have lower (or no) state income tax, and vice versa.

There is no federal sales tax in the US. It does vary from state to state, but it ranges from 0% to ~10%, nowhere near 20%.

>He made a lot of comments about certain mandatory insurances

The only mandatory insurances are car insurance (and even then it's only mandatory if you want to drive a car) and health insurance (and even that has only been mandatory since the ACA passed, and all the enforcement provisions of that have been gutted). The cost to an employee for decent health insurance is usually going to range from $0 a month to a several thousand a month, but the average is something like ~$700 a month for an individual to get coverage and ~$1,400 for family coverage.

Public transport outside of major cities does suck, but I don't think that's easily fixable. Something a lot of Europeans don't realize is that the US is way, way, way, way less dense than Europe. The US has 33.7 people per square km, the entire EU is 116.2 people per square km. public transit isn't really feasible because the costs to provide it go up almost exponentially with lower population density.

>I'm not sure, I don't know everything, but after talking with him I didn't feel bad for being a "poor euro" anymore, because while the absolute "amount" of money he earned was much greater, the amount that he could actually use was lower.

Even after accounting for things in Europe like free healthcare, the actual amount of spending power the typical American has is actually still far, far greater than that enjoyed by the typical European. The metric you can look at to see this is consumption: ~$38,000 per capita for the US in 2017, vs $28,000 for Switzerland, $23,000 for the UK, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

PPP and other factors make a one-to-one comparison difficult, but Americans have far more spending money left after taxes, and that combined with them making more money in general makes Americans far more wealthy. Especially in the software dev industry.

As far as I can see in the definitions, Household Final Consumption does not include public expenditure on behalf of individuals (that would be "Actual Household Final Consumption). US healthcare expenditure per capita is a bit over 10,000, almost exactly accounting for the gap seen in that list between the US and the richer European countries.

OECD data has an indicator for household disposable income including "social transfers in kind, such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations" and accounting for purchase power parity. US has the highest PPP-adjusted household disposable income in the world.

https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm#in...

> and even then it's only mandatory that f

"only if". Given that having a car is a must in the vast majority of places in the US. And given that yes, you do need medical insurance.

I've worked several years in in London, Paris and now the Northeastern USA, so I think I am in a position to draw some high-level conclusions. In a word, your friend is not wrong about there being hidden costs in the US. However, for many high-education jobs, American employers pay significantly more. In pure monetary terms, a software developer will be much better off in the US.

I think it's really hard to have this discussion without some hard numbers. Note that this is a simplified analysis. I am not accounting for the various deductibles (social security, etc.), state taxes etc. I have restricted the analysis to roughly-comparable cities, but it seems to hold at the national level as well.

Currency conversions are left as an exercise to the reader :)

====================================

Median salary for a senior developer

- Paris: 65k € (Paris) (n.b.: some sources say 45k €, but this does not match my experience)

- London: 90k £

- New York City: $160k

======================

Tax Brackets in France

Up to 10,225 € 0 %

From 10,226 € to 26,070 € 11 %

From 26,071 € to 74,545 € 30 %

From 74 546 € to 160,336 € 41 %

Above 160,336 € 45 %

==================================

Tax Brackets in the United Kingdom

Up to £12,570 0%

From £12,571 to £50,270 20%

From £50,271 to £150,000 40%

Above £150,000 45%

=================================

Tax Brackets in the United States

From $0 to $9,950 10%

From $9,951 to $40,525 $995 plus 12% of the amount over $9,950

From $40,526 to $86,375 $4,664 plus 22% of the amount over $40,525

From $86,376 to $164,925 $14,751 plus 24% of the amount over $86,375

From $164,926 to $209,425 $33,603 plus 32% of the amount over $164,925

From $209,426 to $523,600 $47,843 plus 35% of the amount over $209,425

Above $523,600.99 $157,804.25 plus 37% of the amount over $523,600

There are many reasons to pick one place to live over another, but it's very difficult to argue against the enormous economic advantage to working in the US, even with the "hidden costs".

With regards to health insurance in particular, it's important to point out that the quality of care on the upper end of the spectrum is far better than anything I've ever had access to in Europe. I pay $1.2k/month in health insurance and pay nothing out of pocket for: dental, vision, emergency care, ambulance transportation, extended stay in hospital, mental health services, etc. I have a $10 copay for all medications. Waiting times for appointments are on the order of single-digit days. If you make the median income for a senior software dev in NYC, that leaves you with about $145k.

