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Comment by ablatt89 | Hacker News Reader

Good for the engineer who is an expert in those audio and video testing and can get hired for the role. We should be thankful engineering has provided many folk who were previously poor, an opportunity to rise to the middle class simply by studying and being smart.

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You're right but I think you're missing the point. Offering a range that broad in the job listing is just an effort to flaunt a law. That law was put into place to help the people you're talking about.

It’s not flaunting a law. It’s a typical built in Sacramento law written by dilettantes who can’t think through the simplest of problems.

Just like the “can’t charge extra for using a credit card” law. Prices went up and gas stations give a cash discount.

"Can't charge extra for using a credit card" is a contractual condition imposed by the credit card companies. If anything there should be a law voiding such conditions as contrary to sound public policy. Why should cash or debit card users in a competitive market be charged extra to subsidize rewards for credit card users, for example?

Built in Sacramento https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/credit-card-surcharges

It is always convenient for businesses to have the legislature enforce their preferred contract conditions in statutory law, but this particular statute sounds like it is unenforceable.

Well, there is a law that states you can't charge extra for using a certain credit card.

If you want to charge for credit card payments, the same fee has to apply to all cards you accept.

Because they don't. Handling cash is expensive, and typically costs more than credit card fees.

Yes it is.

Perhaps Netflix is not _breaking_ a law, which itself may have been written by "dilettantes", but this action certainly disabuses us of the notion that Netflix has any intention to adhere to the spirit of the law, which was to reduce racial and gender-based salary gaps.

The "spirit of the law" is to bend reality. Laws are always well intended but are often, to put it bluntly, stupid. If it were really that easy, we'd be living in paradise now. Just write another law!

The only thing wrong with the current situation is, unfortunately, anyone naive enough to believe that this law was supposed to have the intended effect. Otherwise, it's functioning exactly as any sensible person would have predicted.

Is it flouting a law though?

The credit card thing mostly isn't a law, it's part of the merchant agreements. There's a few states with a "no fees" law (which all allow cash discounts):

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2021/04...

The typical cash discount at any gas station in California that I've seen is 10 cents.

I get 3% back on gas purchases from my credit card.

Question: At what price per gallon does it stop making cents (heh) to buy with cash?

Hint: California hasn't had gas at that price for many years already.

Written by the same people that gave us the “everything causes cancer” warnings?

> Written by the same people that gave us the “everything causes cancer” warnings?

No, Prop 65 was written by a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund and proposed and passed as an initiative measure, SB 1162 was written by Senator Monique Limon and adoptef by the State Legislature. Different people, different process.

I presume they meant people who share similar values and beliefs, not literally the same individuals. Specifically, the kind of liberal values associated with California, since the state is often mocked for said "cancer" warnings outside of the state (or other states with similar values).

The minimum salary paid for a position is useful information. The median or estimated median may be as well. Legislated disclosure of a maximum is useless. It implies that employees are interchangeable widgets with a cap on their market value that isn't more than some reasonable percentage of the minimum.

There are true superstars out there that some companies can afford to compensate properly, but they are generally remarkably atypical and their salary is irrelevant to what a person of ordinary talent and experience can expect. I think it is great that some of them are worth and can be paid nearly $1M / year, but I wouldn't expect that to be relevant to the salary negotiation of most engineers taking a job with similar duties.

>The minimum salary paid for a position is useful information

Is it? I found SWE roles with a salary range from 50,000-50,000. But in reality I doubt there's any engineers at Netflix making 50k

Misrepresentation of salaries actually paid is false advertising. There was a time when stores would get in trouble for advertising discounts from prices no one actually paid either, like a permanent sale.

Or they're complying in good faith. They may very well be flexible and not really care if they hire a fresh out of school grad or a seasoned expert with a rockstar resume. They'll hire either and pay accordingly.

Maybe, but I don't buy that a FAANG would hire a fresh-out-of-school grad at L5 with a $90k salary.

The L5 thing is weird because the listed minimum qualifications would apply someone 4yr out of college (which doesn't usually correlate with L5) and the rest of the listing is very much worded in a way that is seniority-agnostic.

Depending on how many of the requested qualifications (i.e. you come from a background that gives you little to no experience on most of them but a lot of depth on one specific ones) you hit 90k may be reasonable.

This really just looks like a boilerplate job description with the bare minimum tweaks. Not surprising that the salary range wasn't tweaked.

There is likely no engineer at that level, instead they're gaming the law. They're required to report their salary range for transparency, and they're basically replying with "our salaries are between between 0 and $1M".

I know a couple of Netflix employees making over 700k cash. I also have a friend who was a recruiter at Netflix that handled an offer to an engineer for $1M cash. These are real numbers.

That’s fine but, there are probably multiple levels that have been glommed into one req…which makes it look not great. There should be jr, sr, principal, staff, etc.

Previously Netflix only had 2 levels: software engineer and senior software engineer. I heard they were going to change that but I don’t know to what extent that was changed.

Tell your friend I’m willing to slum it for $999k.

Don’t expect more than 40 hours per week though. It’s not like you’re paying me the big bucks that Mike is getting.

EDIT: On a serious note, I’d be all over this if they offered remote, but if they did they’d not offer nearly as much.

Cash? That seems inconvenient.

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