> The goal is to narrow the gender wage gap. If a woman is paid less than a man doing the same job and a new employer bases her pay on her prior salary, gender discrimination can be perpetuated, the bill’s backers say.
Hmm, I'd never thought about that angle,but I guess it makes sense.
No word on if they are allowed to use Equifax, etc to pull salary data from?
EDIT: looking at the bill it looks like querying Equifax is probably also prohibited
> (b) An employer shall not, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, seek salary history information, including compensation and benefits, about an applicant for employment.
As a side note one of the biggest issues macro economists have is that its very hard to prove their theories as you often can't run huge macro economic experiments.....
> Delaware, Massachusetts and Oregon have passed similar laws that take effect later this year or next, said attorney Ben Ebbink of Fisher & Phillips in Sacramento. Philadelphia passed one that was supposed to take effect in May but is being challenged in court. New York City and San Francisco have similar ordinances that take effect Oct. 31 and July 1, respectively.
With the number of states introducing legislation like this it will be interesting to see if you can tease out any state or city based GDP growth/shrinking based on these laws.
They do - I'm not sure how they licence it though or what data sources they use but I've seen that their data on high income households is the best in the business and shockingly accurate.
However, I can't imagine the compliance nightmare that would exist around a process that lets HR people look up people's equifax information. If they get a full report, it could contain information about disabilities, national origin, ethnicity, religion, and enough information to construct knowledge about sexual orientation.
However, all that information is pretty worthless for most decisions. Aside from it being illegal to use that information for hiring decisions (in most situations), the equifax stuff isn't super accurate. I've looked myself up and it gets a lot of information wrong, most other people I know who have looked themselves up in have also found major inaccuracies.
They (The work Number/Equifax) don't license it at all. Company's pay for the privilege in fact. It's sold as outsourcing the "costly" HR task of providing salary data themselves. Other companys or individuals then pay Equifax $35 to make a single enquiry or subscribe at a monthly rate.
Users include 82% of all F500 companies and they have 225 employment records.
This is a pretty shocking news article regarding the last time Eqifax was in the news about this a few years ago. At that time (like now) they were selling the data to all kinds of companies.
I'm not sure how they licence it though or what data sources
Ever filled out a credit card application? Most of them ask for your current salary. This is before the credit check is done.
My guess is the credit card companies are passing that information back.
Of course, any time I put my salary in one of those applications it's correct in a range of $50K+. If they have those numbers, they are really inaccurate.
This makes me wonder. My employer has some customer data. We're very careful about not just letting any random employee access it without careful permission, auditing, logging, etc. Customer privacy is important to us.
At Equifax, though, information about random people isn't customer data. It's the product. They give it to anyone who asks for money. Do they have any motivation to say J random employee can't just look up everybody's data? Why? Letting you have free access to what they charge everyone else for would just be a perk, right?
I believe it's quid pro quo. Equifax sells analytics services to corporations, and presumably you get a nice discount if you enter into an agreement to give them your information.
Likewise for credit scores--why else would a lender report data to Equifax if Equifax wasn't purchasing that data, either directly or as part of a larger contractual arrangement.
There is nothing wrong with HR having that information. It's only illegal to base hiring/firing decisions on protected information, it's not illegal to have it.
Obviously it gets really tricky to prove someone did or did not use protected information in their hiring/firing decision, so it's clearly safest for HR to avoid having any of that.
Why would a resource department need information from payroll? They aren't the bosses of the employees so it's not like they are making the ultimate hiring decisions.
In your company that may be the case. Some (many, especially public) companies use HR as the initial resume filter. They are supposed to make sure the resume is accurate, the applicant didn't lie about job titles, dates of employment, education, etc, and sometimes the dreaded keyword scanning. Some places they'll also do the initial phone screen to make sure the applicant can form more-or-less coherent sentences. Then they give the person hiring a stack of screened resumes, and that person then does the interviews for the actual position in question.
