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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I live in CO and we recently had a similar law pass that required companies to disclose salary ranges. Like you said it does absolutely nothing, companies will list "Senior Software Engineer" with a salary of "$70k - $240k". This often times isn't even the range for the current position, but the "entire range" of offers they extend to any level of SWE.

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That is explicitly called out as not being allowed:

"An employer cannot post a $70,000-$100,000 range for a junior accountant position just because it pays senior accountants at the high end of that range. But it can post $70,000-$100,000 for an accountant if it does not limit the posting to junior or senior accountants, and genuinely might offer as low as $70,000 for a junior accountant, or as much as $100,000 for a senior one."

https://cdle.colorado.gov/equalpaytransparency https://cdle.colorado.gov/sites/cdle/files/INFO%20%239_%20Eq...

Seems impossible to enforce in practice

Due to my recent job search for remote positions in the US, I've seen a lot of postings in CO which include the salary ranges. While some do use stupidly wide ranges, most companies post more reasonable ones. I'm able to filter out those in the former group because this law they have has effectively exposed their dishonest hiring practices, and the companies that aren't trying to obfuscate their pay have also been exposed.

Can they just audit the actual salaries paid vs the range listed at the end of every year?

That sounds like an incredible amount of work. Who is "they" and who is paying them to do all of this auditing?

One "they" is the state government, who happens to already have the info sitting in their databases due to W-2s being reported.

Even so, the bright side is that the applicant’s expectation of the low end has been set.

Without this broad range, someone new to the industry, like a college grad, has no idea what the low range is. This at least prevents those people from getting lowballed and finding out later.

I’ve seen smart techies who are bad or oblivious to money subjects get way under paid, only to learn later, huge discrepancies in pay with the same or lower grade position due to other factors like gender, race, etc.

Even if the range is too large it is still extremely useful; it shows the company doesn't want to post a meaningful salary range which means salaries offered will be in the lower portion. Companies that are prepared to offer a competitive salary have every incentive to make the lower number higher than their competitor's listings.

Not only are the salary bands meaninglessly wide, but I'd bet that if someone was really great and justified more than the upper bound, the company (Microsoft, but any other rational company too) would, of course, pay that higher amount since it's in their interest to do so.

They are not meaninglessly wide. These laws are of great benefit to those earning the least in society. They get to easily see which occupations and businesses pay more and where their labor should be allocated.

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