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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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

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

That's some universal truth right there.

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...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Photoshop to the rescue!

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.

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.

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.

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.

He should write Jail instead of Yale when applying.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

> "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.

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/

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."

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.

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.

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).

'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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."

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.

>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)