And I have worked at places where HR could unilaterally veto a given employee based on certain criteria (education, background check, etc).
In the US, those are protected categories about which a prospective employer may not inquire. This point was explicitly called out and repeatedly reiterated in the training I received a few years back about how to participate in an interview from that side of the table.
Some of that information can be obvious, as in the case of visible disability and occasionally ethnicity. But it's not permissible to inquire in any case. And speaking from the side of the interviewee, such questions would immediately bring the interview to a not overly friendly close, both because the answers are none of any prospective employer's business, and because no company so insensate to liability concerns is likely destined to end up anywhere I care to go.
Unless the protected characteristic is in some material way relevant to the role, asking such questions is likely to contravene the law or laws establishing the protection. It's not a criminal act, but it is unlawful; to do so, without a very clear and compelling argument for why it's relevant to the candidate's ability to perform the job, places the organization at the mercy of any candidate who cares to file a claim.
This is false, it is generally not illegal to ask about protected characteristics, it's only illegal to use them in hiring decisions. The distinction is important.
The reason people avoid asking (and tell others to avoid the same) is to avoid accusations or the appearance of using that sort of information in their hiring decision. You really have no defense if you ask about ethnicity and then decide not to hire that person, it's logical that you were asking about ethnicity because you wanted to use that information in your decision.
"Don't ask don't tell" is a good policy.
Once you actually have the job it's STILL just as illegal to use this information in promotions/firing decisions. However, it comes up in casual conversation all the time. People don't fret about asking a subordinate where they were born in casual conversation.
Fair. I sort of assumed from "don't even think about doing this unless you have signoff from general counsel in writing" that it was the latter, but on further research, I am indeed finding the former is more accurate to fact.
> In the US, those are protected categories about which a prospective employer may not inquire
No, they aren't. First, it's questionable whether sexual orientation is a federally protected axis of discrimination, and, second, it's illegal to discriminate on protected axes (except where they are bona fide qualifications, or some other exception to the general rule exists), not to enquire on them (HR will generally avoid enquiry not necessary for a clearly legal purpose to mitigate the risk that that will be viewed as evidence of discrimination, not because it is illegal in and of itself.)
I doubt most employers would go for that, but I suppose it's possible. More importantly, though, it'd also be much harder than getting it from a payroll provider.
According to wiki they have 225 million employment records and according to The Work Number they are used by 82% of Fortune 500 employers.
Then they turn around and sell all that data while telling the participating companies what a wonderful service they are providing them by offloading this task from traditional HR.
Prepare to be even more shocked. Here is a 'sample' of the EDR report you can request from The Work Number containing all the information that they have on you and may or may not be giving out (or selling to the highest bidder):
As you can see its much more than 'just' your salary. It includes (amongst other things):
Union Affiliation;
Salary breakdown (Base, OT, Commission, Bonus);
Dates of pay increases;
Medical Insurance (coverage, Policy #, Provider name, Annual cost);
Any Workers Comp claims;
Breakdown of your paycheck (401k contribution, taxes payed, garnishments, etc)
Just imagine the national outrage if some employer was shown to be directly selling this information to someone about their own employees. Yet a third party is doing just that and many companies are complicit. It is absolutely outrageous!
'hmmm maybe I don't want to hire Joe Shmo, after all he did join a union in the past. He might try to unionize our plant'
'looks like Joe also has some garnishments, doesn't sound like someone we want on our team. Probably has a troubled past.'
'well looks like Joe made 70k last year, but a lot of that was from working OT. I think we can get away with offering him 60k and promising him a lot of OT "opportunities"'
Proving my income (with paystubs or a W2) separately from the credit report the bank ran always gave me the impression that the credit agencies didn't have that info. Nor do I ever recall seeing it in the reports I got from them.
Not a lawyer, but for major credit lines lenders would generally want to see a few pay stubs and even tax returns, so seems like they’re using the data from the application form as a ballpark figure anyways.
