Posted by 1659447091 1 day ago
A few years back I wanted to get out of the work situation I was in. I looked around, had some interviews, had some offers. None of the postings had salary ranges, as is common where I live.
My eyes, however, were set on a specific small company because I liked their product. The process was long and involved multiple meetings, a take-home problem, and stretched over 2 or so months. I was upfront about what my salary expectations were (wasn't looking for a raise, just a lateral move). They said we discuss salary when you meet the founders, i.e. the last step before getting hired, but they also didn't tell me that my range was way off.
Turns out I had played this 9 week game and turned down other offers just to be severely low-balled by them. Maybe they saw that I really wanted the position and thought they could get away with a low offer.
Obviously, I rejected their offer on the spot. I also promised myself to never, _ever_, be fooled like that again. We talk money before I invest any significant amount of time or I walk.
EDIT: fixed wording.
Then they went legal trying to prevent me working for a competitor.
I actually got what I needed from the role anyway, but it was a lesson to heed the red flags. I've not heeded that lesson a couple of times recently, just because the market seems to be toast, but it's not been worth it.
Was threatened with that early in my career after I resigned, I just replied "Check my employment contract, Good luck with that".
They where chaotically unorganised and the contract had no non-compete, they are enforceable in the UK but it's quite uphill to enforce an overly broad one (up to and including it just been nullified if you go too broad) and they have to show good evidence why it should be enforced.
1. It depends on how desperate the applicant is: if they're searching while still employed then they can walk (like GP did).
2. Even if they are desperate, they may take the offer… for now… so they can start getting a salary again, but that won't prevent them from continue to look. In which case you're paying for them to learn a job which they'll leave and you'll have to pay someone (else) a second time to learn as well.
False economy IMHO.
unless you're looking at VP and up level roles where there may be a significant delta in risk, cost, and pay it's probably not worth it.
You don't have to show up on the start date, though you do have to be mindful of the bridge you may be burning. But it is totally reasonable to show up to a few days of work, and declare "you know what, I don't think this is a good fit" and no one will be offended. They don't have to know that you already accepted another offer.
Exploding offers, low-ball offers, all bullshit. But you don't have to play their games.
Some corporations will exploit whatever advantages they perceive. I overheard one hiring manager refer to their process as "the hunger games".
If anything the manager would prefer a higher offer that the candidate is likely to expect than a low-ball which they reject and then the hiring process has to continue.
I just thought it should be clearer how many of these businesses likely operate to filter out.
Sounds a bit counterproductive
A lot of places are looking for unambitious, mediocre, status-quo following bodies to fill seats and follow arcane bureaucratic processes. Too much critical thinking is bad. Ability to deal with long drawn out bullshit is good.
I love working in tech because it’s so cushy and chill but it’s the most stupid (and delusional) industry i ever worked in.
They'll spend 5x your ask for a raise finding someone to fill your position because denying you keeps the rest of their payroll in line. And if you consider these people communicate across their industries, they will make informal cartels that depress all employee wages.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there was just a natural way to filter our employees who would be to demanding by making them jump through more hoops.
That doesn't pass the smell test. That would mean those companies do not care about filling a role of hiring competent workers. If your guy is willing to wait two whole months for your offer, you are either Google or you are trying to hire a dude who no company on earth wants.
I’ve similarly had 6-round interviews where at the end I either receive a lowball offer or am rejected because of something disclosed up-front.
> Stretched over two months
These companies aren't Google. There is no valid reason why it should take so long to decide on candidates for a position. It is not necessary to have more than two interview sessions. I bail on any company that subjects people to this garbage.
Google is a very large company. They have capital on hand and an established, well-worn process for onboarding. It costs them comparatively little to hire.
For a small company, an engineering hire is a big investment. They don't do it as often, so it costs them more in terms of both direct costs and indirect costs - like the time it takes their existing team to go through the process and bring the new hire up to speed.
Based on that, assumption was the budget would be adequate. Final response was that they would not even mention the salary because it was too far away.
Following week they posted the job advert for same staff engineer role but at under average eu minimum wage.
It's risky if no salary is listed but do not ever proceed if they don't openly accept your ask without any doubt.
>under average eu minimum wage
Wth ? How does this work
with regards to uk tech companies - they have salary ranges like 60k-75k - where someone might have spent time in a role at 63k e.g if the average tenure within a certain position is 3 years, 63k - then when you join they will say new joiners start at 60k.
That was the other guy's job, and it as a prerequisite - they would not reach me if the compensation was not to their satisfaction. My job was to determine whether the candidate could perform at the offered post. If I needed to discuss compensation then someone before me would have screwed up.
I like giving interviews. It gives me insight into their thinking and the company.
Probably the majority in current late stage capitalism
If i was good enough to get hired as a faang with just interviews and no take home stuff i see no reason to do that for a smaller company.
