New York employers must include pay rates in job ads under new state law
english.elpais.com
english.elpais.com
Looking casually at jobs lately I would say that 80% of them have posted salary ranges. This has been enormously helpful in a) helping me avoid jobs with inflated titles but low pay and b) attracting me to jobs I might not otherwise consider because of very competitive pay.
Seems like a win-win in most cases.
Not very useful, that.
I'm not defending it, I'm pointing out, that when a company tells you this is how they want to be seen by potentially new recruits then listen to them.
It is a red flag for one of two reasons:
- It is intentionally misleading (i.e. top of range is pure fiction).
- Upward mobility is so terrible, that they comingle multiple different tiers of expertise into the same job title.
There is no positive look from this.
One could break it up into separate jobs for the different levels but that's also misleading if you are considering 3 PhD experts and 2 mid-level or 7 juniors and 3 seniors, etc.
In theory its not all that bad when such a post is true, in that it means an individual contributor role might be higher than anywhere else in the industry.
Where are the requirements actually accurate?
For what it's worth, the actual written requirements for many tech jobs are very questionable. In many cases, there's a big disconnect between the people writing the job ads and the people who actually communicate what they want.
And out of sheer laziness or lack of knowledge, there are plenty of recruiters that do things like post JavaScript jobs as Java jobs, as one example I've seen.
So the data says it is useful
Extremely helpful. /s
How about job postings with relatively decent ranges like this backend engineer role in OpenAI: https://openai.com/careers/backend-engineer-evals-understand... with a range of $245,000 – $310,000?
It would be great if the law could say something like "range must be +/- %25 of the target salary" (Obviously that's very difficult...)
"range may have relative error of no more than 10%"?
where the relative error is the usual 2*(max-min)/(max+min)
> Effective immediately, Governor Hochul has signed a law invalidating any provision in an employment agreement that requires employees to assign to the employer any rights to an invention developed entirely on the employee's own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secrets.[1]
[1] https://www.dwt.com/blogs/employment-labor-and-benefits/2023...
curious to hear how the NDA and other laws shift around that.
I work in a very regulated organization where all pay rates are published with postings. [0]
But the ranges are $20-40k for each grade and it’s hard to tell what you will end up being offered and accepted.
I think it helps prevent some mismatches of people confusing $20k and $200k positions but I frequently see people with work history in the $30/hour range applying for very high pay jobs. I find it hard to accurately peg my market value.
When I worked in smaller orgs I would frequently see variability of 100-300% for the same job title. And even in really large orgs with big HR there might be a $100k pay band before bonuses.
So what do I do with a job posting that says $110-250k? If Im senior, do I apply and expect $250k not knowing if there’s a single person who is amazing making they amount? Or if Im junior do I ask for $110, knowing I could get more.
What I do is network to find what the actual pay is and negotiate around there. Or discuss with multiple offers.
Id like to see something like the IRS releasing more anonymized data from w2 for employers that will let you look up quartiles by employer, broken out by employee filing address.
This also has severe limitations but at least you can see how many employees they actually have and actually pay based on taxid. But self-reported pay data is so bad I don’t think it’s actually useful for stuff like “does this company I found on the internet actually hire people?” Unfortunately titles are so useless that I don’t think anything more than number of employees and distribution of their pay is better than what we have now.
The privacy implications are serious and need to be accounted for. But I think only releasing for orgs over 100 or something. Or only for publicly traded. Or only that receive public funds, etc etc
[0] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
This is effectively populism, a simple and wrong solution to a much more complex problem.
Published pay ranges aren’t going to solve anything, but they do reduce the information asymmetry a little bit. They give you and idea of what is possible for they title in that company at that location. Companies have an incentive to post a relatively accurate range, and in most of the jobs I’ve applied for it was.
No, it comes down to about 1/3 negotiating ability and about 2/3 prior experience, impressions you give at the interview, and leverage (e.g. other offers real or perceived). The first one you can get from the resume and the other two happen over the course of the interview(s).
