California companies must include salary ranges in job postings under new law | Hacker News Reader

California companies must include salary ranges in job postings under new law

sfchronicle.com

31 pointsfortran7717 comments

Is it going to be illegal to negotiate a salary beyond the posted maximum?

I suspect your negotiation would simply be "what non salary or wage compensation will you give me?" as that isn't part of the required information.

I did think, maybe you could negotiate to increase the level you come in at, e.g IC2 vs IC1 or whatever - but if that were allowed it seems like it would be an end run around the law, and additionally allow some of the implicit discrimination the bill is trying to prevent (equivalent men and women get different rank/position, which avoids the appearance of pay discrimination as everyone in a given level gets paid the same, it's just one group is more likely to to get put into a higher level than the other)

I honestly don't think this will significantly impact tech, finance, marketing, etc where such a large portion of income is in the form of non salary/wage compensation. But it at least resolves the problem where people were legally allowed to ask what the comp range for a position is, but fear (rightly or wrongly) that asking will mean that they don't get an offer. So that's nice.

I'm also not sure how you make a law that really provides all the meaningful info. There's the obvious simple case of salary or wage, and honestly I think sign on bonuses and stock grants, etc could also easily be factored in. But how do you handle bonus and commission based comp? For commission in many cases it's easy: this person sold $X they get Y% of $X. But at larger scales a single transaction can involve multiple people on commission, so you have to deal with how that's split, etc. Hell I could see a case where a person in group A gets given higher values sales than a person from group B, but to be clear that could be any groups: a real estate company that preferentially assigns people born in NYC to sales in NYC and people born in Jersey City to sales in Jersey City. That seems plausible, reasonable, and would mean that people born in NY would statistically earn more than the NJ one for no reason other than place of birth. Note this is just a silly example of something that seems like it's "plausible" rather than the usual completely absurd/extreme examples.

[edit: as a thought I had a look into the population statistics of NYC vs JC (the city not the religious figure). So my silly example - assuming your employment exactly matched regional statistics, and you had zero actual discrimination - would show up as on average asian Americans earning less than most grous, simply because asian Americans are a larger % of the population in JC vs NYC, and white people earning more than everyone. Again this is just because of the underlying demographics, but it's a good example of how non discriminatory policy can result in something that _looks_ discriminatory. Obviously the counter to that is you could say put people from Memphis in one category and people from Boise in another one to target black Americans.]

They could always hire you to a different position that wasn't the one advertised. This is trivial to work around if you want to on a case by case - but it affects the advertising, and that's going to affect the input of the funnel.

With that same theme, if that's the case I wonder how common this will be: "I'm sorry you weren't a match for position A but you look like a shoe in for position B lower pay tier same duties, would you like to schedule?"

Your reply: "I would not."

(By the way, that sentence costs the hiring company thousands of dollars worth of sunk cost of recruiting and engineering time.) Before this, you wouldn't have known to tell them to kick rocks until much later in the process.

Perhaps the scenario will become more common, but I bet the equilibrium resets to better average pay.

Just curious are you from or do you reside in California or similar tech enclave?

Also see https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-29/new-cali...

The article hints at the rationale:

> “This is a big moment for California workers, especially women and people of color who have long been impacted by systemic inequities that have left them earning far less than their colleagues,” Sen. Monique Limón (D-Goleta), the bill’s author, said in a statement Tuesday. “As we continue to build a sustainable economy, we must ensure every worker is paid equitably.”

Not sure exactly how it benefits those groups specifically and not all workers.

Both can benefit.

For a job whose going rate is M, a company would offer N to Bob and N-d to equally qualified Alice. If they want to hire Bob, they have to publish that they offer N so he applies. Now Alice knows that something is up when they offer N-d.

Theoretically this pushes d toward zero. M and N, I don't know.

Except they post pay ranges and not a single salary. They could just make the pay ranges really big and use the ambiguity to avoid the intended effect

Also I have no clue whether it actually helps reduce pay gaps on average. I remember reading a study in either Australia or UK (can't remember where sorry) where it had the opposite effect

Better information should in theory help with problems caused by lack of information. How it's implemented makes all the difference, of course. I have no idea what if anything this law will actually do.

If they’ve been getting away with paying women less, why don’t companies mostly hire women to save money?

I get the sense you want me to defend a broader position. I was only answering that one specific question about why they mention d.

Largely worthless for tech where salary is often only a part of what you’re paid

I came to say that - and it's not just tech: plenty of finance, sales, etc have significant portions of their annual income come from non-fixed wage/salary sources. RSUs, stock options, etc are particularly common in tech, but there's also bonuses, commissions, etc that from my reading of the text would not be included[1].

It's interesting the SB-973 (the report to actual compensation to the CA gov law) specifies earnings. not wage or salary - clearly there's an understanding that non salary/wage income does actually exist :D.

So it's conceivable at the lower end of the income spectrum (where generally non-salary/wage income is not as significant) this may help, but I've always got the impression that as you get closer to the bottom you approach "everyone is paid equally: the absolute minimum we're legally allowed to"

[1] The bill explicitly states that "pay scale" is understood to be salary or wage range, so excludes additional remuneration. That the bill itself makes this clear makes me, a non-lawyer, think that would pretty quickly shut down any "but the legislature clearly meant X" lawsuits.

Outside of FAANG and startups, salary and standard benefits like a 401k match are pretty much it.

Well, this is obviously a good step forward.

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