5 ms·

I applaud pay transparency, but reading the text of my state's legislation regarding it (RCW 49.58.110), all I see is that it says most employers must have a pa

I applaud pay transparency, but reading the text of my state's legislation regarding it (RCW 49.58.110), all I see is that it says most employers must have a pay scale that is known to candidates. My initial adversarial response as an imaginary business would be to say "okay, the pay scale for this position is between $0-$10000000, depending on qualifications". Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work? Anyway, with regards to the actual article, I was wondering just what mechanism supposedly made jobs with pay transparency harder to negotiate from a recruiter's perspective. Is the implication that there were no hard salary bands before this, so recruiters could sometimes offer 2x or 10x the salary? I'm sure it happened for exceptional candidates, even though it certainly never came up when I negotiated my salary... But I'm wondering: did it happen so often that it affects the overall statistics? That would be a moderate surprise to me.

rafaelmn 3y ago
Because stating your pay range like that makes you sound like a scammer ?
- karaterobot 3y ago
  That's an absurd example, but you see what I mean. Change it to $150-275k if that makes more sense. That's still a huge range: it probably fits 75% of software jobs in the U.S. The point is that you could still comply with the letter of the law without giving candidates very much actual information.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    It does at least save you from the "senior devops engineer with 15 years experience" roles that get you all the way through the interview before dropping "and the salary is $50k".
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Which actually seems pretty reasonable assuming a median somewhere around the middle. That's +/- ~$60K which is a fair bit of money but seems like rational range for a given role.
  - Atrine 3y ago
    I have a different reaction as I find this information useful. The lower range tells me if it's even within what I'm targeting. And if I get to an offer stage and I'm at the lower end of the spectrum, I would want to know why.
  - akavi 3y ago
    150 k$/yr is roughly dividing line to the top quartile of software developer pay. 150 - 275 k$ definitely does not encompass 75% of software jobs in the USA
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    Is that happening in practice? When I see listings, they're usually in a range of $30k or so. Still a huge range, but sort of in the ballpark, and often enough to know I don't want to read any further because the range is too low.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    sounds good to me unless you make 250k and are looking for a 20% pay boost. Someone making 100-130k sees a good minimum, someone 150-200k sees potential for salary and likely ends up negotiating. Someone making 300k wouldn't bother unless they are very sure they can negotiate higher (or are fine taking a pay cut for non-salary benefits). I think the point here is more that the floor is still a very reasonable salary to live on. Not necessarily for every engineer, but I would not pity someone struggling to live on 150k without dire circumstances.
bee_rider 3y ago
I’d expect (hope at least) that the courts would see listing $0-$1000000 as an obviously bad faith tactic to subvert the law. If it became a real thing that companies did, I guess the legislature would just pass another law.
- chongli 3y ago
  Then make it less obvious? Pay scale for this position: Grade | Pay Range E | 40k-50k D | 50k-60k C | 60k-70k B | 70k-80k A | 80k-90k A+ | 90k-150k Grade will be determined by qualifications. Doesn't this sound more like a good faith pay scale?
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    As long as it is possible to apply specifically for a grade that seems fine, right?
  - joshuamorton 3y ago
    No, because there isn't a role for which you pay people 4x others. A grade E and A+ are doing different jobs with different qualifications and requirements.
    - chongli 3y ago
      If the 10x developer exists, why not the 4x developer?
      - naniwaduni 3y ago
        The -10x developer also exists. Even if you could identify them, you still wouldn't get to pay them -10x.
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    The scale is extreme, but that is what a lot of companies do. For example, with large accounting firms, having a CPA license boosts salary by 10-25% over a candidate without a CPA (assuming both are otherwise equally qualified and get offers). With law firms, having a federal court clerkship on the resume boosts salary by 25-50% over candidates without a clerkship (at the early stages of one's career), not including a six-figure signing bonus that generally is not offered to other candidates.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
They should have to produce and justify it on the basis of the previous salary the position required to fill. And I mean this is the sense of them being forced to err on the side of disclosure, I'm sick of this shit where companies always get the discretionary aspect when they need cold, hard, regulation and absolute liabillity. The burden needs to start shiftingto the more facile and natural starting point: the business/hirer. They're running the ship, they need to start charting a legal and practicable course that respects the dignity of the sea of jobseekers. This whole "based on qualifications" is stupid because there's obviously a base level of competency required for candidates and successfull candidates and at the end of the day, its more reasonable to make the previous salary the baseline unless the position has radically altered. If they lie, charge 'em with wire fraud and swoop in as a lesson to the next jerk who wants to play games with hiring and payroll Hell crowdsource it and turn the panopticon back on the abyss where it belongs. Edit: just have a simple test like how much does the least qualified yet acceptable candidate demand and work your way up from there if they have your "special magic abillities"/quals.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > They should have to produce and justify it on the basis of the previous salary the position required to fill. This leads to some ambiguities, ex: 1. How would that work when a company is adding totally new positions? For example, a small company adding DevOps, or where the previous worker was a contractor? 2. How does anyone reliably distinguish moved/renamed positions versus ones that might be dropping an old position and adding new one? 3. For similar titles but very different business-areas, does the "Team Lead" of a new business-analytics unit inherit the past salary of the "Team Lead" for janitorial services?