FFS, that's called "fraud." Providing false information on a credit application is a criminal offense. Are you going to go to jail for it? Probably not, as long as you pay your bills. But it's 100% fraud and illegal and you can go to jail for it and people have.
Also, your accounts would be closed if they found out that you lied on your application. American Express, in particular, is known to conduct financial reviews and shut down accounts who can't prove their income.
I wouldn't call that an aspirational income, though — would you? That's just your real household income. It's also not an option for most adults, who are almost all older than 18.
A million or more 18-20 year olds could no doubt truthfully report 6-figure household income. To me, that's "many".
(Slightly over a quarter of households in the US have a household income over $100K as reported on tax returns. Household income for the purposes of credit application can be meaningfully higher than for adjusted gross income tax return concerns.)
That's actually an interesting stat. If there are ~115 million US households and 20% have > $100,000 income, that is ~23 million households. If 18-24 year olds make up ~9.5% of the population, and we 'assume' they are evenly distributed in these households, then this statement (well 18-24) could be true.
it's 26.3% of households with incomes over $100K. I saw another estimate of 125 million households, so it could well be ~33 million households with >=$100K household income.
(I'm not so much quibbling with numbers as trying to get across that "it's a lot of people")
No you can't. The CARD Act of 2009 explicitly forbids this. You can't include anyone else's income if you are under 21.
Even after you're 21 you're supposed to only include someone else's income if you have access to it. If your parents don't give you a stipend then you aren't supposed to include their income.
You'll be in a lot of trouble if you ever default and provided "aspirational" income, or at least that is the impression I get from the text that accompanies such inquiries.
>ROCHESTER, NY—U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul, Jr. announced today that David P. Gaylord, 51, of Rochester, New York, pleaded guilty to bank loan application fraud before the U.S. District Judge Charles J. Siragusa. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison a fine of $1,000,000.
>Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany H. Lee, who is handling the case, stated that in 2006, while residing in the Western District of New York, the defendant submitted various credit card applications to Advanta Corp., Bank of America, and Family First Federal Credit Union. Gaylord knowingly provided false information regarding his income in order to obtain lines of credit from the banks and credit union. The defendant indicated that his income was anywhere between $90,000 to $122,000 when, in 2006, he reported to the Internal Revenue Service that his income was approximately $12,488. Gaylord ended up leaving outstanding balances on the various lines of credit and filed for bankruptcy.
Yeah, at one place I worked they were able to use that to determine whether people were qualified for means-tested aid in seconds. Which obviously made things faster but it gives you pause to know it's so easy to find out.
Shouldn't this be handled by a government agency? It seems awfully risky to have unaccountable companies trade your sensitive information around for profit.
Some of this stuff is handled by the government, such as your driving record (which includes accidents and tickets). You can obtains a copy of yours from your state's DMV.
They aren't totally unaccountable, there is some regulation, notably the Fair Credit Reporting Act, as well as other laws that regulate data brokers.
Americans, in general, are much more comfortable with private for-profit industries handling these sorts of matters over governments.
Anyways, there's absolutely no laws that salaries should be kept secret, your employer can post that information anywhere it wants. In fact, government employees salaries are expressly public information. The reason why employers limit access to salary data is because it keeps salaries lower, it gives them an upper hand in salary negotiations due to information asymmetry. That's why the salaries of professional athletes are public information, they have unions who make sure this information is available.
For me it's a good thing this information is available. I pay lower interest rates, lower insurance premiums, have more access to credit, have no trouble renting before I bought a house.
The reason the government doesn't do that is talented people don't want to work for them. Virtually all the government jobs are union and pay is primarily based on time served. You'd be getting third rate talent at best.
I don't think that's the real reason, to be honest. More like some combination of anti-hiring ideology and a handful of people getting rich off the process. The British government did it with, apparently, real success. And are government contractors really much better places to work?
