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

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

#211
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you looking at the outliers? So by your logic, if a few companies have useless ranges, it makes the whole thing useless? How about job postings with relatively decent ranges like this backend engineer role in OpenAI: https://openai.com/careers/backend-engineer-evals-understand... with a range of $245,000 – $310,000?

You're right, I shouldn't let a few "bad apples" ruin the whole batch. It would be great if the law could say something like "range must be +/- %25 of the target salary" (Obviously that's very difficult...)

What about

"range may have relative error of no more than 10%"?

where the relative error is the usual 2*(max-min)/(max+min)

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

#212

While I favor transparency, I don't think this is something that should be legislated / regulated. Mainly because the lack of such details in a job ad is a signal. And imho an important one. It gives insight into the org that's hiring. It also leaves the door open to negotiations. Employment is nearly all cases is at will. Every interview stage ends with "Any questions?" There is definitely a time and place for gover…

I disagree. Almost no job postings in NY had a salary in 2020. That number is now close to 100%. Companies will not disclose salaries unless you whack them with a stick

When the call / email comes in you ask, "What's the salary range?"

The smart ones will smarten up and publish a range. As it is, making it required, now you can't tell smart from stupid. You wanna work for stupid? Your dream has some true.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great. Why don't you start. How much do you make?

I know many people in this database, including myself. I'm not sure what the big deal is. https://transparentcalifornia.com

I'm not a fan of the government mandating the disclosure of how much money I make.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does Radford get their salaries from? Is it crowdsourced like Glassdoor, or do they survey employers or employees?

They survey employers, and according to their website: 20+ million employees at 6,700+ companies

Why isn't this reliable then, other than the job titles mess?

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be also a sign of poorly defined levels. If you're calling people the same i.e. set the same expectations, but pay them 3x different amount, something's weird with the org.

Maybe, maybe not. I mean, titles don't really mean anything to developers. It's not like in the army where everyone knows the difference between a colonel and a general. You could run an organisation where everyone from a new graduate right up to Linus Torvalds has the same title, just a different level of pay.

> I mean, titles don't really mean anything to developers.

To the developers themselves? Yeah, it does to many. To the company in general - there's a reason level descriptions exist. They define expectations for a given person. Let's say you create a new team for project X: you want someone who can plan the project out. Are you going to give that to any "developer" who all exist at the same level? If no, then you have different levels, you're just pretending they don't exist.

It also makes things more clear for the pay. Let's say you get some good mid level dev who gets bumped many times for being really good. If they're just doing well at that level but not advancing, are you going to pay them more than senior devs with more responsibility at some point? Is that a wise decision?

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

#216
Another worker-friendly thing that NY did recently was to crack down on companies' claims to ownership of intellectual property that employees create on their own time (the same kind of protection that California has):

> Effective immediately, Governor Hochul has signed a law invalidating any provision in an employment agreement that requires employees to assign to the employer any rights to an invention developed entirely on the employee's own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secrets.[1]

[1] https://www.dwt.com/blogs/employment-labor-and-benefits/2023...

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They survey employers, and according to their website: 20+ million employees at 6,700+ companies

Why isn't this reliable then, other than the job titles mess?

Its probably reliable if you're a Fortune 500 company hiring enterprise J2EE and C# developers because that's most of their customers, but not if you're a more engineering/product driven company. I guess the appeal of Levels.fyi - more tech focused.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have asked some HR people this question about ranges, and most of them tell me they expect to pay the midpoint of the range. That is, if you meet the qualifications, they’ll offer you the midpoint. However if you blow them away or got some competing offers, they will offer you the high end. And if you got very little experience, the low end. That’s the rule of thumb. It doesn’t matter if the range is as wide as 80k…

> just assume the midpoint is the starting offer This is reasonable and is what I thought as well. But I worked for a firm where senior manager band was $120-350k. Most senior managers came in at $120-150 and would climb through years with the firm. If a new hire at the senior manager rate asked for $225-250 as a midpoint it would kill their negotiation and likely cost them their offer.

The band should be what the company is willing to pay the new hire, not what everyone with that title is making.

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

#219
post #3

I have never worked in a job where you can give a reasonable pay band and routinely made 1.5-3x what other people with the same title did, before bonuses. This really only works for well-defined jobs in production, retail, and seems to bring little utility for the HN crowd.

That may be also a sign of poorly defined levels. If you're calling people the same i.e. set the same expectations, but pay them 3x different amount, something's weird with the org.

I think having the same requirements you should expect more than 3x deviance for a lot of roles.

We aren't talking about an observation between the random difference between two average people. We're talking about the most performant and least performant people who could potentially share the same job description.

The entry level is full of this. If you hire a bunch of engineers with no experience, how often will you see a difference of 3x or larger between the top and bottom.

I would say often, and it doesn't show anything bad about the organisation.

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

#220

> “We have small employers who don’t even know about the law,” said Kerbein, who predicted there would be “a lot of unintentional noncompliance.” Fair. But that's not how laws work. I may turn down a road not knowing that it's 35 and I get a ticket for going 45. Not knowing isn't an excuse.

IANAL, but I started googling and here's what I found... I've heard of "mens rea", which means in order for a crime to be committed, you need to have a "guilty mind". From what I can tell, ignorance of the law can be an excuse. If there's a law stating that wearing purple on Tuesdays is a criminal offense, and I wear purple on Tuesday, a prosecutor would have to prove that I knowingly & willingly committed a crime (e…

Many traffic offenses do cross the line into criminal law. I also am not a lawyer, but I think the applicability of mens rea depends on whether it's written into the statute in question.

When it comes to offenses like speeding, generally a part of obtaining a drivers license is accepting responsibility for knowing the rules of the road ahead of time.

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