There's a lot of skepticism in this thread but I will just say that the other laws like this have had a huge positive effect on tech job searching in my opinion.
Looking casually at jobs lately I would say that 80% of them have posted salary ranges. This has been enormously helpful in a) helping me avoid jobs with inflated titles but low pay and b) attracting me to jobs I might not otherwise consider because of very competitive pay.
I've done research into comparing concrete offers vs. the salary ranges specified in their job postings: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SfaV1p_jbgoTOyCsD5wd.... More often than not, the offer is very very close to the midpoint of the salary range. Most employers are thinking similarly: They have a wide range, but expect to pay somewhere in the middle for most candidates.
This law wasn't written to help highly paid SWEs get an extra $10k/year. It's written for lower-wage workers who can't get multiple offers and need to avoid entering long hiring pipelines for jobs that don't pay enough to cover rent.
> Likely the requirements listed will be inaccurate as well.
Where are the requirements actually accurate?
For what it's worth, the actual written requirements for many tech jobs are very questionable. In many cases, there's a big disconnect between the people writing the job ads and the people who actually communicate what they want.
And out of sheer laziness or lack of knowledge, there are plenty of recruiters that do things like post JavaScript jobs as Java jobs, as one example I've seen.
True, but that is also telling you something useful about the company.
I'm not defending it, I'm pointing out, that when a company tells you this is how they want to be seen by potentially new recruits then listen to them.
It is a red flag for one of two reasons:
- It is intentionally misleading (i.e. top of range is pure fiction).
- Upward mobility is so terrible, that they comingle multiple different tiers of expertise into the same job title.
There are companies that actually can hire in this fashion, Google was and then perhaps pretended to be such a company.
One could break it up into separate jobs for the different levels but that's also misleading if you are considering 3 PhD experts and 2 mid-level or 7 juniors and 3 seniors, etc.
In theory its not all that bad when such a post is true, in that it means an individual contributor role might be higher than anywhere else in the industry.
They are likely in violation of the law, unless they genuinely, in good faith, believed that the role could just as easily been satisfied at $10k or $1m.
Another worker-friendly thing that NY did recently was to crack down on companies' claims to ownership of intellectual property that employees create on their own time (the same kind of protection that California has):
> Effective immediately, Governor Hochul has signed a law invalidating any provision in an employment agreement that requires employees to assign to the employer any rights to an invention developed entirely on the employee's own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secrets.[1]
I think it’s better than nothing, but ultimately not helpful for job seekers working to learn how much a position will pay them.
I work in a very regulated organization where all pay rates are published with postings. [0]
But the ranges are $20-40k for each grade and it’s hard to tell what you will end up being offered and accepted.
I think it helps prevent some mismatches of people confusing $20k and $200k positions but I frequently see people with work history in the $30/hour range applying for very high pay jobs. I find it hard to accurately peg my market value.
When I worked in smaller orgs I would frequently see variability of 100-300% for the same job title. And even in really large orgs with big HR there might be a $100k pay band before bonuses.
So what do I do with a job posting that says $110-250k? If Im senior, do I apply and expect $250k not knowing if there’s a single person who is amazing making they amount? Or if Im junior do I ask for $110, knowing I could get more.
What I do is network to find what the actual pay is and negotiate around there. Or discuss with multiple offers.
Id like to see something like the IRS releasing more anonymized data from w2 for employers that will let you look up quartiles by employer, broken out by employee filing address.
This also has severe limitations but at least you can see how many employees they actually have and actually pay based on taxid. But self-reported pay data is so bad I don’t think it’s actually useful for stuff like “does this company I found on the internet actually hire people?” Unfortunately titles are so useless that I don’t think anything more than number of employees and distribution of their pay is better than what we have now.
The privacy implications are serious and need to be accounted for. But I think only releasing for orgs over 100 or something. Or only for publicly traded. Or only that receive public funds, etc etc
I have asked some HR people this question about ranges, and most of them tell me they expect to pay the midpoint of the range. That is, if you meet the qualifications, they’ll offer you the midpoint. However if you blow them away or got some competing offers, they will offer you the high end. And if you got very little experience, the low end. That’s the rule of thumb. It doesn’t matter if the range is as wide as 80k-400k, just assume the midpoint is the starting offer
I worked for a mega-corp (not FAANG) and my manager told me that the company did “extensive research” to determine market value for each position’s salary, and that their goal was to then be at 95% of that market value. So annoying that you, allegedly, know what the market value is and then purposely try to undercut it to save a little money.
I get that it’s a business and it’s nothing personal, but this company had insane profits and mad growth so they could afford to pay people a bit better.
This is reasonable and is what I thought as well. But I worked for a firm where senior manager band was $120-350k. Most senior managers came in at $120-150 and would climb through years with the firm. If a new hire at the senior manager rate asked for $225-250 as a midpoint it would kill their negotiation and likely cost them their offer.
