8 ms·

$90k to $900k: Pay transparency laws usher in baffling pay ranges

37 points by sgerenser 4y ago

sgerenser 4y ago
I actually saw this myself recently while looking at Netflix job listings before I ran across this article. Almost seems like they're sticking up their middle finger to "the man" for making them post pay ranges.
- NickC25 4y ago
  Yeah, it seems like malicious compliance. I mean, I get it. Companies don't want to disclose what they pay. But providing a relatively smaller range that better reflects what someone in that position might expect to get in reality might not be that hard, no? The $90k-$900k might look like $200k to $500k after that. Still quite ambiguous, but more reasonable. Otherwise, I'm having a hard time believing most of the advertised positions aren't in the process of being filled by internal staff, or being recruited for with an internal team that has the actual salary range, and Netflix or similar companies that do this sort of stuff just to post jobs online because of some legal requirement. IIRC in some states you can't actually hire someone unless you've actually posted the job opening online somewhere.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Imagine that I'm an employer and I am hiring for a position that I think could generate $1.5M/yr in value for the company. I'm probably willing to pay the perfect person $1M/yr for that (plus 20-25% in fringe expenses). Some people might want all cash; others might want mostly RSUs. I'd want to pay the first person $900K in cash and $100K in shares. I'd want to pay the second person $100K in cash and $900K in shares. The law requires me to post only the cash portion of their compensation; from the above facts, my range is quite genuinely $100K to $900K.
    - sgerenser 4y ago
      Except Netflix compensation is famously all-cash (with the option to buy Netflix options with some portion of that cash monthly).
    - Jcampuzano2 4y ago
      Yeah this is one of the huge blind spots in industries where compensation is not in the form of cash/benefits. Discretionary income like bonuses and stock grants are often not included in these laws. So the pay ranges at companies/industries where people often have the choice between a more cash heavy vs more RSU/Stock heavy compensation can be quite drastic like the one here without actually being incorrect, though obviously Netflix/other large tech companies can be outliers. Other industries that are very bonus or commision heavy can also get away with posting very "weird" looking pay ranges as well.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      That's a very very specific and uncommon case.
  - sgerenser 4y ago
    I missed that there was a posting on HN about Netflix's posted salary ranges a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268691. There were people in there that knew Netflix employees who got 700k-1M pay packages, so in reality it doesn't seem like the top end of the range is definitely out of the question. I'm pretty sure the bottom end though is way below what they would actually pay for these posted senior engineer positions.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    The law requires they actually list the absolute maximum for the position so if they ever pay $900k they need to list it. This means they list a low end that is unrealistic so that people think the whole range isn’t serious and it doesn’t turn into almost everyone applying wanting $800-900k.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      That contradicts a line in the article (and in the laws that I've read) > “The laws say you should post the ranges that you reasonably expect to pay,” If I reasonably expect to pay up to $900K/yr and I find an amazing candidate that I want to pay $1M/yr, I can almost certainly do so without it being a violation of the law.
- oofta-boofta 4y ago
  > Almost seems like they're sticking up their middle finger to "the man" for making them post pay ranges. Attempting to portray Netflix as anything else other than a conglomerate doing it's damnedest to pay as little as possible is disingenuous at best, and astroturfing at it's worst. Since when was Netflix the little guy sticking up to "the man"? Netflix IS "the man". Lack of pay transparency only benefits one side: the company's.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > a conglomerate doing it's damnedest to pay as little as possible Netflix pays some of the highest compensation in the industry, and all cash at that.
Centigonal 4y ago
Until 2022, I think everyone in engineering at Netflix had the title "Senior Software Engineer" - so that might actually make sense for them specifically. But, IIRC, they recently introduced levels, which makes this feel more petty.
rom-antics 4y ago
Seems good for negotiation. If a company offers you $180k, (given that range) they're implying you're in the lowest 10% of your field. Ask why they're willing to hire you if you're so terrible. If you're in the top 25%, you should be worth $700k.
- simonsarris 4y ago
  That assumes a very linear distribution, and there's no reason to believe that talent is remotely like that. It's very possible that lots of people have $90k stills and only an extremely tiny handful have $700k skills. After all that's how it is in the general population: Most people are $10/hour plumbers in terms of skills. Only a few people (we happen to mostly call them plumbers) are worth $200/hour or more.
  - jen20 4y ago
    Most people are "negative several thousand dollar an hour" plumbers, in that they cause more damage than they fix. The same is true of software.
  - 6510 4y ago
    If you end up in [say] the bottom 5% you should wonder if your belong there or if you are more valuable elsewhere.
- onion2k 4y ago
  The problem is that the salary range for the job isn't 90k to 900k. It's probably more like 100k to 150k. No amount of negotiation is going to change that. The range in the ad just means that a lot of more senior engineers will be wasting their time applying for the role.
  - indymike 4y ago
    > The range in the ad just means that a lot of more senior engineers will be wasting their time applying for the role. When I go through candidates for an open position, I find very little correlation between experience and salary demands. Propensity for audacity seems to have more to do with it.