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Can I ask legit what is the current deal? Do people go into interviews completely blinded as to what the position is minimally and maximally worth? It seems so insane to me as someone who's been out this game for so long now.
    - 3y ago
olddustytrail 3y ago
As mentioned, such an approach is an immediate red flag to anyone applying. But also, judges and courts really aren't impressed with the "but technically" argument. You will get locked up if you try to play the smartarse.
blibble 3y ago
> I applaud pay transparency, but reading the text of my state's legislation regarding it (RCW 49.58.110), all I see is that it says most employers must have a pay scale that is known to candidates. My initial adversarial response as an imaginary business would be to say "okay, the pay scale for this position is between $0-$10000000, depending on qualifications". Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work? tighten up the disclosure requirements example: produce the distribution, at 5% resolution with a range 2 SDs around the median
contravariant 3y ago
I'm guessing it wouldn't work because it is quite a lot easier to tell when a company is being hostile when they're disclosing information, as opposed to a company being reluctant to disclose information. I mean, given the choice between a job listing stating a pay scale of $0-$10000000 or $75000-$125000 it'd be very optimistic to assume the former will actually lead to a higher offer. Basically by forcing employers to state a scale you force them to bid against each other not only on the total amount but also the specificity. When there's only a few companies disclosing any information at all this competition has little effect, but this changes when they're supposed to say something (and I think courts will rule that $0-$10000000 is not a real pay grade, one end is below minimum wage and the other is probably higher than can fit in the budget). Of course is there's no enforcement at all it can still devolve in the same meaningless pay scale everywhere.
- sz4kerto 3y ago
  > job listing stating a pay scale of $0-$10000000 or $75000-$125000 it'd be very optimistic to assume the former will actually lead to a higher offer. Well, this is roughly how banking compensation and bonuses work and tons of people play this game because the expected return is higher than eg in the public sector with very well defined salaries. This is an extreme example but I could have said "German engineering company vs Silicon Valley startup".
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    It's still more informative just to see what amount of information the company will disclose in the posting. And in any case, you usually know when you're applying into an industry where TC is wildly out of step with salary and judge accordingly.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    We're not talking about a probability distribution though, we're talking about a company coming up with a wage offer for a job. If a company can't give you a range that doesn't cover multiple orders of magnitude then they're incompetent or lying, neither really bodes well for your hypothetical employment.
karatinversion 3y ago
But then you need to run your business with that salary range - if you put it in writing to your hr people or hiring managers that the maximum they can actually offer is $less_than_that, those emails will come out in discovery.
- yowzadave 3y ago
  And if the floor of your salary range is lower than that of all your competitors, it will make it harder to attract good applicants to the position; I definitely notice the bottom end of the range when looking at job postings.
slg 3y ago
>Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work? Maybe that doesn't tell a candidate the actual pay range of the job, but it definitely is valuable information that tells you about how the company operates. I wouldn't want to work anywhere that does that because it shows a contempt for both the law and prospective employees.
jdwithit 3y ago
Netflix literally does (or at least did) this. It's not even a hypothetical. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/90000-to-900000-pay-transparency-laws-usher-in-baffling-pay-ranges-in-job-postings-200857290.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/90000-to-900000-pay-transpare...
- seattle_spring 3y ago
  Netflix actually does pay $900k to a non-trivial amount of employees though.
  - presidentender 3y ago
    Surely not for the same role that would pay $90k, though, unless they just don't have titles in any useful sense.
    - malfist 3y ago
      That's exactly how Netflix operates. Everyone is a "senior" engineer.
      - mochomocha 3y ago
        Was true until 2022. Unfortunately levels rolled out for both ICs and managers.
      - Infinitesimus 3y ago
        Not anymore, they introduced levels last year
        fnordpiglet 3y ago
        Ads too. How the mighty have fallen?
- gamblor956 3y ago
  Netflix pays above-grade salaries. A few years ago, I interviewed there for a position that was two levels below my current title but paid 2x more than I made. Netflix pays well because they don't believe in work-life balance, at all. The position I interviewed for was vacant because the previous individual had left. By the time I wrapped up the interviews, the person I would have reported to had left Netflix, and the person who would have been my direct report would have been my boss. By the time I actually declined the offer, that person had also left.)
s0rce 3y ago
Right now, at least in my field there are some companies listing very wide ranges, say $75k-$270k, however, most are not so there is value in knowing that the max a company is offering for a role is say, $160k upfront vs. going through a bunch of interviews and negotiations just to learn that's the ceiling and then turning it down. If more and more companies provide huge ranges then this won't be useful except as another commenter said that you can favor jobs with realistic ranges that actually bracket your desired comp.
jandrewrogers 3y ago
Even when there were rigid salary bands, I've seen companies regularly work around it by inventing new roles with new salary bands. At one company where I worked, a specific title could refer to one of several different independent roles with their own salary bands. The headline title was not the primary key of the system.
cbsmith 3y ago
I would imagine this would increase the risks an employer would face for discriminatory compensation claims. If you're really saying that the range is that varied for the role and you don't have anything like a reasonable distribution of compensation across people in that role...