If your resume shows you as a perfect fit for a position with a ton of relevant hyper-specific experience, you will naturally get an offer higher in the pay band than someone with half the amount of pseudo-relevant experience. Pay bands even $40-50k will help because most people actually do have a decent idea how qualified they are for a given job. I've applied for things where I'd be happy getting an offer toward the bottom of the pay band due to no relevant experience, and applied for things where I knew I should be at the very top.
I agree more specialized and very senior rolls are different, but most people are going into much more generic roles. Even then bad negotiating skills can swamp out everything you else if you throw out a low number to someone willing to take advantage of it.
All said we agree that realistic pay bands will help here.
Labor is absolutely a commodity, and companies price labor both for buying and selling based on skills and demand.
You may inhabit some obscure corner of the world where you’re some sort of free agent priced individually. But most likely, you’re working for a company in a title assigned by some HR person into a salary band. The salary band is chosen by the business unit based on their budget.
The wide bands are published to minimally comply with the law. In the long run, they advertise to applicants that the company will happily bone them given the choice.
I’ve also done some research where I took offers people disclosed in TeamBlind and compared them to the job posting, and in most cases the offer was very close to the midpoint https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SfaV1p_jbgoTOyCsD5wd...
"These people are often neither humane nor are they resourceful"
Is the midpoint between 10k and 1M 100k or 505k?
I think intuitively when the span is large we easily reason in logarithms even with little math training.
Or ask HR: What's the logarithmic mean base for your salary range?
This is reasonable and is what I thought as well. But I worked for a firm where senior manager band was $120-350k. Most senior managers came in at $120-150 and would climb through years with the firm. If a new hire at the senior manager rate asked for $225-250 as a midpoint it would kill their negotiation and likely cost them their offer.
I get that it’s a business and it’s nothing personal, but this company had insane profits and mad growth so they could afford to pay people a bit better.
Does a low-paying job in the past disqualify you from high-paying jobs in the future?
Most companies paying premiums recruit a particular pedigree of university graduate. Few graduates of Flyover State are going to be rockstars at the First National Bank of Nowhere and get a fancy gig at Facebook or a hedge fund.
One exception is .gov employees. For exceptional people, smarter companies will usually value their current comp at 150%.
You apply with the knowledge that you will earn at least $110k, and if you want more, you should apply to more employers so that you have the negotiating position to ask for more.
> But the ranges are $20-40k for each grade and it’s hard to tell what you will end up being offered and accepted
Is it really that hard in fed land? I work for the state of California, and which has a similar level of regulation and similar posted ranges, but its pretty trivial most of the time to know exactly where you’d be set. I mean, its not 100% accurate, but this is right most of the time:
If you are apply from outside the system, you will be offered the exact bottom of the range and there will be no flexibility.
If you are inside the system, if its a lateral, you keep your pay. If its a higher range, you move up by the lesser of 5% or to the minimum of the new range. Also with no flexibility.
The circumstances with any flexibility are very limited, what you get is almost completely determined by how you got to the job.
> The privacy implications are serious and need to be accounted for.
Of by-employer actual pay distribution disclosure? Is that why public sector employers pay a hefty wage premium because their employees pay data is public on an individual level, which obviously has even greater concerns?
Oh, wait...
In every tech company there are programmers, project managers, and sales people who have the same titles but deliver vastly different quality of outcomes. And everyone knows this because they instantly pick the good ones whenever they have the slightest optionality.
You have a new project, difficult client, some fuckup to straighten out, and everyone's eyes turn to the same person. It's such a common occurrence, you must have seen this. You must have seen people being fired without a single tear or with a sigh of relief and others quitting to widespread worry over who will manage to step in for them. People with the same roles on paper.
How long until we rationally decide to pay msc91 a monthly “in case the chips are down” bonus/retainer? Msc91 is made better off; the company and its customers are made better off and thereby, msc91’s colleagues are made better off.
If we decide on principle that we won’t do that, how long until a better-funded or better product-market fit company comes along and hears through the grapevine of ex-msc91 colleagues that they should pay their overall higher wages to msc91 and get them to join? Now, all of the good things that could have happened in the prior paragraph are lost.
Imagine a job where results seem fairly easily quantifiable: sales. You want to hire a great salesguy you know. His current salary is 168k and he collects another 85k in bonuses. How do you get him?