SavageBeast 4y ago
Shenanigans like this are one more reason we don't hire people residing in CA, CO or WA. I'm totally serious too - residency in these states is a hard next for us. Why you ask? Because we have enough real problems to deal with in business as it is and stepping into a bureaucratic web of this kind can only invite trouble and there's plenty of talent to be found elsewhere that doesn't encumber the company with additional regulatory scrutiny. We're small fish here but I'd imagine if we're thinking like this, larger companies must certainly be at least taking this into consideration. In effect, this is The State attempting to Price Fix around jobs-of-a-feather. No matter the intention, this is not The States business. The only possible purpose of making laws like this is so that the state can try to enforce some remedy whereby we're told how much we have to or are allowed to pay someone. Who in their right mind wants to sign up for that kind of risk? EDIT: When I say "one more reason" I mean specifically CA, its simply not cost effective to hire talent from there. CA taxes and cost of living are such that making a competitive offer to a candidate residing there is simply too costly from a compensation perspective. Plenty of people-talent exists in states with more favorable cost of living and tax schemes.
- jen20 4y ago
  > larger companies must certainly be at least taking this into consideration. Any yet, the majority of high-paying tech jobs in the US are still in CA, WA or NYC...
  - indymike 4y ago
    That is changing fairly quickly.
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    > larger companies must certainly be at least taking this into consideration. For many of them, it's probably a small compliance burden added to their already massive pile of existing ones.
- malfist 4y ago
  Similar arguments have been made against minimum wage. It's fine to say you want to pay your employees as little as you can get away with, just be honest about it.
TrackerFF 4y ago
How about companies have to post a histogram / distribution of salaries/compensation for said positions? Sounds ridiculous, but my old University suddenly started doing that, and it worked pretty great.
- malfist 4y ago
  That's what levels.fyi does (well, almost) and it's fantastic. I know I can go into an interview and ask for the 75th percentile and still feel like I'm being reasonable, and they'll probably negotiate down to something above average, but not quite 75th percentile and we'll both come away happy.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Equifax knows how much everyone makes, they could just require Equifax open their databases.
- SavageBeast 4y ago
  Through sheer negligence, I believe Equifax already did that some years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
This was... utterly predictable? Companies have incredibly strong incentives to maintain this information asymmetry, and it's a fool's endeavor to think we can legislate it away. I suspect the next chapter in this, if we try to further clamp down on this from a regulatory standpoint, is that you'll see more and more creativity in terms of what defines compensation, or perhaps even clever re-engineering of titles.
- shortrounddev 4y ago
  You can get a more accurate number if you require companies to post salaries publicly, but anonymously. Just a list of job titles and their salaries
  - giantg2 4y ago
    That can depend on company size and the number of positions. Many "anonymous" data points aren't really that anonymous at smaller companies or with a smaller number of specific roles.
    - asoneth 4y ago
      That is true. Many kinds of reporting requirements are only triggered for companies larger than a certain size, so perhaps that would be beneficial here as well to maintain anonymity.
      - giantg2 4y ago
        That covers half of it. Even in a fairly large company you can still have niche roles that could allow someone to de-anonymize the data. The group size wouldn't be 10k employees, just the 5 people you have in, for example, your legal department.
- kris_wayton 4y ago
  Doesn't it still have value though? Having to show the bottom means people near the bottom now know where they are.
NDizzle 4y ago
$90 to $900k is the 10x engineer, in hard copy.
Sparkle-san 4y ago
When I was looking to switch jobs in a state with salary posting requirements last year, I found the vast majority of the ranges to be perfectly reasonable and having something around a $50k spread. The law also allowed me to see that the ceiling my current company offered for my SRE position was the floor at many other places. There's always going to be a few wild ranges but overall I found the salary posting requirement to be a huge benefit in my job search.
- faet 4y ago
  I've found most ranges to be fair and useful as well. But, I've run into issues where they have no desire to honor the ranges. I've had discussions with HR/Recruiters and requested a salary near the top of their posted range. They've come back and said that the absolute max they can pay is 25% under what was posted as the max. Their 140-200k posted salary capped out at 150k.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Isn't a hidden, lower max actually fraud?
    - malfist 4y ago
      It depends. You'd have to be able to prove they'd never offer anybody that max. It's likely that 25% under the listed maximum is the maximum they'll offer GP when paired with their resume/experience/interview performance.
      - paulryanrogers 4y ago
        > They've come back and said that the absolute max they can pay is 25% under what was posted as the max. Suggests that there is really a lower, across-the-board cap.
  - diggernet 4y ago
    I know someone who was just told the range for a position is $100-130K. I happen to know that the actual salary range for that position is $100-160K. So why was he told 100-130? Company policy that they only hire in the bottom half of the range. So he was given the hiring range. It's possible the company you mention has a similar policy, but posted the full range for the position, not the hiring range. When required to post a range, there are pros/cons to both approaches. One tells you what you can expect for hiring. The other tells you what you can expect going forward. Probably companies that decide they want policies like this really ought to post both ranges, for full transparency. But some literal-minded HR drone who is told to post a range will probably just grab one or the other.
