Can an employee ask employer's debt details?
Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
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Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In fact I'm confident they could fire at least 500 engineers tomorrow without negatively impacting their profit at all That makes no sense. If they can lose a significant chunk of their engineering team "without negatively impacting their profit at all" then why did they hire them in the first place. If your assertion is true, they must have significantly overestimated their staffing needs. If they did, it's likely…
That was the least important part of my comment. If you're arguing there's no shortage because wages are much lower than the marginal value of hiring an engineer, it's on you to come up with evidence supporting this supposed (much) higher marginal value. Everything I've seen points to a real shortage and desperation on the part of the employers: interns making six figures with free Manhattan penthouses, nonstop recru…
> it's on you to come up with evidence supporting this supposed (much) higher marginal value.
There's no more onus on me to prove a higher marginal value than there is on you to prove a lower one. You've attempted to shift the burden of proof by arbitrarily deciding that your assumption is the correct one.
I will say that most of the people I've read trying to determine the marginal value of software engineers, think that it's a good deal higher than what you seem to think it is. When you consider that there are outliers who will make or save companies tens of millions and not very many who are going to have very large negative impacts, the average is going to trend pretty high.
>Everything I've seen points to a real shortage and desperation on the part of the employers: interns making six figures with free Manhattan penthouses, nonstop recruiter spam, 22-year-olds negotiating stock packages on their 8 fulltime offers before they finish school, fresh grads buying Teslas with signing bonuses before their first day of work, countless job listings that never ever go away, $10k+ referral bonuses, websites where employers apply to you...
None of that is at all even remotely normal. The vast majority of software engineers don't experience anything like that. None of the people you're talking about are close to average. Average programmers don't pass Google style interviews. I went to a fairly average state school, and I've done a lot of tutoring and interview prep. I'd be shocked if 1% of the students I graduated with could pass a Google interview.
It's hardly shocking that the top 1% of engineers are making large salaries. Top law firms start associates out at $200k a year, do you think there's a shortage of lawyers?
If there really was a shortage, Google and other companies would relax their interview processes, and invest more in training. If anything, the real problem is that everyone thinks they need to hire the top 1%, but they don't want to pay for it.
$150k in silicon valley is equivalent to about $90k a year where I live, so I'm not interested in moving. If someone there offered me $300k, I'd go in a heartbeat.
Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
Supply/demand. There's a much larger supply of people capable of building roads vs. those capable of developing a system. And the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system. You're right about the value of teams being greater than an individual contributor, but the ability to work within a team is a va…
> the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system. Pick another profession then. How about customer support? The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering…
Don't bring gender into this.
You can't say highly technical fields are comparable to customer support.
Do you think the receptionists in hospitals should earn the same as doctors?
Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just scarcity. That ignores half the equation (demand). Poop popsicles are extremely rare (I have yet to see one). But their price would be essentially $0, if/when they exist.
Scarcity is supply below demand, not just low supply. Scarcity implies a shortage, and shortage implies too little, not just low supply, right?
More supply than demand only exists for 'free' or 'public' goods. If there are costs of production, nobody (except government) will want to supply more than is demanded, as they will be giving the product away (or paying people) to get rid of it. Garbage is an instance of supply > demand.
Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just the Internet, it's real life too. If salaries are low across the board at $COMPANY it's an easy wedge for the management to use. "We couldn't give you more because then you would be making more than your coworkers. Do you feel like you really deserve more? You should be happy to have what you do already." If your coworkers are also too meek to ask for raises it's bad news for all the engineers. Pressure…
"We couldn't give you more because then you would be making more than your coworkers. Do you feel like you really deserve more? You should be happy to have what you do already." The answer is to call their bluff and tell them that yes, you do feel like you deserve more. You may or may not add that you feel like your coworkers also deserve more. You can't negotiate your coworkers' salary for them. You're only in a pos…
In my case I have been fighting for my colleagues salary too, since they're "linked" by company policy.
It works because even though he's not asking for more money I can tell them what the cost of replacing us is, and I can tell them if one of us leaves the other is more than likely to follow.
Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
This adage is used mostly by snake oil salesmen slinging get-rich-quick schemes. Working for somebody else is probably the best way to get rich. Putting a qualification here, rich is not filthy rich, but affluent to comfortably rich.