There's nothing you can do about the dishonest ones.
There are apparently some new regulations in Canada to protect job seekers from this, but it's not a clean line in the sand. It seems like companies won't likely be held accountable unless it is a pattern of hiring like this, but how do people establish a pattern when most people still won't discuss salaries?
Don't want to act like an adult and tell me how much money I'll make? I'm out, good luck.
A second reason is to avoid discrimination. Applicants that feel disadvantaged, even if they are actually qualified, may hesitate to negotiate for a higher salary in the same way that a other applicants would. The consequence is that they start with a lower salary. This applies specially to women. Plenty of research shows that they are less likely to negotiate their salary.
Research[1] suggests that pay transparency leads to lower average salaries because employers avoid paying higher wages to any one employee to avoid costly negotiations with others. The effect is small, around 2%, and it disappears with increasing degree of unionization. In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
I've tried the opposite, paid everyone the same. But there were clear differences in ability and more importantly outside options. It became a problem when it came to retention and the business didn't have the ability to overpay everyone to keep the top performers.
More broadly than that -- it's not that you need to pay everyone the same, it's that you need clear structure around how your pay works.
An example that became a problem with one previous employer was that they kept saying "performance" was their only determining factor for pay, after it had come out that exactly one person on our team had been offered bonuses as a performance incentive.
It's not actually performance-based if you have different and better reward structures, or if you can't/won't explain why gaps exist.
Say that no one you interview has those particulars, and you hire someone who's just -- by your regular, baseline standards -- qualified for the job. Do you have a cutoff for what you would pay those people? Then you should probably post that, and then just act like companies that comply with this stuff already and include some kind of disclaimer, that extraordinary candidates may still fall somewhere outside that range.
You want to set laws that hurt 99% of employees for a theoretical benefit to a 1% case for the employer?
it's just multiple grades at that point masquerading behind a broken HR system
* The company decides to open a specific position, which it will fill no matter what.
* The position will pay the same amount no matter who fills it.
* There exists a binary condition called "qualified" which people metaphysically are or aren't.
* The job must not go to an unqualified person, but could go to any qualified applicant.
* Society may instruct you to use certain non-merit-based criteria to prefer some qualified applicants over others, but hiring managers and teams must not use their own subjective feelings or relationships to do so.
I can understand how a civil service or other massive bureaucracy full of principal-agent problems arrives at these rules, but they are obviously not the only valid way to assemble a high-performing team or the best one in all circumstances.
I'm not answering a pitch that says "$100K-$350K salary, final decision based on vibes" but I will if it says "$250K-$270K salary, needs 10 years of experience leading X kinds of projects and proficiency in Y, Z".
It does make me wonder what would happen if you put out 100 different job adverts split apart by £1,000 increments. I'm sorry you aren't suitable for the 100k job you applied for but would you consider our 97k role instead?
A title like "Senior Software Developer" can range from 5 years of general-purpose web development experience to 20 years of highly specialized experience. Those "Principal" and "Staff" titles don't necessarily make sense outside of larger corporations.
Most recently I've seen salary ranges up to 30% of the upper bound. Completely reasonable.
It's also easiest for candidates. If you are faced with 2 job postings about the same org at a company you may not have any experience with, how will you decide whether to apply for the lower or higher level role? It's not always clear.
If you want juniors to fill out your team, why are you getting a bunch of seniors?
If I'm building a team, I don't need everyone at the exact same level. I want a mix. I want some juniors, some seniors and a tech lead. The job description is the same, I'm not writing 3 or 4.
But a team of SWEs at different experience levels for the same role won't be different job descriptions.
I'm in this situation right now, I have a minimum requirement, it could be MET with someone with 1-2 years of experience or 20 years.
But that is the MINIMUM, if I find someone that meets that minimum but I get a lot more, I will pay more. But I'm still not making multiple job descriptions with different ranges.
There's valid conversation around the nuances of "what if this need isn't specific to a level?" but those don't excuse keeping people in the dark about what the job offers or requires.
Why would you put people with different experience levels in the same role? You'll have three classes of people, only one of them "happy", for the others it'll be too much or too little. You cannot put a junior in the same position as a person who wants to be tech lead?
I think maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because having one job description for those three roles don't make much sense as I understand it currently.
We need a team of X people, we have minimum requirements. We are open to anyone as long as they are close to the requirements (100% match is never possible).
We evaluate the comp based on interview feedback... then as the team gets filled what we look for starts to narrow to "fill out the bench" so to speak.
But we won't ever go back and update the description or pay-band, no need.
If you think every junior/senior/staff has the same ability, you're delusional. Two people can broadly fall into the same bucket but be very different in terms of output.
Or, I find value in areas that get overlooked in the market. Career transition people for example might not have many other options and I can take a gamble on how fast they ramp up.
