I see many concerns here mentioning how this may not be a useful law because the company may create very wide ranges. It sounds like there are some restrictions in the law that try to prevent that, but I wonder if we should be looking at it a different way -- provide both the salary range for the position and also the range of the salaries of the existing employees in that same position.
Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
101–110 of 329 posts
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sources saying it's only about jobs open to Washington residents? Washington state can't regulate how Microsoft hires people in Texas. Microsoft Corp. isn't even a Washington legal entity. (EDIT: Never mind, I stand corrected [1]. In any case, the broader point stands. Delaware doesn't get to regulate how its entities hire outside Delaware. This is well-settled employment/interstate commerce law.) [1] https://www.s…
Just to take this a bit farther... if Washington state can regulate Washington incorporated entities, can it regulate them to act in a way that would violate laws in other states?
They cannot just like they can’t regulate activities of private individual when outside their state of residence.
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#103What's the actual problem that including salaries tries to solve? IMO if used strictly, it could only limit the talent pool (consider if someone more skilled than expected applies, but won't accept at or below the stated upper salary bound; the company won't be able to pivot and hire them). Including salary could let applicants avoid underpaying companies before they embark on a lengthy application process, which is…
> What's the actual problem that including salaries tries to solve? It tries to solve pay equity problems. https://hr.uw.edu/comp/pay-equity/salary-setting-guidance/
> Employers must provide equal compensation to similarly employed workers
The kicker is "similarly employed". I've seen people with the same job title earn a differential of 3x, but that's simply because one negotiated better and was more economically valuable (had about 1.5 more decades' experience) than the other, yet they had the same job title. I guess we could argue to control for years' experience, but I've seen people who were better at a job after 6 months than those in the same job were after 10 years. There are even jobs where people get worse over time, which isn't intuitive but easy to find examples (e.g. you forget documentation if life gets busy for a year or two, and you're less effective because of that).
I suspect "similarly employed" is indefinable in any realistic sense. I'm not against trying, just very sober about the probability of crafting a policy that outperforms the imperfect but free-ish market.
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in CO and we recently had a similar law pass that required companies to disclose salary ranges. Like you said it does absolutely nothing, companies will list "Senior Software Engineer" with a salary of "$70k - $240k". This often times isn't even the range for the current position, but the "entire range" of offers they extend to any level of SWE.
That is explicitly called out as not being allowed: "An employer cannot post a $70,000-$100,000 range for a junior accountant position just because it pays senior accountants at the high end of that range. But it can post $70,000-$100,000 for an accountant if it does not limit the posting to junior or senior accountants, and genuinely might offer as low as $70,000 for a junior accountant, or as much as $100,000 for a…
Seems impossible to enforce in practice
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#105About salaries at Microsoft. I interviewed with them this year. I did a Codility test, followed by four interviews with four US based teams. I got an offer which is 5 to 6 times what they pay in US. I live in a country in Eastern Europe, and prices are a bit lower. I would have expected a lower offer, but not that much lower. It was less than I already make so I had to wish them good luck in finding another person an…
Now you know to ask for compensation up front.
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#106$100k - $5 Million is a valid range
Pay bands are the minimum and maximum that employees at a specific level are paid. So this only works if a company is legitimately going to hire people for $5MM a year and/or have existing employees at that level paid that amount. Also, such large pay bands will raise eyebrows, as they are indicative of discrimination. Why such wildly different wages for the same role?
Because humans aren’t interchangeable cogs?
Let’s consider the range of compensation for the “CEO” role.
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#107About salaries at Microsoft. I interviewed with them this year. I did a Codility test, followed by four interviews with four US based teams. I got an offer which is 5 to 6 times what they pay in US. I live in a country in Eastern Europe, and prices are a bit lower. I would have expected a lower offer, but not that much lower. It was less than I already make so I had to wish them good luck in finding another person an…
I presume you mean 1/5 to 1/6th.
Maybe the low offer was due to an off by order of magnitude math mistake?
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, why does your 401k max out in November? If your employee does matching then wouldn’t you want to spread it as evenly as possible throughout the entire year?
November is pretty close to the whole year. If you choose a fixed % per paycheck and have a bonus that's not perfectly amortized then being off by a month is actually pretty good.
I assumed that employer contribution matching is generally a fixed percentage of the employee’s salary each pay period, which means that if you don’t contribute in one month you forfeit that percentage of your salary and thus about 8% of your total possible employer matching.
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#109Individual states’ pay transparency laws are already applying upwards pressure on salaries across the country.
My company has multiple groups in different states including Colorado, and in anticipation of needing to post salary ranges for our open positions in Colorado, my group (with no positions in Colorado) preemptively bumped up everyone’s salaries to the midpoint of their pay bands to avoid anyone becoming frustrated if they learned they were in the bottom half. Despite the preemptive adjustments, a colleague of mine became angry and quit when they found out their salary wasn’t at the very top of their position’s pay range.
So pay transparency laws are having a big impact—not only in the obvious cases of candidates negotiating salaries in the states that passed the pay transparency laws, but also for average employees in other states who didn’t even need to do anything except learn how much their labor was worth.
Re: Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
#110Given that most big tech companies' base salary tends to plateau and total comp begins to be dominated by stock grants and performance bonuses, just how much real transparency is actually going to be provided?
More people work for Microsoft than just engineers. This applies to all of their US job postings. Just because you specifically don't get much benefit doesn't mean it's not a good thing.