Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

Yeah, I was looking for this reply in this thread and I'm shocked that it took this long to find it and that it's not upvoted to the top. CA has a similar law (and in fact I link it to every recruiter who tries to play coy about salary bands). The actual text of the CA law doesn't hold all that much teeth - but just linking the relevant legal code is helpful

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

"An employer, upon reasonable request, shall provide the pay scale for a position to an applicant applying for employment. For purposes of this section, “pay scale” means a salary or hourly wage range. For purposes of this section “reasonable request” means a request made after an applicant has completed an initial interview with the employer."

Yes, this law will disproportionately benefit sellers of labor with a worse supply/demand situation. Price transparency is always better for the party (buyer or seller) in the worse supply/demand situation.

Agree with your first point.

> Unless they are a flagship megacorp with well known salary bands and staff levels, and they are not disclosing the salary, then you know it's not competitive salary.

Frankly that's not been my experience. I find that especially on the senior level, the variance is so high for what a person could make in a role that publishing the range would just be meaningless. Thus, I take the "lack of range" as a non-signal.

In the US, there is a huge market for those peddling certainty and reduced risk while also taking on very little liability of risks associated with the work.

People love security theater where some professional swoops in and assures them everything is fine. In some cases you have to rely on an expert but in many cases, I've found that for anything significant, I can't outsource risk assessment because it's not worth it most of the time. No one doing the assessments have enough liability or incentive to do a deep assessment, it often simply costs too much relative to what you're assessing.

Now if you're completely naive or ignorant about something or the total risk is known and is relatively low, then it doesn't hurt to pay a small fee for the quick risk assessment passover made by an expert who will be more likely to spot things than you. Also, if someone really has significant liability for their assessment, they tend to be very direct to the point of pointing out low risks they normally would brush over.

I recently purchased a home and it was hooked up to a private well. The seller said it was fine, the inspector said everything looked fine based on old test data, and a private well inspector said it looked fine. Not a single one of them thought it was worth testing the water quality beyond the bare minimum, only concerned about quantity. It turns out, I spent a part of 4-6 years developing water quality monitoring infrastructure and performing water quality analyses and had it not been for the knowledge I had and always skeptical attitude, I wouldn't have batted an eye. I told them to all stuff it and perform a water quality test or I was rejecting on other terms. Good thing I was difficult because there were all sorts of issues (bacteria, organic and inorganic issues) and I may have even gotten sick or a guest could have gotten sick.

Years ago I had a health scare and saw three independent doctors that thought it was nothing, even after describing my symptoms but there were too many red flags for me to ignore accept their opinions. I suggested a specific condition to each of them and they brushed it off like I was crazy. They didn't have the same level of risk or incentive for their time in their assessments to push forward and didn't want to acknowledge that even a low level of uncertainty could be true. Sure enough, I found a fourth doctor to check, they listened, and did appropriate diagnostics eventually confirming via lab and in person diagnostics I was correct. This isn't something that frequently occurs, not a hypochondriac.

Professional risk assessment can be useful but you should always be skeptical of it given the lack of liability and incentives many have. They want to get paid and move to their next transaction. Such is our highly transactional society where people really don't care about other people or can't afford to care about other people in the name of efficiency.

CEO salaries are made public. We object to them, but most of us don't intentionally avoid working for companies that have that outsized pay discrepancy.

Likewise, if I'm making more than I could at any other company, but then found out a coworker was making twice as much as me, I'd still not leave.

How much coworkers are paid doesn't affect whether or not we leave the company; it's how we're paid compared to the rest of the market that does. Just taking that off the table.

What it DOES affect is our morale and our own performance. To that end, it benefits companies to either keep it secret, or to try and ensure that pay discrepancies within the same role match the actual performance. If that person making double or triple what you do is actually delivering 2x or 3x what you are, and you know that if your own performance increases, your comp will too, that seems like solid incentive. If it's completely disconnected, your morale will drop, and your performance likely -will- drop to be half or a third of what that person's is, and it becomes self-fulfilling.

I think the main benefit to making compensation transparent is that it also forces the company to be very mindful about how compensation and performance are tied. They're supposed to be anyway; that's already a goal. It just raises the stakes for getting it right.