As an occasional hiring manager, having this sort of flexibility sounds really nice!
Unfortunately I have to define my requirements and justify a fairly narrow range when I want to add to my team, so it's not something I get to enjoy. There have definitely been candidates who stand out from the crowd and have higher expectations, that I have not been able to offer to.
It's very hard for people to accept that this might even be the case, many people just assume that transparency is better for workers.
That said I think Jury is still out on pay transparency mostly because there isn't that much practical data. The EU has been navigating it for a few years but research is still ongoing.
One paper (which is more focused on pay gap reporting, which is longer implemented and seems to have limited impact) suggests salary disclosure in job ads actually increases wages.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pay-transparency-in-pro...
It's definitely obvious that internal salary transparency will a) act to normalise salaries over the long term and b) generally depress salaries. But disclosure at the job as stage is less clear.
There's a difference between coworkers talking to each other and the system being set up in a transparent way where everyone can see everyone else's salaries, these two aren't the same thing.
A more real time view of the change in people’s pay to quality of life at work ratio can help people decide what to train in and how much to invest in the training.
We will invent narratives to protect our ego and will happily keep other people down (including ourselves) instead of confronting this.
"He just got promoted because he's more outgoing, he's not more talented than me!"
Ok let's assume thats true. But if your job involves spending 40 hours a week with someone (more than your family), it turns out humans value being around charming, outgoing people. Is this wrong or is it the market accurately assessing relative value in the context of the actual work (collaborating with other humans)?
Mediocre and average employees like the idea of reducing inequality, because the mediocre employees stand to financially benefit and the average employees can expect little to no change in compensation while reaping emotional rewards.
For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.
Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality.
Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others. If you want to pay someone outside of band, give them a different title.
If someone performs unexpectedly well, give them a bonus/promotion etc.
It's deeply sad (but unsurprising) that so many people can only focus on their particular benefit (especially when the vast majority of that benefit is context dependent).
Like, if you hired John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard and just told them to take tickets, they'd probably be an average performer at best. If you told them never to take initiative, they'd perform badly. So lots of performance is dependent on context, there are very few "good" employees in a vacuum.
No its not. This is a skill that is useful when exchanging value with other entities (the basis of the economy). You're being compensated for having that skill.
Would you hire a salesperson or head of procurement or media buyer with bad negotiation skills? How about a developer who can't properly negotiate with teams demanding their time to properly allocate themselves where needed?
Then give your money to people who don't negotiate as well. In practice, you don't: your revealed preference speaks louder than your stated preference does.
And the transaction costs on such an approach would be too large, as I'm sure that you know.
M I note that you don't address the notion of context dependent high performance.
As an EM, a person's current salary is an anchor. If someone is paid at the bottom of the band, but then later the company learns about their high impact, they aren't given a raise, they are told to push harder and get promoted.
And then when they are promoted, they are probably at the bottom of the next band.
if a person threatens to leave, the EM (rarely) can magically wave a wand to increase the salary, but they can promise to put them up for promotion next cycle.
The reality is that in most industries competence and impact has very little to do with compensation. Compensation is the result of political status games, not demonstrable ability.
It goes other way round too. It might just be that the your higher salary is not rational, you got lucky or got unfair advantage.
Like, in the bottom of your comment, you made up situation that might just not apply. Or might just not counteract anything
Or, might be directly damaging - agreeing with everyone makes you popular, but causes a lot of damage in the long term. Lying about important stuff makes you popular, but causes damage to company and everyone else.
People go out of their way to rationalize and defend unfair or damaging systems.
So it's far more likely these comments are over-indexing on the "its all luck/unfairness" explanation than the "it's all rational" explanation given there's 100X more people who will have their egos protected by the former positioning (the ratio of executives to worker bees is like 1:100).
It’s more that the “i work hard and hustle everyday” narrative from successful people is to protect their little egos from the realisation that 90% of their success is pure luck / chance / chaos.
Yes, both parties use motivated reasoning to protect their ego.
But there's 100X more of the worker bees than there is of the uber-successful.
Therefore any discussion like this one will over-index on the luck explanation.
We're obviously not at risk of assigning too much agency to successful people here on HN, an internet forum filled with frustrated leftist upper middle class last men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
I'd like the boss to do his work and write down the rationalization. Then, when we have an objective measure of the rationalization of the wage, I can work towards getting a higher wage myself.
The biggest opponents of wage transparency (and many other things) are incompetent managers refusing to do their work.
Signed, a high earner.
See also: hiking the minimum wage (possibly the most obvious example of academic corruption), rent controls, taxing the rich, etc.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary ones are 1) economists also respond to incentives and those think tank jobs pay really well and 2) prestige in the industry is also a commodity - a commodity which can be bought and sold. The level to which money talks in this industry is reflected by the wages - always higher than all other humanities.
