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Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
- potamic 4y agoI wonder why only the US. If they believe pay transparency is the right way forward, they should do it globally. Surely there's no legal hurdles in posting pay ranges for any country.
- troon-lover 4y ago
- bombcar 4y agoFor the US it may be this is the easiest way to comply with Colorado's law. Worldwide may be rolled out later, but those are probably separate business entities that have to work it out. As with all negotiations, once you've stated a number you've put a lower (or upper, depending on the side you're on) bound.
- llbeansandrice 4y agoI believe WA has a similar law going into effect. Since they're based/domiciled(?) in WA the state laws apply I believe. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
- mobiuscog 4y agoThey don't believe pay transparency is the way forward - they're just fending off some US laws and trying to gain kudos for doing so. As you mention, if they really wanted to be transparent, it would be global, but I doubt they want to expose those differences.
- anticensor 4y agoUnfortunately, some countries actually prohibit publishing employee salaries.
- avgDev 4y agoThis is the way. We need more of this. I'm at a point where if a recruiter messages me "about an exciting opportunity" without any salary information, he/she will not get a response. While there are some jobs that maybe I would consider a pay cut for, I generally want to make more money because that allows me to invest more so I can be free one day.
- itqwertz 4y agoIf you do follow up and eventually ask for a salary range, expect vague terms like “competitive” or “market rate”.
- 908B64B197 4y agoThe correct way to interpret this is "Silicon Valley competitive/market rate". The reaction you'll get is hilarious in some cases.
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoThe whole prudish / secretive attitude around salaries has got to be one of the most annoying parts. Just get the formalities over with instead of wasting time, please.
- wonderwonder 4y agoI get ~4 recruiter emails a day and I don't think I have ever seen the salary in the initial job description. If the job looks interesting I will just reply asking what the salary is. Usually they immediately call me rather than respond via email which is pretty annoying.
- silicon2401 4y agoThis is why I stopped putting personal info in my resume. I once had a particularly aggressive recruiter try and recruit me for a contracting position (I only consider full time roles), and when I repeatedly declined his offer, he actually found my resume somewhere and just called my phone. Needless to say it was incredibly annoying and ever since then I've kept all contact info out of my resume.
- ENOTTY 4y agoGiven that most big tech companies' base salary tends to plateau and total comp begins to be dominated by stock grants and performance bonuses, just how much real transparency is actually going to be provided?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- InefficientRed 4y agoAgreed 100%. At big tech salary is close to useless and rarely the primary number that changes during negotiations. My highest paying job -- a 3.5x raise -- came with a $75K salary cut compared to my previous job. This should be, by far, the top voted comment. I don't think MSFT sharing salary ranges is consequential in any way.
- JamesSwift 4y agoSure it is. If more start to do it, it becomes an arms race. If a company is loading the compensation in other ways and coming in light on salary then their job posting becomes much less compelling for job seekers. So they have a choice: disclose the other compensation (in order to compete with the salary numbers of the other companies) or adjust their compensation to be heavier on salary so their numbers are in line with others.
- sokoloff 4y agoFor the longest time, Amazon's cash salary cap was well-known to be in the middle $150K range. I don't see any evidence that hampered their ability to attract job seekers.
- bluGill 4y agoThat depends on what the other things are. Most years I get half of my take home pay in December because of my bonus (some of that is my 401k maxing out in November), there have been a couple bad years where the bonus was less, but at least I was able to keep my job. Keeping my job is a factor as well, since I have a family to support, if I'm laid off (like most companies do all the time) that means I'm scrambling to figure out how to get cash, while I can live off of the smaller paychecks I get. That is me - what is the above worth to you? If you are risk adverse like me, then you like that plan. Others want the cash now but can accept the risk of losing their jobs. Some have a high risk tolerance and like getting their money in stocks - in the best case this is the most money, but in the worst case it is the least. There is no right answer. In the end you need a certain amount of money to live. That is different from your actual value.
- Victerius 4y agoCan a company make an offer outside its stated range? E.g. What if Microsoft has a job opening with a range of $110k - $170k, and the candidate they selected used to make $180k and would like $200k? Will Microsoft offer him or her the 200k they seek or offer 170k and lose their candidate? If salary ranges can be bypassed, then they are not really useful, and if they can't, by law, companies could skirt the law by offering higher bonuses and more stock, or else lose on talent. Or the company could close the job opening, and create a new posting with an updated range for the sole purpose of being legally able to hire their candidate. Which would still invalidate the spirit of the law. I'm not sure these salary transparency laws are good for workers or companies alike.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoProbably easier to have multiple reqs for the same job under different titles to cover a broader range or throw perks of hard to define monetary value at the wall until something sticks than to go through whatever process would be required to offer outside the range.