You offer him 260 base and some unspecified bonus you will work out later. Why? Because he already knows what kind of bonuses he can collect where he is but only has a vague idea of your company's product potential.
This uncertainty and unattainability of full information forces companies into either wide bands or made up titles. That's even before he goes to his current boss for a competing offer.
There are qualified, employed SWEs that I’m 3x as good as. There are other SWEs who (correctly) look at me and draw that exact same conclusion.
(Hint: it's those things, but at 1x.)
The measurability of value is what was at question in this thread. “The same work should bring the same payment” is not incompatible with “some SWEs provide more value than others.”
Most professional jobs allow for a range of working styles and productivity so it’s only natural people with the same job would be compensated differently based on the value they offer the company.
How do you reward good job performance?
I once spoke with someone who acknowledged this, but said it wasn't a bad thing - if the market has decided that someone is worth less, why should he pay them more than he has to?
I mean, titles don't really mean anything to developers. It's not like in the army where everyone knows the difference between a colonel and a general.
You could run an organisation where everyone from a new graduate right up to Linus Torvalds has the same title, just a different level of pay.
No one is expecting a junior to define the technical roadmap for the next 6 months and coordinate it's implementation across 5 teams* and be the final judge on disagreements.
Edit: typo
To the developers themselves? Yeah, it does to many. To the company in general - there's a reason level descriptions exist. They define expectations for a given person. Let's say you create a new team for project X: you want someone who can plan the project out. Are you going to give that to any "developer" who all exist at the same level? If no, then you have different levels, you're just pretending they don't exist.
It also makes things more clear for the pay. Let's say you get some good mid level dev who gets bumped many times for being really good. If they're just doing well at that level but not advancing, are you going to pay them more than senior devs with more responsibility at some point? Is that a wise decision?
Obsession over crisply-defined levels is a sign of an organization that is too far up its own a*** to actually get work done.
When you’ve got a team of midlevel engineers making $150k and one guy making $450k maybe it’s time to bump that person up.
We aren't talking about an observation between the random difference between two average people. We're talking about the most performant and least performant people who could potentially share the same job description.
The entry level is full of this. If you hire a bunch of engineers with no experience, how often will you see a difference of 3x or larger between the top and bottom.
I would say often, and it doesn't show anything bad about the organisation.
The point of levels is to provide an external signal of competence. And perhaps this law will push companies towards doing a better job of that.
In nearly 20 years of experience pay doesn’t generally correlate with performance. The people who I’ve seen with massive pay differences were the people who could negotiate well and knew how to play the game to come in with multiple offers. Those people aren't usually the most long term productive employees. Some of them are, but many of them are just better tangentially related skills.
The biggest single difference in starting pay by far is having multiple offers. If you make it through selective company A’s hiring process, you likely could have made it through a few similar processes. Whether you bothered to do that or not, says nothing much to me other than how much you care about compensation. But most hiring managers have a serious case of FOMO and this works in the majority of cases.
The reality is that every person working in a position brings different things to the table. While larger businesses create defined level boxes and paths, they're really very rough and imprecise ways to describe people and often do a disservice to people who work hard but not in the way that the boxes "expect."
So there are definitely cases when we see people's compensation out of sync with their level (in either direction) and it's sometimes a product of the company recognizing the value of an employee but having levels and tiers that don't match the employee exactly.
Some companies, for example, tie higher pay to a management/leadership ladder. But you can be a solid-contributing or 10x or whatever software developer without going down the leadership road.
The reason you’d push for a higher level is because it makes it clearer to the next company that you’re capable of higher level work. If you’re not doing higher level work then how are you justifying a 3x salary?
https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/09/text-salar...
They specifically declare the terminology "good faith" and that posted ranges must be made in good faith and accurate to reality. Any individual that feels they are harmed by said range not being in good faith can file a department of labor complaint. The NYS DoL is actually quite aggressive once you give them ammo (complaints, tips, etc) to go after companies.
Because of the laws getting passed in other states, many postings already have ranges and they have looked reasonable to me.
https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/294103648
"The overall market range for roles in this area of Netflix is typically $180,000 - $900,000."