indymike 4y ago
This is very predictable, and may be based in fact. I've started a company, hired a CEO, went to work as a developer before If we had to base our advertised pay ranges on what our people were actually being paid, the range be very wide.
kentonv 4y ago
Is this really that surprising? When my team is hiring software engineers, we're almost never looking for a specific level of engineer to fill some sort of specifically-defined role. We're just looking for smart people at every level. We'll hire new college grads and we'll hire senior engineers with 20 years experience. We decide what level to place someone at based on the interview and background, then make them a corresponding offer. While we obviously would like to have a balance of senior and junior people, we're not going to say "OK this time we're specifically looking for a level 4 SWE, no more, no less." It seems like the law was designed with the assumption that companies always know in advance exactly what the person will do and exactly what quality of work will be expected. That's not realistic on software, though, where the work is constantly changing, individual projects are maybe a few months and then it's hard to predict what people will be working on beyond that. You just need to find the best people you can, at a reasonable balance of levels. Maybe the answer is that companies should be posting one job req for each level that they're willing to hire at? But what if you only have one headcount to fill, and you would really like to fill it with a rockstar senior engineer but you know more realistically it's probably going to be a promising junior? I suppose you can post the several different levels anyway and then take them all down once you've hired someone? But then will Yahoo write an article saying you're doing this to work around the law and violating it in spirit? (Disclaimer: I'm not a hiring manager, I'm just an engineer who interviews a lot of people. But I never understood how this law was supposed to apply to our industry.)
- nerdponx 4y ago
  > Maybe the answer is that companies should be posting one job req for each level that they're willing to hire at? From the perspective of an employee and applicant, I think this is completely reasonable. It also gives me a sense of the seniority and pay structure, which helps me make a slightly more informed decision about whether I will ever get a raise or if I'll have to quit and get a new job to get a raise.
- sgerenser 4y ago
  I actually mostly agree with this, and Netflix does seem to be a bit of an outlier because they pay all cash (whereas companies that have large stock components would end up listing a much narrower range since the law only requires disclosing base salary). OTOH, I still think the 90K on the low end still seems disingenuous, is anyone at Netflix making that low of a salary in a senior engineering position? According to levels.fyi, an L3 (entry-level) Netflix SW engineer makes an average of $205K base, and these job postings specifically say either L4 or L5.
freeAgent 4y ago
They should have just required companies to post the median pay for the posted position along with std dev. That would provide actually useful information in a standard format that everyone can reasonably interpret (or figure out how to interpret without too much trouble).
from 4y ago
Reminds me of another malicious compliance case: In Switzerland employers have to give employees reference letters that cannot be disparaging, so instead of writing negative remarks they just use coded language where "good" means "bad", "very good" means "mediocre", and "excellent" means "good". The government tries to ban this practice but it still continues.
mint2 4y ago
Yesterday I saw a new remote Zillow position pop up, it did not include a salary range. It advertised that remote was okay in any of the 50 states. Is that legal or does that break Colorado and California law?
cgearhart 4y ago
This article is trash, and there’s nothing nefarious going on—this is all standard HR stuff. “We need to hire someone.” “What level?” “Dunno. Experienced junior or new senior engineer could work. Depends on experience and education of the candidate.” “HR: ok, here’s a job posting at the Junior-or-senior level.” Pay range: from the minimum of the lower junior level to the maximum of the senior level as allowed by company HR policy. We interview the candidate. During interviews we establish the candidate’s experience level and share that recommendation with HR. HR then negotiates salary and TC within the allowed HR guidelines and the selected pay band. Something very close to this has been the process at all employers I’ve worked at—public and private. Here’s the GS equivalent for NSPS/STRL pay scales used by the US Navy when I was a civil service engineer https://images.federalregister.gov/EN14FE11.000/original.gif?1297497744 https://images.federalregister.gov/EN14FE11.000/original.gif... Notice that a science & engineering (S&E) DP-III position spans GS-9 thru 11, and a DP-IV spans GS-12 & 13. So if I wanted to hire someone at the cusp between those experience levels the published salary range would be $71k-$158k. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2023/SF.pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... Big tech companies have the same kind of scales—E3/4, L3/4, ICT3/4–with wider comp ranges in the bands. It’s not malicious compliance, it’s that those are the actual ranges approved by company HR policy to they can pay at those pay band levels. I would also expect that company policy establishes guidelines for salary offers and negotiation during hiring. So the law is asking the wrong question. It should be asking about the salary distribution of job offers accepted for comparable positions at the company. (Lots of wiggle room there still, but you get the point—it’s not about how much they can pay for a job, but about how much they do pay for that job.)
ht85 4y ago
If you want progress in the right direction, making people's income public would do a lot more than those gimmick measures.