As an example the freakonomics guys popularity are to popular economics what k pop is to music: a slick, highly refined, marketed product from a superbly well oiled marketing machine.
So I live in a country with no rent controls with very high rents and housing costs. The capital is disincentivized from creating more supply by the fact that creating more supply devalues existing supply.
Rent controls would 1. lower the rent (obviously), 2. lower the price of existing apartments since the profit you make on them is lower, 3. like a sibling comment points out, hammer the profits of capital.
> Taxing the rich lowers the velocity of money, disincentivizes capital to search for more profit seeking enterprises.
Wow... Taxing the rich means less taxes for the poor means more people with money/time to start their own companies.
What actually happens is that profit margins get hammered (notice how you forgot about those? you were supposed to) and those businesses that rely upon minimum waged labor complain bitterly.
Very low margin businesses do raise prices but in the study I saw that looked at profit margins ans prices only two examples of price raising from a survey of about 50 were, like, nail salons and catering.
In the well designed studies where they measure job losses they found essentially negligible job losses. These studies caused a lot of drama in the economics community - a lot of them acted like they'd been told that their god didn't exist. It was replicated though.
Some other studies say "look! restaurants go out of business when the minimum wage is hiked! job losses!" but neglect to mention that when restaurant A goes out of business and is replaced with restaurant B (which is what often happens), servers and cooks just switch jobs.
The whinging manifests as money piled into lobbying and public outreach to prevent this type of thing from happening again and the result of that public outreach is how you formulated your opinion about what happens and why you forgot that, for example, profits can also decrease when price goes up.
I think the most common "mistake" is that most economists are used to thinking about money in absolute terms, but in real life it's a lot more useful to treat prices as a percentage of your income. That means the utility of money is not linear, so redistribution is good by itself unless it hurts growth so much that average incomes start going down in real terms.
The other one is way deeper and harder to fix but I don't think a lot of people actually believe it, they just use it implicitly in their research. It's that the goal of economics is to maximize efficiency (measured by ROI = profits), not to deliver the best outcomes for the greatest amount of people.
From this point of view a platform like Doordash is efficient because they underpay workers and overcharge customers, and so are surveillance data brokers. That's clearly not a perspective that gets us into a better society. But measuring quality of life is much harder than taking two numbers every company is legally required to count.
I always found the question “what is a good life?” to be one of the most interesting and consequential philosophical questions. People have found very different answers for this over the millennia.
Not everyone has the time, energy or patience to do that though. Journalists certainly don't and the general public is more inclined to be drawn in by a nice clickbaity story that makes them feel smarter than their friends (which is the market segment freakonomics services).
Point being if you were to make an assumption, "pop economist says that popular thing thing that is bad for profits is bad for you too is probably bullshit" is actually a fairly safe one.
That said, your 3 examples are very well studied, and rent controls are completely different from taxing the rich and hiking the minimum wage.
There is of course still a black market
Most restaurants you go to to eat would have to close if they needed to employ their workers legally. Same thing applies to bars and similar venues.
Source: worked in that industry 10+ years
A minimum wage is a ban on certain baskets of compensation for work.
It doesn't prevent 'exploitation', whatever that means. Companies fiercely competing for labour is what you want here.
No, it's not.
stage 1 is it hammers profit margins <-- for 95% of businesses we are here.
Stage 2 is then it increases prices <-- only affects very low margin businesses which are a small minority.
Stage 3 is it triggers job losses <-- to my knowledge it's never been raised high enough to make this happen. maybe $50 / hour would be the threshold.
Why are people so focussed on employment? Employment is only one area that minimum wage affects, and as you say, with moderate minimum wages and an otherwise functioning economy, employment effects are relatively minor.
Businesses adapt, raise prices and do more automation to keep their margins, which have been remarkable stable if you look back. The losers are consumers and workers, because everything costs more and salaries don't rise as fast.
> Stage 2 is then it increases prices <-- only affects very low margin businesses which are a small minority.
Every mom and pop shop is a low margin business. Most business are low margin, only a few have a really high margins, the ones we all know and talk about.
>Stage 3 is it triggers job losses <-- to my knowledge it's never been raised high enough to make this happen. maybe $50 / hour would be the threshold.
I can only recommend you expanding your knowledge. It's like saying why do we need car seats for babies, because when we were younger we didn't have them and did just fine. Of course those that didn't make it aren't here to tell their story.
I’m more skeptical of the minimum wage one, I think the details there matter a lot, and raising the minimum wage too much too fast can indeed be worse for just about everyone.
But rent control? Really?
It’s also interesting to me how a certain segment of the political persuasion simply cannot resist the allure of price controls, and no amount of data or historical experience seems to convince them that it’s generally a bad idea.
