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NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

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Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is convenient for corporations so suck it up." isn't a very compelling argument. The purpose of the government is to represent the interests of the people in situations where there is sufficient agreement to pass legislation. If your company doesn't like complying with local laws, its easy, just don't look for people in this country. The people have a right to set the terms of exchanges in the marketplace.

That's a fairly uncharitable way to phrase his point. I think what he's getting at is that it is hard for market participants to accurately price goods and services when they are working with insufficient information. If I asked you to tell me how much you'd pay for a shirt, you'd either have to give me a wide range, or start asking questions to understand what you're getting. A formal tux dress shirtfront? A dirty o…

No, I wouldn't say it is uncharitable at all. The balance of power and information already lies on the side that does more of these negotiations, and has less to lose in each one. It's time that balance starts to swing the other way, and if corporations don't like it, too damn bad.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is convenient for corporations so suck it up." isn't a very compelling argument. The purpose of the government is to represent the interests of the people in situations where there is sufficient agreement to pass legislation. If your company doesn't like complying with local laws, its easy, just don't look for people in this country. The people have a right to set the terms of exchanges in the marketplace.

That's a fairly uncharitable way to phrase his point. I think what he's getting at is that it is hard for market participants to accurately price goods and services when they are working with insufficient information. If I asked you to tell me how much you'd pay for a shirt, you'd either have to give me a wide range, or start asking questions to understand what you're getting. A formal tux dress shirtfront? A dirty o…

A job advertisement is meant to address the major questions a candidate would have that will contextualize the pay being offered. If I asked you to tell me how much to pay for a shirt with a sufficiently detailed list of requirements and expectations for the shirt, you could probably give me a pretty useful range.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not about to go through 3 phone screens, a take-home test, a full-day onsite, etc. just for the privilege to be low-balled or even worse denied. Maybe I got lucky but I've always been able to figure out the rough range they were thinking of paying before the first real interview. In case of recruiters, sure, they want to talk to you first and that's 15 minutes you'll never get back. Personally I just don't move…

Yep, just ask "What is the budget for this role?". Yep, it's that simple.

It's never that simple. If it were, that's how it would turn out to be and in some places it is. Just one example why it's not that simple - you might have an ad running for a role with no seniority attached. You're open to all seniority, because you need all. Do you open all three ranges in the ad, in the convo? It might be that simple but it closes the door to another convo which might be, after you hear out the company's needs and present yourself, you might offer to jump to the occasion and offer an extended role of yourself above what you were before (a step up) and ask for more. Now what? There's no room to go either way anymore in negotiation but down from the top of the budget.

There's no black and white, fits all, thing. Never is that simple. The only fair thing I saw so far is along the lines of if there's any indication that company is decent and you're interested in a role, if you pass a filter to get a call: do the short intro about the company and the people and the role, do the short intro (after company intro, that's important because you can tune your self-presentation) about yourself and then go a bit back and forth on the expectations from both ends, including financials. If all things are aligned then you proceed forward. If there's no talk about financials on that call, not worth it or if there's no indication there's an honest answer we have to see since we're talking about outside of what we initially even asked for but here we are - offered more. Getting low-balled there, in such environments, is hard since the day you start you get to feel and know that you, indeed, were.. and what did company accomplish with that then? Nothing good. Overall, that's about half an hour or so IF there's indication that company has good reputation. If not, or a startup, or you're just shotgunning it across to get to the high score (and hopping) - there's no help, it's a gamble where number indicated will help but will also close a lot of real good opportunities.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#195
post #180

> The sweeping New York City rules will apply to almost all companies except for the smallest firms. Any business with at least four workers, assuming at least one of them is based in the city, must include the lowest and highest salaries for any job it posts. ...so, uh, question, because I'm getting increasingly confused about how jurisdiction works. Let's say Houston passes a law which makes it illegal for companie…

Have them work from the Florida office and bypass this

Does even that work? They're saying if the company has any jobs that could be performed in the NYC—even fully remote jobs—they have to post salary ranges for all jobs, as I understood it.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#196

I get why employers would hate this, but overall, wouldn't greater transparency in the labor market drive economic growth by virtue of making the labor market more efficient by doing a better job of connecting skilled, hard-working and motivated employees with employers who can pay more?