37 points by sgerenser 4y ago

I actually saw this myself recently while looking at Netflix job listings before I ran across this article. Almost seems like they're sticking up their middle finger to "the man" for making them post pay ranges.

NickC25 4y ago
Yeah, it seems like malicious compliance. I mean, I get it. Companies don't want to disclose what they pay. But providing a relatively smaller range that better reflects what someone in that position might expect to get in reality might not be that hard, no? The $90k-$900k might look like $200k to $500k after that. Still quite ambiguous, but more reasonable. Otherwise, I'm having a hard time believing most of the advertised positions aren't in the process of being filled by internal staff, or being recruited for with an internal team that has the actual salary range, and Netflix or similar companies that do this sort of stuff just to post jobs online because of some legal requirement. IIRC in some states you can't actually hire someone unless you've actually posted the job opening online somewhere.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Imagine that I'm an employer and I am hiring for a position that I think could generate $1.5M/yr in value for the company. I'm probably willing to pay the perfect person $1M/yr for that (plus 20-25% in fringe expenses). Some people might want all cash; others might want mostly RSUs. I'd want to pay the first person $900K in cash and $100K in shares. I'd want to pay the second person $100K in cash and $900K in shares. The law requires me to post only the cash portion of their compensation; from the above facts, my range is quite genuinely $100K to $900K.
  - sgerenser 4y ago
    Except Netflix compensation is famously all-cash (with the option to buy Netflix options with some portion of that cash monthly).
  - Jcampuzano2 4y ago
    Yeah this is one of the huge blind spots in industries where compensation is not in the form of cash/benefits. Discretionary income like bonuses and stock grants are often not included in these laws. So the pay ranges at companies/industries where people often have the choice between a more cash heavy vs more RSU/Stock heavy compensation can be quite drastic like the one here without actually being incorrect, though obviously Netflix/other large tech companies can be outliers. Other industries that are very bonus or commision heavy can also get away with posting very "weird" looking pay ranges as well.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    That's a very very specific and uncommon case.
- sgerenser 4y ago
  I missed that there was a posting on HN about Netflix's posted salary ranges a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268691. There were people in there that knew Netflix employees who got 700k-1M pay packages, so in reality it doesn't seem like the top end of the range is definitely out of the question. I'm pretty sure the bottom end though is way below what they would actually pay for these posted senior engineer positions.
- TimPC 4y ago
  The law requires they actually list the absolute maximum for the position so if they ever pay $900k they need to list it. This means they list a low end that is unrealistic so that people think the whole range isn’t serious and it doesn’t turn into almost everyone applying wanting $800-900k.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    That contradicts a line in the article (and in the laws that I've read) > “The laws say you should post the ranges that you reasonably expect to pay,” If I reasonably expect to pay up to $900K/yr and I find an amazing candidate that I want to pay $1M/yr, I can almost certainly do so without it being a violation of the law.
oofta-boofta 4y ago
> Almost seems like they're sticking up their middle finger to "the man" for making them post pay ranges. Attempting to portray Netflix as anything else other than a conglomerate doing it's damnedest to pay as little as possible is disingenuous at best, and astroturfing at it's worst. Since when was Netflix the little guy sticking up to "the man"? Netflix IS "the man". Lack of pay transparency only benefits one side: the company's.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > a conglomerate doing it's damnedest to pay as little as possible Netflix pays some of the highest compensation in the industry, and all cash at that.

