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Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

nytimes.com

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Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#281

Post by aianus »

llamataboot wrote: post #169
merpnderp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

If you're doing it because you love it, then you should consider that joy/satisfaction as part of the comp package. A lot (most?) high-paying jobs are high-paying because people don't love doing them and they involve a lot of sacrifice. That's why they call it 'compensation'.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#282

Post by Azkar »

johnrob wrote: post #178
inlined wrote: post #10

Candidates "may" offer this information upfront? I feel like I'm watching Office Space "Am I supposed to tell you my salary before even hearing your initial offer?" "Some employees choose to offer salary information, and we encourage that"

If you're currently paid well (relative to other companies), it's good idea to disclose your salary.

Why do you need to disclose your salary? It's just as easy to say "I won't accept the position for anything less than $X"

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#283

Post by bcheung »

ohitsdom wrote: post #253
bcheung wrote: post #247

I started off with a really low salary because I was working as a developer outside the SF bay area and in an industry that paid really low. Then moved to the bay area. Every company or recruiter tries to place you at maybe 5% to 10% more than your current job. There was a time when I was just hopping from job to job to increase my salary. If there wasn't this convention of paying someone the same I wouldn't have swi…

"Having a law that says you can't ask someone something seems to violate Freedom of Speech and it sets a dangerous precedent." Like your age, religion, sexual orientation, or if you're planning on getting pregnant?

I'm fine with the not discriminating part, it's the asking part I'm concerned with. It seems like censorship and going against Freedom of Speech to me.

A better law would be that employers may not discriminate or refuse to hire someone if they refuse to tell them their previous salary.

Specificity is key, just saying you can't ask feels too overreaching. The intent is to prevent discrimination, not speech.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#284

Post by dvt »

morgante wrote: post #270
dvt wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for seeming incredulous, but if you're saying that you're saving 100k a year in NYC, then you must be making like 400k or living in a cardboard box. Even with a 300k salary, you could only save 10k a month if you only had 5k worth of monthly expenses (3-4k is easily rent in NYC). And keep in mind that making 300k-400k is not typical.

I make substantially less than 400k and I assure you that I do not live in a cardboard box. $5k is high for monthly expenses. I rented a single bedroom in Manhattan for $1850 and you can save even more if you're willing to live with roommates. I'm not sure what I can do to convince you I'm not lying, but consider that median household income is less than $100k in both SV and NY. If the average person can get by on Of…

Ok, so maybe I'm just bad at math. I know that if you make 200k as an engineer in NYC (which is STILL high[1]), you make around 10k a month after taxes.

10k - 2k for rent - 1k for expenses = 7k saved if you don't go on vacation, and literally do nothing that costs money for ten years. Even saving 7k a month, you won't save 100k a year.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/new-york-city-software-en...

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#285

Post by matthewowen »

jack9 wrote: post #274
matthewowen wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your answer also shows a common misunderstanding about economics, because it takes too narrow a focus. If there exist jobs that produce $1MM in value but that have a going rate of 200k, then there should be more of those jobs: either the company doing the work should expand, or it should have competitors. This will lead to increased competition to hire, which means higher wages. The increased number of jobs might gen…

> either the company doing the work should expand, or it should have competitors. That's not how technology works. The most evident example is where data feeds data, creating a market without compare. You can't compete with google for map data or AWS for hosting. > we should ultimately reach some sort of equilibrium The equilibrium is not based on the metrics you have proposed except in the slightest degree.

Doesn't the fact that people are trying to compete with those services suggest that you can? Bing maps, Apple maps, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Digital Ocean, Joyent.

I don't think technology is that different. Incumbents have always had advantages. That doesn't totally preclude the possibility of competition. It might be that they compete by providing less value for less cost (eg the maps might not be as good, but they might be good enough for some users), or by servicing users that the incumbent doesn't care about (side note: isn't this what The Innovator's Dilemma is about?). But it's rare that a competitor is so dominant as to totally preclude any possibility of competition. You certainly haven't provided an example of one yet.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#286

Post by tombert »

humanrebar wrote: post #79
tombert wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that basically what a recruiter does? Every time I've dealt with a recruiter, they've done the salary haggling for me. EDIT: I should point out that that's what they do in regards to full-time W2 work, not contract.

