New York employers must include pay rates in job ads under new state law

The HN crowd, thanks to the ubiquitous and indiscriminating nature of the internet access and ability to self-select, comprises of academics and engineers but also of artists, philosophers, enthusiasts and people still finding their way in the world. That includes production and retail workers.

IMO a much better idea that circumvents all these problems is requiring companies to disclose how much they're already paying their employees, the Scandinavian way.

This wouldn't even necessarily need to be broken down by individual employees, per position would work too, with statistics like number of employees covered, min, max, average and median.

This is a necessary step if they are to continue the system:

Next they will tell unemployed what salary they can request.

I think it’s better than nothing, but ultimately not helpful for job seekers working to learn how much a position will pay them.

I work in a very regulated organization where all pay rates are published with postings. [0]

But the ranges are $20-40k for each grade and it’s hard to tell what you will end up being offered and accepted.

I think it helps prevent some mismatches of people confusing $20k and $200k positions but I frequently see people with work history in the $30/hour range applying for very high pay jobs. I find it hard to accurately peg my market value.

When I worked in smaller orgs I would frequently see variability of 100-300% for the same job title. And even in really large orgs with big HR there might be a $100k pay band before bonuses.

So what do I do with a job posting that says $110-250k? If Im senior, do I apply and expect $250k not knowing if there’s a single person who is amazing making they amount? Or if Im junior do I ask for $110, knowing I could get more.

What I do is network to find what the actual pay is and negotiate around there. Or discuss with multiple offers.

Id like to see something like the IRS releasing more anonymized data from w2 for employers that will let you look up quartiles by employer, broken out by employee filing address.

This also has severe limitations but at least you can see how many employees they actually have and actually pay based on taxid. But self-reported pay data is so bad I don’t think it’s actually useful for stuff like “does this company I found on the internet actually hire people?” Unfortunately titles are so useless that I don’t think anything more than number of employees and distribution of their pay is better than what we have now.

The privacy implications are serious and need to be accounted for. But I think only releasing for orgs over 100 or something. Or only for publicly traded. Or only that receive public funds, etc etc

[0] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Posting a large, unreal range will also cause headaches internally with your existing employees. Skip all the hassle and just use a valid range.

Because of the laws getting passed in other states, many postings already have ranges and they have looked reasonable to me.