- ghaff 4y agoOr $170K is the most they're willing to offer for a particular position. And, if someone wants significantly more, they'll just pass. Companies will find ways to make exceptions for someone they really want--including creating a new position for them. But companies won't always salary match.
- Gustomaximus 4y ago> If salary ranges can be bypassed, then they are not really useful Sure they are. With common sense and fines for clear ongoing breaches it will do as planned. There are always exceptions so if occasionally a salary is bypassed to match the candidate, higher or lower this is going to happen and be reasonable. If 30%+ of candidates get paid less than the advertised role there is a clear case of bait and switch for authorities to show a court type deal. I feel you need to approach this from altitude rather than individual cases.
- 4y ago
- epwr 4y ago> Microsoft said it would disclose salary ranges in all internal and external U.S. job postings no later than January 2023. That date is when Washington state, where Microsoft’s headquarters are located, will start requiring employers with at least 15 employees to disclose salary ranges for each position. In other news, Microsoft to comply with a new law.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> In other news, Microsoft to comply with a new law Microsoft is under no obligation to comply with Washington law outside Washington. That's what they're doing here.
- wing-_-nuts 4y agoProbably easier to just do it for everybody than have two separate listings for WA and the rest of the US. I wonder if this is TC or just salary?
- sgerenser 4y agoEverything I’ve seen so far is just salary. Which is kind of a huge loophole for tech companies where 20-60% of compensation is often in the form of stock and bonuses.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoI am curious what level of details the text of the law requires: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?billnumber=5761&year=2021#documentSection https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?billnumber=5761&year=2021... https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2021-22/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Passed%20Legislature/5761-S.PL.pdf?q=20220610100849 https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2021-22/Pdf/Bills/Se... >disclose in each posting for each job opening the wage scale or salary range, and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation to be offered to the hired applicant. What is general description? Is that how many RSUs? Does it require showing what metal level health insurance is offered and specific the employer paid proportion?
- logicalmonster 4y agoJust to play Devil's Advocate: being explicit about salaries is the kind of practice that sounds amazingly good on the surface, but might have some unintended real-world consequences. For instance, whereas before when salaries weren't explicit, a weaker candidate with some good qualities who was on the bubble for consideration might be able to get a job if the salary was more favorable than the company was initially planning. With explicit salary ranges, if the candidate isn't deemed good enough to warrant hitting that predefined range, they might be unemployable in that field and not gain the experience needed to progress. In the past, a weaker candidate might have been able to go for a lesser salary range, get the job and gain more experience, and maybe make it up down the line. Maybe that's no longer a path forward for a lot of people on the bubble. And stronger candidates who are perfect fits and world-class performers might be lost for a lot of companies because the company has the excuse of a pre-defined salary range. So maybe firms miss out on some genius, perfect fits, because the bean counters can't be bothered to assess everybody's merits individually.
- tcskeptic 4y agoMost companies have explicit and firm salary ranges for positions already -- I would bet MS is one of them. They just didn't put them in the job postings until now.
- thebean11 4y agoMost companies the size of MS, yeah
- bluGill 4y agoWe just made an offer to someone that was far more than asked, our salary range doesn't go that low. It is to our benefit to give a fair offer as we will train this person and want them to stick around not leave in a year when they get a better offer.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
- nrclark 4y agoHow do the Washington/Colorado salary disclosure laws interact with bonus structures and stock grants? A staff engineer might make $250k/year in base salary, but their total comp could be much higher.
- 0daystock 4y ago"250/year with bonus and equity options" is what I'd seen - not very helpful.
- llbeansandrice 4y agoThese laws apply to all jobs, not just tech jobs.
- mkl95 4y agoI wish all companies included pay ranges. When I was a junior / mid level dev I was lowballed more times than I care to admit. Nowadays if some recruiter messages me I ask for the range immediately, and I end the conversation if I don't get a straight answer.