If you gather this information in any way from an applicant, you are opening yourself up to a lawsuit that will cost you many multiples of whatever you were hoping to save. Even if you win, which you won't.
Also, "and — if applicants ask — must give them a pay range for the job they are seeking"
Considering that companies like Google and Apple went to illegal extremes to prevent competition for labor and depress employee wages, I find it unlikely that they’re not going to do the same thing here. They’ll probably invent some cryptic, convoluted means to launder the data, and if they ever get caught, pay whatever slap on the wrist fine is the cost of doing this kind of stuff.
The head changes - the process stays the same.
Without monetary damages, companys would just continue to hire CEOs to take the blame, like a ablative hull.
This is so dumb. Employers can research candidate history without any chance of getting caught, and it's an obvious goal of most ethical (1st amendment respecting) hackers to make sure it stays that way.
You didn't understand. This kind of situation is very common. It's not that there's someone looking for a certain violation, but that the violation arises in the course of an already started, maybe unrelated investigation.
Actually I don't like this kind of law at all, because it causes random enforcement or in the worst case enables selective enforcement.
Calling this a gender issue is like saying "we're raising the minimum wage to help women".
The law benefits male employees just as much as it benefits women. Lawmakers and PR teams just like to spin everything as addressing the gender gap to appeal to society-wide damsel in distress syndrome.
Not sure about that. It helps anyone who has been systematically discriminated in hiring against over time.
When you start a new job, it's not uncommon for your new employer to offer you a salary that's X% higher than your old one, using that as a base. If your old salary was lower due to discrimination, you'd start with a lower base, and would get less in the new job than someone who was not previously discriminated against.
Real wages for everybody have been roughly flat for decades even as productivity and GDP/capita have skyrocketed.
I wouldn't necessarily call this exploitation since I think there's a broader issue in play, but it's not exactly like everybody, except this one isolated discriminated segment, is just thriving. And in particular I thinking framing this as an issue of discrimination works as a red herring against the aforementioned broader issue. That issue being that general increases in productivity and the percent of qualified individuals are resulting in a downward pressure on wages. The rapid growth in outsourcing, increases in foreign workers, free trade, and other such things also work to compound these issues.
I do not believe there is any clear solution, but I think it's a shame that the focus is rarely placed on this issue. And when it is, it's often more in the context of jingoism than the issue itself.
I think you have it a bit backwards... you're suggesting that we should sideline equality and discrimination issues and focus on raising the boat for everyone.
But the economy doesn't really work that way, it's the opposite. When the economy is doing well, fewer people complain... it doesn't matter if my neighbor makes more than me as long as I'm improving at a decent clip.
But when the economy does less well, it's only reasonable for everyone to look at the inequities.
But just because fewer people complain about inequities in a good economy doesn't mean that we should forget about them and solely focus on the economy overall. Curing inequities is a moral goal in its own right.
Right now the economy, by most all of the normal metrics, is doing extremely well. Yes real wages are flat, but the stock market is hitting record highs and accelerating, unemployment (even more realistic measures like U6) is lower than it's been in a long time, inflation is stable, and so on. So I don't think it's really reasonable to take as an assumption that people behave in a certain way during a bad economy and imply we're in a bad economy. I would completely agree with you [about the state of the economy], but this is not a majority view so we can't extrapolate outward.
And a bit of a tangent here but the "it doesn't matter if my neighbor makes more than me as long as I'm improving at a decent clip" is also a bit dubious. One social study that has repeated and reproduced countless times is that people are happier being the king among rats than a pauper among kings. People ought care about themselves objectively. In reality we measure ourselves relatively. Kind of a bad trait for a species seeking to make global progress, but again - that's all a tangent that's way out there!
