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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

#661

Post by Consultant32452 »

stickfigure wrote: post #620
Consultant32452 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/do-illegal-immigr... Labor economists have concluded that undocumented workers have lowered the wages of U.S. adults without a high-school diploma — 25 million of them — by anywhere between 0.4 to 7.4 percent.

...and increased the wages of otherwise poor Guatemalans, Mexicans, and their families by thousands of percent. Why exactly should I be opposed to this?

I don't think it's noble to be charitable with someone else's money, especially when that someone else is already at the poverty level.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#662

Post by arrrg »

rimantas wrote: post #655
PhilWright wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing unique or special about being a programmer. Programmers think they are undervalued and should get more. But guess what, nurses think they should get more as well because they are saving lives. Soldiers think they should get more for making us all safe. Police think they should get more for reducing the level of crime in society which benefits us all. Teachers think they should get more because they a…

> There is nothing unique or special about being a programmer. Really? Take 1000 programmers and try to teach them skills nurses have. How many will be able to do the job well enought to be able to work at the hospitals? Now take 1000 nurses and try to teach them skills programmers have. Is the number suitable for profession work at sowftware companies be the same, as in the first case? You can claim, that there is n…

Huh?

I’m in no way mentally prepared to be a nurse. That is something I suspect I would never ever be able to do. That has to do with skills (especially hard to learn skills, like interacting with people properly), it also has to do with being emotionally ready to do such a job. Especially a job like being a nurse is in my estimation not something you can just teach. You need people who are prepared, ready and willing to do the job.

I think very, very few of those 1,000 programmers would be ready to work in hospitals. I would not at all be surprised if you could find more great programmers among 1,000 nurses than you can find great nurses among 1,000 programmers. To me being a nurse is an extremely demanding job.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#663

Post by Taek »

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…

As a businessman, I'm going to find the cheapest way to do something at the necessary quality that I can, regardless of how much value it adds. If a faster database is worth $50M to the company, and one person can do it for $500k and the other for $200k, I'm going to choose the guy who will do it for $200k (assuming he's up to the task). It's all about supply and demand.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#664

Post by [deleted] »

xiaoma wrote: post #576

The part of this that looks more important than forbidding recruiters from asking about previous pay is this: > "And the law will require equal pay not just for workers whose jobs are alike, but also for those whose work is of “comparable character” or who work in “comparable operations.” Workers with more seniority will still be permitted to earn higher pay, but the law effectively broadens the definition of what is…

[deleted]

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#665

Post by chii »

aetherson wrote: post #459
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.

Turning that around, a CEO is paid 100mil/yr, is he creating more than that in value?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#666

Post by twblalock »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #661
stickfigure wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and increased the wages of otherwise poor Guatemalans, Mexicans, and their families by thousands of percent. Why exactly should I be opposed to this?

I don't think it's noble to be charitable with someone else's money, especially when that someone else is already at the poverty level.

Poverty is relative. What we call poverty is a lot more comfortable, and safer, than the conditions the immigrants came from.

We haven't eliminated poverty in this country because we keep moving the goalposts.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#667

Post by chii »

cloverich wrote: post #94
JonFish85 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really difficult to quantify, I imagine. Sure, engineers can create very valuable things. They can also create totally useless things (I am one, and I've made my own share of 'useless' features). I don't really see why singling out engineers is really terribly helpful in saying how much they're worth. An engineer can create great value, but if no one is selling it, is it worth much? A company without a direct…

Though I'm not sufficiently familiar w/ Jobs / Woz careers -- I like what you're getting at. I would say that just like there are 10x engineers, there's 10x Product managers / CEOs (really, just 10x people in general). They are few and far between (or, I've never met one) -- but if you got one, I can't imagine its possible to overpay them.

Except it's hard to identify the 10x'ers, unless you do it after the fact (i.e , too late).

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#668

Post by thatfrenchguy »

School-Cotton wrote: post #602
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…

Not sure why you're calling out California when developers there get paid more than literally anywhere else in the world, often by several times.

Cost of living ? If you make 30k in Budapest, you will live a better life than with 140k in California.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#669

Post by benwad »

mark-r wrote: post #556
PostOnce wrote: post #501

Earlier 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…

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…

You can't use supply and demand to defend low pay for some jobs while saying other jobs aren't paid enough, it's the same mechanism.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#670

Post by Consultant32452 »

twblalock wrote: post #660
Consultant32452 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/do-illegal-immigr... Labor economists have concluded that undocumented workers have lowered the wages of U.S. adults without a high-school diploma — 25 million of them — by anywhere between 0.4 to 7.4 percent.

This is the paragraph immediately following the sentence you quoted: > The impact on everyone else, though, is surprisingly positive. Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has written a series of influential papers comparing the labor markets in states with high immigration levels to those with low ones. He concluded that undocumented workers do not compete with skilled laborers — instea…

So your argument is that it's okay that we've made it worse for the people who already had it the hardest because the rest of the more wealthy people in the country benefitted from it? Sorry, but that doesn't make it better.

As for the rest of your post, my comment implied a context of the moral an legal framework currently in place in the US and most countries people would actually want to live in. But you're willing to dismiss major components of domestic and international law as well as the basic moral principles most of us live by with a vague existentialist argument about whether fairness even exists. We're not even debating the same thing, and what you want to debate isn't something I'm interested in debating.

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