Yep, the range is also used for internal promotions. Someone who gets a title bump might end up in the lower end of the range for their new level (which should usually be higher than the high end of their previous range)
> I work in a very regulated organization where all pay rates are published with postings.
> But the ranges are $20-40k for each grade and it’s hard to tell what you will end up being offered and accepted
Is it really that hard in fed land? I work for the state of California, and which has a similar level of regulation and similar posted ranges, but its pretty trivial most of the time to know exactly where you’d be set. I mean, its not 100% accurate, but this is right most of the time:
If you are apply from outside the system, you will be offered the exact bottom of the range and there will be no flexibility.
If you are inside the system, if its a lateral, you keep your pay. If its a higher range, you move up by the lesser of 5% or to the minimum of the new range. Also with no flexibility.
The circumstances with any flexibility are very limited, what you get is almost completely determined by how you got to the job.
> The privacy implications are serious and need to be accounted for.
Of by-employer actual pay distribution disclosure? Is that why public sector employers pay a hefty wage premium because their employees pay data is public on an individual level, which obviously has even greater concerns?
Yeah, it’s an entrenched form of classism. Sort of like the American version of the old British Civil Service. The plucky clerk will never be the high commissioner.
Most companies paying premiums recruit a particular pedigree of university graduate. Few graduates of Flyover State are going to be rockstars at the First National Bank of Nowhere and get a fancy gig at Facebook or a hedge fund.
One exception is .gov employees. For exceptional people, smarter companies will usually value their current comp at 150%.
In my experience, it mostly does. Everyone tries to funnel you into +5-15% positions and may relent to +15%-30% when you reject their offer (two times and they still decide they need you).
I generally just don't say what my current role pays when interviewing. I ask what pay range they're targeting, and if they need a number from me, I'll offer a range where the low end is what I'd actually like.
The big ranges is a logical consequence of such stupid rules. People are not commodities, and only in the most trivial of work can you a priori know what an individual brings to it. It's typical government thinking that makes no sense in the real world. So employers are stuck publishing an absurdly wide band that reflects the difference in what different people might bring to the position.
This is effectively populism, a simple and wrong solution to a much more complex problem.
In the vast majority of cases, you’re not going to know what an individual brings to the job for 6 months to a year at the minimum. The majority of the pay difference between 2 people with the same job title (assuming standard bigco leveling) comes down to negotiating ability.
Published pay ranges aren’t going to solve anything, but they do reduce the information asymmetry a little bit. They give you and idea of what is possible for they title in that company at that location. Companies have an incentive to post a relatively accurate range, and in most of the jobs I’ve applied for it was.
> The majority of the pay difference between 2 people with the same job title (assuming standard bigco leveling) comes down to negotiating ability.
No, it comes down to about 1/3 negotiating ability and about 2/3 prior experience, impressions you give at the interview, and leverage (e.g. other offers real or perceived). The first one you can get from the resume and the other two happen over the course of the interview(s).
If your resume shows you as a perfect fit for a position with a ton of relevant hyper-specific experience, you will naturally get an offer higher in the pay band than someone with half the amount of pseudo-relevant experience. Pay bands even $40-50k will help because most people actually do have a decent idea how qualified they are for a given job. I've applied for things where I'd be happy getting an offer toward the bottom of the pay band due to no relevant experience, and applied for things where I knew I should be at the very top.
When I say negotiating ability I also mean to include multiple offers. Which in my experience is the single biggest factor in determining pay for most software engineers.
I agree more specialized and very senior rolls are different, but most people are going into much more generic roles. Even then bad negotiating skills can swamp out everything you else if you throw out a low number to someone willing to take advantage of it.
All said we agree that realistic pay bands will help here.
It's not uncommon to have budget be expressed in headcount rather than dollars, though. So you can hire one "senior software engineer" and your HR department has a model that tells them at what percentile of "senior software engineer" pay any given amount is - then you need to go into an exception process if you (as hiring manager) want to pay over 90th or 100th percentile or whatever.
Labor is absolutely a commodity, and companies price labor both for buying and selling based on skills and demand.
You may inhabit some obscure corner of the world where you’re some sort of free agent priced individually. But most likely, you’re working for a company in a title assigned by some HR person into a salary band. The salary band is chosen by the business unit based on their budget.
The wide bands are published to minimally comply with the law. In the long run, they advertise to applicants that the company will happily bone them given the choice.
> So what do I do with a job posting that says $110-250k? If Im senior, do I apply and expect $250k not knowing if there’s a single person who is amazing making they amount? Or if Im junior do I ask for $110, knowing I could get more.
You apply with the knowledge that you will earn at least $110k, and if you want more, you should apply to more employers so that you have the negotiating position to ask for more.
I have never worked in a job where you can give a reasonable pay band and routinely made 1.5-3x what other people with the same title did, before bonuses. This really only works for well-defined jobs in production, retail, and seems to bring little utility for the HN crowd.
That may be also a sign of poorly defined levels. If you're calling people the same i.e. set the same expectations, but pay them 3x different amount, something's weird with the org.