- DisjointedHunt 4y ago$100k - $5 Million is a valid range
- mywittyname 4y agoPay bands are the minimum and maximum that employees at a specific level are paid. So this only works if a company is legitimately going to hire people for $5MM a year and/or have existing employees at that level paid that amount. Also, such large pay bands will raise eyebrows, as they are indicative of discrimination. Why such wildly different wages for the same role?
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoBecause humans aren’t interchangeable cogs? Let’s consider the range of compensation for the “CEO” role.
- llbeansandrice 4y agoThese laws are not intended to help CEOs or people in tech already making 6-figure salaries before other compensation. These ludicrous edge cases are not a "gotcha" for a type of law that greatly helps pay transparency for the vast majority of the population. Even in tech this is helpful. What's the going rate for a new-grad SWE in Nashville TN? I certainly didn't know when I graduated. I had to get all the way to the offer stage before any numbers were discussed at all. Also no equity was involved anyway.
- indymike 4y agoJob posts with a pay rate get about 28% more applications than those without. Some job boards that syndicate jobs from other job boards will insert an "estimated salary" or "industry salary" just to get more clicks if you don't include a salary. Source: my company does recruitment advertising for many other companies, and including salary is something we coach our customers to do.
- ChicagoBoy11 4y agoThis is going do to absolutely nothing. Most of this legislation does nothing to really address the potential for folks to just advertise incredibly wide potential salary ranges, to say nothing of alternative ways that they can change total compensation "for the right candidate," if you catch my drift. I would suspect that the biggest effect of this is to actually lead to overall greater distrusts, as folks will make all sorts of assumptions based on the ranges they see for jobs at their companies, based on their own biases. True transparency which would require something like disclosure of average/median total compensation at the company for that role, for instance, would be incredibly meaningful, but it will never come.
- naikrovek 4y agoI want to be snarky and compliment you on your clairvoyance while pointing out that you are only guessing, and instead I'll just ask why you think this kind of thing is never coming, given that some companies already do this.
- xhkkffbf 4y agoI can see some heartache if they advertise the range as between $X to $Y and then they make an offer that is much closer to $X.
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoPossibly, but that's basically the applicants choice to go ahead and apply (within the normal confines of "choice" in work). At lest there is a bottom they can expect. This won't even be that often if the company is actually upfront about how it determines pay: Higher for x qualification, lower without the optional qualifications/experience. On the other hand, some folks will be happy about that bottom since it will be either more than they expected or more than they are making now.
- psyc 4y agoInternally, salary ranges at MS are quite narrow by job and level. Particularly since they're more compressed toward zero than at the FAANGs and Unicorns. Why would they invite trouble by not simply publishing those?
- outside1234 4y agoBut will it include stock ranges too? This is where the huge discrepancy occurs between candidates. Salary is almost always in a tight range at Microsoft at a given level -- but external candidates can get anywhere from peanuts (a so called "tier 1" offer) to jumbo stock allocations (a so called "tier 3" offer).
- dubcanada 4y agoThere are a ton of people here who probably make 6 figures complaining about pay ranges in job postings. I am not sure I fully see how this is a problem, any minimum wage job says pay range (or a specific rate), any job for dish washers or line cooks say $18 a hour or what not, a tech job with a six figure salary should at least say a range, since it varies based on skill and department. I haven't read a single response that I agree with as to why this is a negative? Can someone provide some insight in to why people seem to be against this? Also the silly comments about well $5 to $5 million is a range are just silly. They are going to provide a range like $42k to $55k. Because it is based on skill to some degree (7 years in the industry should pay more you more than 2).
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoAt the very least, MS is probably just "collateral damage" of a law which could help low earners gain more transparency. If you're already working at MS or any big tech, odds are you aren't part of the target audience. Doubly so since information from big corps is pretty readily shared and available already.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kansface 4y ago> I haven't read a single response that I agree with as to why this is a negative? ...They are going to provide a range like $42k to $55k Why? Its like prop 65 cancer warnings being on 100% of the products and buildings in CA. Its just a thing you do so as to avoid liability. Now, we have these useless warnings pasted everywhere that have no meaning beyond compliance. Is CA better off with these warnings? I can't imagine so. Will companies post very broad salary ranges? With certainty, whats the downside? Will the ranges correspond to reality? Probably not. Are we better off forcing companies to do this? I'm not sure.
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoI'm sorry, I don't see how this is the same. Will you explain why you think they are similar?
