4 ms·

Is it going to be illegal to negotiate a salary beyond the posted maximum?

olliej 4y ago
I suspect your negotiation would simply be "what non salary or wage compensation will you give me?" as that isn't part of the required information. I did think, maybe you could negotiate to increase the level you come in at, e.g IC2 vs IC1 or whatever - but if that were allowed it seems like it would be an end run around the law, and additionally allow some of the implicit discrimination the bill is trying to prevent (equivalent men and women get different rank/position, which avoids the appearance of pay discrimination as everyone in a given level gets paid the same, it's just one group is more likely to to get put into a higher level than the other) I honestly don't think this will significantly impact tech, finance, marketing, etc where such a large portion of income is in the form of non salary/wage compensation. But it at least resolves the problem where people were legally allowed to ask what the comp range for a position is, but fear (rightly or wrongly) that asking will mean that they don't get an offer. So that's nice. I'm also not sure how you make a law that really provides all the meaningful info. There's the obvious simple case of salary or wage, and honestly I think sign on bonuses and stock grants, etc could also easily be factored in. But how do you handle bonus and commission based comp? For commission in many cases it's easy: this person sold $X they get Y% of $X. But at larger scales a single transaction can involve multiple people on commission, so you have to deal with how that's split, etc. Hell I could see a case where a person in group A gets given higher values sales than a person from group B, but to be clear that could be any groups: a real estate company that preferentially assigns people born in NYC to sales in NYC and people born in Jersey City to sales in Jersey City. That seems plausible, reasonable, and would mean that people born in NY would statistically earn more than the NJ one for no reason other than place of birth. Note this is just a silly example of something that seems like it's "plausible" rather than the usual completely absurd/extreme examples. [edit: as a thought I had a look into the population statistics of NYC vs JC (the city not the religious figure). So my silly example - assuming your employment exactly matched regional statistics, and you had zero actual discrimination - would show up as on average asian Americans earning less than most grous, simply because asian Americans are a larger % of the population in JC vs NYC, and white people earning more than everyone. Again this is just because of the underlying demographics, but it's a good example of how non discriminatory policy can result in something that _looks_ discriminatory. Obviously the counter to that is you could say put people from Memphis in one category and people from Boise in another one to target black Americans.]
anothernewdude 4y ago
They could always hire you to a different position that wasn't the one advertised. This is trivial to work around if you want to on a case by case - but it affects the advertising, and that's going to affect the input of the funnel.
- aliqot 4y ago
  With that same theme, if that's the case I wonder how common this will be: "I'm sorry you weren't a match for position A but you look like a shoe in for position B lower pay tier same duties, would you like to schedule?"
  - thrtythreeforty 4y ago
    Your reply: "I would not." (By the way, that sentence costs the hiring company thousands of dollars worth of sunk cost of recruiting and engineering time.) Before this, you wouldn't have known to tell them to kick rocks until much later in the process. Perhaps the scenario will become more common, but I bet the equilibrium resets to better average pay.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      Just curious are you from or do you reside in California or similar tech enclave?

I suspect your negotiation would simply be "what non salary or wage compensation will you give me?" as that isn't part of the required information. I did think, maybe you could negotiate to increase the level you come in at, e.g IC2 vs IC1 or whatever - but if that were allowed it seems like it would be an end run around the law, and additionally allow some of the implicit discrimination the bill is trying to prevent (equivalent men and women get different rank/position, which avoids the appearance of pay discrimination as everyone in a given level gets paid the same, it's just one group is more likely to to get put into a higher level than the other) I honestly don't think this will significantly impact tech, finance, marketing, etc where such a large portion of income is in the form of non salary/wage compensation. But it at least resolves the problem where people were legally allowed to ask what the comp range for a position is, but fear (rightly or wrongly) that asking will mean that they don't get an offer. So that's nice. I'm also not sure how you make a law that really provides all the meaningful info. There's the obvious simple case of salary or wage, and honestly I think sign on bonuses and stock grants, etc could also easily be factored in. But how do you handle bonus and commission based comp? For commission in many cases it's easy: this person sold $X they get Y% of $X. But at larger scales a single transaction can involve multiple people on commission, so you have to deal with how that's split, etc. Hell I could see a case where a person in group A gets given higher values sales than a person from group B, but to be clear that could be any groups: a real estate company that preferentially assigns people born in NYC to sales in NYC and people born in Jersey City to sales in Jersey City. That seems plausible, reasonable, and would mean that people born in NY would statistically earn more than the NJ one for no reason other than place of birth. Note this is just a silly example of something that seems like it's "plausible" rather than the usual completely absurd/extreme examples. [edit: as a thought I had a look into the population statistics of NYC vs JC (the city not the religious figure). So my silly example - assuming your employment exactly matched regional statistics, and you had zero actual discrimination - would show up as on average asian Americans earning less than most grous, simply because asian Americans are a larger % of the population in JC vs NYC, and white people earning more than everyone. Again this is just because of the underlying demographics, but it's a good example of how non discriminatory policy can result in something that _looks_ discriminatory. Obviously the counter to that is you could say put people from Memphis in one category and people from Boise in another one to target black Americans.]

anothernewdude 4y ago

They could always hire you to a different position that wasn't the one advertised. This is trivial to work around if you want to on a case by case - but it affects the advertising, and that's going to affect the input of the funnel.

aliqot 4y ago
With that same theme, if that's the case I wonder how common this will be: "I'm sorry you weren't a match for position A but you look like a shoe in for position B lower pay tier same duties, would you like to schedule?"
- thrtythreeforty 4y ago
  Your reply: "I would not." (By the way, that sentence costs the hiring company thousands of dollars worth of sunk cost of recruiting and engineering time.) Before this, you wouldn't have known to tell them to kick rocks until much later in the process. Perhaps the scenario will become more common, but I bet the equilibrium resets to better average pay.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Just curious are you from or do you reside in California or similar tech enclave?