4 ms·

This is exactly what is happening right now in Colorado. 1. Pay ranges are visible for a job. However, the ranges are very wide in some cases, almost $200k wid

This is exactly what is happening right now in Colorado. 1. Pay ranges are visible for a job. However, the ranges are very wide in some cases, almost $200k wide. What am I to learn from this if I get offered the mid point, but almost everyone else is earning the max limit? Pay ranges are useless without seeing the distribution. 2. Equity isn’t included in this (or any other govt processes) because it is not considered “guaranteed pay”. Especially in tech where equity is a big part of your compensation, it’s very hard to use this data in any meaningful way.

commandlinefan 4y ago
So... a simple-minded law not only didn't fix the problem it was supposed to solve, but actually made things worse? Ah, government.
- peter422 4y ago
  How is it worse?
  - pb7 4y ago
    I don't agree with GP but it can be worse by misleading people that don't know how compensation structures work at certain companies. They might be happy that they got 90th percentile salary but not understand and/or pursue stocks which is generally the bulk of the compensation or at at the very least, the biggest differentiator between individuals. Further, being at the top of band, they may receive small raises whereas those with lower base salary may receive higher.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      I still don't understand how this is worse than no information. Both scenarios can have the uninformed not know about stocks.
      - pb7 4y ago
        When nothing is posted, you do secondary research. When something is posted, you could assume that's all of it.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  CO’s wage transparency law does fix one problem, which is inefficient allocation of labor resources due to lack of price transparency. Markets cannot allocate resources most efficiently without market participants having knowledge of price movements.
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    Ah, so the efficient market hypothesis is not just a hypothesis anymore. Can you point me at the proof?
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      I can provide an example. Pharmacists in the US experienced some nice pay gains in the 1990s and 2000s. This became well known and drove huge increases in the number of students pursuing the field. The US government gives out unlimited loans to students pursuing education at “accredited” schools, so schools seeing an opportunity to cash in, helped advertise all of the amazing pay opportunities and drastically increased the costs of pharmacy school as well as opened tons of new schools. Problem is the pay, and quality of life at work, for pharmacists started stagnating in 2010 and declining by 2012, and has not stopped. Or at least the pay to quality of life at work ratio has not stopped declining. Now, the schools have already hired all these admins and professors that need to get paid, even though the real time pay figures have already indicated that supply of pharmacists is now outstripping demand. So what do they do? They start using old pay data, or selective pay data, or showing dollars per hour without mentioning people are only getting scheduled to work 32 hours per week. All of this information is available on online forums such as /r/pharmacy and sdnforum, where actual pharmacists are discussing changes to the field, but that is not what the 22 year old taking out $200k+ of loans is reading. They are busy being hoodwinked by their schools. One might ask why should the US public care? Well, now that it is well known that pharmacists pay to quality of life at work is shit, schools are experiencing drastic drops in applicants, so what did they do? They lowered standards. No entry exam, liberal grades in school, and bottom line is any smart kid avoids pharmacy school, and so the US public now has lesser qualified and overworked people to look forward to as their pharmacists. By the way, during 2010 to 2020, while entry level pharmacist nominal pay was declining, in an economy where everyone else’s pay was increasing, BLS kept stating that pharmacy was a growth career at +10%. It was only in 2020 that BLS data caught up and said pharmacy was contracting at -3%. So real time price information can help prevent such massive wastes of society’s resources. Now we have a few hundred thousand people saddled with enormous taxpayer funded debt, doing a shitty job because they are under the thumb of their employers. Read the forums, they openly admit CVS/Walgreens/etc force them to work at such high rates that they fear they cannot properly vet medications.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> What am I to learn from this if I get offered the mid point, but almost everyone else is earning the max limit? Pay ranges are useless without seeing the distribution. You learn not to apply to jobs with low minimum ranges, and high school students learn not to study fuels with low minimum and low high ranges. The law is not for you, specifically to help you negotiate maximum pay from one job. For that, you need to go out and sell your labor to multiple parties and have them bid against each other.
sidlls 4y ago
The bill requires companies of a certain size (100+ employees or contractors) to publish the median and mean for each category, across race, ethnicity, and sex. It's not the complete distribution, and the numbers can probably be fudged with clever identification of what a "category" is, but it's something. Knowing the median and mean can show just how skewed the distribution is.
sokoloff 4y ago
> Pay ranges are useless without seeing the distribution. "Useless"? Or just "not as useful as a more complete picture would be"? I agree that the latter is true, but that doesn't make them useless, IMO.