I mean, titles don't really mean anything to developers. It's not like in the army where everyone knows the difference between a colonel and a general.
You could run an organisation where everyone from a new graduate right up to Linus Torvalds has the same title, just a different level of pay.
> I mean, titles don't really mean anything to developers.
To the developers themselves? Yeah, it does to many. To the company in general - there's a reason level descriptions exist. They define expectations for a given person. Let's say you create a new team for project X: you want someone who can plan the project out. Are you going to give that to any "developer" who all exist at the same level? If no, then you have different levels, you're just pretending they don't exist.
It also makes things more clear for the pay. Let's say you get some good mid level dev who gets bumped many times for being really good. If they're just doing well at that level but not advancing, are you going to pay them more than senior devs with more responsibility at some point? Is that a wise decision?
You could, but you would implicitly give them titles and have different expectations.
No one is expecting a junior to define the technical roadmap for the next 6 months and coordinate it's implementation across 5 teams* and be the final judge on disagreements.
I think having the same requirements you should expect more than 3x deviance for a lot of roles.
We aren't talking about an observation between the random difference between two average people. We're talking about the most performant and least performant people who could potentially share the same job description.
The entry level is full of this. If you hire a bunch of engineers with no experience, how often will you see a difference of 3x or larger between the top and bottom.
I would say often, and it doesn't show anything bad about the organisation.
The same work should bring the same payment, period. Everything else just ends up rewarding those with the best "negotiation" skill which is completely unrelated to one's actually work-relevant skills.
There is no such thing as "same work" outside of a production line and the like. You learn this in the initial weeks of your career.
In every tech company there are programmers, project managers, and sales people who have the same titles but deliver vastly different quality of outcomes. And everyone knows this because they instantly pick the good ones whenever they have the slightest optionality.
You have a new project, difficult client, some fuckup to straighten out, and everyone's eyes turn to the same person. It's such a common occurrence, you must have seen this. You must have seen people being fired without a single tear or with a sigh of relief and others quitting to widespread worry over who will manage to step in for them. People with the same roles on paper.
Let’s imagine that msc91 is the person we always turn to when the chips are down and they always deliver great results in the clutch situations while maintaining all of their regular duties as well.
How long until we rationally decide to pay msc91 a monthly “in case the chips are down” bonus/retainer? Msc91 is made better off; the company and its customers are made better off and thereby, msc91’s colleagues are made better off.
If we decide on principle that we won’t do that, how long until a better-funded or better product-market fit company comes along and hears through the grapevine of ex-msc91 colleagues that they should pay their overall higher wages to msc91 and get them to join? Now, all of the good things that could have happened in the prior paragraph are lost.
Interestingly, you can't. Although to be fair, plenty of managers still believe they can.
Imagine a job where results seem fairly easily quantifiable: sales. You want to hire a great salesguy you know. His current salary is 168k and he collects another 85k in bonuses. How do you get him?
You offer him 260 base and some unspecified bonus you will work out later. Why? Because he already knows what kind of bonuses he can collect where he is but only has a vague idea of your company's product potential.
This uncertainty and unattainability of full information forces companies into either wide bands or made up titles. That's even before he goes to his current boss for a competing offer.
Because you are able to confidently measure yourself as 3x as good as somebody else, and because you're able to confidently measure value created to be a factor of 10 or more higher, you're able to measure what's needed to define "same."
I'm flattered that you think there are no SWEs who are capable of creating 3x as much value per year as I am. I think you're incorrect, but I'm flattered.
You misread my comment. If you can definitively say that there are some who can create 3x as much value as you, then you can also definitively say that value is measurable.
The measurability of value is what was at question in this thread. “The same work should bring the same payment” is not incompatible with “some SWEs provide more value than others.”
Or worse, it rewards those that are "in demand" elsewhere, and harms those that due to some factors outside of their control (sexism, racism) would receive less interest elsewhere, so they can be paid less to keep them here.
I once spoke with someone who acknowledged this, but said it wasn't a bad thing - if the market has decided that someone is worth less, why should he pay them more than he has to?
Well negotiation is definitely a work skill and every single person does it many times per day so it’s a valuable skill to improve.
Most professional jobs allow for a range of working styles and productivity so it’s only natural people with the same job would be compensated differently based on the value they offer the company.
If it's a small company, what about revenue and profit sharing over the next X years (so they do what's good long term not quarterly), weighted by how many days they've worked for the company?
It's definitely possible with RSUs and refreshers. But it's more comparable to your Neighbor with a much lower mortgage payment because they bought several years ago and the asset appreciated.
The HN crowd, thanks to the ubiquitous and indiscriminating nature of the internet access and ability to self-select, comprises of academics and engineers but also of artists, philosophers, enthusiasts and people still finding their way in the world. That includes production and retail workers.