As for my own view, the way to "cure inequities" is to ensure equal opportunity. It turns out time and again the medicine is rather worse than the disease when we start working to ensure equality of results. I'm actually in favor of this law since I see no positive result from employers asking for employee past earnings. What's offered to somebody should not be based on what they earned in the past like some sort of soft caste. It also takes another burden off applicants. However, I would be rather shocked to see this have any meaningful effect whatsoever. An employer is going to have a high price and a low price. I don't see removing one tidbit of information making all that of substantial changes to either, or the applicant's ability to more effectively hit the high. But I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.
> Right now the economy, by most all of the normal metrics, is doing extremely well. Yes real wages are flat, but the stock market is hitting record highs and accelerating ...
When stocks are up and wages are flat, it means that those with wealth get wealthier and a faster rate than those without wealth. Inequality worsens, and advancement is based not on what one is doing, but on what they started with. Not exactly equal opportunity.
It helps anybody who's underpaid. One being underpaid doesn't imply or even suggest that one was discriminated against. I was underpaid my first job, and it wasn't due to discrimination. I would imagine that the majority of people who are underpaid are underpaid not due to discrimination, but due to poor negotiating ability, lack of awareness of the market rate, etc.
My analogy of "we're raising the minimum wage to help women/<insert minority>" still stands.
>I would imagine that the majority of people who are underpaid are underpaid not due to discrimination, but due to poor negotiating ability, lack of awareness of the market rate, etc.
That is due to discrimination. Discriminating against someone who is socially awkward and can't negotiate isn't any different than discriminating against someone for their gender. Both factors are things people can't generally control. One might even go so far as saying it is worse than discriminating based on religion, given the general view of religion being a choice one can actively change.
Historically we have been fine with such discrimination, but it wasn't too long ago the true was based on all the forms of discrimination we now view as wrong.
> Discriminating against someone who is socially awkward and can't negotiate isn't any different than discriminating against someone for their gender. Both factors are things people can't generally control.
Actually, it's very different, precisely because most people can control social awkwardness, and further, a socially awkward person by definition can be difficult to work with others, which is a major component to just about any job.
> precisely because most people can control social awkwardness
This is a wild generalisation at best. I know many people with crippling social awkwardness that they would give anything to be able to control to any degree but they can't.
> a socially awkward person by definition can be difficult to work with others
Data shows women tend to do much less negotiation than men. If you didn't negotiate your first salary that can compound for the rest of your career even if you negotiate later salaries.
Same law getting passed all at once in multiple places: makes me wonder if (bigger) companies with access to government figured out some angle on this.
Does this law prevent employees from sharing salaries though?
I could see companies low-balling when they don't have salary information, but then going up if they find out they're not matching/beating the candidates current salary, which would effectively be the same thing as today.
> With the number of states introducing legislation like this it will be interesting to see if you can tease out any state or city based GDP growth/shrinking based on these laws.
Probably not reliably; the numbers are still small and there are way too may potential confounding factors.
This makes the law seem even more ridiculous to me. Do we really need the government stepping into the hiring process like this and micromanaging? It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something
> This makes the law seem even more ridiculous to me.
Why is it more ridiculous? We already have laws against discrimination based on gender. If the issue isn't being solved, while being hands off, it seems natural to try something different.
> It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something
Well it does seem employers are incapable of eliminating the gender wage gap so perhaps the treatment is appropriate. Not that I blame them.. being unbiased is extremely difficult and requires a conscious effort.
Except for the fact that male and female pay for the same job, and experience level are statistically the same and there is no actual pay gap.
The $0.79 on the $1 shit has been debunked a million times yet is still persists for some reason.
The last good study I read showed a gap of something like 5% which was in the statistical margin and was largely accounted for by negotiation tactics.
For an anecdote I (a male) earn less than many other men in my same job, and same experience level. Why because I am TERRIBLE at salary negotiation, (or any other price negotiation, i.e I prefer the CarMax pay what the sticker says model to the haggle over every last $1 model)
At the same time, I have been involved in the hiring of both male and female employees in the IT world, never once at any time I have ever seen, heard or been a part of discussions where a person would be offered to get a lower salary simply because of their gender.