- mywittyname 4y agoDoes anyone know if popular job platforms out there use your location to determine whether or not to show the salary information for a job posting? Or is it usually something that have to request once you can establish that you're a resident of Colorado?
- llbeansandrice 4y agoColorado's law is written so that it would apply to any job that can reasonably be done by someone residing in the state. So if you're hiring for a remote position, under CO law you have to provide a salary range. It doesn't technically matter where _you_ are located. As a result, some companies have started explicitly excluding CO from their job postings. I'm not a lawyer, but I think there's probably latent lawsuits there. Especially if they employ anyone in CO already.
- rootusrootus 4y ago> I'm not a lawyer, but I think there's probably latent lawsuits there. I hope not. We've got states trying to regulate things like abortion rights across state lines, too. I prefer states not have the same reach as the federal government, because some of them are especially crazy.
- DeathArrow 4y agoAbout salaries at Microsoft. I interviewed with them this year. I did a Codility test, followed by four interviews with four US based teams. I got an offer which is 5 to 6 times what they pay in US. I live in a country in Eastern Europe, and prices are a bit lower. I would have expected a lower offer, but not that much lower. It was less than I already make so I had to wish them good luck in finding another person and was feeling sorry that I lost so much time in the interviewing process and also invested a lot of energy.
- TrackerFF 4y agoInterestingly enough, I know MS (engineering) managers in other European satellite offices that make absolute bank. Easily 4-5 times more than comparable jobs at domestic companies.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoI presume you mean 1/5 to 1/6th.
- brianwawok 4y agoMaybe the low offer was due to an off by order of magnitude math mistake?
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoNow you know to ask for compensation up front.
- BuckRogers 4y agoEveryone always says this is a RED FLAG, so I've hesitated to do this myself. But I value my time more than I care about being "flagged" as a dissident against company interests. So I do that now with the initial HR interview. The energy put into this can be completely insane as per the GP's experience. What we need is just a certificate that proves competency, so we can remove all these exams, quizzes and foolishness. Typically, that was a computer science degree, but there wouldn't be enough degree holders to fill all the roles, and wages would skyrocket. So some sort of interview meatgrinder it is I suppose. As a result of all this, I wouldn't do this career path over again, and won't be recommending it to my kids. Companies will have to reap the rewards for their downward pressure on wages by going to India. They will continue to have to hire there for the next 20 to 100 years. And once the Americans are out of the industry, I think the Indians won't always take things lying down like we do in the US. I suspect they'll unionize and make life hell for these corporations. I hope the Indians become insanely wealthy from it, and US corporations will deserve it.
- nomilk 4y agoWhat's the actual problem that including salaries tries to solve? IMO if used strictly, it could only limit the talent pool (consider if someone more skilled than expected applies, but won't accept at or below the stated upper salary bound; the company won't be able to pivot and hire them). Including salary could let applicants avoid underpaying companies before they embark on a lengthy application process, which is beneficial, but don't companies already have strong incentives not to exploit people in this way since they'll only leave shortly afterward and those onboarding costs would be false economy.
- nvr219 4y ago> What's the actual problem that including salaries tries to solve? It tries to solve pay equity problems. https://hr.uw.edu/comp/pay-equity/salary-setting-guidance/ https://hr.uw.edu/comp/pay-equity/salary-setting-guidance/
- nomilk 4y ago> Employers must provide equal compensation to similarly employed workers The kicker is "similarly employed". I've seen people with the same job title earn a differential of 3x, but that's simply because one negotiated better and was more economically valuable (had about 1.5 more decades' experience) than the other, yet they had the same job title. I guess we could argue to control for years' experience, but I've seen people who were better at a job after 6 months than those in the same job were after 10 years. There are even jobs where people get worse over time, which isn't intuitive but easy to find examples (e.g. you forget documentation if life gets busy for a year or two, and you're less effective because of that). I suspect "similarly employed" is indefinable in any realistic sense. I'm not against trying, just very sober about the probability of crafting a policy that outperforms the imperfect but free-ish market.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoBeginner microeconomics courses teach that for the best allocation of resources, a market must have price transparency. How else are market participants supposed to ascertain the movements of supply and demand curves?
- awsrocks 4y ago
- jorblumesea 4y agoAre they going to take a look a TC? Their "highest we can go offer" was 100k below everyone else in my region (seattle)
- rsanek 4y agoI see many concerns here mentioning how this may not be a useful law because the company may create very wide ranges. It sounds like there are some restrictions in the law that try to prevent that, but I wonder if we should be looking at it a different way -- provide both the salary range for the position and also the range of the salaries of the existing employees in that same position.
