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Right. The whole purpose of such legislation is to discourage companies from maintaining egregiously dysfunctional salary allotment systems (for example, based

• 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.
  • atom_arranger 5y ago
    I haven’t worked in big tech but do levels not cover people doing basically the same thing with different competencies? I suppose people can fight over the levels but at least you could say SDE 1 gets $X SDE 2 gets $Y, and SDE 2 is just a more competent SDE 1.