Concerning cars, they are far more affordable here than in Europe, especially if you buy a reliable used car. I drive a 2000 Subaru Legacy with about 125k miles on it. It costs me about $850/year to insure. I pay about $100/month in gas, so let's round that up to $1,500 per annum. Last year, I spent $1,236.57 in maintenance & repairs. Total cost of ownership: approximately $3,600 per annum. If you make the median income for a senior software dev in NYC, that now leaves you with $141,400.

College education? It's wildly variable, but let's take the pessimistic case of sending your two children to an Ivy League school that costs $75k per year. Let's be even more conservative and factor in an additional $25k in non-tuition costs (room & board, meals, books, pocket money, etc.). That's a total of $800k for two BAs. Assuming you have twins who go to college at the same time, that leaves you with 18 years to accrue those savings, or about $45k/year. Taking the leftover salary, that leaves you with about $96k. For comparison, my education in an American "public Ivy" school cost about 36% of this figure, which would leave you with about $125 in gross annual income. There are tax deductions for tuition fees, and many scholarships available for good students.

It bears repeating that there are many good reasons to prefer living in Europe over the US. Economic analysis is not the only relevant analysis. But, it is very difficult to argue that the cost-of-living breaks even for the overwhelming majority of STEM jobs, or jobs requiring post-secondary education. If you have a college degree, you will almost certainly have more money in the United States than in the European Union, by a significant margin. There is a reason the Brain Drain exists.

Also I bet his healthcare costs were a lot higher in USA.

Is there anything in this mandate that prevents corporations from listing unreasonably large ranges?

For the sake of this example, let's say FAANG is looking for a software engineer and the range for the job listing is: 68k - 600k. Would this be allowed?

I ask because Denver, Colorado has identical mandated restrictions for job listings, and employers are skirting regulations by offering ridiculously broad ranges, putting everyone back at square one.

Candidates will be more attracted towards positions that list accurate ranges. Also, for this mandate there's this gem: "Employees would have a right to ask their employer for sex-disaggregated information on the average pay of other workers doing the same work or work of equal value."

If I understand correctly they basically list what other people in the same role in the same company are paid. E.g. the company has 5 junior software developers and they are paid between 40k and 60k€ then that must be listed as the range if a new junior software developer is recruited.

I'm very interested in this too.

OTOH it can't be worse than no info at all!

The lower range still gives some information and will probably be used as an indication of what the company is at least willing to pay.

If they put it way lower than their actual budget, it will scare away the candidates they are targeting.

Also, won't companies just make narrow job titles sometimes only held by one person?

Is there anything in this text that would prevent a company from posting offers with very large ranges?

"this position salary can be from €35k to 75k€ depending on multiple factors"

Such ranges would render it pointless

I'm not sure. If you can afford to be picky such a large range might be a bit of a red flag.

Also, if I'm looking for something close to the top of the range the possibility that I may get a way lower offer might put me off. Specially if I'll need to fight the company to get the top of the range salary.

I can think of some unusual situations with a really small company. Say you're looking for people who can do two tasks and those two tasks either don't come along in the same person or take too much time for one person. So you're looking for two people, but you're also looking for one of them to be senior and head up the team -- you don't care which one.

I feel like this comes up in the sub 10 people startup situation. You need someone to work on anything that comes through the door, and you need junior guys to just pick up the grunt work and do tasks.

I would think that it will be benchmarked and compared against the same role/roles in other Europen countries (taking in to account cost of living etc).

So as an example Junior Software Engineer / Developer in one European country may be 35-45k salary but could be 30k-40k elsewhere (where property prices / food prices etc are lower).

This would also may it easier for job applicants to know what the expected pay scale is before interviewing (in my experience recruiters often contact people with roles that would be below their salary expectation e.g. software developer with 10 years experience being sent a role with a salary scale equivalent to a recent graduate)

I think this is going to be the natural side-effect. I remember seeing Monzo posting salary ranges of £40k - £100k for certain positions. So for the right person they'll make a plan but they can also lure in more candidates and low-ball them when making an offer at the end of the process.