If you’re making 3x what other people at your level are making, you’re at the wrong level. Unless you’re already at the highest level. If you’re worth that much more, I’m surprised that you don’t push for a higher level.
The point of levels is to provide an external signal of competence. And perhaps this law will push companies towards doing a better job of that.
In nearly 20 years of experience pay doesn’t generally correlate with performance. The people who I’ve seen with massive pay differences were the people who could negotiate well and knew how to play the game to come in with multiple offers. Those people aren't usually the most long term productive employees. Some of them are, but many of them are just better tangentially related skills.
The biggest single difference in starting pay by far is having multiple offers. If you make it through selective company A’s hiring process, you likely could have made it through a few similar processes. Whether you bothered to do that or not, says nothing much to me other than how much you care about compensation. But most hiring managers have a serious case of FOMO and this works in the majority of cases.
Or "levels" are a low-granularity schema that can't box in how people actually work in their jobs.
The reality is that every person working in a position brings different things to the table. While larger businesses create defined level boxes and paths, they're really very rough and imprecise ways to describe people and often do a disservice to people who work hard but not in the way that the boxes "expect."
So there are definitely cases when we see people's compensation out of sync with their level (in either direction) and it's sometimes a product of the company recognizing the value of an employee but having levels and tiers that don't match the employee exactly.
Some companies, for example, tie higher pay to a management/leadership ladder. But you can be a solid-contributing or 10x or whatever software developer without going down the leadership road.
Sure they are low granularity. But one person making 3x what another of the same level does goes way behind a rough and imprecise description. That’s a complete breakdown of a level system.
Who is going to pay you 3x what the rest of the people at your level make without a corresponding increase in expectations.
The reason you’d push for a higher level is because it makes it clearer to the next company that you’re capable of higher level work. If you’re not doing higher level work then how are you justifying a 3x salary?
I've previously commented [0] on how broken this implementation is. It's frustrating politicians don't see how easy it is to circumvent what the law seeks to achieve.
> Also, it only forces companies to list the base salary, but especially in tech, that's just a portion of one's total comp.
"Total compensation" is, to me, a way to inflate one's own value.
1. In companies with no market for stock options (privately owned, startups, companies that are just absolutely worthless), equity is hypothetical money which may never be worth anything. I worked for a company which gave me 250,000 options but the company lost 18mil a year and they ended up cancelling all stock options. Some people worked there for 15 years hoping the options would be worth something and eventually saw them cancelled outright. Unless I'm working for a publicly traded company, I don't put much value in stock options. With a startup, you're basically asking to be paid in poker chips.
2. Health insurance is something I expect to be there, regardless of the monetary value.
3. I've worked for plenty of companies that include a 10% performance-based bonus as part of the compensation only to never get that bonus (or get nowhere near 10%) regardless of my own performance because the company itself didn't profit last quarter, or they did profit and just chose not to pay out bonuses.
4. The perks that you get (free breakfast burritos, free barrista, gym membership) are tokens that can (and will) be taken away as soon as the federal reserve decides to jack up rates on your company lays off 25% of the workforce in order to pay their CEO his 300mil compensation package
"Total compensation" means "base salary plus hypothetical money in a perfect universe"
> 2. Health insurance is something I expect to be there, regardless of the monetary value.
I hear what you're saying, but man, I really wish employers would be banned from offering healthcare benefits. They have zero business offering healthcare benefits.
Because we'll never get healthcare reform as long as corporations have their hands in it. It is yet another way for them to have more control over us than they should.
IMO a much better idea that circumvents all these problems is requiring companies to disclose how much they're already paying their employees, the Scandinavian way.
This wouldn't even necessarily need to be broken down by individual employees, per position would work too, with statistics like number of employees covered, min, max, average and median.
If that's possible, you can at least in theory try to find a representative sample of current employees and get an idea of how much you could realistically get paid.
Some blue states (I would be shocked to see Republicans support this, despite the fact more information is very pro-market) institute this and maybe someday at the federal level as voters warm up to the idea.
The incentive against posting a huge range like $50-500k is that it anchors the range a candidate expects. If you post that range and then offer $100k to a qualified candidate, they will probably balk, so if that’s closer to the desired salary band you have an incentive just to say so.
I think the largest range I've seen that wasn't very obviously from some resume harvester or z-tier recruiting firm was $30-40k between the lowest and highest, and it didn't seem to grow all that much as the upper band number increased (e.g. I distinctly remember one that said $180-200k). These $50-500k ranges simply don't happen in reality.
I've seen plenty that go $100-350k, especially when it looks like a company is hiring a few people... Useless to a candidate, but not dodgy or malicious.
Not useless at all. Every candidate will start with the expectation that it will be explained why they did not hit the maximum of the range. They also know the minimum.
They specifically declare the terminology "good faith" and that posted ranges must be made in good faith and accurate to reality. Any individual that feels they are harmed by said range not being in good faith can file a department of labor complaint. The NYS DoL is actually quite aggressive once you give them ammo (complaints, tips, etc) to go after companies.