rafaelmn 3y ago

Because stating your pay range like that makes you sound like a scammer ?

karaterobot 3y ago
That's an absurd example, but you see what I mean. Change it to $150-275k if that makes more sense. That's still a huge range: it probably fits 75% of software jobs in the U.S. The point is that you could still comply with the letter of the law without giving candidates very much actual information.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  It does at least save you from the "senior devops engineer with 15 years experience" roles that get you all the way through the interview before dropping "and the salary is $50k".
- ghaff 3y ago
  Which actually seems pretty reasonable assuming a median somewhere around the middle. That's +/- ~$60K which is a fair bit of money but seems like rational range for a given role.
- Atrine 3y ago
  I have a different reaction as I find this information useful. The lower range tells me if it's even within what I'm targeting. And if I get to an offer stage and I'm at the lower end of the spectrum, I would want to know why.
- akavi 3y ago
  150 k$/yr is roughly dividing line to the top quartile of software developer pay. 150 - 275 k$ definitely does not encompass 75% of software jobs in the USA
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Is that happening in practice? When I see listings, they're usually in a range of $30k or so. Still a huge range, but sort of in the ballpark, and often enough to know I don't want to read any further because the range is too low.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  sounds good to me unless you make 250k and are looking for a 20% pay boost. Someone making 100-130k sees a good minimum, someone 150-200k sees potential for salary and likely ends up negotiating. Someone making 300k wouldn't bother unless they are very sure they can negotiate higher (or are fine taking a pay cut for non-salary benefits). I think the point here is more that the floor is still a very reasonable salary to live on. Not necessarily for every engineer, but I would not pity someone struggling to live on 150k without dire circumstances.