That doesn't work very well because if you have a large range then most candidates would be disappointed if they got towards the bottom end, even if that made pratical sense. Maybe you could mitigate this by making the range even larger at the bottom end, below the minimum that you would ever pay, but then you'd put off the best people (who are the people that you most want to avoid putting off).

Why would the best candidates be put off by a low minimum? Their salary isn't going to have anything to do with the minimum.

If anything, the best candidates should prefer a wide range. That would mean there is more opportunity for them to distinguish themselves beyond just "years served".

I don't have a problem with wide pay ranges for the same job as long as it's detailed - e.g. "job X with 1 year of experience pays this much, job X with 10 years of experience pays that much". It HAS to be made transparent, else people will just troll with a range of "minimum wage" to "trillions per second".

> Why would the best candidates be put off by a low minimum?

Because they now know they're competing for a position with (a lot of) people willing to work for half their salary, and they know employers like to pay as little as possible if they can get away with it - so their chances are pretty low. It becomes obvious that there is little point in going through the process altogether.

Because a low minimum signals that the position is not as senior and not as serious as the description claims it is.

If you advertise for a senior software engineer and your range is 50k-250k, why would I apply? It's clearly not a senior software engineer position if you're willing to hire someone for 50k.

Why dismiss the proposal based on how companies can avoid it? I like this proposal because it is a step towards transparency. It is not perfect, as any law, but the small steps are compounding over time.

It is not as much about dismissal of the proposal - they are just pointing out a trivial mechanisms to bypass it, all the while making us all worse off.

I for one suspect that better the "equality enforcement" gets the less ability a company has to reward a better worker over worse ones. This applies to both men and women.

When everyone is "equal" it just means more productive people subsidize the work of less productive ones. Which at least today can be rewarded.

If someone is not productive up to the company standards is usually let go, at least in private sector for small-medium companies ( Public Sector and large corporations are different thing).

At the same time, even if the range is large you might still give an hint to the employee for how far they can go with their raise requests.

* Employees would have a right to ask their employer for sex-disaggregated information on the average pay of other workers doing the same work or work of equal value.

If an applicant cannot get the high end for that position then it seems reasonable to counter. Also, it'll just look stupid to applicants.

35-75 would also help rule out the role for quite a lot of people.

I assume the range has to be based on actual salaries that are being paid in that company for similar positions.

> Such ranges would render it pointless

Employers will pull shenanigans, surely, but it's a start. And when the lower bound doesn't compare well with competing offers, the employer might risk losing the best.

Then we have more regulation to prevent said shenanigans.

We either do nothing at all and leave the marketplace to the forces of favoring the employer or the other way around.

The reality (based on my current interviewing) is open roles already have this range, and it is relatively wide. But by not disclosing they can get you lower. Say range is 170-220, you are coming from 170; they offer you 170 and you negotiate 180. You feel good and got a bump, but employer could have gone higher.

But not all employers are offering the same range. I ask up front now and select the higher paying ranges to start, then ideally you get an offer from multiple of them at the same time, and you know how high you can push it. By simply going back and forth between them they negotiate for you. Obviously that is a luxury, but by merely knowing the range, even if wide, you greatly increase your ability to land a higher paying job.

If they post 170-220 they can afford 220, and everybody will be hitting the upper margin of that.... this means that they'll advertise 140-190, you'll get 180, and be happy, even though they had a budget for 220, if they couldn't get you to do it for 180.

Everyone won't hit the upper margin of that; only those that are either exceptionally strong, experienced, or landing offers at multiple companies will. More generally though, the trick is to research and interview at multiple companies, and get the salary range established early (first call). Companies compete on talent heavily right now, so you can push the ranges by simply talking (not even interviewing) to enough companies, asking ranges, and selecting out the lower ones.

I don't get why pay range guidance isn't just completely standard. I have pretty much always had them and it's really helpful to weed out bad fits. As a job searcher, it also helps me to understand what opportunities to look for, and save everyone time. I don't think this needs to be regulated, but I feel it's a good practice period. The best reason I can think of for not displaying it is because of some other regulatory concerns. Removing regulatory barriers could maybe help here.

> Such ranges would render it pointless

They would surely make current employees ask, "So what do I have to do to move from my 45k to the theoretical 75k max?"

