12 ms·

Goldman, Google and Just About Every NYC Employer Will Soon Have to Disclose Pay

28 points by LopRabbit 5y ago

penneyd 5y ago
What a great idea - no reason wage information should be so cloak and dagger.
- d0mine 5y ago
  There is a reason: companies benefit from information asymmetry regarding salaries (companies know more than a typical job candidate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
LopRabbit 5y ago
https://archive.is/RAYTg https://archive.is/RAYTg
cft 5y ago
From the founder of a household name internet company, with a market cap >100bn, that I heard in person: "The fastest way to destroy [his company name] would be to send a company-wide email with the salaries of everybody".
- vanusa 5y ago
  Right. The whole purpose of such legislation is to discourage companies from maintaining egregiously dysfunctional salary allotment systems (for example, based on candidate's negotiation skill, or salary history) which are exactly what expose the company to such "risk" in the first place.
  - olliej 5y ago
    From the PoV of the company that system is functional. It allows them to pay as little as possible, because two people on the same job can earn disparate amounts. The company won't ever pay above the actual market rate, but they'll happily pay below.
    - vanusa 5y ago
      No doubt. That's why we need to beat these companies into submission until they do the right thing. For, you know, society as a whole.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    We had a major "pay equity" initiative a few years ago. Pay bands narrowed and managers lost most of their ability to compensate employees at the same level differently. The upshot was that you really couldn't reward good performance except with promotion. But promotion isn't about good performance per se. It's about next-level scope and responsibility, influencing larger groups of people, owning bigger pieces of the pie. To the extent that promo committees held the line on this, strong in-the-trenches engineers faced stagnant comp and eventually took outside offers. But managers are wily and committees couldn't hold the line completely, so there was also a lot of title inflation. Worst of all was the effect on culture. Because the only way to get paid more was to get promoted, and the only legitimate way to get promoted is to drive grand initiatives.... everybody started manufacturing grand initiatives. Why get something done in a week on your own, when you could chair a weekly cross-functional sync with a dozen stakeholders for 12 months? Why do housekeeping on your platform when you could lead a deprecation, rewrite, and migration for 100 dependent teams? Now maybe you would expect managers to put a stop to this kind of gaming. But managers want their stars to get ahead! If only for the selfish reason of not having to replace them. It's also good for the manager's own promotion path to have successful proteges. So managers play along and even coach their reports on how to turn the team's needs into "senior engineer" or "staff engineer" projects that will smell right to a promo committee. When all they really wanted to do was give the guy a raise. All this in the name of pay equity. I'm glad the pendulum swung back.
    - vanusa 5y ago
      The new law doesn't mandate pay equity; just some measure of transparency. There's no reason a company needs to adopt that kind of a system ("raises only via promotion") just because expected salaries now have to be posted along with job listings.
      - closeparen 5y ago
        From what I can tell, pay transparency (“a company wide email with the salaries of everybody”) is considered good because it’s a lever towards pay equity. That people doing ostensibly the same work are paid differently is a dirty secret; sunlight will force the bosses to fix it. I can see the attraction in that idea! But when people aren’t actually, in their hearts, quite that committed to solidarity, their ambitions and inequalities find other, costlier ways of expressing themselves.
- otoburb 5y ago
  It looks like this legislation forces employers to list salary bands for future job listings. Hence, as far as I can see, this legislation doesn't force any founder to "send a company-wide email with the salaries of everybody" -- only for new staff requisitions. I also don't know if the legislation solely applies to disclosure of salary/wage, or if everything in the total compensation package must be disclosed (value of benefits, equity, etc.). I suspect the disclosure is only limited to salary (for now), but will need to read up on the legislation.
olliej 5y ago
Does "pay" information include non-base-pay factors? e.g. For a lot of finance companies media makes it seem like bonuses form a considerable part of total comp package, tech companies tend to have fairly significant stock compensation contributions, etc
roflulz 5y ago
Seems like this will cause unnecessary discord. But, overall, I'm happy for things to become more competitive - I do think we should have national lists that can be searched for how well you scored on the SATs and your high school GPA etc., all stack ranked against each other.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  Quite the opposite, I think this will cause necessary discord.

