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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

#721

Post by stickfigure »

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.

Let me see if I understand this: In your worldview, allowing the brown-skinned person next door to bid on the same work that you are bidding on is equivalent to taking money from you?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#722

Post by vonmoltke »

sib wrote: post #540
vonmoltke wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third party recruiters work for themselves . Both sides in the transaction should remember that.

Yes, but their contract and fiduciary duty rests with the employer, not the candidate. They are paid by the company to find an employee, not the other way around.

Many third-party recruiters are simply matchmakers, not retained agents of a company. Sure, they still get paid by the companies for matching employees, but their motivation is still to make matches, not get either the employer or the employee the best deal.

> fiduciary duty

I think you are misusing that word. A third-party recruiter does not have a fiduciary duty to the company with the role unless they have been empowered to make the hiring decision themselves. I don't know of any agencies with such power.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#723

Post by Bartweiss »

afandian wrote: post #680
dijit wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never put your most technical people on the first line. And in that vein, I've worked with some very skilled receptionists. But they're not doctors.

Depends on the value of the customer. I've seen some very switched-on first-line support dedicated to high-value customers. Anyway erikpukinskis didn't say public-facing.

B2B seems like the obvious standard of comparison here. Customer support really can be worth millions there, and that's reflected by how the system works.

Keeping customers happy as a general principle isn't gendered, or undervalued, or much of anything else. It just varies from "you're an essential customer, you can call our engineers night and day" to "abandon us forever, see if we care". Any kind of generalization like "treated as women's work" or "don't put technical people in front" is going to find counterexamples in big, high-stakes contracts.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#724

Post by gaius »

avindroth wrote: post #679
gaius wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. Everyone remembers getting shitty offshore technical support from company X then a few years later you're the engineer making recommendations or the CTO signing off POs and you think "I will never deal with X again". I've got my list, I bet everyone reading this can think of their own X's too...

Of course it is. What do you mean by it ? That the difference between great and average technical support is worth millions of dollars in revenue? Everyone remembers getting shitty offshore technical support This seems hardly generalizable, but beyond that, I agree with you. Shitty tech support is never excusable. Pay for average or above-average tech support. Those you can train in less than a month. Don't break you…

Yes that is what I mean by "it".

"Average" tech support is pretty bad is why. Companies either care a lot about support (i.e. their reputation), or they don't care at all, there is no middle ground in my experience... Companies with good tech support are good all round.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#725

Post by ghshephard »

Frondo wrote: post #604
ghshephard wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple points - I didn't say there is anything unique or special about being a programmer from a skill perspective. Almost everyone who can graduate from high school can be taught to program, and put together useful applications. I tried to call that out when describing the difference between a day-day CRUD developer and platform developer. But there is a distinct hierarchy of developers who can, for example, instinc…

I'd disagree about the 100x something-other-than-a-coder having a limited impact. I'd call Florence Nightingale a 100x nurse, or maybe a 10,000x nurse, for the impact she had on the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale#Statistic...

Now we're talking about heroic icons. There are thousands, or maybe 10s of thousands of 100x developers. There is only one Florence Nightingale, Steve Jobs, Donald Knuth, Michelangelo, Einstein, etc...

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#726

Post by Bartweiss »

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.

It's an interesting question to look at job and calculate how much value it would need to create per day or per hour to "outperform" the salary. Certainly it's a good benchmark in cases like this, where lone engineers are obviously not producing large-multiples of the value of their entire company.

At a guess most engineers are getting paid >10% of their value created, and some jobs (a crappy CEO, perhaps?) are getting paid >100% of that value. In fact, I'm not even sure that >100% of value means anything is wrong if someone is undertaking a high-risk job.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#727

Post by NotSammyHagar »

eru wrote: post #504
dvt wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because these companies don't exist. Top companies pay SDE3s and tech leads like 300-400k. Medium-sized companies in high cost of living areas pay directors around that much. No one pays engineers that much. Literally no one. Unless you're Norvig or Dijkstra.

What's the difference between a tech lead and an engineer?

At most companies tech lead means someone who is planning the technical work of a team, but is not the manager. The tech lead is an engineer. So that company has separated manager and tech leadership. Google works this way. There are some groups at google where someone does both tech lead and manager, they call that person the TLM.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#728

Post by JamesBarney »

pc86 wrote: post #683
JamesBarney wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if your problem is every time you look for a job people keep on wanting to throw more money at you than you could ask for with a straight face. Well then dang I wish I had that problem :) This problem is usually because people just set their starting price too low, or aren't firm enough on it. One tactic(I haven't used yet, but I'll try the next time I apply to a job) is ask the hiring manager how selective they…

Your citation needs a citation.

Whoops, here you go. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#729

Post by NotSammyHagar »

duaneb wrote: post #28
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…

Developers are just another means—we're not wizards. We are a commodity, and if you don't recognize that you're in for a hard midlife crisis. Do you really expect to make any money without taking the risk of deciding what to build? How it's constructed is a (admittedly time-consuming and distracting) detail—only a small aspect of the company's value. Risk and comfort are tradeoffs. If you want to live without risk, y…

A startup might make lots of money, but most never succeed. As a regular dev in an established company, I expect to make a lot, my goal is $400k a year in total comp, but I might only break 300k this year. I'm not the VP, I'm not a director. I'm an experienced dev in Seattle, I hope for $200k in stock, 200k in salary + bonus. I have 20 years of experience.

As many people have said, you don't have to do your own startup to make a lot of money at the big companies. In Seattle, your average 10 year experience google employee is making $200k salary + bonus, and then at least $100k in stock. Amazon, Msft, Facebook pay comparably.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#730

Post by avindroth »

kaitai wrote: post #715
avindroth wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?articl…

That is my mistake, I would have assumed otherwise. Thus it must make my example invalid. I would have to think otherwise, then.

The point about janitorial services — I am sure having horrible janitors (and horrible customer support) is a true disaster. But being an average janitor is not too hard; if a place has bad janitors, then of course that should be a priority investment.

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