Really, can you at least provide some napkin calculations to see the cons and pros? Some countries have tried it, notably France. It backfired as expected and they had to revert.
I usually reply to the brush-off with "I only ask because the seniority level is reflected in the salary, not the role or the advertisement."
I say that because it is, in fact, true: the seniority/skill required for the role and duties/responsibilities dictates the pay, the bullet points in the advertisement and the role description is often completely divorced from the level of seniority or skill required in the actual role.
IOW "We're hiring a Senior dev" might have me respond "That's a Junior pay-bracket".
I need someone to do a specific set of tasks, but there’s also a wider group of tasks which I’d like someone to do, but it isn’t urgent.
The posting goes out for the task we NEED. If someone more senior applies, and they can do more than the role needs, we pay them more.
There is no (and I feel comfortable with this absolute) scenario where you need to keep the salary range hidden, or where a published salary range prevents you from hiring a candidate for an expanded role. None.
The only thing transparent pricing does is result in an informed participant in the market, which is pricing signals and thus something Capitalism.
Once you go down the route of asking for special exemption to make your business work in an open market, you're not doing Capitalism anymore.
To be honest, the places I’ve worked for that could do this were not the best jobs I’ve had. That flexibility can sometimes point to other organizational issues.
My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.
From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.
Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.
The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.
So now in my initial intro call with any recruiter I just tell them my minimum, fully knowing that becomes the maximum offer. If they're ok with that we can keep talking, if not, that's cool, we both avoided wasting time.
That way you can respond to their range with something along the lines of "that sounds roughly what I was expecting", "okay, I'd probably be looking for the top end of that", "that's perhaps a little lower than I was expecting - is there enough room for flexibility for us to be able to continue talking?" or whatever. It's too early in the conversation to be doing a full salary negotiation, you're just making sure the role's at the right level.
There's a big problem with employers writing a senior-sounding job ad for a junior role - the salary range is a much more accurate indicator than a job description.
Disagree, I've had "my range is X-Y", and the recruiter told me "for this role the range starts at Y+20%, are you ok with that".
I suspect we're pretty lucky in tech, though. Anecdotally, I've heard that in fields such as sales and marketing it's much more the norm to treat potential new hires in a much more adversarial manner.
I hold no opinion on whether this is fair is not. Another applicant who is single, low mortgage may end up with more disposable income for less pay and subjectively be "better off" and effectively undercut me and my dependents that I support.
No system is fair. My only personal opinion is that any employee should be able to have representation in employment negotiations. That does not mean just unions, although they work for some, rather they could be a family member or a paid agent.
This always enabled the company to shift around who is the top 10% (whereas salary is locked in).
If these companies are just measuring salary and not considering RSU grants and bonuses, then you may see an overall reduction on salary, but (potentially) a collective increase on total compensation.
It's why we require public companies to disclose their finances. How could a person, even in theory, know whether to invest otherwise? It's why we require sellers of houses to deliver an independent inspection report. Etc etc.
The converse is also why HFT companies make more money than croesus.
At least the young women in UK are outearning (and outeducating) young men.
More critically; historical data shows pay gap for women increases through their 20s and jumps significantly in their 30s
At the very end you can see what states they’re talking about and it’s basically just New York and California (no other state enacted a law 3 years before 2019).
California’s median income increased 17% from 2016 to 2019 (the 3 years following the law).
New york income increased 17% too.
Federally it increased 5%.
I think using some random spreadsheet as your data source just isn’t a great idea. NBER should be aware the IRS will let people have access to income data for research purposes.
Employers are willing to pay more for someone who can hit the ground running and contribute meaningfully to the team's output in week 2 vs someone who has the basic skills and a couple years experience but will need months to come up to speed on industry-specific knowledge.
But "week 2" people are hard to find, so they often settle for "months" people just to keep work moving along.
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
Maybe I've been lucky to work for moderately reasonable companies, but I've never seen that.
For example in my current company, yearly raises are directly tied to performance rating. And while there is subjectivity in the rating, it is basically impossible to squeeze in a high performer rating for someone who doesn't do anything even if I wanted to (which I don't). It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
The correlation will never be a perfect 1.0, but it is closer to 1 than to 0. Low performers end up getting low to nothing in raises, and the high performers get a multiplier that increases their raises.
I work at a smaller company now, with a lot of very good people, so I've been happy enough with my rating and bumps.
When I was at "bigcorp", I was still as good at my job, but I didn't play the game very well. I presume I was not visible enough to be rated highly by my peers (peers aren't those in your team, but outside your team) and so I didn't see the rate of progression I think I merited, and eventually left.
That was a very good decision.
Well yes, that's common. But I was responding to the idea that there is literally 0 correlation between performance and raises.
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments, underwater social entitlement systems and mass riots. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
Let me guess, your next rebuttal:
> "But then we'll create more policy to try to stop the downsides of the first policy we created!"