- another_poster 4y agoIndividual states’ pay transparency laws are already applying upwards pressure on salaries across the country. My company has multiple groups in different states including Colorado, and in anticipation of needing to post salary ranges for our open positions in Colorado, my group (with no positions in Colorado) preemptively bumped up everyone’s salaries to the midpoint of their pay bands to avoid anyone becoming frustrated if they learned they were in the bottom half. Despite the preemptive adjustments, a colleague of mine became angry and quit when they found out their salary wasn’t at the very top of their position’s pay range. So pay transparency laws are having a big impact—not only in the obvious cases of candidates negotiating salaries in the states that passed the pay transparency laws, but also for average employees in other states who didn’t even need to do anything except learn how much their labor was worth.
- zdragnar 4y agoI think your example might be more of an exception than a rule; the last company I was in that introduced pay bands only bumped up people who were below the bottom of the band. The only people who were upset were those who found out some people were way over the new pay band and generated a bit of gossip over how those people were way overpaid for the quality of their work
- TulliusCicero 4y ago> my group (with no positions in Colorado) preemptively bumped up everyone’s salaries to the midpoint of their pay bands Uhh, surely I'm not the only one seeing the obvious flaw here, right? Is the inevitable outcome here that pay bands will now cover a range where nobody is actually in the lower half, ever? That lower half of the range will just be there as a sort of psychological buffer?
- billfruit 4y agoWhy only in the US? Why not everywhere?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gigatexal 4y agoAwesome. I love this. This just granted +100 goodwill to MSFT.
- givemeethekeys 4y agoDoes this include executive roles and total compensation or just the base salary?
- galkk 4y agoIs it going to be salary or total comp?
- ramesh31 4y agoAny tips for landing a MS interview?
- Fargoan 4y agoI wonder if this applies to contractors working at their campuses. From what I've heard, here in Fargo most of the people working at the Microsoft campus work for Archway
- killjoywashere 4y agoThis will work for a while, but have a look at how this has played out in other situations: 1) college tuition cost of attendance calculators (shit goes up every year), 2) federal pay scales (completely immobile), 3) healthcare standard charges mandate. This will eventually become oppressive as the powerful learn to communicate with this new node in the network. edit: not sure why the downvotes. Making information public increases market efficiencies, but market efficiencies don't always transfer to the workers. See: the last 30 years.
- marlowe221 4y agoIf your job posting doesn't give some indication as to the possible salary range, I'm just not going to apply. What? I'm going to go through some bullshit interview process that includes some esoteric algorithm problem that has nothing to do with the actual position in question and, even if it did, I could "npm install"/google my way out of only to find out later on that the job pays the same (or less) than what I make right now? That's just a waste of everyone's time.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoMicrosoft already posts salaries for remote or potentially remote positions to comply with Colorado law - but I have not seen Meta, Netflix, etc doing the same under similar circumstances.
- Chinjut 4y agoIt's incredible in these comments that so many of you who work in the industry on the employee side are arguing against having more transparency for the employee, and for having more leverage in the negotiating process for the employer instead. I want all the advantage as an employee that I can get. Any secret withheld from me is not to my advantage.
- kccqzy 4y agoI think for most people external tools like levels.fyi are already good enough in that they provide a salary range with sufficient accuracy. Of course these same people would hope that the other candidates haven't heard of levels.fyi so that companies can lowball them to have more budget for the salaries of those who have heard of levels.fyi. It's just selfishness, not collective action.
- rat9988 4y agoIt's misguided selfishness because other people raising their price would raise yours too.
- hcnews 4y agoIn 2022, you have to assume a fair amount of activity on popular boards/forums/subreddits/twitter etc. has been purposefully influenced by nefarious parties. In more concrete terms, I do think there are a fair amount of bots/paid-commenters on HN who push for anti-progressive agenda which helps maintain status quo.
- xtat 4y agoRead this as "our initial offer"
- WalterBright 4y agoI would have been paid less in companies I worked for under this system. Be careful what you wish for.
- sys_64738 4y agoPay ranges for positions are vast and overlap to a massive degree. They also are skewed with CoL variations to make comparison difficult. They were not include discretionary add-one like cash bonuses and RSUs.