While some engineers definitely get compensated in stock more, is it really the majority of engineers? I feel like it’s over represented because we’re in HN but the vast majority of software engineers in this world don’t get stock at all, it’s just mostly base salary
Absolutely not, it's a VC ecosystem oddity just like people saying they make $400k when most of that is stock and sometimes there isn't even a liquid market for it.
The median software engineer salary in the US is something like $110k. Still about twice the average individual income in the US[0], but the vast majority are going to be making 99% of their income in cash compensation including bonuses. I've worked for about a dozen companies based across the US in a variety of industries, and never have I or any of my coworkers had access to stock as part of compensation.
If you want to use "software engineers" to describe everyone in the US who writes code, I don't think #1 is accurate at all. Half of the developers in the US make less than $100k/yr. Most of these people work for banks, small mom-and-pop companies that have 1-3 developers. Public companies with bigger teams who don't give stock to anyone below the VP level.
If your entire exposure to software development has been startup fantasy land where profitability doesn't matter yeah most of those companies are giving everyone stock down to the person at the front desk answering phones. That's the minority by every metric - number of companies, number of developers, total revenue, everything. I don't think anyone expects stock compensation unless they're artificially limiting their search to that type of company.
I can't speak for all engineers, but I've worked at mid-size companies, huge companies, and startups. At each one, I was granted stock options that I had no faith in the value of (and most of which actually declined in value). Many of my coworkers talked about their stock options as part of their TC though. My experience is probably not the norm though
There's also lots of engineers who get paid in worthless stock. Companies which have no plan to ever IPO or who lose money every year. Taking a job at a startup based on potential future valuation and stock options is essentially gambling with hours of your own life
Given that TheWorkNumber exists (a service that does the opposite; allowing prospective employers to view your salary history as reported by your previous employers), this is a good counterbalance in negotiating power for workers. If you've been very underpaid, it'll be a lot harder for your next employer to offer you a 10% raise if you know the bottom end of their advertised range would be a 60% raise.
I think the commenters here focus too much on themselves and people like them. This law was not written for SWEs with a market value of $120k/year who are being paid $80k/year. 0-60th percentile income workers are getting absolutely hosed and need every bit of negotiating power that they can get.
Our working and hiring culture is very weird and favors employers. Anyone can be fired at any time for (almost) any reason, so your ability to pay rent and put food in your mouth depends upon your ability to find another job. When that process involves several dozen or hundred job applications, long hiring timelines, multiple interviews across days, weeks, and months, >60% rates of ghosting at every step, and exploding offers, lower income workers are often forced to accept the first offer they get regardless of how much lower it is than their true market rate. This wage transparency policy helps low-wage workers avoid entering the long hiring pipeline for jobs that pay abysmal wages.
It is a strong net-positive for these workers who need it most.
We just post the actual compensation, not a range, and we stick to it.
It’s worked pretty well, you discuss it in the first steps of the process to make sure they get that’s actually how it’s going to work and then you spend your time interviewing people who are OK with the comp.
If the candidate pool isn’t any good then change the comp. And sure if you want to recruit a hotshot candidate or something nothing is stopping you from taking an individualized approach with that person.
I think people tend to overestimate their ability to game the process. Why not just say what you want.
What happens if you interview a candidate, and they're a great fit (team, enthusiasm, etc), but they're a bit more junior than you were originally hiring for? Would it be possible to adjust the role for the candidate in that case (my normal approach), or would you be forced to pass on them?
Part of the strategy is you have a lot of job postings going at once. So if someone applies for one and there's a more junior position that's a match you just tell them that.
That happens all the time by the way and it's fine. People often come to one job via keywords and don't see the various options.
I just think the whole premise is that we need this like ninja ability to react on the fly, and optimize the process to perfectly get the comp into this exact number that's the best possible deal for the company or something.
But it's not. It just makes the experience disorienting and confusing for applicants, the same way it does when they have to deal with some insane process to buy cars and mattresses and enterprise SaaS contracts, which they also hate.
Explain the job and then say what it pays. It makes the process so much simpler that the burden should be on people who don't do that to really prove why it needs to be more opaque and confusing for all involved.
Agree, but it's not just about exploitation. Many people are weird about money and honesty around their skillset. I think it would be a good change, but I'm not sure the majority of people would like working like a pro sports team. In pro sports you know what everyone makes and relative skillsets are ranked and on display.
I mean it's a corporate decision to have all the work be hidden. There's few laws requiring that your company operate on a dark web but they all choose to.
I think if a pro sports team could figure out how to make it so the opposing team couldn't tell which one of their players is which they would choose to. Good luck running a shift in the MLB if you don't know if the batter is swinging lefty or righty.
Also I think pro sports teams is probably one of the best examples that public information doesn't make perfect decisions. Anybody that seriously follows a team can tell you about numerous bonehead (perhaps bonehead in hindsight) trades that their team made. Or players that were offered a deal well beyond what they were worth.