@dang, i would suggest to change the editorialized title.

Its not a fait accompli, its a draft under discussion.

E.g. Proposed EU directive on pay transparency andbetter access to justice for victims of pay discrimination.

Related "Pay Transparency: European Commission proposes measures" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30429182 It's still a proposal not a mandate or requirement yet.

I never started a conversation with a client or an employer, about work without clear idea how much I will get in return. Usually after taxes on a hourly rate measurement. If a company is not giving this information before the interview is not worth any attention at all. Period.

I think these proposals go a long way towards closing the asymmetrical advantage that employers have when it comes to salary negotiations and generally creates a much better functioning labour marketplace as a result.

Many posts here talk about value-to-employer, but I have only ever seen wages driven by best-alternative-to-negotiated-agreement [0]. I find the discrepancy odd.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/best-alternative-to-a-n...

How does this work for US companies working for remote workers who can be from the US or EU?

Not every employee in role X is as good as every other employee in role X. The better ones deserve higher pay, which creates an incentive for the others to up their game so that they, too, can earn more.

Why try harder if it's run like romper room?

That is what bonus structures are for. Where you can pay extra in addition in order to incentivise better outcomes for your business.

What enshrines bonuses from being free from these disclosures and regulations? Any law about pay could be extended to bonuses and bonus disparity becomes pay disparity (unless I'm missing some enshrined, unchangeable, legal exemption/difference between bonuses and pay).

It’s not a law about compensation it’s a law about salary as far as I know. So total compensation is salary plus bonuses in that scenario.

A lot of bonuses in the EU are paid based on numbers. EG. Bonus of 20% of price for every product sold.

If I sell 100 product x and you sell 10 product x in the same day we are not doing equal work.

Heavily editorialized title - for "EU to..." to be accurate it would have to be much further along the legislative process. This is at a draft report stage, not even voted on in committee yet.

Money quote: "... more than two-thirds of them have said they are in favour of the publication of average wages by job type and gender at their company (64 %)."

Since when are 64% more than two-thirs?

I find myself at the other end of the equal pay problem - I am equally payed with equally titled but not equally working coworkers. The entire management chain has clearly different expectations from me: I get most if not all of the difficult tasks and my coworkers rely daily on my guidance.

In this quarter discussion with my manager I've been told I can not get a pay raise as it would create a discrepancy with my coworker salaries. As an current EU and formal communist republic citizen I find this worrying to say the least. The only option I have is to work less and browse youtube more. As that brings back communist memories I started looking for another job.

So I guess my question is how do they plan to measure the work part of "equal pay for equal work"?

How is this any different from the normal state of affairs?

You think you work too much and are paid too little? Then leave, this has nothing to do with "equal pay".

> How is this any different from the normal state of affairs?

They explained that in their post. They aren't getting a raise because it would create a discrepancy with the pay bands. This is exactly the type of bureaucracy being enshrined in law here. It removes discretion and disincentivises those who are capable.

I believe their point is that it's thematically similar to the company policy they chafed under, and were reminded of communism by.

but that's still a diversion from the real problem: their boss isn't willing to give them a raise. Even with this legislation, if the boss wanted to give a raise they could simply change the salary and give a new title. The "pay bands" is just another excuse from a bad manager, and if the pay bands didn't exist then the manager would just find a different excuse.

Good luck finding another job. This is a problem of shitty management, not transparency, right?

> I am equally payed with equally titled but not equally working coworkers. The entire management chain has clearly different expectations from me: I get most if not all of the difficult tasks and my coworkers rely daily on my guidance.

Careful with this line of thinking. It is just going to lead to aggrandizing yourself while downplaying and belittling others work. Once you get to that point you become the problem not others.

So no comparison of myself to others is allowed? Regarding work amount, difficulty or results? How exactly do I become the problem? Other than the fact that I'm leaving for another job?

> So I guess my question is how do they plan to measure the work part of "equal pay for equal work"?

I do hope that the new laws don't directly require that, but that that would just be a positive consequence of having public salary statistics for each company.

I.e. people would automatically start demanding equal pay if they roughly knew how much other people in that company earn. Especially for insecure or less agressive people (e.g. women, fresh graduates, foreigners, shy people,..) knowing exactly what a fair salary is, would give them more leverage / confidence during salary negotiations.