Now you have a patchwork of 48,000 regulations all collectively harming the efficiency of the economy and creating all sorts of weird un-intended consequences and loopholes for low-trust people to game instead of rewarding honest people for doing the right thing like you intended.
My actual response "But then we will have to deal with biases, discretion and management collecting their 10mil bonus by giving the juniors a pittance"
The flip side of course is people who actually work in bonus heavy revenue generating roles - where the impact is easy to measure - tend to leave if they are not valued and take their clients with them.
Things work a lot better in a healthy economy with competition and low friction for people to move around - exploitation blossoms when people are trapped by economic circumstances
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
Not if high performers underrate their skill, and under-performers overestimate their skill, both of which studies suggest is true.
Absolutely not. It has a maximum, sure, and a minimum it can get away with, but there's always a range in between them.
> Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees
Bold assumption that the best are paid the most.
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
When they hire and amazing 100x employee they have higher sales, revenues and profits with which to pay employees.
It is your fault if you allow the recruiting process to get to the third interview without at least knowing if the salary range is acceptable.
If you lack confidence in talking money, here is what you say:
"I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer."
You might add:
"$120K is my minimum but I am really hoping to find a role at the higher end - $130K is what I'm aiming for, depending on the job."
If, after saying all this, you get lowballed, then you have good reason to be very annoyed, and express calmly but clearly that you have had your minimum salary on the table since the first phone call." At that point you withdraw from the process and go look for a job with a professional company.
This law will force them to actaully stick to a number.
No it won't - such a thing would never be pursued by anyone or enforced it's not worth the effort.
As I said, if you get lowballed after making it clear at the start then just withdraw and move on, find a company that is professional.
How are you so sure about that? Seems to me that without enforcement this law is useless.
Or play their game, sign the contract, keep your original job, not show up and later tell them why they did waste their time themselves. If they then threaten you, you can point at the law.
The law will make it visible how much a company values someone with those skills. Companies won’t advertise the salary though, they will advertise the range.
Also, large parts of the UK culturally have difficulty talking about money. (Exceptions are Yorkshire, which is proud of it's difference here, and (parts of?) Scotland). That's not going to change overnight, so making disclosure a legal requirement is a fair solution.
It isn't uncommon to be given an acceptable figure, go through several rounds of interviews and end up with job offer but with a lower salary than initially agreed because the recruiter padded the numbers.
No, it doesn't lose the negotiation. What makes you think so? Setting anchors and controlling the document is very powerful.
But yes, you need to know what you can get, and you need to be able and willing to walk away.
> They're already anchored, because they know what everyone else is making.
Different people make different amounts of money.
Governments can quite easily streamline the process. You have a db with resumes and job offers. Make the potential employers pay a fee above 1k. Require the registration to be up to date for any kind of social support. Strange requirements or strange behavior costs money. Not listing the salary is fine, it costs 10k. Want to interview more than 3 qualified applicants? 1k for each beyond 3, 5k for each beyond 10. Want more than two rounds of interviews? Pay the previous fee again for each round.
The government agency can also set the salary. They have a db full of people with the same job.
You want someone overqualified? Pay 50k per interview.
No show, unwashed poorly behaved candidate? Lower their salary range and/or cut their social support. Act professional or get thrown out.
Interviews in a government building supervised by an industry expert.
Public performance ratings for hiring companies. If they have 0 stars and are banned for 10 years you know what to expect when applying.
> I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer.
Or they can just lie and say yeah we cover that.
If you ask for their range, if they are honest, provide their range.
If dishonest, now they have to provide a range which is within the range you are looking for, and is probably more difficult to gauge.
I find it easier to lie on a yes or no question, than a question of quantity.
But in the end, if you provide a quote, they may save themselves money if you value yourself below market.
There's no single market value for workers, because there's no one archetypical worker, especially not for the kind of knowledge work many people here do where you have salary negotiations at all.
So it's your responsibility as a candidate to portrait yourself as the highest and most valuable kind of worker and ask for compensation that's commensurate with that. That number is also part of the signalling.
> Or they can just lie and say yeah we cover that.
Well, you'll detect that lie at the latest when it comes to signing the contract. If you do, that's a big red flag and you will save yourself a lot of hassle by walking away.
> I find it easier to lie on a yes or no question, than a question of quantity.
I'm not sure that makes much of a difference. But let's grant it for the sake of argument: in that case, you giving them a number also has bigger signalling effect.
For me, being fresh out of university, I didn't really think to press on salary too much and was just happy to land a job. In my first job, I recall not knowing the salary until I got the contract and offer (luckily, it was surprisingly above average pay).
When I moved into the software industry, I started to realise my worth a bit more and job-hopped for 10-50% pay bumps on an annual basis for the first few years and just started chasing higher salaries and turning down interviews unless they were in my desired range.