Every hiring process I have ever been involved in the Pay scale is always set long before we even have any applicants. We have a budget, wages for each position are set based on the budget the gender or personal circumstances of the person have no factor in it. We have to find someone that not only fits the job requirements, but also the salary requirements. That can be a challenge, and we have had to pass on candidates simply because we could not meet their salary demands.
Moving jobs is the best way to get a large pay increase, especially if you're underpaid in your current job. Once you tell them how much you currently make, you've screwed yourself. This is a negotiating tactic used by employers to know how much they'll set as their upper bound for pay.
Your employer may have strict pay bounds set, but a lot of places don't. The pay can vary highly between candidates, especially if the candidates are weak negotiators. If you disclose your current salary, you're a weak negotiator, but employers put a lot of pressure on you to disclose it. I tend to tell employers that I'm not allowed to disclose my salary, which ends that part of the conversation, but most people don't know to do this.
This law benefits you just as much as it does women.
I dont disagree with much of what you said, I am mainly speaking out against the pay gap myth.
As far as disclosing pay, I alway deflect it and treat the question as them asking me what my salary expectations are, which likely ends up doing the same thing, but I dont think I have ever told a company what my salary was at a previous job
My current employer never asked, they said "this job pays X per year" did get a small increase over that first offer but not alot.
At this point in my career though (17 years in) I focus less on raw salary and more on working environment, I would rather take a lower salary to have a care free easy environment than make 15% more but have a high stress high demanding employer. Been there done that... not for me.
[1] - this is a good report, but it uses a different definition of "gender pay gap" than parent - it does not analyze a "pay gap" for the same position/same experience(i.e. gender discrimination), but rather the aggregated difference in payments men and women receive for their work, which are affected by a multitude of factors(referenced in the study) - men working more, full-time, longer careers, different types of jobs, etc..
[2] - there are no sources or data analysis in their report, it's just infographics. Even then, their definition of the gender pay gap is similar to [1]:
"The report flags a clear risk, however: the choices that young women undergrads are making now are setting them up to enter the workforce with fewer digital skills, less mentoring advice and lower interest in pursuing high-paying jobs, compared with their male peers. "
"Adding to this imbalance is the fact that women are much less likely than men to have paid work (50 percent and 76 percent, respectively). This contributes to a hidden pay gap that increases the economic inequities between women and men. Based on the hidden pay gap, our research shows that for every $100 a woman earns, a man earns $258. Since women are usually responsible for the bulk of unpaid work, such as child care and housekeeping, the
effects of the hidden pay gap for them are immense."
At a minimum it does appear I have a better ability to read and understand what I am reading because none of those sources refute what i stated.
Number 1 is not comparing Equal Work and experiance, infact one of their summary bullet points is how part time women earn less than Full Time men... ummm yea. Part time people earn less than Full Time people.. That is not a earth shattering fact nor it is a symptom of sexism
They also point out that Part time women earn MORE than part time men...
Further most of the study looks at Overall wages in general with out comparing actual job roles to job role. This is a general misdirection often used by people that want to invent sexism where there is none. The fact that women often choose careers in fields that are traditionally lowering paying like Social Work, or Teaching is not a symptom of sexism
> Once you tell them how much you currently make, you've screwed yourself.
This is the truth. When I finished my CS degree and started looking for work, I had a recruiter tell me I shouldn't expect any pay over my previous job, and since my previous job was a software testing internship for $12.75/hr, I shouldn't expect more than $15/hr or so. I said "Yeah, no. I'm not taking a software engineering job for barely over $30k/year." He insisted that's how the industry works, even though my previous job was just an internship and wasn't even an engineering position.
I basically told him to pound sand, especially after he told me that at that position, I'd be expected to work 45-50 hours/week. Sure, I needed work, but I wasn't destitute.