bee_rider 3y ago

I’d expect (hope at least) that the courts would see listing $0-$1000000 as an obviously bad faith tactic to subvert the law. If it became a real thing that companies did, I guess the legislature would just pass another law.

chongli 3y ago
Then make it less obvious? Pay scale for this position: Grade | Pay Range E | 40k-50k D | 50k-60k C | 60k-70k B | 70k-80k A | 80k-90k A+ | 90k-150k Grade will be determined by qualifications. Doesn't this sound more like a good faith pay scale?
- bee_rider 3y ago
  As long as it is possible to apply specifically for a grade that seems fine, right?
- joshuamorton 3y ago
  No, because there isn't a role for which you pay people 4x others. A grade E and A+ are doing different jobs with different qualifications and requirements.
  - chongli 3y ago
    If the 10x developer exists, why not the 4x developer?
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      The -10x developer also exists. Even if you could identify them, you still wouldn't get to pay them -10x.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  The scale is extreme, but that is what a lot of companies do. For example, with large accounting firms, having a CPA license boosts salary by 10-25% over a candidate without a CPA (assuming both are otherwise equally qualified and get offers). With law firms, having a federal court clerkship on the resume boosts salary by 25-50% over candidates without a clerkship (at the early stages of one's career), not including a six-figure signing bonus that generally is not offered to other candidates.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

They should have to produce and justify it on the basis of the previous salary the position required to fill. And I mean this is the sense of them being forced to err on the side of disclosure, I'm sick of this shit where companies always get the discretionary aspect when they need cold, hard, regulation and absolute liabillity. The burden needs to start shiftingto the more facile and natural starting point: the business/hirer. They're running the ship, they need to start charting a legal and practicable course that respects the dignity of the sea of jobseekers. This whole "based on qualifications" is stupid because there's obviously a base level of competency required for candidates and successfull candidates and at the end of the day, its more reasonable to make the previous salary the baseline unless the position has radically altered. If they lie, charge 'em with wire fraud and swoop in as a lesson to the next jerk who wants to play games with hiring and payroll Hell crowdsource it and turn the panopticon back on the abyss where it belongs. Edit: just have a simple test like how much does the least qualified yet acceptable candidate demand and work your way up from there if they have your "special magic abillities"/quals.

Terr_ 3y ago
> They should have to produce and justify it on the basis of the previous salary the position required to fill. This leads to some ambiguities, ex: 1. How would that work when a company is adding totally new positions? For example, a small company adding DevOps, or where the previous worker was a contractor? 2. How does anyone reliably distinguish moved/renamed positions versus ones that might be dropping an old position and adding new one? 3. For similar titles but very different business-areas, does the "Team Lead" of a new business-analytics unit inherit the past salary of the "Team Lead" for janitorial services?
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Can I ask legit what is the current deal? Do people go into interviews completely blinded as to what the position is minimally and maximally worth? It seems so insane to me as someone who's been out this game for so long now.
  - 3y ago

olddustytrail 3y ago

As mentioned, such an approach is an immediate red flag to anyone applying. But also, judges and courts really aren't impressed with the "but technically" argument. You will get locked up if you try to play the smartarse.

blibble 3y ago

> I applaud pay transparency, but reading the text of my state's legislation regarding it (RCW 49.58.110), all I see is that it says most employers must have a pay scale that is known to candidates. My initial adversarial response as an imaginary business would be to say "okay, the pay scale for this position is between $0-$10000000, depending on qualifications". Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work? tighten up the disclosure requirements example: produce the distribution, at 5% resolution with a range 2 SDs around the median

contravariant 3y ago

I'm guessing it wouldn't work because it is quite a lot easier to tell when a company is being hostile when they're disclosing information, as opposed to a company being reluctant to disclose information. I mean, given the choice between a job listing stating a pay scale of $0-$10000000 or $75000-$125000 it'd be very optimistic to assume the former will actually lead to a higher offer. Basically by forcing employers to state a scale you force them to bid against each other not only on the total amount but also the specificity. When there's only a few companies disclosing any information at all this competition has little effect, but this changes when they're supposed to say something (and I think courts will rule that $0-$10000000 is not a real pay grade, one end is below minimum wage and the other is probably higher than can fit in the budget). Of course is there's no enforcement at all it can still devolve in the same meaningless pay scale everywhere.