I didn't say it led to perfect decisions. And while it's a corporate decision, my point was that not all employees are ready to have their company operate like a pro sports team. Many people aren't ready to have the conversation that Sue is better than they are and is paid more.
Athletes leave teams all the time over disagreements over compensation. At least in the NHL it's not uncommon for a player to take the team to arbitration over their salary [1].
This is hiring salary only, so it removes some negotiation there, but other benefits and future raises can still be negotiated for.
Also, I'm not sure what happens if they offer more than that to someone after posting the offer. I suspect offering lower would be would be lawsuit time... But I don't think a higher offer is that much of a problem.
Not really - just now you'll be negotiating job title instead of salary.
Instead of negotiating for another $20k, you'll be negotiating to add prefixes like 'Senior' and 'Staff' and 'Architect' to your title, which will be worth $20k each.
Can you flesh out the scenario that you have in mind?
As far as I'm concerned, if you wanted 250k but the Jr. Dev's range caps at 220k then you can still negotiate to be hired as a Dev.
But if you wanted 250k and the Jr. Dev caps at 240k I think it's pretty reasonable for them to hire you at 250k as a Jr. Dev and just say that when they made the ad they reasonably believed the maximum salary was 240k.
> [1] A pay range must include a minimum and maximum
annual salary or hourly rate of compensation for a job,
promotion, or transfer opportunity that the employer
in good faith believes to be accurate at the time of the
posting.
Personally, I don't feel like having a higher skill at bullshitting and persuading people that is utterly unrelated to the job should get you paid more for the same work.
(If the job is sales, then negotiating for higher pay could just be part of proving your skill, of course.)
I wonder if this will result in remote job applications excluding candidates from New York, as we've seen with other states. Although once a critical mass of states start requiring this, that won't really be an option any more.
I'm curious how much overlap there is in these salary range requirements between states. I believe California, Colorado, and New York require them, but I wonder if they are actually all consistent in terms of what needs to be included, or if we'll end up in a case where you have to carefully craft your job listing to be compliant with all states (or have a different one for each state).
I don't have any stats to back it up, but I've seen various threads and discussions on Reddit where people are flagging jobs adverts that exclude people from those state - for instance:
If it does, good. Those are companies you probably don't want to work for. In California, we also have a minimum pay here for exempt software engineers - it's $112,065.20, which is higher than the US median salary for software developers.
My company applies that same standard nationwide with remote engineers, so kind of the opposite of what you're saying.
> The law, signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022, also will apply to remote employees who work outside of New York but report to a supervisor, office or worksite based in the state.
Nope, it pertains to where the job itself is listed as being based. If the company is HQ'd in NYC, but the listing is for a job based out of their Miami office, then the law doesn't apply.
that is reminiscent of data protection laws which apply if you're processing the data of [sometimes >N] residents from country or U.S. state X, even if you have no presence there
Intent and reasonably foreseeable outcomes probably matters here.
If that company in Belgium advertises worldwide and somehow hires many people who live in New York, you bet NY will argue (successfully) that they have to follow this law, at least prospectively, as it affects residents of their state and the DoL has jurisdiction over protecting the labor rights of its residents.
GDPR is already enforced on American companies serving EU citizens. Only if the American company never intends to do business in the EU can they get away with breaching it.
Yes, however companies are actively being fined for those. It's just that there is a huge amount of websites and not enough resources to prosecute them all at once.
Hopefully, haven't seen a difference as and end user.
Do you know which of those fines are due to non compliant cookie banners? Had a quick look but I'm not well up enough on GDPR to figure out which fines are for violating which parts of GDPR.
No idea, but IIRC some are. The text is legalese so hard to make out exactly. Then also it's per country, even more complicated. Filing a case also is per country.
Just like anything else: if the belgian company doesn't comply but does any business with the US, then the US can interfere. Now this example is quite irrelevant, the interesting and usual case is a company from any other state hiring a worker remotely and residing in NY. This is straightforward.
Companies generally use third party compensation benchmark tools like Radford, which are total garbage. They base comp off title, and these tools are stuck in the stone age (think 'programmer analyst' as a SWE). When recruiting and/or engineering decide to post a job, they need to consult HR, who don't know anything about tech hiring, so they'll just guess. This will result in a broad, inaccurate, or crappy range. This seems like a decent law for retail and lower skilled jobs, but I think it just creates confusion for tech/startups. Engineers/tech employees talk, and its evident in online forums, slack/discord groups, linkedin, etc. When I see people say they won't apply to a job w/o the band or will pass on the job if its low, I'd suggest you do your own research. See who the company employs. If they are hiring talent from companies known to pay big $$, the posted band is just a bureaucratic formality because nobody knows how to properly navigate it. Also, talk to recruiters - they know what people are getting paid.
No one in 2020: “I won’t apply to AWS because of the global salary cap of only $160K (or whatever the figure was back then).”