commandlinefan 4y ago

So... a simple-minded law not only didn't fix the problem it was supposed to solve, but actually made things worse? Ah, government.

peter422 4y ago
How is it worse?
- pb7 4y ago
  I don't agree with GP but it can be worse by misleading people that don't know how compensation structures work at certain companies. They might be happy that they got 90th percentile salary but not understand and/or pursue stocks which is generally the bulk of the compensation or at at the very least, the biggest differentiator between individuals. Further, being at the top of band, they may receive small raises whereas those with lower base salary may receive higher.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    I still don't understand how this is worse than no information. Both scenarios can have the uninformed not know about stocks.
    - pb7 4y ago
      When nothing is posted, you do secondary research. When something is posted, you could assume that's all of it.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
CO’s wage transparency law does fix one problem, which is inefficient allocation of labor resources due to lack of price transparency. Markets cannot allocate resources most efficiently without market participants having knowledge of price movements.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  Ah, so the efficient market hypothesis is not just a hypothesis anymore. Can you point me at the proof?
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I can provide an example. Pharmacists in the US experienced some nice pay gains in the 1990s and 2000s. This became well known and drove huge increases in the number of students pursuing the field. The US government gives out unlimited loans to students pursuing education at “accredited” schools, so schools seeing an opportunity to cash in, helped advertise all of the amazing pay opportunities and drastically increased the costs of pharmacy school as well as opened tons of new schools. Problem is the pay, and quality of life at work, for pharmacists started stagnating in 2010 and declining by 2012, and has not stopped. Or at least the pay to quality of life at work ratio has not stopped declining. Now, the schools have already hired all these admins and professors that need to get paid, even though the real time pay figures have already indicated that supply of pharmacists is now outstripping demand. So what do they do? They start using old pay data, or selective pay data, or showing dollars per hour without mentioning people are only getting scheduled to work 32 hours per week. All of this information is available on online forums such as /r/pharmacy and sdnforum, where actual pharmacists are discussing changes to the field, but that is not what the 22 year old taking out $200k+ of loans is reading. They are busy being hoodwinked by their schools. One might ask why should the US public care? Well, now that it is well known that pharmacists pay to quality of life at work is shit, schools are experiencing drastic drops in applicants, so what did they do? They lowered standards. No entry exam, liberal grades in school, and bottom line is any smart kid avoids pharmacy school, and so the US public now has lesser qualified and overworked people to look forward to as their pharmacists. By the way, during 2010 to 2020, while entry level pharmacist nominal pay was declining, in an economy where everyone else’s pay was increasing, BLS kept stating that pharmacy was a growth career at +10%. It was only in 2020 that BLS data caught up and said pharmacy was contracting at -3%. So real time price information can help prevent such massive wastes of society’s resources. Now we have a few hundred thousand people saddled with enormous taxpayer funded debt, doing a shitty job because they are under the thumb of their employers. Read the forums, they openly admit CVS/Walgreens/etc force them to work at such high rates that they fear they cannot properly vet medications.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

> What am I to learn from this if I get offered the mid point, but almost everyone else is earning the max limit? Pay ranges are useless without seeing the distribution. You learn not to apply to jobs with low minimum ranges, and high school students learn not to study fuels with low minimum and low high ranges. The law is not for you, specifically to help you negotiate maximum pay from one job. For that, you need to go out and sell your labor to multiple parties and have them bid against each other.

sidlls 4y ago

The bill requires companies of a certain size (100+ employees or contractors) to publish the median and mean for each category, across race, ethnicity, and sex. It's not the complete distribution, and the numbers can probably be fudged with clever identification of what a "category" is, but it's something. Knowing the median and mean can show just how skewed the distribution is.

sokoloff 4y ago

> Pay ranges are useless without seeing the distribution. "Useless"? Or just "not as useful as a more complete picture would be"? I agree that the latter is true, but that doesn't make them useless, IMO.