sz4kerto 3y ago
> job listing stating a pay scale of $0-$10000000 or $75000-$125000 it'd be very optimistic to assume the former will actually lead to a higher offer. Well, this is roughly how banking compensation and bonuses work and tons of people play this game because the expected return is higher than eg in the public sector with very well defined salaries. This is an extreme example but I could have said "German engineering company vs Silicon Valley startup".
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  It's still more informative just to see what amount of information the company will disclose in the posting. And in any case, you usually know when you're applying into an industry where TC is wildly out of step with salary and judge accordingly.
- contravariant 3y ago
  We're not talking about a probability distribution though, we're talking about a company coming up with a wage offer for a job. If a company can't give you a range that doesn't cover multiple orders of magnitude then they're incompetent or lying, neither really bodes well for your hypothetical employment.

karatinversion 3y ago

But then you need to run your business with that salary range - if you put it in writing to your hr people or hiring managers that the maximum they can actually offer is $less_than_that, those emails will come out in discovery.

yowzadave 3y ago
And if the floor of your salary range is lower than that of all your competitors, it will make it harder to attract good applicants to the position; I definitely notice the bottom end of the range when looking at job postings.

slg 3y ago

>Now we're back where we started, with the candidate having no valuable information, and the company seemingly in compliance with the law. Why wouldn't this work? Maybe that doesn't tell a candidate the actual pay range of the job, but it definitely is valuable information that tells you about how the company operates. I wouldn't want to work anywhere that does that because it shows a contempt for both the law and prospective employees.

jdwithit 3y ago

Netflix literally does (or at least did) this. It's not even a hypothetical. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/90000-to-900000-pay-transparency-laws-usher-in-baffling-pay-ranges-in-job-postings-200857290.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/90000-to-900000-pay-transpare...

seattle_spring 3y ago
Netflix actually does pay $900k to a non-trivial amount of employees though.
- presidentender 3y ago
  Surely not for the same role that would pay $90k, though, unless they just don't have titles in any useful sense.
  - malfist 3y ago
    That's exactly how Netflix operates. Everyone is a "senior" engineer.
    - mochomocha 3y ago
      Was true until 2022. Unfortunately levels rolled out for both ICs and managers.
    - Infinitesimus 3y ago
      Not anymore, they introduced levels last year
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        Ads too. How the mighty have fallen?
gamblor956 3y ago
Netflix pays above-grade salaries. A few years ago, I interviewed there for a position that was two levels below my current title but paid 2x more than I made. Netflix pays well because they don't believe in work-life balance, at all. The position I interviewed for was vacant because the previous individual had left. By the time I wrapped up the interviews, the person I would have reported to had left Netflix, and the person who would have been my direct report would have been my boss. By the time I actually declined the offer, that person had also left.)

s0rce 3y ago

Right now, at least in my field there are some companies listing very wide ranges, say $75k-$270k, however, most are not so there is value in knowing that the max a company is offering for a role is say, $160k upfront vs. going through a bunch of interviews and negotiations just to learn that's the ceiling and then turning it down. If more and more companies provide huge ranges then this won't be useful except as another commenter said that you can favor jobs with realistic ranges that actually bracket your desired comp.

jandrewrogers 3y ago

Even when there were rigid salary bands, I've seen companies regularly work around it by inventing new roles with new salary bands. At one company where I worked, a specific title could refer to one of several different independent roles with their own salary bands. The headline title was not the primary key of the system.

cbsmith 3y ago

I would imagine this would increase the risks an employer would face for discriminatory compensation claims. If you're really saying that the range is that varied for the role and you don't have anything like a reasonable distribution of compensation across people in that role...