I know many other engineers who never changed this behaviour (or were never taught to be more ruthless and know their worth) and were just happy to receive any increase in salary - and as a result had 10+ years in the industry and had utterly pitiful salaries due to their employer simply taking advantage - you'll never receive the same increase in pay by remaining loyal to a company versus job hopping. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing in the UK or what but this is the type of advice that should be given in schools more IMO.
Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.
Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.
Consider that a lot of people don't have the luxury of just not working until proper work appears. Because they have to pay for housing and food and if they don't have work, they would not be able to.
There are plenty of jobs where that is not true. I think the article using a picture of a jobscentre as a stock photo should give you a clue as to who it is there to help.
Sure, but the first phone call happens after you have already spent potentially hours putting together a tailored resume, cover letter, and 3 creative writing prompts about how you resolved a conflict with a coworker.
Would you agree to buy a house before you knew what it costs?
Literally insane behaviour
Depending on your circumstances, that might be reasonable. If most people aren't quoting pay ranges and you need a job, not applying because of that isn't very smart.
I would make sure I knew the pay range before going through all the interview rounds, but not sending your CV in sounds too limiting to me.
Recruiters at big companies will be told to advertise the role within the payband (the min to max pay for that role at that pay band)
So if you see a top end number and think you’ll get that, you probably won’t it will be around the middle of the range.
At that point you go back to the recruiter and state that you would expect the top end of the range. They may agree with you but then keep in mind that may also impact your salary increase at the end of the year, meaning a smaller increase for you compared to your peers which over several years would even out and out you back in the middle of the payband like your peers. This is why the common idea is to jump roles every few years.
That is only about 50% more than full time minimum wage!
There are job ads in Canada for "senior" devs at non-tech shops for $70-$90k. There are signs you'd be the only dev at the shop (or one of very few)
I was like, okay, fair enough.
I played it completely wrong though. I should have just reframed it and said, well, I paid this, but you're not competing against my current employer, you're competing against Meta, who I'm also interviewing with this week.
In small companies this does mean people have to operate with internal Chinese walls in their heads.
"A Chinese wall or ethical wall is an information barrier protocol within an organization designed to prevent exchange of information or communication that could lead to conflicts of interest. For example, a Chinese wall may be established to separate people who make investments from those who are privy to confidential information that could improperly influence the investment decisions. Firms are generally required by law to safeguard insider information and ensure that improper trading does not occur."
"Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage states that the metaphor title "derives of course from the Great Wall of China",[2] although an alternative explanation links the idea to the screen walls of Chinese internal architecture.[3]
The term was popularized in the United States following the stock market crash of 1929, when the U.S. government legislated information separation between investment bankers and brokerage firms, in order to limit the conflict of interest between objective company analysis and the desire for successful initial public offerings.[4] Rather than prohibiting one company from engaging in both businesses, the government permitted the implementation of Chinese-wall procedures."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall
though I still don't get the China reference, Great wall of China never really helped against any attacks or exchange of information, so I still don't get the etymology
"My current salary is xyz, but I'm currently interviewing with several companies, so my salary expectations are tied to what I'm worth in the market, not my current pay. My specific ask will change as interviews progress"
They also don't know if your tax band is due to salary, loans, deduction, pensions, second incomes etc.
I changed job last year and wasn't asked for a P45 by my new employer. Despite starting near month end, my first month's payslip already had the right tax code.
The days of being stuck paying emergency tax for months finally seem to be at an end!
For instance, to compare with a contractor's day rate or an American view of "total comp", a UK employee will have to take their headline salary and add the value of all benefits, paid holiday days, employer pension contribution, Employer NICs, and potentially even the additional value from being able to take certain benefits through salary sacrifice.
Very few people who're used to being on PAYE will do all of that. They'll either just state the headline salary figure or stretch it a bit to cover some (but typically not all!) of the benefits. In other words, it's usual for many people in the UK to under-state the value of their total package even if they believe they're over-egging it.
That's the first I've heard of it, and I've seen plenty of job postings the past year for European companies where there was no salary indication. See for example the recent HN Who's Hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50338728
Again, member states miss European deadlines, but since it has no practical consequences, I don't see a why they would do it differently.
I wouldn't have been bothered if it where some exhaustive reform of the work law, but in practice it would amount to a couple of amendments. Probably could be drafted up in an afternoon.
Also “in the last year” means only ~50% of that time is covered by when enforcement started.
Some countries have yet to pass any legislation too, this happens quite a lot if you look into past EU declarations, so companies there might be using that as a loophole to act as if not yet be effectively covered (in theory they could be taken to court over it, but that is can be complicated, or at least expensive, when there is no local legislation yet, so in practise it is far less likely to happen). What action will be taken by the EU to push things forward, I'm not sure, presumably there is some sort of fine for extended non-compliance? The question of who you are advertising to and where from can get a bit complex if you are a company in a member state that has not yet enacted anything, especially when you operate out of more than one territory.
