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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

#691

Post by pc86 »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #15
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?

> Here's an idea: compensation agents who negotiate the compensation package on your behalf. Athletes and actors have them, why not everyone else? I'd definitely be willing to pay for something like this. Make it commission based (pay as a percentage of additional salary negotiated) and the incentives between the negotiator and client will be perfectly aligned.

> pay as a percentage of additional salary negotiated

So many things wrong with this. Agents typically negotiate fixed-term contracts for athletes and entertainers. Agents take 10% of the entire pot, not "additional salary negotiated" whatever that means. You don't know what you would have been able to negotiate so there is no "additional" amount, only what they got you. Are you willing to give 10% of every paycheck to your agent?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#692

Post by pc86 »

ghaff wrote: post #85
lewisl9029 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's an idea: compensation agents who negotiate the compensation package on your behalf. Athletes and actors have them, why not everyone else? I'd definitely be willing to pay for something like this. Make it commission based (pay as a percentage of additional salary negotiated) and the incentives between the negotiator and client will be perfectly aligned.

And the agents for athletes take in the ballpark of 10% or so of their total compensation.

Total compensation is the important part here.

Everyone talking about how great an agent would be are forgetting that under the current way every agent works, they'd be writing off 10% of their paychecks in perpetuity to that agent (or at least along a defined timeline).

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#693

Post by dijit »

avindroth wrote: post #688
afandian wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious? There's more to customer support than picking up a phone. I've worked with some very intelligent customer support people who know the product as well as the engineers.

There's more to customer support than picking up a phone. I agree. There is more to customer support than picking up a phone, and some people make it sound like supporting a customer is just reading from the manual. There's also more to cleaning than mopping. You can employ your philosophy of cleanliness and make things perfectly ordered and spiffy-shiny. Maybe one day the CEO might walk in and be impressed by your a…

> (Names Jan and Dan were chosen as such because I have seen more female customer support and male software engineers than their counterparts. If you think that is sexism, then you are inherently valuing the human worth of software engineers over that of customer support personnel.)

That's not really needed, my Name is Jan and I'm male. My cousin is called Dan and she is female (people call her Dan but it's Danielle).

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#694

Post by aianus »

learc83 wrote: post #622
aianus wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So we've been disagreeing the whole time on what it means to be a 'qualified engineer'.

The employers don't consider someone who can't pass an AmaGoogTwitBook interview (with some practice, of course) to be a 'qualified engineer', and there is indeed a shortage of such people.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#695

Post by aianus »

eon1 wrote: post #606
aianus wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't attribute much of the value created by a Boeing 747 to the mechanic the maintains it, so why would you do so with the mechanics that maintain the AdWords money machine built ten years ago?

I'm not really sure what to make of this analogy. Are you suggesting that the mechanic maintaining a 747 is on the same level as the design and fabrication team who built it?

The design and fabrication team who built AdWords years ago are rich. The engineers they're hiring today at 150-200k are akin to the mechanics hired to keep it running.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#696

Post by emodendroket »

ghaff wrote: post #304
jbooth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably something to the fact that it's biotech first, government contractor tech second and software startups third, though. Those employer-friendly and IP-friendly laws work a lot better for biotech's long product cycles and government contractors.. whatever it is about them.

Although EMC is the company name that comes up repeatedly in its support for non-competes.

Not a startup; different interests.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#697

Post by piaste »

piaste wrote: post #677
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." "OK, you can do that. But I have a policy of always turning down offers that are too low for the role and benefits involved. I just want the best for me."

Or alternatively (esprit de l'escalier):

"Sorry, I do not negotiate with terrorists."

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#698

Post by emodendroket »

tn13 wrote: post #432
fdsaaf wrote: post #3

LOL. Massachusetts lawmakers passed this stupid, empty gesture but didn't ban noncompetes. Enjoy your technology non-industry, Massachusetts.

Not sure why these comment is being down-voted. It is not even rude. The law does seem stupid and an empty gesture. (Like NY state banning Sex offenders from playing Pokemon Go) but such laws benefit no one, add an extra layer of complexity in hiring process. Are not there any other proxies for determining a person salary ? For example you can always ask a person his/her house rent or ask for tax returns.

Who the hell asks for those things in an interview?

Considering how much salary negotiation advice talks about how revealing your current salary puts you at a disadvantage this doesn't seem like an awful thing to try.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#699

Post by simons »

gozur88 wrote: post #277
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…

>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. How could you possibly determine how much value your efforts are producing? How much value are you assigning to the risk the founder and investors are taking? Maybe your $200k job is producing $200k in value. Or eve…

> Tech companies always pretend it's impossible to find employees. That's not reality, though. That's a political strategy.

Genuinely interested to hear an expansion of this. How would pretending that technical employees are hard to recruit, benefit a company politically?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#700

Post by 54mf »

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…

"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 which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people."

Spent a few years doing community management / customer support. This is _100% correct_. Oh, the stories I could tell. The role is critically important, and terribly, horribly underpaid. I went back to web development because, even with a 3-year gap in my resume and taking a non-senior role, I was still able to make 50% more.

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