This wouldn't even necessarily need to be broken down by individual employees, per position would work too, with statistics like number of employees covered, min, max, average and median.
They… do no such thing?
However for most people it should be representative and you should be able to get a good estimate of how much they're paid.
Some blue states (I would be shocked to see Republicans support this, despite the fact more information is very pro-market) institute this and maybe someday at the federal level as voters warm up to the idea.
If that's possible, you can at least in theory try to find a representative sample of current employees and get an idea of how much you could realistically get paid.
The median software engineer salary in the US is something like $110k. Still about twice the average individual income in the US[0], but the vast majority are going to be making 99% of their income in cash compensation including bonuses. I've worked for about a dozen companies based across the US in a variety of industries, and never have I or any of my coworkers had access to stock as part of compensation.
1. Software engineers have come to expect it
2. It provides a very cheap incentive for the engineer to remain at the company for the N number of years required to vest
And in the end, they may still end up being worthless
If your entire exposure to software development has been startup fantasy land where profitability doesn't matter yeah most of those companies are giving everyone stock down to the person at the front desk answering phones. That's the minority by every metric - number of companies, number of developers, total revenue, everything. I don't think anyone expects stock compensation unless they're artificially limiting their search to that type of company.
> Also, it only forces companies to list the base salary, but especially in tech, that's just a portion of one's total comp.
"Total compensation" is, to me, a way to inflate one's own value.
1. In companies with no market for stock options (privately owned, startups, companies that are just absolutely worthless), equity is hypothetical money which may never be worth anything. I worked for a company which gave me 250,000 options but the company lost 18mil a year and they ended up cancelling all stock options. Some people worked there for 15 years hoping the options would be worth something and eventually saw them cancelled outright. Unless I'm working for a publicly traded company, I don't put much value in stock options. With a startup, you're basically asking to be paid in poker chips.
2. Health insurance is something I expect to be there, regardless of the monetary value.
3. I've worked for plenty of companies that include a 10% performance-based bonus as part of the compensation only to never get that bonus (or get nowhere near 10%) regardless of my own performance because the company itself didn't profit last quarter, or they did profit and just chose not to pay out bonuses.
4. The perks that you get (free breakfast burritos, free barrista, gym membership) are tokens that can (and will) be taken away as soon as the federal reserve decides to jack up rates on your company lays off 25% of the workforce in order to pay their CEO his 300mil compensation package
"Total compensation" means "base salary plus hypothetical money in a perfect universe"
I hear what you're saying, but man, I really wish employers would be banned from offering healthcare benefits. They have zero business offering healthcare benefits.
> Hire a TC negotiation consultant with access to comp data. They can get you 20-40% more.
What does TC mean here?
I think the commenters here focus too much on themselves and people like them. This law was not written for SWEs with a market value of $120k/year who are being paid $80k/year. 0-60th percentile income workers are getting absolutely hosed and need every bit of negotiating power that they can get.
Our working and hiring culture is very weird and favors employers. Anyone can be fired at any time for (almost) any reason, so your ability to pay rent and put food in your mouth depends upon your ability to find another job. When that process involves several dozen or hundred job applications, long hiring timelines, multiple interviews across days, weeks, and months, >60% rates of ghosting at every step, and exploding offers, lower income workers are often forced to accept the first offer they get regardless of how much lower it is than their true market rate. This wage transparency policy helps low-wage workers avoid entering the long hiring pipeline for jobs that pay abysmal wages.
It is a strong net-positive for these workers who need it most.
It’s worked pretty well, you discuss it in the first steps of the process to make sure they get that’s actually how it’s going to work and then you spend your time interviewing people who are OK with the comp.
If the candidate pool isn’t any good then change the comp. And sure if you want to recruit a hotshot candidate or something nothing is stopping you from taking an individualized approach with that person.
I think people tend to overestimate their ability to game the process. Why not just say what you want.
That happens all the time by the way and it's fine. People often come to one job via keywords and don't see the various options.
I just think the whole premise is that we need this like ninja ability to react on the fly, and optimize the process to perfectly get the comp into this exact number that's the best possible deal for the company or something.
