Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay • Hacker News Board

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#151

Post by drawkbox » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:02 PM UTC

Massachusetts is doing some good steps to better the work environment and entrepreneurship. This is a nice to have in negotiations and MA challenging non-competes are great things to change[1].

Non-competes are extremely anti-innovation, anti-worker, anti-business and really anti-American. Workers that are skilled cannot be owned. Good knowledgable workers should be compensated to keep them around, not fear of legal threat of using skills they developed.

Non-competes need to go away everywhere.

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/06/30/massachusetts-non-compete-pass...

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#152

Post by oillio » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:03 PM UTC

fecak wrote: post #136

siculars wrote: post #12

This. Negotiating a compensation package, in general, is asymmetric information warfare. Having to reveal your salary history you may as well not even negotiate. I know so many women who are constantly bit by this and negotiating in general. Here's an idea: compensation agents who negotiate the compensation package on your behalf. Athletes and actors have them, why not everyone else?

I wrote a post a few years ago about agents ( https://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/09/17/disrupt/ ) and actually had some people from HN approach me to see if I'd started that service. At the time I hadn't but I'm reconsidering this right now. I wrote the article in response to the incentives for recruiters being typically seen as driven by the client (hiring firm). The main issue is that recruiters are paid by hiring fi…

Personally, I would be interested in this service when I am job hunting.

Having a trusted third party between myself and the prospective employer would help shift the power dynamic significantly.

Also having a trained negotiator would take a lot of stress off of me.

Any thoughts on a rough price range you would look for to provide this sort of service?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#153

Post by PhasmaFelis » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:04 PM UTC

markonthewall wrote: post #11

I love the US and California, the tech scene is amazing and I was lucky to met such talented and friendly people in about every place I worked... from very large tech cos to "garage" startups. Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the av…

> Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the average worker does in the country but ridiculously to what they would look like if engineers were allowed to capture a greater (that is a >0.01%) percentage of the added value they CREATE.*

As an engineer, I'd certainly like to make more, and I plan to negotiate more aggressively at my next position; but I'm honestly more concerned about how little most of the rest of the nation gets paid compared to the value they create. I don't like seeing my friends who work harder than I do--and contribute at least as much to society--getting paid 1/3 of what I make, just because they don't happen to have natural aptitudes for a currently fashionable skillset.

If I could fix just one of those two problems, it would be the second one. I make enough to live comfortably. Too many people don't.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#154

Post by antisthenes » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:04 PM UTC

blahi wrote: post #42

markonthewall wrote: post #11

I love the US and California, the tech scene is amazing and I was lucky to met such talented and friendly people in about every place I worked... from very large tech cos to "garage" startups. Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the av…

Sorry, but this is straight up proletariat bull. You get hired, you get paid. If it doesn't pan out, you go somewhere else. You have 0 risk and a guaranteed career. And sorry, but 100k for a javascript "engineer" is more than the "fair share" in my opinion, but it's a market, so it is what it is.

Yes, I find it quite ironic that one of the most privileged groups on the planet is suddenly supporting an essentially communist argument of wage theft, as soon as there's even a slight possibility of them being underpaid. Apparently they are also entitled to unprecedented upward mobility.

I sincerely doubt many software developers here spend any sleepless nights wondering what it would have been like had they been in another field or profession, which are just as much victims of wage theft as supposedly these engineers are.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#155

Post by ubernostrum » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:04 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #58

markonthewall wrote: post #11

I love the US and California, the tech scene is amazing and I was lucky to met such talented and friendly people in about every place I worked... from very large tech cos to "garage" startups. Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the av…

I am a developer, so I am all for higher developer salaries, but your posts shows a common misunderstanding about economics. The value someone creates has nothing to do with their salary. Their salary is dictated by how many people need to hire developers and how many developers exist to fill those jobs or in simple terms, supply and demand. I might create millions of dollars in value with my code, but there might be…

So, this supply and demand thing.

We keep hearing from large tech companies that there's a crisis -- a massive shortage of qualified software engineers, to such a degree that they won't be able to operate at all if they can't raise the H1-B quotas and import more people to fill all the jobs currently going unfilled.