> Isn't that basically what a recruiter does? Every time I've dealt with a recruiter, they've done the salary haggling for me. Recruiters are much more likely to cut bait and leave an extra 5% on the table to: 1. Keep a good relationship with the employer 2. Keep their turnover high, making money on negotiating many "OK" salaries instead of maximizing each individual salary (including yours).

I agree, except what I generally tell a recruiter what I want for a job before an offer has even been made, and I usually work with multiple at once. It gives me some haggling power without being the one who has to haggle directly.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#287

Post by hx87 »

dvt wrote: post #258
morgante wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can argue all you want, but I understand how cost of living works plenty well. SV is expensive but not so expensive that it wipes out $200k in income. If you're careful about expenses you can easily put away tens of thousands annually. This is backed up by own personal experience as a developer in NYC (hardly a low cost area). I expect to have a million dollars saved up within a decade and I certainly haven't rel…

Sorry for seeming incredulous, but if you're saying that you're saving 100k a year in NYC, then you must be making like 400k or living in a cardboard box. Even with a 300k salary, you could only save 10k a month if you only had 5k worth of monthly expenses (3-4k is easily rent in NYC). And keep in mind that making 300k-400k is not typical.

> 3-4k is easily rent in NYC

Only if you insist on living by yourself, or renting a luxury apartment with your friends/family in Manhattan. Going under $2k a month is easily possible if you have a large, multiple earner family or roommates, especially if you live outside Manhattan/Brooklyn. Plenty of New Yorkers manage with incomes less than $60k, and if you can live like them, saving 10k a month on a $300,000 salary is easy.

There is nothing requiring you to spend a certain amount of money just because you are earning a certain amount of money. We don't have sumptuary laws, after all.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#288

Post by learc83 »

aianus wrote: post #255
ubernostrum wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> why aren't they simply offering large enough compensation packages to attract the existing pool? Well, they are. Compensation packages at the big tech companies are ridiculous. I know someone that got $100k signing bonus (cash, not stock) without a degree at 21 years old. He's not a genius either. At a certain point, don't you think it's better to share some of that opportunity with smart foreigners? How many Tesla…

>Well, they are.

Clearly they aren't. Say an engineer can make a company $1 million per year. They are only willing to pay $200k per year in total compensation, but they complain that they can't hire enough engineers. Obviously they aren't paying enough per engineer.

>At a certain point, don't you think it's better to share some of that opportunity with smart foreigners? How many Teslas does an American twenty-something need?

So it's not the multi-billion dollar companies that are being greedy, but the engineers making $150k a year?

Companies want to import foreign workers to depress wages so that they can save money, and your instinct is to blame the workers who don't want lower wages?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#289

Post by nsedlet »

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 agree with this: employees are at a huge information disadvantage. However, I think a better (& admittedly more radical) solution to this problem would be to force employers to publicly post anonymized salaries by job title. That way prospective and current employees know exactly how much they ought to be paid. It makes salary negotiation almost trivial.

Preventing employers from asking about previous salary does not prevent them from discriminating against women, which is the intention of the MA law. I can definitely see how this law might hasten a transition away from an era where salary was unfairly pegged to gender - but only to the degree that employers aren't still just blatantly discriminating by gender.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#290

Post by jonknee »

serge2k wrote: post #265
jonknee wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Silicon Valley it seems popular to just start your own company and capture the value that way, but other fields have solved this issue by unionizing.

> other fields have solved this issue by unionizing careful with the "U word" around here. We don't need no stinkin unions, or any sort of professional association. I mean sure we don't get OT and too frequently get asked to be in a hellish oncall rotation or some 80 hour a week death march. We like it that way and we don't want to do anything to change it!

... Because those stock options are going to make me rich!
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