Most of the jobs in that HN thread do give a salary expectation (though a few with a very wide range, which might be outside the rules, but they were US anyway so not covered), I don't think I saw an EU one in my quick scan that did not (at least one UK one, but again those are not currently covered by such rules).
So companies are not even breaking the law, just delaying the process...
As an employer that ruins one of the classic ruses that has been going on for a while: take someone through multiple interviews and then lowball the candidate who seems the most desperate.
If you believe in free market economics I think we can expect this to be a mess for a little while and then within a year or two it gets relatively efficient at dealing with the inefficiencies it’s targeting: younger people just not wanting to play the bullshit game where employers dangle generous starting offers, and then rug pull them to 2/3rds of that number; and to fix the gender pay gap (and the smaller reaching ethnicity pay gap).
There is no gender pay gap in 20s, 30s with several areas now favouring women. The mean pay gap is entirely due to the percentage of women in their 40s+ taking time off work for motherhood.
A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
The paygap is just a dial which controls the rate of motherhood.
There is no "per job" paygap. Nor could there plausibly be. For if any group could be paid less to do the same work, someone en mass would be, thus lowering the pay for that work. (Its unclear how such a rich source of free output from 50% of the population could go untapped, systematically).
Though even if that logic isnt persuasive, there is no measured per-job pay difference at an individual level. The "pay gap" describes a mean difference in pay at population level -- when you control for total hours worked, it disappears.
Do they? I've seen women take 6 months or even 3 months maternity leave, with their partner stepping in to support.
For what purpose are we saying such crazy things? Why is it so important to place all members of the human species on the same rack, stretch them to the same length, and maim them till they fit?
How have we, as a civilisation, become so terrified of difference?
Also, 1.5 months off prior to the due date is more than normal. Most women work until 2-4 weeks before.
I've never met a mother who wanted to be in work full time. What exactly do zoom meetings, email threads, and spreadsheets get you in life?
I'm not one to say "captialism has gone too far", but perhaps in this case at least, isnt it mad to force average labour hours to be the same across sexes "just because" ?
the goal is to require men to take equal parental leave in order to remove that pressure and put women and men on a more equal position when it comes to children.
today women are considered a hiring risk because they might have children and take parental leave. if fathers were required to take parental leave as well, then the risk would be more similar for both.
I wonder what the economic implications are when both parents take leave instead of just one (e.g. twice the overhead for finding temporary cover, short-term liquidity impact for employer and public benefit funds)
OK, now ask the same question of fathers.
This is as daft an argument as me saying "my wife is one so all women must be"
> The paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children.
> A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
Your claims are disproven by your own math.
A paygap over that period would be a 3% to 8% drop due to child rearing, not 10%, if we accept your claims.
In reality, in the US women do not usually take 1 year off per child. Paid maternity leave is 12 weeks by federal law. That creates a "motherhood-caused" paygap of only 0.75% to 2%.
We can also do the simulation trivially using empirical data, women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career across male/female populations
The claim that the economy sustains a free markdown on 50% of the population's labour is mad. What force of nature is keeping a mass of businesses forming just hiring this cheap labour? Why arent there businesses booming hiring, en mass, women?
Either way, aside from that madness. The effect is, to a significant figure, entirely explained by working duration not differential pay.
And I've personally known no mothers who think the population of women is better served by reducing their part-time work, and having them work more.
And people wonder why professional women don't want to have children any more.
The "cost" of two children, with above numbers, for "mean woman" is 20% of pay -- so she earns ~1.1m
Presented on a deathbed: would you have preferred to earn 1.4mil over your working life and have neither of your two children, or 1.1m and have both?
The question would seem an absurdity. Bearing in mind that 300k comes with a lifetime of zoom calls and emails, and not much else.
Now if you want to pay women to have children, that's a proposal I'd be open to -- it would reduce the pay gap by significant tax rises, and so on. Nevertheless, I've not met any mothers who wanted to work more nor would take the trade for 1.4 over 1.1 (this, of course, doesnt control for tax credits or welfare -- which both perform this redistribution anyway).
However that consultation said this:
>We propose to introduce this requirement [pay transparency in recruitment] through a delegated power, enabling regulations to specify exact requirements. For example, the size of a salary range.
Example: https://www.enduranceenergy.com/careers/2af3b48c-4e20-420a-b...
When I’ve raised this to a CEO that was bragging that he gives competitive salaries but can’t disclose it, he said that a person that asks for the range before the interview it’s in it for the money.
any CEO who says that is also just in it for the money and wants to exploit employees.
what do you expect me to do? work for free?