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.)
Just be completely transparent with your compensation policy. Copy-paste whatever internal logic you use to determine salary into the posting, that should follow the spirit of the law.
"Compensation policy: We're open to hiring at a range of experience levels. Our junior engineers make $90-100k. The difference between $90k and $100k is whether or not they have a degree, whether they demonstrate proficiency in our specific tech stack, and whether they have previous professional experience. We define a junior engineer as someone who has less than 1 year of professional software engineering experience. We pay a $10k premium to junior engineers living in the following high cost of living areas: SF, NYC, .... Our mid-level engineers make $120-140k ... ... Click Here to see a full list of all our employees and how much they make"
It's not that hard. Many companies have privacy policies that are many pages long, surely they can put the same amount of effort and detail into their public compensation policies.
I think this just shifts the uncertainty. You'll know what the pay is for each role, now they just won't tell you which role until you're done interviewing.
You'll have Junior 1-5, Mid 1-5, Senior 1-5. During interviews, you'll be told you're interviewing for Junior 4 - Mid 3, and they'll tell you which level you're at once you're done interviewing.
I.e. instead of knowing which role you're applying for and not knowing what the pay range is, you'll know the pay ranges and not know the role.
> 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.
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.
Oh, if the posting specifically says L4 or L5 then I don't understand the broad salary range. Unless maybe it's a worldwide remote position with wildly different pay depending on location?
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.
>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?
How is this the logical conclusion you arrive at? Do you as a company not have a salary range for headcount? Do you not expect prices to be posted by your vendors leading to a lack in informational symmetry and haggling during every routine interaction?
Imagine if your landlord could arbitrarily raise your rent an untold amount with no notice. You of course have options, move or negotiate. But the informational asymmetry means it is harder for you to know if you are getting a good deal if every other landlord is listing their rent as $1-100000 per month or not telling you until after you spent the time checking out the property only to find it is way outside your budget.
The time cost of candidates finding your job, doing some basic research, prepping for X rounds of interviews, possible homework, dealing with hiring managers/ recruiters is insane once you figure folks usually apply to multiple jobs. Why not just tell them up front the salary like you do for role expectations and company culture drivel? Posting honest salary bands is fine to me, say seniors will get $100-150k or whatever, but the article shows clear malice towards any legitimate transparency up front.
But in pretty much all cases, the renter incurs possibly substantial costs in time, money, and general well-being. So the mere act imposes a cost on the renter, even if the renter never pays the landlord an extra cent. Landlords know this, and if they can estimate those costs, they are able to increase rent freely as long as the present value of the rent increase is still less than the cost of moving and/or getting a lawyer. Employers have the same power, especially in tight labor markets.
Whether or not posting salary bands for a given position is a good idea or not a good idea, It rubs me the wrong way that a state government somehow imagines it has the authority to mandate this. And for what purpose? Why does a state make a law if not to enforce some as yet undefined remedy? What will this remedy be? I don't think we know yet but I for one do not want to find out. I have enough other problems to be concerned with.
There are 2 boxes in front of you each containing a tasty red apple. One of those boxes is filled with barbed wire, razor blades and broken glass with an apple in the middle. The other is just an empty box with an apple in it, and it happens to be priced lower.
The reason for the regulation is the same reason that a lot of regulations are made: companies refuse to do something that’s one of good/common sense/not evil unless they’re absolutely forced to.
The unwillingness of some to comply with the spirit (posting absurd ranges) of the law shows how there is no chance the information asymmetry between worker and the potential employer would be fixed by letting the companies do as they will.
What possible hazards do you honestly feel the WA law is leading to?
I’m all for it. Less for tech workers and more for blue collar workers who don’t have nearly as much career mobility. Having them able to understand the current wider market when looking will only help them get better and more livable work.
You talk about a bureaucratic web, but this is really just about posting a pay range, which is entirely reasonable. Job applicants don't want to spend hours, sometimes even days, on a job application process only to discover at the very end that the pay is way too low for them to realistically consider. It's easy information to share upfront, and can save both parties a lot of time and effort.
Now if you don't want to hire from CA because people expect too high salary, then posting this salary range upfront will actually accomplish exactly what you need: people for whom the pay is too low will not respond and not waste your time.
> 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.
This has nothing to do with price fixing. You can still decide your own pay range. It's just for transparency.
> 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.
