Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay • Hacker News Board

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#731

Post by NotSammyHagar » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 3:57 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #375

mcbits wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working as an employee is not without risk. There is the risk that you'll invest 10% or 50% of your productive lifespan in an employer who squanders it all and leaves you jobless without notice instead of an employer who puts your abilities to good use and recognizes the value that you create. The risk is partially mitigated by receiving a paycheck during those wasted years regardless of the employer's competence.

And software developers are different from literally any other kind of employee in this regard... how?

At a company, devs and come and go and they are just people working in a job. The difference is that at this time in history, there's a huge shortage of us. A company can hire as many secretaries as they need, and its a lot easier to hire directors and vps. But if you can't hire enough devs, a company that builds software isn't going to be able to do anything. The acute shortage is the difference.

If there was a big shortage of say people with business skills, then they'd be worth more, or sales. Good sales and biz dev is always valuable. But there's not really a shortage of them, in the same way that there is in software.

To give an example, I worked at a startup. We had millions to pay salaries. We were paying 150-200k in salary. We couldn't ever grow over 5. We wanted to hire about 20 more. We had plents of designers, office managers, and leaders. Devs were far more valuable than a new hire in those other areas, because we were short. I left after a while, we couldn't ever hire anyone to work on a group I was supposed to lead.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#732

Post by NotSammyHagar » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:00 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #189

trentmb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we're not actually engineers. https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe Although there does appear to be a PE exam for software: http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SWE-Apr-2013.pdf

Specific to the US No, we're not "professional engineers," which means we cannot testify in court as an expert in our field, and have limitations for what we can consult on based on the licensing requirements of your state. However, the title of "engineer" can be conferred upon an individual by an employer, during the term of their employment.

PE of course is a special term for that single accreditation agency. We can call ourselves whatever we want. The PE types have sued people in some places for calling themselves software "engineers" but they've pretty much given up on that. The work I do is engineering, I'm a professional.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#733

Post by zaroth » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #610

zaroth wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the money itself which is risked. Everything else is adjacent. How much the specific individual holding the money actually values it is irrelevant. It's how much that you value the money that's relevant. What is $1,000 worth to you? Now, that question has a wide range of answers. In some places, that's literally worth multiple lives. Or it could be beyond insignificant. Obviously very few can or should take…

You are arbitrarily limiting the scope of risk to a unit of account without regard to what those units of account do or do not afford one in the world. That is too limited a definition to be useful IRL.

What I was trying to get at is that the value of money is both absolutely consistent (unit of account) but also completely situational ($10 can save a life). At the same time, the IRR of investing on public markets, like an index fund tracking the S&P 500, is exactly the same for everyone, and anyone can invest 10% of their net worth, whether that is $1,000 or $10,000,000.

The original comment was that holding money generates nothing, you have to risk it, and I completely agree. You can risk 20% of your net worth and you're not risking your livelihood, and odds are in ~8 years your investment will have doubled, and your net worth increased by 20%. For some people that's a thousand dollars, others it's ten million. If you want to double your net worth in less than 30 years, you're going to have to risk a lot more. Everyone has access to the same returns on the public market (and we restrict access to private markets for very good reasons).

So it's a literal definition of risk, and as a percentage of net worth it works well. The problem of massive wealth inequality to me is completely adjacent to risking capital in return for investment returns.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#734

Post by passiveincomelg » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:16 PM UTC

54mf wrote: post #700

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 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 suppo…

I think I would actually enjoy doing customer support. Maybe this pay gap doesn't exist for companies hiring "Customer Success Engineers"?

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#735

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:18 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #628

ryandrake wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're very likely talking about the top 0.1% employees at the top 0.1% of companies. Every time salary is discussed on HN, inevitably someone brings up this "fact" that engineers are "routinely" making $200K or $300K or $400K or whatever other ridiculous figure. Given average Bay Area software engineer compensation being between $100K and $140K depending on your source, even at $200K we're probably talking at least…

This is all in the greater thread's context of whether you are more likely to get rich working for someone else or yourself. Sure, only the top engineers get paid $300k+/year, but an even smaller number of founders are able to pull that sort of effective salary. I'd wager that these days a smart engineer is financially better off at a big co than even starting a startup. For more specifics, large, prestigious compani…

> This is is all in the greater thread's context of whether you are more likely to get rich working for someone else or yourself.

The point I'm trying to make is that both likelihoods are very small. Maybe you have a 1 in 1000 shot at becoming a multi-millionaire by working at BigCo vs. a 1 in 2000 shot at a startup. Some people are claiming that Google, Facebook, etc. are simply pumping out millionaire after millionaire and this is obviously not true. And when you call them on this, they trot out the usual "Bbbbut I know That One Guy At Google Who..." anecdote to somehow prove that everyone in the valley is printing money.

I generally don't trust equity figures when looking at Glassdoor, because there are no details. My guess is most of what's self-reported as yearly equity is really just signing bonus equity that vests after 4 years and then you're back to making base salary.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#736

Post by cloudjacker » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

cloudjacker wrote: post #719

eru wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

but many forms of greater liquidity could be possible for potential value producing software engineering roles

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#737

Post by mindvirus » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:40 PM UTC

TheCowboy wrote: post #716

mindvirus wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I mean I think that people will survive. I would think with 150% pay one should be able to stay up to date, and I think that the non-compete would be a reasonable explanation for the gap. If you offered for friends 150% of their pay to not work for a year, how many would say yes? Go get a master's degree, travel the world, write OSS, etc. I bet 90%+.

I don't even think that you'd have to limit it to competitors in this case either - it could be a blanket "we have the option to bench you for up to a year" clause. I think that if non-competes were paid at a multiple like this, companies would think very hard before enforcing them, and it would work out to the employee's advantage.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#738

Post by rev_bird » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:57 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #647

rev_bird wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

That's interesting, I hadn't considered it that way. I was looking at it as, "We want this person to work here because they passed our tests, now we wreck the deal for no reason." You're saying the salary disclosure is just one of the tests. Makes sense.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#739

Post by SubiculumCode » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:58 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #733

SubiculumCode wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are arbitrarily limiting the scope of risk to a unit of account without regard to what those units of account do or do not afford one in the world. That is too limited a definition to be useful IRL.

What I was trying to get at is that the value of money is both absolutely consistent (unit of account) but also completely situational ($10 can save a life). At the same time, the IRR of investing on public markets, like an index fund tracking the S&P 500, is exactly the same for everyone, and anyone can invest 10% of their net worth, whether that is $1,000 or $10,000,000. The original comment was that holding money…

In truth my original comment was to point out that the holding money comment was misunderstood to mean keeping money under a pillow when I took it as it takes money to make money, and those that have money risk little in terms of their physical welfare.

Re: Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

#740

Post by baakss » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #725

Frondo wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You don't need to be a heroic icon to be more valuable than a 100x developer.

The 100x teacher who molds the mind of the kid/teenager/adult who eventually cures cancer is worth more than just about any single 100x developer out there right now, and you'll never know that person's name.

(Yeah, I'm aware there will be multiple different cures for different cancers, the point remains)