But it's not. It just makes the experience disorienting and confusing for applicants, the same way it does when they have to deal with some insane process to buy cars and mattresses and enterprise SaaS contracts, which they also hate.
Explain the job and then say what it pays. It makes the process so much simpler that the burden should be on people who don't do that to really prove why it needs to be more opaque and confusing for all involved.
I think if a pro sports team could figure out how to make it so the opposing team couldn't tell which one of their players is which they would choose to. Good luck running a shift in the MLB if you don't know if the batter is swinging lefty or righty.
Also I think pro sports teams is probably one of the best examples that public information doesn't make perfect decisions. Anybody that seriously follows a team can tell you about numerous bonehead (perhaps bonehead in hindsight) trades that their team made. Or players that were offered a deal well beyond what they were worth.
Athletes leave teams all the time over disagreements over compensation. At least in the NHL it's not uncommon for a player to take the team to arbitration over their salary [1].
Also, I'm not sure what happens if they offer more than that to someone after posting the offer. I suspect offering lower would be would be lawsuit time... But I don't think a higher offer is that much of a problem.
(If the job is sales, then negotiating for higher pay could just be part of proving your skill, of course.)
As far as I'm concerned, if you wanted 250k but the Jr. Dev's range caps at 220k then you can still negotiate to be hired as a Dev.
But if you wanted 250k and the Jr. Dev caps at 240k I think it's pretty reasonable for them to hire you at 250k as a Jr. Dev and just say that when they made the ad they reasonably believed the maximum salary was 240k.
> [1] A pay range must include a minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly rate of compensation for a job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that the employer in good faith believes to be accurate at the time of the posting.
[1]: https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/09/p687-pay-t...
Instead of negotiating for another $20k, you'll be negotiating to add prefixes like 'Senior' and 'Staff' and 'Architect' to your title, which will be worth $20k each.
https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/168ce1e/saw...
If that company in Belgium advertises worldwide and somehow hires many people who live in New York, you bet NY will argue (successfully) that they have to follow this law, at least prospectively, as it affects residents of their state and the DoL has jurisdiction over protecting the labor rights of its residents.
Do you know which of those fines are due to non compliant cookie banners? Had a quick look but I'm not well up enough on GDPR to figure out which fines are for violating which parts of GDPR.
> The law, signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022, also will apply to remote employees who work outside of New York but report to a supervisor, office or worksite based in the state.
My company applies that same standard nationwide with remote engineers, so kind of the opposite of what you're saying.
When (substantially) all of your comp is cash salary, posting cash salary ranges is illuminating. When a lot of it isn’t, posting a cash salary range just tells prospective applicants one tiny view into a cash flow aspect.
Of this whole tangent is mostly a non-sequitor because that's not what the law requires or is an attempt to enforce.
It makes it so that applicants can see what all employers are offering up front, which incentivizes the employers to be more competitive on salary offer if they want applicants to choose to apply there.
Salary equality for equivalent positions within the company, as you're describing it, would require companies to publicly list what each of their existing employees are making, which is a completely different thing than what this law is requiring.
My coworkers are the busiest people on the planet.
Employment is nearly all cases is at will. Every interview stage ends with "Any questions?" There is definitely a time and place for government regulation. This is not one of them. It's too Nanny State-y.
The smart ones will smarten up and publish a range. As it is, making it required, now you can't tell smart from stupid. You wanna work for stupid? Your dream has some true.
Fair. But that's not how laws work. I may turn down a road not knowing that it's 35 and I get a ticket for going 45. Not knowing isn't an excuse.
True, unless you are a police officer: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/when-co...
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-questio...
I've heard of "mens rea", which means in order for a crime to be committed, you need to have a "guilty mind".
From what I can tell, ignorance of the law can be an excuse. If there's a law stating that wearing purple on Tuesdays is a criminal offense, and I wear purple on Tuesday, a prosecutor would have to prove that I knowingly & willingly committed a crime (e.g. showing a social media post where I saw "I'm going to wear purple this Tuesday. I dare you to arrest me!").
In the case of a traffic offense, ignorance of the law is typical not an excuse because a traffic not a criminal offense.
Can a real lawyer comment here?