No, the only purpose of laws like this is to increase transparency and thereby make the labor market more a free market. I really don't understand your concern here.
>the only purpose of laws like this is to increase transparency and thereby make the labor market more a free market. I really don't understand your concern here.
If your offers aren't competitive for CA candidates, then it makes sense not to waste time recruiting them. Another way to accomplish this would be to post your salary ranges. Candidates who don't find it competitive won't apply at all. You may find some candidates in California who do find it competitive (perhaps outside the major metro areas). And you might avoid interviewing candidates from other regions who would never have accepted your offer.
Yes it's definitely a conspiracy by state governments to control your business, and not an attempt to decrease the asymmetry in labor markets, which without intervention strongly favors employers.
Posting a salary range is hardly burdensome. The only “shenanigans” going on here is businesses willfully disregarding the intent of the law in furtherance of maintaining a status quo in which job seekers are at a significant disadvantage.
I’m not necessarily in favor of these pay transparency laws, but this comment is paranoid hyperbole. Posting a pay range is not some slippery slope to wage fixing, nor is it some insurmountable bureaucratic hurdle. It’s frankly just an administrative checkbox that may (or may not if the range is too large to be useful) waste less time with upwardly mobile candidates. There is 0% chance California starts mandating salaries at the mid to high end.
In our business an important factor is the personal/business/relationships network of the candidate we're talking with. You can see how this would be highly variable between 2 candidates. There is no "salary" or "salary range" in our case. We're not talking about hiring developers here but more Business Development types. It's hard to rank those people on a standard basis.
I agree with the trend you mention, but the fact that it is bi-directional preference may even things out a bit.
States can focus on attracting employers by having business-friendly taxes, minimal labor laws, minimal environmental protection, and other corporate-friendly regulations. If they can attract and retain companies then people who need work will follow.
Other states focus on attracting employees by having stronger worker-protection laws, strict environmental regulations, and amenities like education/arts/healthcare/transit. If they can attract and retain people then companies who need access to that labor pool will follow.
Depending on their constraints, industries seem to gravitate towards states on one end of that continuum or the other. For example, there seems to be more manufacturing and agriculture than the US average in employer-friendly states and more technology and finance than the US average in employee-friendly states.
I avoid NY in addition. I need to take out like 6 kinds of extra insurance (family leave insurance)?? Just not worth it. I’ll stick to the Midwest and lower east coast please!
I don't know if we have a hard rule or not, but HR has cautioned us against bringing in talent from CA multiple times over the years. Right now, our employees all reside central or eastern. I have a feeling we will not hire anyone living west of ATX for a long time.
Beyond the bureaucracy issues, keeping to ~2 timezones is turning into a strategic advantage at our scale. If we had to do mountain & pacific as well, things would get much more complicated.
"The only possible purpose of making laws like this"...
Is for pay transparency. And in the vast, overwhelming percentage of the time, an employer knows precisely what they're planning to pay for a role, with extremely little variance. These cherry picked examples don't really mean a lot.
As to your imaginary firm not hiring in "CA, CO or WA", absolutely nothing was lost by the residents of those states.
It's not about penalizing people residing in certain states. It's about not taking on additional regulatory burden. In a free country this is a choice we're allowed to make and we're willing to accept the trade off.
It takes a lot of effort to type one sentence on a job posting.
If you're hiring you already know what you're willing to pay for the position. It really isn't that hard to write that down where people besides just HR can see.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who's to say the bottom is the actual bottom though? Suppose I pay all my engineer's 170, 170, 190, and 210. What prevents me from listing the salary range at 100-210?
And this is exactly what Netflix is doing, because they don’t pay any of their senior engineers (these listings were for senior positions) only $90K. I’d be surprised if any (in the U.S. at least, and this is a U.S. job posting) make under $200K.
You're right, though the article is talking about pay transparency laws in several different US states, so perhaps some have this loophole and others don't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's exactly what I'm saying though (and everyone seems to have missed it, maybe I left too many dots unconnected)
Negotiation is typically lopsided in favor of the employer. With a range like that, they've handed you a piece of information that tilts the balance in favor of the candidate. Even better if it's a lie, it still works in your favor. Use that nugget of information to your advantage.
> 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.
So if a senior engineer applies successfully and gets offered a role at 150k then they will be motivated to tell people through whatever review site that the company is acting disreputably.
It would count as a red flag for the senior and negatively impact hiring.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)