Centigonal 4y ago

Until 2022, I think everyone in engineering at Netflix had the title "Senior Software Engineer" - so that might actually make sense for them specifically. But, IIRC, they recently introduced levels, which makes this feel more petty.

rom-antics 4y ago

Seems good for negotiation. If a company offers you $180k, (given that range) they're implying you're in the lowest 10% of your field. Ask why they're willing to hire you if you're so terrible. If you're in the top 25%, you should be worth $700k.

simonsarris 4y ago
That assumes a very linear distribution, and there's no reason to believe that talent is remotely like that. It's very possible that lots of people have $90k stills and only an extremely tiny handful have $700k skills. After all that's how it is in the general population: Most people are $10/hour plumbers in terms of skills. Only a few people (we happen to mostly call them plumbers) are worth $200/hour or more.
- jen20 4y ago
  Most people are "negative several thousand dollar an hour" plumbers, in that they cause more damage than they fix. The same is true of software.
- 6510 4y ago
  If you end up in [say] the bottom 5% you should wonder if your belong there or if you are more valuable elsewhere.
onion2k 4y ago
The problem is that the salary range for the job isn't 90k to 900k. It's probably more like 100k to 150k. No amount of negotiation is going to change that. The range in the ad just means that a lot of more senior engineers will be wasting their time applying for the role.
- indymike 4y ago
  > The range in the ad just means that a lot of more senior engineers will be wasting their time applying for the role. When I go through candidates for an open position, I find very little correlation between experience and salary demands. Propensity for audacity seems to have more to do with it.

SavageBeast 4y ago

Shenanigans like this are one more reason we don't hire people residing in CA, CO or WA. I'm totally serious too - residency in these states is a hard next for us. Why you ask? Because we have enough real problems to deal with in business as it is and stepping into a bureaucratic web of this kind can only invite trouble and there's plenty of talent to be found elsewhere that doesn't encumber the company with additional regulatory scrutiny. We're small fish here but I'd imagine if we're thinking like this, larger companies must certainly be at least taking this into consideration. In effect, this is The State attempting to Price Fix around jobs-of-a-feather. No matter the intention, this is not The States business. The only possible purpose of making laws like this is so that the state can try to enforce some remedy whereby we're told how much we have to or are allowed to pay someone. Who in their right mind wants to sign up for that kind of risk? EDIT: When I say "one more reason" I mean specifically CA, its simply not cost effective to hire talent from there. CA taxes and cost of living are such that making a competitive offer to a candidate residing there is simply too costly from a compensation perspective. Plenty of people-talent exists in states with more favorable cost of living and tax schemes.

jen20 4y ago
> larger companies must certainly be at least taking this into consideration. Any yet, the majority of high-paying tech jobs in the US are still in CA, WA or NYC...
- indymike 4y ago
  That is changing fairly quickly.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  > larger companies must certainly be at least taking this into consideration. For many of them, it's probably a small compliance burden added to their already massive pile of existing ones.
malfist 4y ago
Similar arguments have been made against minimum wage. It's fine to say you want to pay your employees as little as you can get away with, just be honest about it.

