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Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

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Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#161

Post by ap22213 »

morgante wrote: post #159
ap22213 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, got it - it's probably semantics then. When I say 'work', I mean doing something other than what you enjoy. If you love it, it's not work, in common vernacular.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#162

Post by danjoc »

gjkood wrote: post #30
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…

There's a common saying "Nobody ever gets rich working for someone else". I am not sure how much that is backed up by any statistics but the Bay Area and employees of unicorns or Google/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft/... may be outliers to this adage. Anyway the point I am trying to make is that as an engineer you either have the choice of working for an employer and living an albeit comfortable life (without any risk) or go…

>as an engineer you either have the choice

I don't feel like I do. I cannot afford to battle patent trolls when something I produce somehow infringes on their "intellectual properties." There has been some progress, given the Alice vs CLS Bank decision, but there's still lots of patents flying around out there like this one (https://www.google.com/patents/EP2973038A1) where Google attempts to patent "Classifying resources using a deep network." Given that there's a very real threat of bankruptcy for even trying to start my own venture, I plod along at my position which is automating thousands out of their jobs while I make a minuscule fraction of what those people were once paid.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#163

Post by morgante »

markonthewall wrote: post #90
wildmusings wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're unfairly discounting the essential work done by other people in any business. While we engineer-types are tempted to look down upon sales, marketing, legal, HR, and leadership as do-nothing fluff, those roles can be just as crucial to a business's success as an engineer's. Pay is determined by the supply and demand of labor in the market.

Most professions you are referring to are unionized and defend their interests as a group, if you wait for C-execs to increase salaries of its information workers you might wait a long... long time. They have a board of shareholders to respond to and that is just not in their interest. I am actually quite surprised at the devotion of some people here for their masters. It does provide a beautiful illustration of La B…

> Most professions you are referring to are unionized and defend their interests as a group

Where on earth did you get that assumption?

Most marketers, lawyers, HR people, or managers are not unionized.

Unions work well for commodity labor, not professionals with a huge variation in pay and value.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#164

Post by Retric »

cheald wrote: post #74
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…

Nail on the head right here. The price of an employee isn't their MPL, it's no greater than their MPL and is set by how little the next guy is willing to take to do the job. Competitive pressures work to drive down labor prices, too! 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 g…

This assumes the opportunity's to generate 1.5m in value are finite and all developers are equivalent. Both are rather sketchy assumptions. I might have a 1% chance of preforming an amputation successfully. But, the people with an 90% chancing of doing the same are worth vastly more.

Out of 100 developers 10 might save you 1.5million and getting the correct 2 might save you 3 million.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#165

Post by GFischer »

devishard wrote: post #147
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…

I don't think the poster of your parent comment would disagree with your explanation of the how things are; they're only saying that's not how it should be. If we lived in a just meritocracy, people who created millions of dollars in value with their code would be compensated with millions of dollars, but this is rarely, if ever, the case.

As a counterpoint: people don't create millions of dollars in value in a vacuum.

Somebody (usually several somebodies) took the chance to create a support structure to enable said person to create the millions of dollars in value.

How much of the value should go to the value creator and how much to the enabler with the capital (and the vision to use it in that way instead of spending it on something else) is a very interesting question that has been tackled for a long time, particularly from Marx onwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#166

Post by sbov »

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…

This isn't exactly correct either. It's a combination of barriers to entry (e.g. startup costs) and how much value the developer can make vs what they're paid. If a developer makes $100k/year and can create $1 million in value, then certainly I can poach them by offering them $200k/year and still make a profit on top of that.

In many fields what prevents this is startup capital. It's expensive to get a supply chain for physical goods up and running. But if you have the business acumen and connections there is not nearly as much of a barrier to entry in the software world.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#167

Post by skolos »

up_and_up wrote: post #62

Feel free to tell them what you make just add 15-40% to that number. This has worked well for me. Employers seem happy as well. Example: Assuming your current salary is X. "So I currently make (X * 1.20), but in order to make the jump I need at least (X * 1.40)." That way they get to feel out immediately whether they can afford you, you get the salary that would motivate you, and no one is wasting time in the hiring…

Works well until an employer does due diligence (ask for proof of your number). In my experience many (not all) do due diligence.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#168

Post by dvt »

morgante wrote: post #149
dvt wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no. This adage is very very true. Sure, you can get a comfortable six figure salary, but that is by no stretch of the imagination "affluent". I'm defining rich as making 7 figures a year. I think that's a pretty fair assessment. You'll never get that working for someone else (especially as an engineer), barring extenuating circumstances. High equity employee #1 or co-founder is the way to go. High risk, high rewa…

A 7 figure annual income is setting the affluent definition very high. You can work at Google for a decade and end up a multi-millionaire, with enough money to retire to most places in the US. From your other comment, it seems like you haven't done the analysis on this. Top companies are routinely paying $200k-300k these days. That's enough to save a million dollars over a decade even if you have a family.

$200k-$300k in places like San Francisco and Menlo Park. Clearly, you don't understand how cost of living works. Also, to make that much, you need to be at around a level of SDE3/tech lead, which is by no means easy (a decade of making low six-figures & some political panache). See this top answer on Quora, for a pretty detailed analysis: https://www.quora.com/Will-I-be-able-to-become-a-millionaire...

You might be able to become a millionaire in 25 years assuming a frugal lifestyle and no big life event costs, but that's optimistic.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#169

Post by llamataboot »

merpnderp wrote: post #75
llamataboot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hardly think underpaid engineers are the main problem with our economy. We could start by looking at, oh I dunno, teachers?

Underpaid relative to what? Oklahoma pays teachers crap, yet for every open position there are fully credentialed applicants willing to accept that salary. I wish everyone could make a million dollars a year, but as of yet the only fair way to set value for labor is a free market.

You're trained in something because you love it. You really want to do it, and you went to school for it, have experience in it. Someone gives you a choice -- you can do this for $XX/year or you can starve. The labor market is not as "free" as free-marketers make it out to be. I made a mid-career switch from social work to coding in part because of compensation, but it wasn't a friction-free switch. Also, my point was in response to the above poster who claimed that engineers were getting a fraction of what they deserved. By your metric, programmers are also getting what the market values them at. But by OPs metrics, I maintain that teachers create a lot more value than someone building another ad-tracker.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#170

Post by elteto »

trentmb wrote: post #126
usaphp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me the reason behind you thinking that "100k for a JavaScript engeneer is more than the "fair share"? And why you highlight the word "engeneer"?

Because we're not actually engineers. https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe Although there does appear to be a PE exam for software: http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SWE-Apr-2013.pdf

Having a PE license is by no means the definition of being an engineer. And if it was it would be a very narrow one. I work at an aerospace company, most of my peers with advanced degrees in mechanical, aerospace and electrical don't hold a PE and don't need it. Are those not engineers? I have a degree in aerospace by currently write software exclusively, am I not an engineer either?
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