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Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

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Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#131

Post by EduardoBautista »

pravda wrote: post #29
kerkeslager wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking hurts the people who give bad answers, which is unfair since in many cases those answers are irrelevant to the job being interviewed for. Claiming the information is confidential may hurt your chances of getting the job, or simply get the "we need this information or we can't continue, sorry, it's policy" answer. Lying about it benefits the liars (assuming they lie intelligently). I suspect that offers are fre…

>Is lying really the behavior we want to incentivize? Oh gosh. You make it sound bad that way! It's not 'lying', it is 'strategic disinformation'.

Honestly I have answered slightly under what I wanted to earn.

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#132

Post by lend000 »

quickben wrote: post #118
lend000 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have a very naive, non-nuanced, and absolutist view of the world. Already excited for the personal attacks and logical fallacies which await. > Are you serious? Do you really think Glassdoor is a legitimate authority for salary at companies? They do zero verification and are mostly dependent on people's honesty. Personally, I've signed up for no less than 10 Glassdoor accounts with companies I've never worked f…

>"Sounds like the same argument people made against Wikipedia, which I consider to be a very legitimate source of information on average." It can not be "legitimate" and "on average".

> It can not be "legitimate" and "on average".

I do believe you just made that up. Nothing is perfect, and yet there have been studies that show Wikipedia is more often factually correct than Encyclopedia Britannica, which was previously considered the gold standard. http://www.nature.com/nature/britannica/index.html

Is the New York Times legitimate on average? I would say so. Are there mistakes from time to time? Yes. They are typically corrected, as are Wikipedia's.

I don't see the point in trying to find a petty side-argument when there is no argument to be had. If that's the best you could find though, I consider my above points to be well-vetted.

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#133

Post by lend000 »

stephen_g wrote: post #121
meanduck wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is toast. Its being overrun by statists/socialists.

I think one would have to be extremely far right to view the predominate view of HN as 'socialist'... But as for statist, it depends on how you define the word, but in an economic sense at least, the more I talk to libertarians, the more I associate that word with 'realist'. There are lots of nice ideals in voluntarism and total free-market economics, but I'm less and less convinced that they could work at any signif…

There is a wide range of libertarian perspectives, just like you find on the left (socialist and beyond to moderate). I consider myself and my arguments on this thread to be with a moderate-leaning interpretation of the libertarian-associated non-aggression principle. I think everyone here agrees with the non-aggression principle, but Democrats don't usually recognize it or try to apply it as a logical, almost quantifiable rule (quantifiable in the sense of maximizing units of freedom) against policy positions.

HN appears to lean left of moderate liberals, though. The hive-mind can be a major turn-off at times...

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#134

Post by Ericson2314 »

lend000 wrote: post #41
ch4s3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because there is a very large disparity in power and information. A few points: 1. You will always need the job more than Comcast will need you (unless you're unusually skilled, most workers aren't) 2. Comcast knows how much the pay every one of their employees, you the job seeker do not. 3. Comcast is only asking so they can figure out the lowest pay you'll accept. You have no way to figure out how high the…

> You will always need the job more than Comcast will need you Where is the evidence for this? This is by no means an obvious claim. No one in the world needs "the job," even though most people need "a job." Do companies exist that are more moral/popular/friendly than others? Of course. And some of them are successful in part because people want them to succeed due to their aforementioned characteristics. That is fre…

The symmetry is naive. The only way I'd be completely confident in it is if the branching factors matched, i.e. the distribution of "number of employees per employer" mirrored the distribution of "number of employers per employee".

Absent that, you need to prove assymmetries cancel out, which has a higher burden of proof.

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#135

Post by lend000 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #23
lend000 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are all employers corporations? And even as such, this is just outlawing information. I do not understand how so many on the left support such a measure. It's a question -- outlawing questions, especially between private parties in a consensual relationship (applicant and employer), is backwards. You can choose not to answer it; you can lie; you can choose not to work for employers that ask the question in the first…

If one group in a negotiation has near all the power sometimes society benefits from negotiating on behalf of the one with none.

Hiring the right person is more difficult than you may think, if you've never had the misfortune of doing it yourself. Only a minority of well-known tech companies have an endless supply of talent knocking on their door-steps, and coincidentally, they tend to have above average hiring practices (Google, for example).