When (substantially) all of your comp is cash salary, posting cash salary ranges is illuminating. When a lot of it isn’t, posting a cash salary range just tells prospective applicants one tiny view into a cash flow aspect.
Its probably reliable if you're a Fortune 500 company hiring enterprise J2EE and C# developers because that's most of their customers, but not if you're a more engineering/product driven company. I guess the appeal of Levels.fyi - more tech focused.
The purpose of this law is salary transparency, not necessarily on salary equality across positions in the company.
It makes it so that applicants can see what all employers are offering up front, which incentivizes the employers to be more competitive on salary offer if they want applicants to choose to apply there.
Salary equality for equivalent positions within the company, as you're describing it, would require companies to publicly list what each of their existing employees are making, which is a completely different thing than what this law is requiring.
I was always the hardest worker in my class, but never found a job because companies said I would want to be paid too much, meanwhile I told them my salary requirements were zero because I was homeless. Was that satire?
My megacorp operates in at least 3 states with these laws now, so all our postings include a pay band. The band is lower than practically every person's offer...
While I favor transparency, I don't think this is something that should be legislated / regulated. Mainly because the lack of such details in a job ad is a signal. And imho an important one. It gives insight into the org that's hiring. It also leaves the door open to negotiations.
Employment is nearly all cases is at will. Every interview stage ends with "Any questions?" There is definitely a time and place for government regulation. This is not one of them. It's too Nanny State-y.
I disagree. Almost no job postings in NY had a salary in 2020. That number is now close to 100%. Companies will not disclose salaries unless you whack them with a stick
When the call / email comes in you ask, "What's the salary range?"
The smart ones will smarten up and publish a range. As it is, making it required, now you can't tell smart from stupid. You wanna work for stupid? Your dream has some true.
IANAL, but I started googling and here's what I found...
I've heard of "mens rea", which means in order for a crime to be committed, you need to have a "guilty mind".
From what I can tell, ignorance of the law can be an excuse. If there's a law stating that wearing purple on Tuesdays is a criminal offense, and I wear purple on Tuesday, a prosecutor would have to prove that I knowingly & willingly committed a crime (e.g. showing a social media post where I saw "I'm going to wear purple this Tuesday. I dare you to arrest me!").
In the case of a traffic offense, ignorance of the law is typical not an excuse because a traffic not a criminal offense.
Many traffic offenses do cross the line into criminal law. I also am not a lawyer, but I think the applicability of mens rea depends on whether it's written into the statute in question.
When it comes to offenses like speeding, generally a part of obtaining a drivers license is accepting responsibility for knowing the rules of the road ahead of time.
Yet somehow police don't have to know the laws they are enforcing. Why do we allow good faith excuses for people carrying guns enforcing the law but give no favors to the general public. Do you know every single law you are subject to at the given moment? Even the US government does not know how many laws it has on its own books.
1) This seems like a fairly decent bit of legislation for some standardized professions, particularly those that are often paid hourly, work in person and cannot be outsourced out of state, and in many cases are the most economically vulnerable. I'm thinking that it would be pretty decent for dishwashers, cashiers, gas station attendants, etc to know if a job is offering say $15-18 per hour or $20-25 per hour. But this seems horrendous for salaried remote knowledge workers, particularly those that have the ability to negotiate a better deal. And additionally, there will be unintended consequences of this legislation, such as some employers not wanting to deal with New York employees.
2) If the goal of this legislation is to prevent exploitation, it seems that requiring a salary floor would be important, but requiring a salary ceiling would be a negative part of this legislation as it makes it a lot tougher to allow employees to have the room to negotiate.
I don't agree with your second point, but lets say you are right: the benefits of having a "salary ceiling" to me still outweigh any down-sides. I would argue that in many roles it gives a betters sense of what is on the table and allows folks to aim for higher than they might have.
No legislation is perfect, but this a vast improvement over the current situation.
Personally speaking, this only seems to be a very marginal improvement over the current situation if you consider the impact of legislation in a vacuum and magically wish away any possible unintended consequences.
Does your analysis consider that at least some employers will not want to deal with employees affected by this? You might wish that this wasn't a thing, but it is.
Maybe this legislation isn't as questionable in good economic times where companies are rapidly hiring as many people as they can wherever they can, but it seems particularly self-destructive in a market where employers have the leverage to look anywhere.
What are you going to tell those increasingly desperate New Yorkers who start getting sad feedback like the following? "Thank you for your application to our company. Unfortunately, this role is not currently eligible for New York State residents. Have a nice day."
That's not going to happen. California and now NY all require salary transparency. What's going to happen is the opposite. More and more states that don't have these laws, especially neighboring ones (like NJ, Connecticut) are going to disclose their salaries because they're competing with companies from those states that are being transparent, and attracting more candidates because of that transparency.
They're all going to surrender to what the market is asking of them. Salary transparency is quickly becoming table stakes
1) You're guessing about what's going to happen in the future like it's a complete given that only good things would result from this and enough other states would join in. I would point out that (this doesn't involve speculation) we already know that some companies don't want to compete in locations that have these policies, which isn't ideal for New Yorkers.
