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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

#451

Post by philsnow »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #416

I applied and soon after worked as an engineer for a large company that not only asked for my previous compensation but part of the application process involved my employer validating that I actually made what I told them. They worked with a third party to match my figures with W2 statements and/or pay stubs. It was really intrusive. Pay should equate to value, not some silly ladder climb

> Pay should equate to value, not some silly ladder climb

I agree with this statement, but that's a tough thing to get large companies to agree with

I think it's in the interest of the industry-at-large to not ask this question, because it incentivizes hopping jobs every 1-2 years.

But, that's all fine and good and everybody might agree with what I said, but individual companies still profit by 'defecting' (asking how much you made before and offering you that * 1.05).

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#452

Post by VladKovac »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #416

I applied and soon after worked as an engineer for a large company that not only asked for my previous compensation but part of the application process involved my employer validating that I actually made what I told them. They worked with a third party to match my figures with W2 statements and/or pay stubs. It was really intrusive. Pay should equate to value, not some silly ladder climb

>It was really intrusive

Imagine how painful it is to be an entrepreneur with a very weak signal about how much you can pay people to remain happy to work with you without going broke and still retaining good enough talent.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#453

Post by andrepd »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #92
cheald wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I wish I could, but I don't have the cash. Maybe I can save some, by working a few years as an aforementioned employee monkey, but I'll be 30+ by then.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#454

Post by aianus »

learc83 wrote: post #405
aianus wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Engineers are not created from money. You might be able to fill your positions by paying more, but not all of the positions in the entire country. Not without immigration or higher graduation rates. > Companies want to import foreign workers to…

If there was really a shortage of engineers, then engineer salary would be very close to the value the engineer adds to the company, because the competition to hire would drive the price as high as it could possibly go. Salary is nowhere near close to the value an engineer adds to the company, so most likely there is no shortage. The shortage is a manufactured problem to justify an attempt to depress wages. >How do y…

> Salary is nowhere near close to the value an engineer adds to the company, so most likely there is no shortage.

I think it is more likely that the marginal value added by an engineer to a company is much less than you think it is.

If Google currently earns an average of ~$2m per engineer that does not imply that they will earn an additional $2m upon hiring another engineer. In fact I'm confident they could fire at least 500 engineers tomorrow without negatively impacting their profit at all.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#455

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#456

Post by danjoc »

gjkood wrote: post #195
danjoc wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 re…

There is a tremendous amount of risk to go it alone, especially when the alternative is so comfortable and risk free. By all definition you would be crazy to go it alone. The statistics seem to point in that direction. But then again the reward profile if you are in that 10% to 5% that succeed and have the stomach to continue for the long haul is huge. I personally am a victim of the 'Analysis Paralysis' that your ar…

>the alternative is so comfortable and risk free

I've seen people with a decade of experience on the job "disappeared" and there's little more than an email to the staff telling us they are gone, effective immediately. I don't consider that comfortable or risk free. Especially true if one is in charge of systems, because of stories about loose cannons like

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12179637

>Maybe its better to try and fail than never to have tried at all.

I hear this sentiment mostly from upper middle class people who can fall back on family if they fail. I don't meet a lot of people who have experienced true financial ruin, recovered, and are willing to risk going back. A lot of us are as hungry as any entrepreneur. We simply don't have the safety nets. I don't know your case. Maybe you're as "financially independent" as I am, but advice like that sounds condescending in such a context. Of course they'll walk the tightrope. They've got a net.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10979926

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#457

Post by aianus »

nradov wrote: post #353
reinhardt wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? I don't get this argument. If there are 100 open positions and 80 eligible candidates, 20 (at least) positions will remain vacant, regardless of compensation. Not saying that this example reflects…

Your math is wrong, or rather irrelevant. The pool of eligible candidates is not fixed. It constantly changes based on the offered compensation and other factors. For example there are plenty of people qualified to do engineering work who aren't working in that field right now for whatever reason, but could be enticed to take an engineering job for enough money.

I disagree, the pool of candidates basically only changes via immigration and as people retrain or teenagers choose different college majors (very slow).

> For example there are plenty of people qualified to do engineering work who aren't working in that field right now for whatever reason, but could be enticed to take an engineering job for enough money.

Like whom? How can you be qualified to do software engineering if a) you've invested so much in a different career that you already make more than SV salaries and b) you presumably haven't done software engineering in years?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#458

Post by x0x0 »

jrockway wrote: post #425
r0m4n0 wrote: post #416

I applied and soon after worked as an engineer for a large company that not only asked for my previous compensation but part of the application process involved my employer validating that I actually made what I told them. They worked with a third party to match my figures with W2 statements and/or pay stubs. It was really intrusive. Pay should equate to value, not some silly ladder climb

The problem is that they must have too many qualified engineers applying, and they need an arbitrary way to filter people out. I almost managed to write that with a straight face.

yahoo did this to me. Verifying employment is one thing (I guess...), but their background check thing wanted exact salaries too, and permission to ask HR at all my previous employers.

Is this common? I've worked for small companies so haven't run into anything like this elsewhere. Except for one asshole that wanted to do a reference check two weeks after I started work (!!!) (he offered me a job at the end of the interview with a 24 hour time limit and had me start 3 days later; I had already left the previous employer so it suited me well enough at the time), and was unhappy when I told him what he could do with himself.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#459

Post by aetherson »

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…

Wait a minute, it is straight up crazy to suggest that most engineers get paid less than 0.01% of the value they create. If you make $100,000/year, in order for that to be 0.01% of the value you create, you'd need to create $1 billion in value.

You're off by like dead minimum two orders of magnitude, and probably more than three.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#460

Post by mindvirus »

drawkbox wrote: post #151

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…

I think non competes could be done if they were required to be paid at say 150% of comp in the past year, and the employee would continue to be considered an employee for the duration for the purposes of bonuses and equity vesting.

This way, if there was an employee for whom it was worth it for you business to bench, you could do it, but it would be expensive enough to only apply to truly key employees.

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