And all that happens automatically, without the government needing to dictate any specific salary requirements.

This sounds like a lie. There is no obligation to pay everyone the same (and neither would this regulation, once it is eventually agreed, create such an obligation).

You should ask for a promotion. Explain how you are taking a leadership role in your team and mentoring your peers. If you get a new title your employer can also cone up with a salary which no longer needs to match your current peers.

I worked in a consultancy in London in the 80s. Salaries of everyone were available and usually pinned on a notice board. It was very liberating.

Wouldn't that result in overly broad ranges being advertised?

In this proposal, I dislike the very heavy and singular emphasis on gender. In my country, the Netherlands, when accounting for hours worked and the field people work in, the gap is about 5%. Some theorize part of this remaining small gap is men more aggressively negotiating, but I'm unsure. In any case it's pretty much a solved problem.

Even more if you consider the trend. girls/women dominate in higher education and the breadwinner model is soon to be flipped. Add to that the fact that in some fields, women are now favored to balance the headcount in terms of diversity.

Sometimes in extreme ways even. The university of Eindhoven has stopped considering men altogether in their hiring of professors. Imagine being an absolute guru in your field, fully qualified and wanting to passionately teach at this very high level. But you can't...because you have a penis.

None of this is to say that no work remains in this area, but I openly wonder if legislation is proportional to the issue at hand, if there's even an issue in the first place. The legislation seems distrustful of businesses, assuming there's some secret plot against women progressing.

I frankly find this type of regulation insulting and degrading to women and minorities. It creates this image that society is strongly working against you at every level, which is vastly overstating things. It also constantly signals to you that you're a helpless creature with no agency, you require special help with every interaction in society, as you can definitely not make it on your own.

It must feel terrible to constantly be reminded of the fact that just your gender defines you. You're not a talented female programmer that is creative and a great communicator. No, you're a woman. A special case. It must feel even worse to constantly have to wonder where you've been "helped" in your career and if you're just a diversity token. Did you get that raise based on performance or because it looks good on the Excel sheet sent to the EU?

We're even at risk of making nuclear objects out of women. Businesses and male colleagues being scared of them. For example, a recent study showed that female founders do not get useful critical feedback from VCs whilst male founders get harsh but useful feedback.

I guess the VCs are scared. Is this what we want in the work place, male-female interactions not based on good intent but based on fear and mistrust? Imagine being a woman and having a bad week. At the end of the week your male manager says: "best week ever, proud of you". Would you at all feel taken serious?

When?

I look forward to when every human interaction is finally regulated in law, and we're still not happy.

And that's a good thing, no? I mean if we were happy with current state of things we'd still be living in caves. Bickering and not being happy is what drives progress forward. You want it better than current state of affairs, for you/your kids and that makes the human brain jump from riding on horseback to riding in a Tesla in roughly 200 hundred years.

We can still be happy with the current state regarding some things, and not happy with the state of other things.

Every human interaction? No, it won't be regulated.

(Almost) every human interaction between a company and an actual human? In most cases, yes please.

Well...what happens when company lawyers and lobbyist are the ones drafting regulations governing every human interaction with said company?

Does that sound like initiatives written by corporate lawyers?

Who do you believe this affects more. Big corporations or small/medium businesses

EDIT: to be clearer, what if this is to hinder competition? This seems like it would affect small companies disproportionally more than big ones, since small ones will not have a formalized pay system (and probably shouldn't, since value produced is way less obvious).

Every time there's this cry of "think of the small business!".

And every time it's bullshit.

Or perhaps most regulation is harmful to small businesses because they lack the lobbying power of the elite.

I mean they are apparently necessary because people won't stick to the universal "don't be a dick" rule; they'll argue about what defines "dickish behaviour".

What if the people writing regulations are also dicks?

Other people should watch how regulations are written, i.e., participate in politics.

"It shouldn't happen" is not a great answer to "what if something bad happens?".

But it is quite common!

Don't worry, even getting close enough to that dystopia will wipe out the society and so not that many people will be left to worry about happiness.

Great then everyone knows the minimum salary I earn. I always wanted that.

It's public in many countries anyway - Norway and Sweden at least have public tax returns.

How many?