TrackerFF 4y ago

How about companies have to post a histogram / distribution of salaries/compensation for said positions? Sounds ridiculous, but my old University suddenly started doing that, and it worked pretty great.

malfist 4y ago
That's what levels.fyi does (well, almost) and it's fantastic. I know I can go into an interview and ask for the 75th percentile and still feel like I'm being reasonable, and they'll probably negotiate down to something above average, but not quite 75th percentile and we'll both come away happy.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Equifax knows how much everyone makes, they could just require Equifax open their databases.

SavageBeast 4y ago
Through sheer negligence, I believe Equifax already did that some years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago

This was... utterly predictable? Companies have incredibly strong incentives to maintain this information asymmetry, and it's a fool's endeavor to think we can legislate it away. I suspect the next chapter in this, if we try to further clamp down on this from a regulatory standpoint, is that you'll see more and more creativity in terms of what defines compensation, or perhaps even clever re-engineering of titles.

shortrounddev 4y ago
You can get a more accurate number if you require companies to post salaries publicly, but anonymously. Just a list of job titles and their salaries
- giantg2 4y ago
  That can depend on company size and the number of positions. Many "anonymous" data points aren't really that anonymous at smaller companies or with a smaller number of specific roles.
  - asoneth 4y ago
    That is true. Many kinds of reporting requirements are only triggered for companies larger than a certain size, so perhaps that would be beneficial here as well to maintain anonymity.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      That covers half of it. Even in a fairly large company you can still have niche roles that could allow someone to de-anonymize the data. The group size wouldn't be 10k employees, just the 5 people you have in, for example, your legal department.
kris_wayton 4y ago
Doesn't it still have value though? Having to show the bottom means people near the bottom now know where they are.

NDizzle 4y ago

$90 to $900k is the 10x engineer, in hard copy.

Sparkle-san 4y ago

When I was looking to switch jobs in a state with salary posting requirements last year, I found the vast majority of the ranges to be perfectly reasonable and having something around a $50k spread. The law also allowed me to see that the ceiling my current company offered for my SRE position was the floor at many other places. There's always going to be a few wild ranges but overall I found the salary posting requirement to be a huge benefit in my job search.

faet 4y ago
I've found most ranges to be fair and useful as well. But, I've run into issues where they have no desire to honor the ranges. I've had discussions with HR/Recruiters and requested a salary near the top of their posted range. They've come back and said that the absolute max they can pay is 25% under what was posted as the max. Their 140-200k posted salary capped out at 150k.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Isn't a hidden, lower max actually fraud?
  - malfist 4y ago
    It depends. You'd have to be able to prove they'd never offer anybody that max. It's likely that 25% under the listed maximum is the maximum they'll offer GP when paired with their resume/experience/interview performance.
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      > They've come back and said that the absolute max they can pay is 25% under what was posted as the max. Suggests that there is really a lower, across-the-board cap.
- diggernet 4y ago
  I know someone who was just told the range for a position is $100-130K. I happen to know that the actual salary range for that position is $100-160K. So why was he told 100-130? Company policy that they only hire in the bottom half of the range. So he was given the hiring range. It's possible the company you mention has a similar policy, but posted the full range for the position, not the hiring range. When required to post a range, there are pros/cons to both approaches. One tells you what you can expect for hiring. The other tells you what you can expect going forward. Probably companies that decide they want policies like this really ought to post both ranges, for full transparency. But some literal-minded HR drone who is told to post a range will probably just grab one or the other.

indymike 4y ago

This is very predictable, and may be based in fact. I've started a company, hired a CEO, went to work as a developer before If we had to base our advertised pay ranges on what our people were actually being paid, the range be very wide.

