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Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

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

#331
post #114

As a Coloradan another thing that's happening is companies are listing their jobs as Remote, only advertising in CO, and just mentioning it's a CO only job verbally. They do the thing where they sit in the gray area due to pandemic "Oh, it's remote, FOR NOW, but it's a CO job" Or listing the job as Denver and a few other cities, but it's really just Denver/Boulder (Twitter currently doing this). Another pattern is li…

> Another pattern is listing the range as 40-250k so the disclosure is effectively nothing. This feels like a losing strategy as other employers will be posting tighter ranges which will get more applications. Especially if the lower bounds is too low. Hopefully this sorts itself out.

Data about how those job posts perform with large vs small ranges would be helpful in dissuading smaller companies from doing it. I think larger companies are going to do it regardless though.

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

#332
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.

I live in Scotland, and the process here is the seller has to undertake a survey with someone who is accredited. In practice this means that the same 3-4 firms end up doing most of the surveys. It's not just some ranodmer saying "yeah, looks good mate". > In the US this only costs a few hundred dollars for a typical house, which is a tiny fraction of the overall transaction price. You know what's even better than _on…

Suppose the seller got a bad report. Wouldn’t they just shop to a new surveyor to get a better one? The incentives are bad in this situation.

Also, even if the money first comes out of the sellers pocket, it’s still being paid by the buyer in the houses cost.

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Then you'd miss out on GME, TSLA, and all the stocks that make the most money. That's obviously a viable strategy, but it's certainly not the best in terms of ROI.

You also probably miss out on the fraud and negative ROI that the investigations would conceivably uncover.

Also, making decisions around catching Tesla or GME at the right timing in the market… that’s not a great starting point for investment strategy.

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

#334
post #43

Insightful to see DigitalOcean as the example company here.

I live in Colorado and received an offer from DigitalOcean a couple of years ago for a remote position. The pay was okay--roughly the same as the job I had at the time. But they insisted on keeping a non-compete clause in the employment contract, which can prevent an employee from joining a competitor for up to a year after their last day at DigitalOcean.

Think about that for a second. You get a job at DO, working on cloud infrastructure. If you leave that job, you can't join another cloud provider for a year. Your options are A) ask DO for explicit permission to take a new role anyway, leaving it to their discretion, B) live in CA where these clauses are invalid, C) change industries with your next job, or D) take a year off between jobs without pay.

Apparently these contracts are not uncommon in NY, MA, WA. But it was the only time I've personally encountered one, and I was not okay with limiting my future job options like that, so I turned it down.

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Scotland, and the process here is the seller has to undertake a survey with someone who is accredited. In practice this means that the same 3-4 firms end up doing most of the surveys. It's not just some ranodmer saying "yeah, looks good mate". > In the US this only costs a few hundred dollars for a typical house, which is a tiny fraction of the overall transaction price. You know what's even better than _on…

Suppose the seller got a bad report. Wouldn’t they just shop to a new surveyor to get a better one? The incentives are bad in this situation. Also, even if the money first comes out of the sellers pocket, it’s still being paid by the buyer in the houses cost.

Easy way to solve that is making sure there’s a record of all accredited inspections that potential buyers can access. So you have a do-over after fixing something but there’s a trail for the buyer.

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> Or the situation where a company is very flexible on who they hire and thus would pay a lot more or a lot less depending on what the individual brings to the table. You're making it sound like the companies are being forced to pay the same salary for the same role - they are not , and this is a straw man argument. The companies should publish the salary range - they are free to adjust the offers within the range de…

My friend interviewed for an SDE 1 position but after interview, was then offered a role of SDE 2 on the team, since the team was hiring for both, and he was more qualified as a 2.

I think this is an example of flexibility that people bring up. Not that they shouldn't publish the range, but my friend had no idea the other range was open to him.

TO be clear, i agree that they should have to explain "why" if they chose the part of the range, like you say, but i think it misses some edge cases that are not uncommon.

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

#338

I think one reason why this is difficult for companies that are hiring software engineers, is that they can hire at multiple levels of experience. They just need good developers! A company that needs, say, a Golang developer, or Scala, or React, might be willing to hire a junior, mid-level or senior developer- they'll take whatever experience level they can get. Remember, saying that you don't want to hire someone to…

I find it very difficult to believe that an employer that would be happy to fill a certain position at $80k would also be willing to fill that same position at $180k.

I am actively interviewing someone with 4 years and someone with 20 years of experience for the same role. Our needs are quite specific but it is not our first or last hire in that area; as long as someone can fill them we are willing to be flexible about to what extent this particular hire fills our overall need and will adjust accordingly down the line.

Given the stage of my company, our hiring plan, and the fact we hire remote across the US, we absolutely could have a role with a salary range of $80k or more.

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

#339

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…

Context: startup, 50ish employees.

We don't necessarily want to advertise all open positions to an internal selection process, particularly more senior managers.

The record keeping requirements in CO are concerning, particularly job description records. In particular, we don't yet have a full time HR person (there is a dedicated person, but that person has other job duties).

There's 49 other states.

edit: one more reason. We had a failing exec. Not enough to merit immediate firing, but failing enough that it was clear he or she was not going to last through the next round. We needed that person to continue doing a mildly-failing job while we found a replacement, due to lack of another person who could take on those responsibilities.

Not sure how you manage something like that with an internal hiring announcement.

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

#340

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.

There is no fixed salary for a job. That's the whole point. It's a negotiation, where candidates with unique skills can negotiate higher compensation that reflects their unique skill-sets and contributions. What you want is to impose a one-size-fits-all rule on the market. That's going to produce misallocation and inefficiency.

> view a few houses before you've paid the house price in survey fees

Surveys and inspections cost a few hundred dollars. Houses cost several hundred thousand dollars at least.

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