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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

#641

Post by tracker1 »

codeddesign wrote: post #563
eru wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And that's why every employee should spend some low amount of background effort constantly interviewing elsewhere. First, to get a feeler for what the rest of the market is doing. Second, to take a better offer if available. Third, even a committed lifer needs to keep the interviewing skills sharp, in case of layoffs or bankruptcy.

You do realize that it costs companies more to continually hire. If you add real value to a company, from my experience most non-global companies see and understand that. However, in many cases the engineer is mediocre in their job (regardless of actual skill) and still expects a company to increase their pay. In a generation of people that feel something is owed to them, unfortunately the mediocre engineer covers 80…

There are also places that hamstring their above average developers with processes and/or interruptions that tend to bring down a lot of potential productivity (and morale).

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#642

Post by rajeshp1986 »

I think is a great step. I work for a big company and has been around for 4 years. when I joined this company, my salary was on par (also justified as per my previous salary). We saw a tremendous amount of growth in the technology and the team has grown by 20X. The people joining now are getting far better salary because either their current salary is high and they negotiate on that OR the company is ready to pay more for filling up the positions. But I feel very bad when I think of it, the employees who laid the foundations got very small hike over the years and I feel underpaid now. Also, I was the member who laid the foundation of the team and created the initial reputation which was required.

Salary negotiations based on previous salaries are just plain idiocracy. I have co-workers who are excellent in terms of the skillset and the value they create but they come from either smaller cities where the pay was not great or from startups which didn't pay very well in the early days. These people suffer a lot even though they know that their counterparts who come from large companies and had good salaries get paid almost 1.5-2X.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#643

Post by roel_v »

danjoc wrote: post #162
gjkood wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

You don't start a company because you might get sued for infringing on something with an idea you don't even have yet? Okay...

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#645

Post by rawTruthHurts »

tuna-piano wrote: post #562
zaroth wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our economy pays differently for different jobs for exactly one reason; scarcity. The best road workers in the world, they do what? The best miner? Now, the best coder? Some coders should be paid like the best road worker. Few road workers should be paid like the best coders, because there's just too many ready replacements who would do the work for less. Coding is becoming that way, but far from it currently. Our be…

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.

Just in case you don't know how close you are to be wrong...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit

... truth is stranger than fiction!

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#646

Post by shubhamjain »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #617
mark-r wrote: post #556

Earlier 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…

> But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value

Cherry-picking one profession to claim low salaries are because of gender is absurd. The world is an unfair place if you can't cope with the fact that a large majority of jobs will pay "peanuts". If tomorrow there is an infinite supply of highly qualified programmers, surely programmers would be paid low wages too but the truth is that there never will be - there is a lot of valuable software left to be created, to be maintained and we won't hit saturation any time soon.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#647

Post by pluma »

rev_bird wrote: post #390
lukejduncan wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've followed this advice in the past with mixed results. Some companies do a great job of either respecting this or not asking in the first place. When I interviewed at Uber (a little more than a year back), the recruiter was super persistent. I told them "I understand why you're interested, but it's my personal preference at the advice of personal mentors, not to disclose that information. If we both like each othe…

> "OK, we can do that. But we have a policy of always making the lowest possible offer to candidates who won't share their compensation information. I just want the best for you." This makes absolutely no sense to me. "Oh, we can't use previous compensation to effectively lowball this candidate we like, so we'll ineffectively lowball them instead."

It makes perfect sense. If an applicant doesn't want to disclose their previous salary and disclosing it is the cultural norm, that indicates a) they're troublemakers (very privacy conscious or what have you), or b) their previous salary was very low.

You probably don't want troublemakers so there's no point in making them a generous offer. And if the previous salary was very low the lowest possible offer is probably not too far off.

It actually incentivises disclosing your previous salary because unless it was lower or as low as the lowest offer, you'll have a better bargaining position.

I'm not saying the reasoning is particularly ethical or nice, just that it is entirely rational.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#648

Post by linkregister »

stygiansonic wrote: post #449
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

I'm sorry that you had to go through this. I agree that it's intrusive and really shouldn't be tolerated. A while ago, I was in the middle of the job interview process for a company. Having read some rudimentary background on salary negotiation, I was somewhat prepared for how to deflect the "how much are you making?" question. The next interview was a technical interview, so I wasn't too focused on this aspect of th…

It looks like they learned something as well, since you declined after they invested time into your interview and offer process. Thanks for doing that, you made things better for everyone else here in aggregate.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#649

Post by linkregister »

VladKovac wrote: post #452
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.

Startups typically pay less in exchange for equity. This is expected and transparent.

Large and medium size businesses have much more information available to them than their applicants do.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#650

Post by JED3 »

PostOnce wrote: post #501
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…

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…

You have a prejudice against Silicon Valley / California.

Aside from that, I think one key point you failed to observe is that the engineers are often the biggest producer of innovation and invention in the production process. Software engineering is not manual labor, instead a heightened level of mental focus and ingenuity is required to perform the job.

I think I might have a prejudice against manual labor.

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