Most won't directly voice this, but I believe the primary objection from many employers is that there kinds of salary transparency laws raise the floor , since you know (roughly) what all of your colleagues are making. In other words: software (like most other industries) relies in part on employees low-balling themselves (and stigma around sharing salary information), which is harder to do when you know what the act…

In my opinion -- and I have no hard data to back this up, merely some limited personal experience -- the biggest issue employers will have about salary transparency is that it makes paying high performers high salaries more difficult.

Typically having a high performer on staff is a huge win for the employer. E.g., at one previous company, the top couple sales people were 10X performers compared to the median sales person. And they were compensated maybe 5X the median. A disgruntled employee found and leaked a document that listed everyone's compensation -- and the negative feelings that were generated towards the company and towards the highly paid sales people was profound. Part of the issue is that the 10X sales people did not necessarily work 10X harder, they just had the right set of personality traits, industry experience, and je ne sais quoi that made them able to bring in more and bigger clients. But many people feel intrinsically that compensation should be tied to effort and to those people it was upsetting to see coworkers who did not necessarily put in 5X more effort get 5X more money.

Edited to add: to be clear, I do not personally have a problem with pay being tied to results instead of to effort, but I saw first hand that many people have a different opinion about this.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#197
post #183

> The sweeping New York City rules will apply to almost all companies except for the smallest firms. Any business with at least four workers, assuming at least one of them is based in the city, must include the lowest and highest salaries for any job it posts. ...so, uh, question, because I'm getting increasingly confused about how jurisdiction works. Let's say Houston passes a law which makes it illegal for companie…

> How does BigCorp avoid breaking the law? Without ceasing operations, they can't. It goes to court, where courts resolve it. That is one function of the court system in the US.

It goes to federal court and the court makes a decision that states (or cities) cannot regulate each other and strikes down the laws requiring contradictory actions on entities which cross state boundaries. Too lazy to google references to similar decisions, I believe a landmark case involves shipping with either trucks or trains with states having conflicting requirements.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#199
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters should be talking about numbers in the first interview. Employers should have a sense of what your number is and whether or not they can get there before moving forward with interviewing. If they're not doing that, they're wasting your time and their time.

> If they're not doing that, they're wasting your time and their time. Actually, they're getting paid for the their time. I'm not. I'm actually burning my time. > Recruiters should be talking about numbers in the first interview. I'm going through the recruitment process right now and the numbers out of the gate are always lowball figures (possibly personalized to me), because of two reasons. Because they want to see…

> wow, 185k, that's awesome" & they'll figure it out that the company was willing to pay upto 350k for the same work.

I’m nowhere near the Bay Area, I know what Bay Area salaries are by looking at publicly available sites.

I also know while I never made above $160K until starting at my first “FAANG” two years ago working remotely, there is no way in hell I would accept less than $250K - $300K to ever give up my big house in the burbs in a much lower cost of living area and that’s only because my kids have already graduated and my wife and I could stay in a smaller place and not worry about the school system.

Well I personally would never work a job where I had to go into an office again.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC's Fact sheet about the new law notes that minimum and maximum stated salaries must be in "good faith". Not a lawyer, but maybe this is space for class action lawsuits or something... Salary Transparency Fact Sheet: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...

A knowledge worker's productivity can easily (and provably ) range from -10x to +1000x. So, it's much easier to prove in the court of law that the ranges are justified. Dude who created the React Framework is always 100x valuable to the company than an average Javascript developer. A couple of brilliant dudes is all that is required for a company to be a mere $100 Million company vs $1 Billion company. It's ridiculou…

> A knowledge worker's productivity can easily (and provably ) range from -10x to +1000x.

this is a variation of the 10x engineer BS meme. statistically this is not possible, and realistically you'll see the companies using that line of arguments for obfuscating salary information are also doing it to comply maliciously. In fact, using a far outlier case to justify your average base case is the definition of operating in bad faith.

Also, sure if you see an actual superstar nobody is stopping you from hiring him for a different role and paying him 10x or whatever. anecdotally speaking in my many years in silicon valley I have seen very few cases for such high performance engineers and you need a lot more than tech expertise to not just produce 10x more personally but also keep your team productive & all that is not easy to judge in an interview.

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