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…
Have you seen the thing about how there are no rich Americans?[1] No matter how big my house and expensive my car, I'm not rich, heavens no, that guy over there has a bigger house and a shinier car, he's rich. And of course he'll tell you the same thing.
$200k/year is most definitely rich by the standards of most of America. If you think that's silly, hang out with someone who makes $30,000 a year and think about how much $200,000 would change their lives.
[1]http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/03/03/how_americans...
Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#627Earlier 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.
Be careful about that. The recruiter's incentive is stronger to get more people into jobs that to get one person a little bit more money. It's much like the situation with real estate agents that freakonomics covered in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jO_w6f8Ck
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Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're very likely talking about the top 0.1% employees at the top 0.1% of companies. Every time salary is discussed on HN, inevitably someone brings up this "fact" that engineers are "routinely" making $200K or $300K or $400K or whatever other ridiculous figure. Given average Bay Area software engineer compensation being between $100K and $140K depending on your source, even at $200K we're probably talking at least…
This is all in the greater thread's context of whether you are more likely to get rich working for someone else or yourself. Sure, only the top engineers get paid $300k+/year, but an even smaller number of founders are able to pull that sort of effective salary. I'd wager that these days a smart engineer is financially better off at a big co than even starting a startup.
For more specifics, large, prestigious companies such as Google have salary and equity bands based on levels. The majority of engineers at Google are going to be above $200k total comp (salary + bonus + equity). Here's a glassdoor link for context: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engi...
Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the linesmen who provide the power for your computers? What about the road workers who make it possible for you to get to work? What about the African miners who dig up the rare earths for your components to run your computer? What about the guys soldering all this crap together? I bet you'd say the road worker creates hardly any value, but in reality the economy just ceases to function without roads. Or s…
All of those guys already got paid by the time you sit down at your desk. The wealth that the GP is talking about is the incremental wealth created by the engineers under consideration. They're taking publicly available things and putting them together in a new way to create something more valuable than the cost of parts and labour.
Yeah, I suppose it would be interesting to look at the value multipliers throughout the supply chain to see if they are even or uneven. There is a difference between value of input goods and a value of output products, and workers capture some percentage of that difference as pay.. For instance, if someone who takes raw metals at $1/unit and processes them into component-ready materials at $2 per unit and are paid $0.50/unit, they're capturing 50% of the value they have created. A programmer takes software and hardware components that have some intrinsic value (perhaps not, difficult to reason about here) and processes them into software and hardware or services that have a greater intrinsic value. At large tech companies, the programmer might get a salary of $1XX,XXX, but the company might making a profit on the services that programmer created of $5XX,XXX, which only capturing 20% of the value added. I guess what I wonder is: should everyone in the pipeline for goods creation capture the same percentage of what the inherent value they've created? Or is it the nature of markets to differentiate based on scarcity of labor at each stage?
Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
Supply/demand. There's a much larger supply of people capable of building roads vs. those capable of developing a system. And the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system. You're right about the value of teams being greater than an individual contributor, but the ability to work within a team is a va…
> the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system. Pick another profession then. How about customer support? The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering…
I can train someone in less than a month to be a world class customer support agent. Assuming they have the temperament, the job requires no scarce skills. I can train a person to work on a crew pouring concrete in a day. Comparing road crews to software engineering is a false equivalence. Mining in Africa is certainly hard work, but I could staff a mine with eager workers in an hour.
If one feels that income inequality among the professions is a problem, one should change professions. There's nothing stopping anyone right? However if we do acknowledge that there are barriers to entry, then we have just proven the point as to why a guy pouring asphalt is paid less than a person writing APIs. Marxist theory has every profession being equal. Yet, why, in the Soviet Union were nuclear scientists rewarded differently than the shop clerk at Moscow's GUM department store? Why were Soviet ballerinas treated like relative royalty while the people running electricity to the Bolshoi treated far worse?
Because of scarcity. Gold is worth more than sand. Though without sand, you wouldn't have concrete. I can't believe we're still having economic discussions where scarcity seems to be a novel (and controversial) concept. Marxism fails every time it has been tried because it fails to recognize scarcity.