> It's public in many countries anyway

That doesn't mean it's good and it is not public in all countries. I don't consider this a valid argument.

Nor does it mean it's bad.

Also how do others know that some job ad matches the job that you are doing?

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sala...

What do you mean public tax returns? Public to who?

Meaning there's a website where I can look up the incomes of my Norwegian friends.

+1 for Switzerland

Is this still true for Sweden with GDPR being a thing?

My last job was for a local government in the US. All public employees in the entire state have their exact salaries (including before and after benefits) publicly available for anyone to see.

Happens like that on some federal grant program employees. It is a bit harder to get that information though. Many school districts also publish all salaries and that has come up a lot in politics in the US.

Should make for some great dinner conversation at family gatherings.

Each EU country is perfectly capable of intruducing such laws if they feel like it. I don't see the benefit of the EU forcing this regulation on the whole bloc.

I would love to see just how big the disparity is between countries.

Just like they can introduce laws to help workers' social protection. Or safety measures. And yet they don't.

You know its a crap proposal when heroic bragging about equal pay for everyone ends up being about the gender gap only. Age, religion, nationality and the classic: "I don't like you" not included.

ok, perhaps put a bit blunt.

The result is that people looking for equal reward end up digging though bloated discrimination laws seemingly talking about everyone except them. IMHO if you have to be a member of a protected group or gender it is unequal treatment. It is the exact behavior we were trying to get rid of.

Lets do equality without some being more equal than others.

These laws don’t have the effect people think they will in tech given that “salary” is often a small part of someone’s overall compensation.

A role might say it has a $150,000 “salary” but if someone has say $300,000 in RSUs on top of that then they’re really making $450,000 with a $150,000 “salary”.

Eg in the US employers must publish the “salary” for certain visa applicants, but those numbers are often only a small fraction of total comp because they exclude equity-based compensation. Given that different companies give different cash/equity mix in their comp plans this leads to a lot of misleading data points about the pay of various companies. One company many look like it it’s more (because it does in cash salary) but actually the total pay relative to others is much less (eg because they give out less stock).

Sounds like that creates two incentives, one the one hand to mention directly in the job posting whether salary will be a small part of someone's overall compensation, on the other hand this might also incentive companies to push the salary/stock ratio up to appear more competitive.

Given the wide availability of more complete data points on total comp packages from other sources (eg levels.fyi) it’s unlikely a “government mandated salary database” will add any net new information in many cases, and per above that government salary data will likely be misleading at best.

I do get that the optics look good though and it makes politicians feel like they’re doing something.

Barely published and the US tech sector is looking for ways to minimize its effect or bypass it completely.

levels.fyi is dependent on people willing disclosing, and is of course for very limited sectors of the job market.

Maybe it would be useful to remember that the "options-based tech payment" is more a US thing, more a certain US area thing and even more with a certain type of employers. Not saying that it doesn't happen in Europe, but we're talking a small minority possibly overrepresented on HN.

We don't really have startups in Europe. We're only paid money.

I work at one in a building filled with them in Europe. N=1 though but it refutes your claim.

That's such a ludicrous statement I can only assume you meant to say something else

RSUs aren't much of a thing in most of the EU.

I'm from EU and in my country, RSUs are considered a kind of salary and taxed in the same manner so perhaps they will have to be mentioned as well? The idea is that you can get paid for your work by different means, money being only one of them.

RSU value at vesting is taxed like salary in the US too (gains post vesting would be taxed less at capital gains rates if one doesn’t immediately sell).

It’s a change for all job postings, across all industries and roles across the EW. Not just the privileges few who work in the western North American technology bubble

I'm sorry by Europe is not USA. We have no RSU and little to zera extra compensations. Salary is just salary. Please don't undervaluate this law proposal if you don't know what you are talking about

Speak for yourself, I've had both RSU-like arrangements and bonus payouts on a similar order to my annual salary working in Europe.

While lot of forms "paying by with stock" or "bonus based on partial profit margin" and similar a not quite legal in many parts of the EU it's not that bonus payments and similar don't exist they are just less common and more constraint.

Working in Ireland RSUs are very much a thing here same as in US

When you take a look at the job market in totality, hardly anybody is paid in anything other than salary.

You do understand that there is more to the workforce than engineers at SV startups and big tech, right?

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