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I'm guessing it wouldn't work because it is quite a lot easier to tell when a company is being hostile when they're disclosing information, as opposed to a company being reluctant to disclose information. I mean, given the choice between a job listing stating a pay scale of $0-$10000000 or $75000-$125000 it'd be very optimistic to assume the former will actually lead to a higher offer.

Basically by forcing employers to state a scale you force them to bid against each other not only on the total amount but also the specificity. When there's only a few companies disclosing any information at all this competition has little effect, but this changes when they're supposed to say something (and I think courts will rule that $0-$10000000 is not a real pay grade, one end is below minimum wage and the other is probably higher than can fit in the budget).

Of course is there's no enforcement at all it can still devolve in the same meaningless pay scale everywhere.

> job listing stating a pay scale of $0-$10000000 or $75000-$125000 it'd be very optimistic to assume the former will actually lead to a higher offer.

Well, this is roughly how banking compensation and bonuses work and tons of people play this game because the expected return is higher than eg in the public sector with very well defined salaries. This is an extreme example but I could have said "German engineering company vs Silicon Valley startup".

It's still more informative just to see what amount of information the company will disclose in the posting. And in any case, you usually know when you're applying into an industry where TC is wildly out of step with salary and judge accordingly.

We're not talking about a probability distribution though, we're talking about a company coming up with a wage offer for a job. If a company can't give you a range that doesn't cover multiple orders of magnitude then they're incompetent or lying, neither really bodes well for your hypothetical employment.

I think the adversarial counter is that employees would avoid any job listing job salary bands that are to wide or just out of expectations.

this should incentives most honest bands and narrow ranges.

Netflix literally does (or at least did) this. It's not even a hypothetical.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/90000-to-900000-pay-transpare...

Netflix actually does pay $900k to a non-trivial amount of employees though.

Surely not for the same role that would pay $90k, though, unless they just don't have titles in any useful sense.

That's exactly how Netflix operates. Everyone is a "senior" engineer.

Was true until 2022. Unfortunately levels rolled out for both ICs and managers.

Not anymore, they introduced levels last year

Ads too. How the mighty have fallen?

Netflix pays above-grade salaries. A few years ago, I interviewed there for a position that was two levels below my current title but paid 2x more than I made.

Netflix pays well because they don't believe in work-life balance, at all. The position I interviewed for was vacant because the previous individual had left. By the time I wrapped up the interviews, the person I would have reported to had left Netflix, and the person who would have been my direct report would have been my boss. By the time I actually declined the offer, that person had also left.)

> Netflix pays well because they don't believe in work-life balance, at all.

I'm surprised you've made a general statement out of a company you've never actually worked for.

For engineering roles, work life balance at Netflix is mostly what you want it to be.

My general statement isn't based solely on my experience with applying to Netflix.

I know a number of employees spread across the technical and entertainment sides of the company. They are all overworked, but they're all okay with it because the get paid $$$ for it (and knew that going into it).

only third hand reports on my end, but every account has said that Netflix works you to the bone. But back then they had stack ranking, so I'm not sure if that changed.

Well, from my first account (I worked there) this is wrong. Also, there's never been stack ranking.

This still seems orthogonal to the fact that a law was passed requiring them to publish salary bands and they gave the finger to it by publishing a range of $0 to $infinity. Maybe everyone has the title "software engineer" but come on, you are still putting new hires into a pay band based on experience and interview results etc. You've complied with the letter of the law and it should have been written better assuming bad actors. But this childish "gotcha", anti worker behavior is a bad look.

I've never worked at Netflix so accept or disregard my takes as you wish. I do know several people personally who used to work there and left voluntarily because they found it to be a poor work environment on diversity grounds.

I’d expect (hope at least) that the courts would see listing $0-$1000000 as an obviously bad faith tactic to subvert the law. If it became a real thing that companies did, I guess the legislature would just pass another law.

Then make it less obvious? Pay scale for this position:

    Grade | Pay Range
    E     | 40k-50k
    D     | 50k-60k
    C     | 60k-70k
    B     | 70k-80k
    A     | 80k-90k
    A+    | 90k-150k

Grade will be determined by qualifications. Doesn't this sound more like a good faith pay scale?

As long as it is possible to apply specifically for a grade that seems fine, right?

No, because there isn't a role for which you pay people 4x others. A grade E and A+ are doing different jobs with different qualifications and requirements.

If the 10x developer exists, why not the 4x developer?

The -10x developer also exists. Even if you could identify them, you still wouldn't get to pay them -10x.

The scale is extreme, but that is what a lot of companies do.

For example, with large accounting firms, having a CPA license boosts salary by 10-25% over a candidate without a CPA (assuming both are otherwise equally qualified and get offers). With law firms, having a federal court clerkship on the resume boosts salary by 25-50% over candidates without a clerkship (at the early stages of one's career), not including a six-figure signing bonus that generally is not offered to other candidates.

Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee you that someone with a degree from Harvard who clerked at SCOTUS is going to earn a lot more than someone who has a degree from a send- or third-tier school and a no name clerkship--at a white shoe law firm, assuming the latter can even get an offer (even before the interview).

And this is not a category that is so rare that I don't know people in the former one even though I'm not even remotely in law.

>Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work?

Maybe that doesn't tell a candidate the actual pay range of the job, but it definitely is valuable information that tells you about how the company operates. I wouldn't want to work anywhere that does that because it shows a contempt for both the law and prospective employees.

Because stating your pay range like that makes you sound like a scammer ?

That's an absurd example, but you see what I mean. Change it to $150-275k if that makes more sense. That's still a huge range: it probably fits 75% of software jobs in the U.S. The point is that you could still comply with the letter of the law without giving candidates very much actual information.