kentonv 4y ago

Is this really that surprising? When my team is hiring software engineers, we're almost never looking for a specific level of engineer to fill some sort of specifically-defined role. We're just looking for smart people at every level. We'll hire new college grads and we'll hire senior engineers with 20 years experience. We decide what level to place someone at based on the interview and background, then make them a corresponding offer. While we obviously would like to have a balance of senior and junior people, we're not going to say "OK this time we're specifically looking for a level 4 SWE, no more, no less." It seems like the law was designed with the assumption that companies always know in advance exactly what the person will do and exactly what quality of work will be expected. That's not realistic on software, though, where the work is constantly changing, individual projects are maybe a few months and then it's hard to predict what people will be working on beyond that. You just need to find the best people you can, at a reasonable balance of levels. Maybe the answer is that companies should be posting one job req for each level that they're willing to hire at? But what if you only have one headcount to fill, and you would really like to fill it with a rockstar senior engineer but you know more realistically it's probably going to be a promising junior? I suppose you can post the several different levels anyway and then take them all down once you've hired someone? But then will Yahoo write an article saying you're doing this to work around the law and violating it in spirit? (Disclaimer: I'm not a hiring manager, I'm just an engineer who interviews a lot of people. But I never understood how this law was supposed to apply to our industry.)

nerdponx 4y ago
> Maybe the answer is that companies should be posting one job req for each level that they're willing to hire at? From the perspective of an employee and applicant, I think this is completely reasonable. It also gives me a sense of the seniority and pay structure, which helps me make a slightly more informed decision about whether I will ever get a raise or if I'll have to quit and get a new job to get a raise.
sgerenser 4y ago
I actually mostly agree with this, and Netflix does seem to be a bit of an outlier because they pay all cash (whereas companies that have large stock components would end up listing a much narrower range since the law only requires disclosing base salary). OTOH, I still think the 90K on the low end still seems disingenuous, is anyone at Netflix making that low of a salary in a senior engineering position? According to levels.fyi, an L3 (entry-level) Netflix SW engineer makes an average of $205K base, and these job postings specifically say either L4 or L5.

freeAgent 4y ago

They should have just required companies to post the median pay for the posted position along with std dev. That would provide actually useful information in a standard format that everyone can reasonably interpret (or figure out how to interpret without too much trouble).

from 4y ago

Reminds me of another malicious compliance case: In Switzerland employers have to give employees reference letters that cannot be disparaging, so instead of writing negative remarks they just use coded language where "good" means "bad", "very good" means "mediocre", and "excellent" means "good". The government tries to ban this practice but it still continues.

mint2 4y ago

Yesterday I saw a new remote Zillow position pop up, it did not include a salary range. It advertised that remote was okay in any of the 50 states. Is that legal or does that break Colorado and California law?

cgearhart 4y ago

This article is trash, and there’s nothing nefarious going on—this is all standard HR stuff. “We need to hire someone.” “What level?” “Dunno. Experienced junior or new senior engineer could work. Depends on experience and education of the candidate.” “HR: ok, here’s a job posting at the Junior-or-senior level.” Pay range: from the minimum of the lower junior level to the maximum of the senior level as allowed by company HR policy. We interview the candidate. During interviews we establish the candidate’s experience level and share that recommendation with HR. HR then negotiates salary and TC within the allowed HR guidelines and the selected pay band. Something very close to this has been the process at all employers I’ve worked at—public and private. Here’s the GS equivalent for NSPS/STRL pay scales used by the US Navy when I was a civil service engineer https://images.federalregister.gov/EN14FE11.000/original.gif?1297497744 https://images.federalregister.gov/EN14FE11.000/original.gif... Notice that a science & engineering (S&E) DP-III position spans GS-9 thru 11, and a DP-IV spans GS-12 & 13. So if I wanted to hire someone at the cusp between those experience levels the published salary range would be $71k-$158k. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2023/SF.pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... Big tech companies have the same kind of scales—E3/4, L3/4, ICT3/4–with wider comp ranges in the bands. It’s not malicious compliance, it’s that those are the actual ranges approved by company HR policy to they can pay at those pay band levels. I would also expect that company policy establishes guidelines for salary offers and negotiation during hiring. So the law is asking the wrong question. It should be asking about the salary distribution of job offers accepted for comparable positions at the company. (Lots of wiggle room there still, but you get the point—it’s not about how much they can pay for a job, but about how much they do pay for that job.)

ht85 4y ago

If you want progress in the right direction, making people's income public would do a lot more than those gimmick measures.