28 points by LopRabbit 5y ago

penneyd 5y ago

What a great idea - no reason wage information should be so cloak and dagger.

d0mine 5y ago
There is a reason: companies benefit from information asymmetry regarding salaries (companies know more than a typical job candidate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

LopRabbit 5y ago

https://archive.is/RAYTg https://archive.is/RAYTg

cft 5y ago

From the founder of a household name internet company, with a market cap >100bn, that I heard in person: "The fastest way to destroy [his company name] would be to send a company-wide email with the salaries of everybody".

vanusa 5y ago
Right. The whole purpose of such legislation is to discourage companies from maintaining egregiously dysfunctional salary allotment systems (for example, based on candidate's negotiation skill, or salary history) which are exactly what expose the company to such "risk" in the first place.
- olliej 5y ago
  From the PoV of the company that system is functional. It allows them to pay as little as possible, because two people on the same job can earn disparate amounts. The company won't ever pay above the actual market rate, but they'll happily pay below.
  - vanusa 5y ago
    No doubt. That's why we need to beat these companies into submission until they do the right thing. For, you know, society as a whole.
- closeparen 5y ago
  We had a major "pay equity" initiative a few years ago. Pay bands narrowed and managers lost most of their ability to compensate employees at the same level differently. The upshot was that you really couldn't reward good performance except with promotion. But promotion isn't about good performance per se. It's about next-level scope and responsibility, influencing larger groups of people, owning bigger pieces of the pie. To the extent that promo committees held the line on this, strong in-the-trenches engineers faced stagnant comp and eventually took outside offers. But managers are wily and committees couldn't hold the line completely, so there was also a lot of title inflation. Worst of all was the effect on culture. Because the only way to get paid more was to get promoted, and the only legitimate way to get promoted is to drive grand initiatives.... everybody started manufacturing grand initiatives. Why get something done in a week on your own, when you could chair a weekly cross-functional sync with a dozen stakeholders for 12 months? Why do housekeeping on your platform when you could lead a deprecation, rewrite, and migration for 100 dependent teams? Now maybe you would expect managers to put a stop to this kind of gaming. But managers want their stars to get ahead! If only for the selfish reason of not having to replace them. It's also good for the manager's own promotion path to have successful proteges. So managers play along and even coach their reports on how to turn the team's needs into "senior engineer" or "staff engineer" projects that will smell right to a promo committee. When all they really wanted to do was give the guy a raise. All this in the name of pay equity. I'm glad the pendulum swung back.
  - vanusa 5y ago
    The new law doesn't mandate pay equity; just some measure of transparency. There's no reason a company needs to adopt that kind of a system ("raises only via promotion") just because expected salaries now have to be posted along with job listings.
    - closeparen 5y ago
      From what I can tell, pay transparency (“a company wide email with the salaries of everybody”) is considered good because it’s a lever towards pay equity. That people doing ostensibly the same work are paid differently is a dirty secret; sunlight will force the bosses to fix it. I can see the attraction in that idea! But when people aren’t actually, in their hearts, quite that committed to solidarity, their ambitions and inequalities find other, costlier ways of expressing themselves.
otoburb 5y ago
It looks like this legislation forces employers to list salary bands for future job listings. Hence, as far as I can see, this legislation doesn't force any founder to "send a company-wide email with the salaries of everybody" -- only for new staff requisitions. I also don't know if the legislation solely applies to disclosure of salary/wage, or if everything in the total compensation package must be disclosed (value of benefits, equity, etc.). I suspect the disclosure is only limited to salary (for now), but will need to read up on the legislation.

olliej 5y ago

Does "pay" information include non-base-pay factors? e.g. For a lot of finance companies media makes it seem like bonuses form a considerable part of total comp package, tech companies tend to have fairly significant stock compensation contributions, etc

roflulz 5y ago

Seems like this will cause unnecessary discord. But, overall, I'm happy for things to become more competitive - I do think we should have national lists that can be searched for how well you scored on the SATs and your high school GPA etc., all stack ranked against each other.

wildrhythms 5y ago
Quite the opposite, I think this will cause necessary discord.