2) Your positive speculation might be a little more reasonable were we entering great economic times where companies were rushing to hire anywhere they can. In troubled economic times, companies have a lot more leverage to seek the best deals they can and can exclude locations that are more trouble than they're worth.
1) That was true when it was just pitiful Colorado (no offense to Colorado residents)
2) That might be true for some companies that need mediocre talent, but if you’re looking to hire the best, and don’t got a salary disclosed, those elite workers have plenty of other options
The employer is much more likely to post a higher, unrealistic, salary ceiling that they have no intention of actually paying in order to attract more/better candidates.
that tends to self-correct. talking to candidates burns alot of time. sure, you can lie and try to get a better outcome. but you also spent precious time buttering them up only to have them walk away in a huff. I'm seeing the same kind of aspirational posts with respect to commutes.
My query with this sort of thing is always that will this do any more than remove the low and high end people for roles in companies, and maybe the people who want the highs will go to somewhere where they can be paid with more variability.
High and low end people don't have to be hired for the advertised position. I believe the company can still say "yeah, you're not this level, but we're interested in you for position X instead" which may be outside of the advertised range.
Sure. But then what if that position isn't advertised, because you just made it for this candidate?
E.g. if someone is already on a little below your top end, but they'd have to trade a nice short commute at their current role for a longer commute to come to you, they might need more than the top end. What then? Do they have to stay put, because this sort of law only thinks about salary, and not overall cost-benefit for the employee's situation, judged by the employee?
Also, what happens if both parties agree to a salary outside of the bound during the interview. Is the employer bound by that number? I am guessing there is no mechanism that would enforce it.
I imagine nothing happens. It's just an indication of what the company is thinking they're going to pay. This helps people who are bad negotiators from getting into trouble; "And what are your salary requirements?" "....uhhhh... 60k?" "Awesome, we were thinking we'd have to pay at least 100k"
I’ve recently noticed some of the special YC company hiring ads on here advertising ranges like 10k-1M for engineering positions. Is this New York law a major cause for such listings?
I'd imagine this would get abused in unfortunately amusing ways.
Start out as:
"Senior XYZ-Division Backend Software Developer" at ZYX Corp
Then as you start touching more and more of the database, you get a new title to become the:
"Senior XYZ-Division Backend Database Software Engineer" at ZYX Corp
At which point you get bored and switch departments to become the:
"Senior CBA-Division Backend Performance Optimization Software Developer" at ZYX Corp
Standardise job titles in a nationwide regulation and make employers pick titles out of them (with an allowance to propose a title for an exceptional work, subject to approval) instead of using arbitrary titles.
Our labor market is completely different. There is no loyalty between employee and employer anymore, so job switching is far more frequent here. The hiring culture is similarly bonkers: you have to apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs to get a callback, even when unemployment is low and employers are whining to anyone who will listen that it's hard to find workers, even for low-wage restaurant and retail positions. Employers take a long time (days, weeks, months) to get back to you, they interview you multiple times, and they ghost you entirely at every stage of the process.
Imagine going through this, just to be told "You're hired, and the wage is $x/hour", where x is far less than you make now or would need to pay rent.
Salary transparency laws are necessary because workers, especially lower-wage workers, have finite time and cannot go through this process and receive multiple offers. Employers can hold out for desperate workers, but workers need to eat and pay rent, and are thus forced to take what they can get. In this hiring culture, lower-wages workers are often forced to work for far less than they could otherwise get because of the high time and effort cost of finding better paying work.
Typically the highest paid labourers are all people with relatively transparent salaries.
- CEOs
- Athletes
Also things with salary transparency (i.e. Unions / Guilds) results in hirer wages for their members compared to similar workers without the things.
It's also in line between with the basic principals of capitalism. The basic supply-demand graph assumes perfect information which is obviously not true when a job-seeker doesn't know the salary of a job they're seeking so you'll end up with mismatches in the job-supply and job-demand.
I'm not sure it should be phrased that way. The rationale for such laws is to ensure an efficient allocation of labor. An expected side-effect of efficient allocation is higher wages as employees take the best paying job they're suited for but it's not like the point of the law is to make McDonalds pay 25$/h for a fryer.
> [1] The legislation underscores New York's commitment to addressing wage disparities and promoting transparency in compensation practices across the state. It ensures that employees have access to vital compensation information, and empowering them to make informed decisions about their careers.
Yeah no fair enough, I guess it's just an odd statement really. It's a Spanish language News outlet though, and given the amount of countries that speak Spanish natively just seemed an out of place comment.
Looking casually at jobs lately I would say that 80% of them have posted salary ranges. This has been enormously helpful in a) helping me avoid jobs with inflated titles but low pay and b) attracting me to jobs I might not otherwise consider because of very competitive pay.
Seems like a win-win in most cases.