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#136

Post by Ericson2314 »

quickben wrote: post #116
pliny wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It does not require a great deal of imagination to understand that a large corporation and single prospective employee are not equal parties. If you fail to get a job, you will starve. If Comcast fails to hire you, they most clearly will not face an existential crisis. Is Comcast the only company hiring people? If you don't get a job with Comcast you get a job with a different company. That is a market, many sellers…

You are missing the point. Companies are offering jobs and thus in a position of power.

I'm not free market shlop, but do note in extremely idealized conditions buyer and seller is symmetric, and that includes the job market. Though with the realities of what a job is, yes that's mostly true.

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#137

Post by wnevets »

lend000 wrote: post #15
hackuser wrote: post #7

An important detail: Comcast, backed by the local Chamber of Commerce, has threatened to sue the city over this law. On what basis? The corporation's Constitutional First Amendment free speech right to ask the question: http://www.investopedia.com/news/comcast-threatens-sue-city-... Are these the same free speech rights the Supreme Court recently bestowed on the corporations? I remember that at the time legal analyst…

Are all employers corporations? And even as such, this is just outlawing information. I do not understand how so many on the left support such a measure. It's a question -- outlawing questions, especially between private parties in a consensual relationship (applicant and employer), is backwards. You can choose not to answer it; you can lie; you can choose not to work for employers that ask the question in the first…

how is it different than a company asking someone's sexual orientation, religion, etc during an interview?

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#138

Post by hackuser »

cmdrfred wrote: post #45
rayiner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cities and municipalities are our hope for good governance we're are all pretty screwed. Cities across the country basically bankrupt and state and local governance is rife with corruption.

I believe state and local governments are unable to run a deficit. If the federal government had to play by the same rules it would be bankrupt as well.

> I believe state and local governments are unable to run a deficit.

That's true in at least many places, but they still can borrow from the future by issuing bonds, or by pushing off massive costs like pensions. They underfund pensions now and let the next mayor/governor deal with it; this process repeats until they can't meet the cash flow needed to pay current pensions and are effectively bankrupt.

Remember when Detroit went bankrupt: According to an article I read about it, there were at least two main causes: 1) Going back to at least the 1990s their pensions were overfunded because they would need that money to pay future pensions when the ratio of current workers to retirees would drop. Instead of saving the money, they distributed it to pensioners as a '13th month'. Detroit also invested in some financial engineering instrument sold to them by Wall Street that the city couldn't pay off.

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#139

Post by stephen_g »

meanduck wrote: post #125
stephen_g wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one would have to be extremely far right to view the predominate view of HN as 'socialist'... But as for statist, it depends on how you define the word, but in an economic sense at least, the more I talk to libertarians, the more I associate that word with 'realist'. There are lots of nice ideals in voluntarism and total free-market economics, but I'm less and less convinced that they could work at any signif…

If free-market cannot solve this nothing will. No actor (including Govt) has mental capicity to understand everything in this world. Free-market solves everthing best with most stability.

That's a statement of faith though (or ideology if you prefer), not a statement of fact. And I think it's built on shaky ground (such as requiring economic systems to tend towards equilibrium, which while perhaps a useful simplifying assumption a few hundred years ago, these days it's looking more like economic systems are actually better modelled as complex dynamic systems that don't necessarily happen in equilibrium).

I think empirically history shows that lack of regulation can be as bad as too much regulation. The reality is more of a balance, and black-and-white faith in the free market solving everything looks more and more to me at least as a dangerous delusion.

Re: Philadelphia Poised to Ban Employers from Asking Hires About Salary History

#140

Post by unscaled »

meanduck wrote: post #125
stephen_g wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one would have to be extremely far right to view the predominate view of HN as 'socialist'... But as for statist, it depends on how you define the word, but in an economic sense at least, the more I talk to libertarians, the more I associate that word with 'realist'. There are lots of nice ideals in voluntarism and total free-market economics, but I'm less and less convinced that they could work at any signif…

If free-market cannot solve this nothing will. No actor (including Govt) has mental capicity to understand everything in this world. Free-market solves everthing best with most stability.

Does the free market really solves everything best? Did it solve Pi for very large number of decimal digits? Fermat's Last Theorem? Do you consult the free market when you want to decide what to do tomorrow?

This maximalist position is crazy. Our experience shows that there are some things which are most efficiently solved by the (mostly) free market, but nobody managed to conclusively prove that the free market (and which type of free market is that anyway?) solves everything. That's the point where Libertarianism shifts from an ideology to a religion.

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