Sources for my amateur legal assessment:
- mens rea: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea
- Actus Reus vs. Mens Rea vs. Strict Liability: https://shorylaw.com/actus-reus-vs-mens-rea-vs-strict-liabil...
When it comes to offenses like speeding, generally a part of obtaining a drivers license is accepting responsibility for knowing the rules of the road ahead of time.
1) This seems like a fairly decent bit of legislation for some standardized professions, particularly those that are often paid hourly, work in person and cannot be outsourced out of state, and in many cases are the most economically vulnerable. I'm thinking that it would be pretty decent for dishwashers, cashiers, gas station attendants, etc to know if a job is offering say $15-18 per hour or $20-25 per hour. But this seems horrendous for salaried remote knowledge workers, particularly those that have the ability to negotiate a better deal. And additionally, there will be unintended consequences of this legislation, such as some employers not wanting to deal with New York employees.
2) If the goal of this legislation is to prevent exploitation, it seems that requiring a salary floor would be important, but requiring a salary ceiling would be a negative part of this legislation as it makes it a lot tougher to allow employees to have the room to negotiate.
No legislation is perfect, but this a vast improvement over the current situation.
Personally speaking, this only seems to be a very marginal improvement over the current situation if you consider the impact of legislation in a vacuum and magically wish away any possible unintended consequences.
Does your analysis consider that at least some employers will not want to deal with employees affected by this? You might wish that this wasn't a thing, but it is.
Maybe this legislation isn't as questionable in good economic times where companies are rapidly hiring as many people as they can wherever they can, but it seems particularly self-destructive in a market where employers have the leverage to look anywhere.
What are you going to tell those increasingly desperate New Yorkers who start getting sad feedback like the following? "Thank you for your application to our company. Unfortunately, this role is not currently eligible for New York State residents. Have a nice day."
They're all going to surrender to what the market is asking of them. Salary transparency is quickly becoming table stakes
2) Your positive speculation might be a little more reasonable were we entering great economic times where companies were rushing to hire anywhere they can. In troubled economic times, companies have a lot more leverage to seek the best deals they can and can exclude locations that are more trouble than they're worth.
2) That might be true for some companies that need mediocre talent, but if you’re looking to hire the best, and don’t got a salary disclosed, those elite workers have plenty of other options
E.g. if someone is already on a little below your top end, but they'd have to trade a nice short commute at their current role for a longer commute to come to you, they might need more than the top end. What then? Do they have to stay put, because this sort of law only thinks about salary, and not overall cost-benefit for the employee's situation, judged by the employee?
Start out as: "Senior XYZ-Division Backend Software Developer" at ZYX Corp
Then as you start touching more and more of the database, you get a new title to become the: "Senior XYZ-Division Backend Database Software Engineer" at ZYX Corp
At which point you get bored and switch departments to become the: "Senior CBA-Division Backend Performance Optimization Software Developer" at ZYX Corp
Also things with salary transparency (i.e. Unions / Guilds) results in hirer wages for their members compared to similar workers without the things.
It's also in line between with the basic principals of capitalism. The basic supply-demand graph assumes perfect information which is obviously not true when a job-seeker doesn't know the salary of a job they're seeking so you'll end up with mismatches in the job-supply and job-demand.
> [1] The legislation underscores New York's commitment to addressing wage disparities and promoting transparency in compensation practices across the state. It ensures that employees have access to vital compensation information, and empowering them to make informed decisions about their careers.
Imagine going through this, just to be told "You're hired, and the wage is $x/hour", where x is far less than you make now or would need to pay rent.
Salary transparency laws are necessary because workers, especially lower-wage workers, have finite time and cannot go through this process and receive multiple offers. Employers can hold out for desperate workers, but workers need to eat and pay rent, and are thus forced to take what they can get. In this hiring culture, lower-wages workers are often forced to work for far less than they could otherwise get because of the high time and effort cost of finding better paying work.
Someone else berates them for wanting to enforce the thing they were surprised at, despite zero evidence.
Is elpais like a national major? Is it similar to seeing an article from lemonde on HN?
It would be like being surprised someone outside the UK reads the Guardian
Next they will tell unemployed what salary they can request.