Which actually seems pretty reasonable assuming a median somewhere around the middle. That's +/- ~$60K which is a fair bit of money but seems like rational range for a given role.

I have a different reaction as I find this information useful. The lower range tells me if it's even within what I'm targeting. And if I get to an offer stage and I'm at the lower end of the spectrum, I would want to know why.

It does at least save you from the "senior devops engineer with 15 years experience" roles that get you all the way through the interview before dropping "and the salary is $50k".

150 k$/yr is roughly dividing line to the top quartile of software developer pay.

150 - 275 k$ definitely does not encompass 75% of software jobs in the USA

Is that happening in practice? When I see listings, they're usually in a range of $30k or so. Still a huge range, but sort of in the ballpark, and often enough to know I don't want to read any further because the range is too low.

sounds good to me unless you make 250k and are looking for a 20% pay boost. Someone making 100-130k sees a good minimum, someone 150-200k sees potential for salary and likely ends up negotiating. Someone making 300k wouldn't bother unless they are very sure they can negotiate higher (or are fine taking a pay cut for non-salary benefits).

I think the point here is more that the floor is still a very reasonable salary to live on. Not necessarily for every engineer, but I would not pity someone struggling to live on 150k without dire circumstances.

> I applaud pay transparency, but reading the text of my state's legislation regarding it (RCW 49.58.110), all I see is that it says most employers must have a pay scale that is known to candidates. My initial adversarial response as an imaginary business would be to say "okay, the pay scale for this position is between $0-$10000000, depending on qualifications". Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work?

tighten up the disclosure requirements

example: produce the distribution, at 5% resolution with a range 2 SDs around the median

But then you need to run your business with that salary range - if you put it in writing to your hr people or hiring managers that the maximum they can actually offer is $less_than_that, those emails will come out in discovery.

And if the floor of your salary range is lower than that of all your competitors, it will make it harder to attract good applicants to the position; I definitely notice the bottom end of the range when looking at job postings.

Right now, at least in my field there are some companies listing very wide ranges, say $75k-$270k, however, most are not so there is value in knowing that the max a company is offering for a role is say, $160k upfront vs. going through a bunch of interviews and negotiations just to learn that's the ceiling and then turning it down. If more and more companies provide huge ranges then this won't be useful except as another commenter said that you can favor jobs with realistic ranges that actually bracket your desired comp.

Even when there were rigid salary bands, I've seen companies regularly work around it by inventing new roles with new salary bands. At one company where I worked, a specific title could refer to one of several different independent roles with their own salary bands. The headline title was not the primary key of the system.

I would imagine this would increase the risks an employer would face for discriminatory compensation claims. If you're really saying that the range is that varied for the role and you don't have anything like a reasonable distribution of compensation across people in that role...

They should have to produce and justify it on the basis of the previous salary the position required to fill. And I mean this is the sense of them being forced to err on the side of disclosure, I'm sick of this shit where companies always get the discretionary aspect when they need cold, hard, regulation and absolute liabillity. The burden needs to start shiftingto the more facile and natural starting point: the business/hirer. They're running the ship, they need to start charting a legal and practicable course that respects the dignity of the sea of jobseekers.

This whole "based on qualifications" is stupid because there's obviously a base level of competency required for candidates and successfull candidates and at the end of the day, its more reasonable to make the previous salary the baseline unless the position has radically altered. If they lie, charge 'em with wire fraud and swoop in as a lesson to the next jerk who wants to play games with hiring and payroll

Hell crowdsource it and turn the panopticon back on the abyss where it belongs.

Edit: just have a simple test like how much does the least qualified yet acceptable candidate demand and work your way up from there if they have your "special magic abillities"/quals.

> They should have to produce and justify it on the basis of the previous salary the position required to fill.

This leads to some ambiguities, ex:

1. How would that work when a company is adding totally new positions? For example, a small company adding DevOps, or where the previous worker was a contractor?

2. How does anyone reliably distinguish moved/renamed positions versus ones that might be dropping an old position and adding new one?

3. For similar titles but very different business-areas, does the "Team Lead" of a new business-analytics unit inherit the past salary of the "Team Lead" for janitorial services?

Can I ask legit what is the current deal? Do people go into interviews completely blinded as to what the position is minimally and maximally worth? It seems so insane to me as someone who's been out this game for so long now.

optimistically, pay comes up in the recruiting call or even in the application. There's an entire psychology to what number you put or if you even give a number at first, but it should be discussed before a hiring manager comes in.

Pessimistically (or for entry level positions) it comes at the end in an informal offer letter before negotiations open up. you'd need to do general research on the position and gleam salaries from Glassdoor to minimize surprises. or be ready with counter offers to negotiate.

Ya, unless there's a "price floor" you know is at least satisfactory (to say nothing of optimality or actual worth) that is immediately apparent before you even get to the apply button, thats complete bullshit. Time is money and companies need to stop treating people like theirs is worthless and thus not deserving of being able to zoom! by seeing the going rate immediately and not even having to doll up and go out to meet them tete-a-tete.

Edit: also, on the conjectural side, the fact we need to use words like "optimistically" and "pessimism" or the like/speak in these superlatives is indicative of how hokey all this is. It should be the most natural thing in the world, like a restaurant menu with [gasp] prices, instead there's this Apple culture of secrecy which is compelyely inappropriate for at least a public labour market. It really is bullshit and ripe for harsh regulation taking out the biggest bullshitters and beneficiaries of the current system.

As mentioned, such an approach is an immediate red flag to anyone applying.

But also, judges and courts really aren't impressed with the "but technically" argument. You will get locked up if you try to play the smartarse.