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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

#711

Post by danielweber »

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…

This is a big problem that I hope doesn't swamp the benefits of making salary private. Employers might have to prove in a court of law that I'm worth more than another employee? This could really really suck.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#712

Post by danielweber »

barnacs wrote: post #632

It pains me to see that people can't apply common sense without law anymore. If a potential employer asks about my previous salary, I refuse to answer. Similarly, it never even occured to me to hide my salary from my coworkers regardless of what my employer asked me to do. Needless to say, if any employer has a problem with that, I definitely don't want to spend 8+ hours of my day with them.

Right now, it is an applicant's ballgame, because our skills are highly valued.

What happens if that is no longer the situation?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#713

Post by hueving »

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…

Assuming people should pay what things are worth to them is complete and utter bullshit and isn't how economics work.

Do you realize how much water is worth to you? You cannot live without it, but you aren't going to send your water company $100/gallon for it because there is a massive supply of it.

The same applies to paying people to do things. Nobody is going to pay more than what the price is for the skills they are looking for. To expect otherwise or lament the fact that's it's not happening shows a very basic misunderstanding of economics.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#714

Post by randallsquared »

pc86 wrote: post #689
williamscales wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we go one step further and make all salaries public information?

Because it's none of your business how much money I make.

What's that got to do with anything? It's none of their business what you look like, but you still go out in public, right?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#715

Post by kaitai »

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…

I disagree with a lot of what you said (starting with the importance of janitorial services -- have you ever worked in a place with truly bad janitorial services?) but to stick to the factual side right now, male nurses earn more than female nurses. The article I'll link from the Journal of the American Medical Association includes analysis of approximately 290,000 RNs.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2208795

It's touching that you think that "gender traits" will give women higher pay in some profession like nursing, but it's only true in porn.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#716

Post by TheCowboy »

mindvirus wrote: post #460
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.

Keeping an employee out of the market for even a year is extremely detrimental to that employee's career. Skills atrophy and domain-specific knowledge fades. And past income is not an indicator of actual value or future income.

The idea of simply limiting it to "competitors" is difficult to determine, since it's easy for any company to call anyone a competitor. It would simply allow contracts to exist that would be cost prohibitive for employees to challenge.

If a business wants to prevent high turnover and on-going poaching, then it should be the one bumping up pay to 150% of the previous year, otherwise they're paying below market wages for their industry.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#717

Post by rpgmaker »

lukejduncan wrote: post #551
cozuya wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. It could be 20 years from now and all that's left in tech is Amagoogleapplesoft and I'd still walk out when that was said to my face.

Yeah fair. It was definitely a very negative sign. Having participated in hiring elsewhere, my assumption was maybe it was just a bad recruiter. Generally, engineering managers have a big input into the offer process and I thought I'd give the process the benefit of the doubt over the bad salesmanship. Plus, at that point, it costs me nothing to hear their offer and make a fully informed decision. Even if I knew I wa…

I agree. It's not easy to gracefully walk out of that kind of situation. At that point it was better to just go through the motions and maybe end the interview prematurely.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#718

Post by VikingCoder »

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…

> 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.

I used to drive over the I-35W bridge, twice per day, on my way to work and back.

Feel free to keep talking about how there's not much difference between roads, but I'm not going to be listening.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#719

Post by cloudjacker »

eru wrote: post #495
cloudjacker wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, there was a time when the finance community similarly valued themselves with the broader market until some people realized the numeric dollar value they could create. And the rest is history. Its time for software engineers to collectively realize their expanding relevance to value creation in actual numeric value.

Why collectively? Did the finance people need anything collective?

Not sure how to answer that

It's routine to get bonuses larger than your annual salary in finance, specially in investment banking roles, this is not routine in software engineering

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#720

Post by Bartweiss »

avindroth wrote: post #634
erikpukinskis wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 and a great customer support is not millions of dollars in revenue. You are thinking about the difference between a terrible and a great customer, and with 1 in a million scenario. There are some situations where great customer support brings the company tremendous value and opportunity. But these situations are so rare and few that investing in great customer support (for high price…

Reinforcing this, B2B customer support is vastly different than consumer-facing customer support.

Screwing up B2B support genuinely can cost millions in a single incident, which is why service level agreements and reliability standards exist. Compare that to the service level of your average help line (somewhere between "maybe if you're lucky" and "go die"). And of course, entities like ISPs don't count in the first place when they're immune to competition.

There are customer support reps making six figures. They tend to go by names like "service engineer", and actively solve problems the customer can't, rather than just guiding someone through a reboot process. In extreme cases, customer support is the development team - if your business is worth enough you'll end up talking to someone who actually made the broken product.

As you pointed out, it's not an accident that the companies with useless, call-center customer support are the ones not worried about losing a consumer or two.

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