Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 406 posts

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#181

Post by analog31 »

xyzelement wrote: post #135
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #55

A competitive market would enable me to sort by salary and benefits and apply for the best job. However companies don't want to compete on salary, and potentialy drive them up - they want maximum leverage. They get more leverage if process is obscure, so that you only agree salary late in the process and for the applicant, pulling out is risky. The market is not really free - its being manipulated by one side. Simila…

> A competitive market would enable me to sort by salary and benefits and apply for the best job. I am always surprised to see comments that make it sound like jobs (or, employees) are fungible commodities that can be bought and sold purely on price. One simple example - two jobs may have the same title (Senior Developer, or whatever) but have totally different expectations of communication skills, leadership skills,…

Interestingly, I use price-sort extensively when doing online shopping. I don't often buy the thing that comes up first, but I certainly use it to help figure out the tradeoff between price and quality, and to filter out items that I have no reason to consider. Also, price-sort eliminates one of the psychological burdens of shopping, which is the manipulative presentation of products by the vendor.

Price-sort is a very crude version of an even more powerful tool, which is: "Show me everything about every product, without trying to manipulate me, and let me organize the data by criteria that I choose, not that you choose." This is why Excel pivot tables are so popular in business.

Anything that makes the job search function less psychological has to be beneficial. Nothing prevents me from taking a pay cut for a particular job that I absolutely love, in a favored location, etc.

Oddly enough, product marketing and hiring share a common feature, which is that both fields have endless amounts of verbiage about how psychological manipulation is actually beneficial to the person being manipulated. If so, it should be an opt-in feature, perhaps even one that people are willing to pay for.

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#182

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

elliekelly wrote: post #93
privacylawthrow wrote: post #19

The law also requires that Colorado employees be informed of all promotional opportunities. A promotional opportunity is "a vacancy in an existing or new position that could be considered a promotion for one or more employees in terms of compensation, benefits, status, duties, or access to further advancement." If a company doesn't already have Colorado employees, they may not be interested in having a remote employe…

Who says the CO remote employee requires special treatment? That would be a terrible leadership decision. The easy and obvious approach would be to treat all employees under the CO standard. It’s as simple as posting all open positions internally. Or even sending a firm-wide email when a new position is posted externally. I have a hard time believing most companies aren’t already doing this with the exception maybe o…

Many organizations just aren’t structured that way. I had a coworker who worked alone on what was a small project, gradually transitioning to a technical leadership role over the project as it got larger, until eventually he became the manager of the team that owns it. So he got a promotion opportunity, but there was never an opening as such; it would be pretty unfair for the company to open up applications for anyone to come in and take his project away.

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#183

Post by ethbr0 »

HPsquared wrote: post #103
ethbr0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition is fairer, not so much good nor bad.

Fairness is an objective good to most people.

I would disagree with that, because the requirements for fairness typically disadvantage a majority in favor of leveling the field for a minority. Ergo, most people will gripe about the actual policies, even if they agree with the abstract end goal.

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#184

Post by ghaff »

ethbr0 wrote: post #113
eplanit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's legal to discriminate based on geographic location.

It is. Afaict, protected classes and characteristics as of 2021 are: Sex, race, color, religion, national origin, pregnancy and childbirth (and related medical conditions), age (including mandatory retirement), disability (including requiring reasonable accommodation), black lung disease (mine operators), bankruptcy and bad debt, citizenship status, & genetic information. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_di…

>citizenship status

It's a little more complicated. The person needs to have the legal right to work in the country of course. And, if there are any legal restrictions related to e.g. Federal contracts such as defense contractors often have, a job may be restricted to US citizens.

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#185

Post by Clubber »

grumple wrote: post #115
commandlinefan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> favorable to employees Is it really though? Complete transparency in salary ranges also means that every other employer can see exactly what their competition is offering. I can't help but worry that this will lead to a sort of "price fixing" that will actually drive wages _down_.