If that truly is the case, then supply and demand would tell us that currently engineers are underpaid; if there are companies so desperate to hire engineers that they're turning to immigration law to try to increase the supply, why aren't they simply offering large enough compensation packages to attract the existing pool?

Pondering the answer to that may enlighten you.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#156

Post by jazzyk » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #104

toomuchtodo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is stopping engineers from saying "I'm going to contribute $1.5m to your bottom line this next year, I want you to pay me $1.4m", but they'll be shown the door because there's a guy that's willing to contribute the same $1.5m in exchange for $100k in compensation. Which is why you should be an owner/competitor versus an employee if you know the business well enough.

Assuming that you can tolerate the commensurate risk, absolutely. Many people forget that the rank-and-file employee isn't exposed to the financial and legal risk that their employers were/are.

But they are exposed!

In case of financial trouble (very common at startups), who gets to be laid off first, the CEO or the developer?

Also, rank-and-file employees are typically scape-goated in legal proceedings, example: finance people going to jail for rogue/insider trading, even though upper management at least encouraged such behavior.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#157

Post by Kliment » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #128

slg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a developer, so I am all for higher developer salaries, but your posts shows a common misunderstanding about economics. The value someone creates has nothing to do with their salary. Their salary is dictated by how many people need to hire developers and how many developers exist to fill those jobs or in simple terms, supply and demand. I might create millions of dollars in value with my code, but there might be…

All of these things are true. However, there is another input into supply side, and that's alternatives to employment like starting a company. Any employees that really create much more value than their salary can and will just leave and start their own company, where they get to set their own salary. By doing so, they'll also be leaving the pool of employees, and potentially hiring others too (reducing supply, incre…

The latter is not necessarily true - you might be creating tremendous value, but have barriers to market entry that are enormous such that you can only really create that value from within one of the existing players on the market. See aerospace, telecommunications, medicine, government contracting for examples of such industries. If I'm making a huge amount of added value for a large telecom, it's unlikely I can start a startup to compete with it, and given the state of the market I'm unlikely to make much more at their direct competitors. Thus, as long as my value is industry-specific, and the industries have large barriers to entry, I might be creating much more value than my salary but unable to leave and compete against my employer.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#158

Post by squozzer » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

I am not sure of the utility of asking the salary question anyway. A credit check which is usually part of the pre-offer paper chase will provide an employer with plenty of info for determining your current burn rate.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#159

Post by morgante » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

ap22213 wrote: post #148

ap22213 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say proletariat like it's a bad thing. Of all the social goals that we have (curing cancer, hunger, war, etc.), it amazes me that we haven't added 'work' to that list. Maybe like 5% of people that I know enjoy work more than 50% of the time (and it's probably not 'work' at that point). Work sucks - we should eradicate it and let people spend their short time on Earth doing what they enjoy. Many of our ancestors w…

And, for the people down-voting, I'd love to know why. Send me a message if you don't want to say publicly. The anthropologist in me genuinely wants to know. I can't understand how anyone would be for work ('they call it work for a reason, right?'). The only reasons I can imagine are 1) inflexible ideology, 2) sadism, or 3) love of power hierarchies.

I enjoy my work. If I go more than a week or two without doing some paid programming, I start to feel listless.

I'm lucky enough to get paid well as a freelancer, so I can work as much as I want from wherever I want. Even if I could retire tomorrow, I would still continue to do similar work to what I'm doing now.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#160

Post by crdoconnor » Tue, Aug 02, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

ktRolster wrote: post #93

zenlikethat wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked on a project where management considered developers as pretty much interchangeable and added folks to the team that did more damage than good? If so, do you want to repeat that experience?

I'll say this: if you aren't writing code in a way that someone else can pick up the project when you leave, then you are being an irresponsible coder.

This only makes sense if the compensation isn't tied to your replacement value. If it's tied to replacement value... well, too bad - the company shouldn't create an incentive to ramp up technical debt.