Good luck in a competitive field like tech. Companies might not advertise salary ranges at a few big tech companies, but the vast majority of recruiters tell you the salary range as soon as you talk to them (or you name your price and they say "that will work"). I already totally ignore the bottom 75% of salaries. The problem tech companies have is that many of them can be disrupted by a few motivated individuals, an…

>The problem tech companies have is that many of them can be disrupted by a few motivated individuals

I'm convinced a primary motivation for hiring in mega-tech companies is to keep people from making startups to dethrone them. You can't legally compete with Google, etc if you've signed a non-compete.

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#186

Post by borvo »

gambiting wrote: post #84
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #55

A competitive market would enable me to sort by salary and benefits and apply for the best job. However companies don't want to compete on salary, and potentialy drive them up - they want maximum leverage. They get more leverage if process is obscure, so that you only agree salary late in the process and for the applicant, pulling out is risky. The market is not really free - its being manipulated by one side. Simila…

>>With housing (in UK) there is no competition on quality because the seller doesn't have to disclose any problems with the house. If it falls of a cliff the minute you sign on the dotted line, it's your problem. I'm in the UK and that's absolutely not true. If you think the owner knew about the problem and purposefully omitted telling you, then you definitely have a court case and any law firm worth their salt will…

I’m looking at 5 houses and want to pick the best one. Of course I need to see the surveys now. Tell me which bank is this that will pay for the 5 surveys?

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#187

Post by InitialLastName »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #150
nradov wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not sane, it's crazy! As a buyer why would I trust a surveyor selected by the seller? I would rather pay inspector myself for an independent opinion. In the US this only costs a few hundred dollars for a typical house, which is a tiny fraction of the overall transaction price.

For the same reason you trust an auditor and accountant hired by Tesla to produce quartely earnings report - they are on the hook if they lie. Surely you do not hire an independant accountant every time you buy stocks?

>Surely you do not hire an independant accountant every time you buy stocks?

Of course not, I let the short sellers do it for me.

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#188

Post by brendoelfrendo »

sokoloff wrote: post #158
elliekelly wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says the CO remote employee requires special treatment? That would be a terrible leadership decision. The easy and obvious approach would be to treat all employees under the CO standard. It’s as simple as posting all open positions internally. Or even sending a firm-wide email when a new position is posted externally. I have a hard time believing most companies aren’t already doing this with the exception maybe o…

We have something like 15,000 employees and 20 some odd brand companies that operate largely independently. There is no reasonable way for us to wrangle every single opening into a single process to comply with a CO law (times all the other jurisdictions who’d like to put their own thumbprint on it). I would always rather take a qualified internal candidate rather than spend months to land someone outside. So, I do s…

I can't see why the number of employees or companies complicates this. I work for an enterprise with over 60,000 employees and they have decided to apply the Colorado standard to all job openings.

Editing This was poor word choice in the morning; I should say I can clearly see how the size or scope of a company could complicate this. I just don't have any sympathy for them; you adapt your processes to match the desired state.

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#189

Post by renewiltord »

DangitBobby wrote: post #139
mdorazio wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volume doesn’t matter if your margins are negative. Grocery stores typically run on very slim margins (3% or less) so it’s pretty reasonable to think that raising employee pay significantly would make them lose money.

Maybe I'm not thinking about this right, but if they are getting way more business because of the pandemic and their costs have more or less stayed put, it's practically impossible that their revenue hasn't gone up considerably. Despite thin margins on their product, if they sell more of it they should be making more money (eliding some growing pains which should be surmountable). In that light, I have to say I kind…

Surely, it’s easier to believe that than that some non-chain grocer is protesting paying more by shutting down entirely.

Re: Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

#190

Post by AlwaysRock »

offtop5 wrote: post #163

I'm actually not a fan of this law. My first salary position was for job which advertised a range of something like 80 to 90k a year. The highest I had made previously was $10 an hour, the CEO of the company was a nice guy who brought me in for an interview anyway. I took an offer at 40K or so, and within 3 years I was at 100k. With laws like this in play I'm not sure if that would still be legal. A lot of these idea…

Does this law say that you cant offer someone below the salary posted in the job? I thought it was just a referance point more than anything.
Post reply on HN