I've been through 2 employers and working at my third. I've never disclosed my salary pre-interview. All three jobs at Bangalore, India. So no, that's not how the system works.
The best response to 'here's a penny more than you were making' is multiple offers.
The second best response is 'your offer is better, but inspires zero loyalty. If you want me to stay for longer than it takes for your competitors to get back to me with an offer, you'll improve that offer.'
> Except for the fact that male and female pay for the same job, and experience level are statistically the same and there is no actual pay gap.
Sure, but if women have a harder time getting promoted then they also have a harder time getting the same job and experience. Thus, even if women are being paid the same when they have the same job and experience, the discrimination still exists and they are still as a group prone to being paid less. Perhaps we should name it something more appropriate than wage gap though since the nuance is lost.
That still doesn't support the idea there is a need to "minimize the wage gap" by controlling what questions an employer can ask. If such a bias does exist it won't be eliminated because they aren't allowed to ask a single question.
Most research I've seen show that it's the women who are failing to take initiative in asking for raises, rather than the employer purposefully holding them back.
Yet the pretext of these laws is always under the assumption it's the employer actively doing something to block it instead of passively not offering it to people who don't ask (for whatever cultural or biological reason), likewise the women are not active but also passive in this situation.
Additionally you made the same jump in logic to assume women aren't getting the same jobs, the study was limited to promotions and this can't be easily assumed either.
This isn't about blaming the victim either but if you're going to micromanage it at least have to clear motivations and end goals that are being controlled for...
> If such a bias does exist it won't be eliminated because they aren't allowed to ask a single question.
Agreed.
> Most research I've seen show that it's the women who are failing to take initiative in asking for raises, rather than the employer purposefully holding them back.
Yet the pretext of these laws is always under the assumption it's the employer actively doing something to block it instead of passively not offering it to people who don't ask (for whatever cultural or biological reason), likewise the women are not active but also passive in this situation.
I don't get that impression but that's a fair point.
> Additionally you made the same jump in logic to assume women aren't getting the same jobs, the study was limited to promotions and this can't be easily assumed either.
Is it unreasonable to assume that someone with a higher position and more responsibilities would have an easier time landing a higher position job at another company? Or perhaps I'm not understanding what you're saying?
> This isn't about blaming the victim either but if you're going to micromanage it at least have to clear motivations and end goals that are being controlled for...
> The $0.79 on the $1 shit has been debunked a million times yet is still persists for some reason.
Because a certain group of people insists that the original $0.77 on the $1 statistic DID control for career choice and the like...even though it didn't. Any claims to the contrary are obviously misogynistic lies continuing the patriarchy. \eyeroll\
I've always said...if the pay gap really WAS that big, then why would employers bother to hire men?
That questioning of the gap being that big makes me think about this exchange Milton Friedman had with some college students in like the 70s or something regarding equal pay for equal work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsIpQ7YguGE
Yes, it's a real average that proves that a female teacher makes less than a male mechanical engineer. How does that help anyone, other than pushing a false narrative?
Well, it might tell us the shape of discrimination is less overt and more structural. Why exactly was it that out of my CS graduating class of 100 there was 1 woman?
Given the supplied anecdote, it is because 99 men and 1 woman completed the requirements for a CS degree, for whatever reasons the individuals decided go do so.
Let's step aside the point of generalizing one anecdote to be representative, however. Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women? Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49? What is the threshold of equality with respect to noise?
> Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women?
No. Did I suggest that? I don't think I did. All I mentioned was structural disparity, which is likely multivariate. Microaggressions is a strange thing to jump to from the conversation, compared to say, the effect of video game marketing on preferences, the attitudes of parents and guidance counselors, or parental fears about internet predators and private PCs for children.
I don't have data readily available on this, but there weren't that many women declaring CS to start with, and I kind of expect that if we divided CS freshmen men into 'has written a program before' and 'has not', attrition rates for women would track the 'has not' fairly closely.
> Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49?
I don't know where the bright line is, and there probably isn't one. If it exists, it'd probably exist be between those to ratios. But the fact is it's more imbalanced than either ratio suggested, which should probably motivate policy changes more strongly.
I don't... don't really get why the above poster's observation is not inline given national graduation rates for CS. Seems within the expected distribution, no?
> Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women? Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49? What is the threshold of equality with respect to noise?
Why don't you use your powerful male thoughts to do some basic bayesian modeling and come up with some proposals? Many people have so maybe you can borrow their work, if that sounds like too much effort.
Here's a fun one: Stats suggest in the US that men:women declare majors ~3:1 across all engineering disciplines but ~2:1 in computer science at the outset. However, when we look at graduation rates proportional to the whole of their class in 2016 we saw: computer sciences (17.9%), engineering (19.3%), physical sciences (39%) and mathematics (43.1%).
Computer science has an abnormally high attrition rate despite a increased chance of declaration for major. Other similarly complex and abstract disciplines such as mathematics (which CS leans upon heavily to get any real work done) do not have such a falloff.
So gosh. Where do YOU draw the line? Care to show us the work for how you derived it? I'd love to know.
I could probably get numbers for major vocational education startups. I think I might go pursue that. Since many of those are online, they'll have less noise from on-campus harassment.
This has been brought up so many times that it would be off-topic just for bone-crushing tedium if it weren't already off limits as ideological trolling. Feel free to search HN for the countless flamewars we've already had about it. It's a perfect example of the kind of unsubstantive, inflammatory discussion we don't want here.
You took the thread into a tedious, pointless flamewar and broke the rules by being uncivil as well. We ban accounts that do these things, so please read the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them from now on.
Janitors tend to be male. Housekeepers tend to be female. It is similar work with a different name. This is really common. It has been documented that when a job becomes a predominantly female job, society tends to pay less than when it was a male job.
The crux of the issue here is that no matter how you slice it and dice it, on average, women make less money than men. Arguing that it isn't really due to sexism and that women just have interests in fields that happen to pay less is a pretty crappy justification for a well documented, unarguable fact.
>>Janitors tend to be male. Housekeepers tend to be female. It is similar work with a different name
Except it is not really the Same Job. Janitors tend to be the job title for Commercial, Industrial, and Business crews that do far more than just some light cleaning. For example the janitorial staff at my company operates medium duty equipment (Zamboni Style Scrubbers, polishers, large compactors, etc), has specialized training in hazard waste disposal, and does light maintenance tasks such as painting
Housekeepers are an occupation that is mainly Residential the involves primary light duty cleaning with limited exposure to non-household type chemicals
Calling the 2 jobs "similar" shows your ignorance of the occupations
>Arguing that it isn't really due to sexism and that women just have interests in fields that happen to pay less is a pretty crappy justification for a well documented, unarguable fact.
I believe I have, and will continue to argue these points, as they are not actually facts. That are ignorant statements with no basis in reality
You are cherry picking. You did not reply to these parts of what I said:
It has been documented that when a job becomes a predominantly female job, society tends to pay less than when it was a male job.
The crux of the issue here is that no matter how you slice it and dice it, on average, women make less money than men.
We can debate all the live long day exactly why women tend to make less than men, but that is an established fact. Furthermore, when teaching was a male profession, it paid better than after it became a female profession. This is such an established phenomenon there is a term for it: The Pink Collar Ghetto.
Your original remark top which I was replying was this:
Why are you not asking why out of 100 janitors, or 100 trash collectors there are only 1 women?
I love how every time this subject somes up it is always how there is a lack of women in tech, never pluming, janitorial, auto mechanics, etc. Only Tech.
And I am telling you women already do similar work to janitors. It just has a different name and pays less. You are moving the goal posts. Your position seems to boil down to "No matter what you say, I am fine with women making less money than men and I will justify it to the end of time."
So, I regret trying to engage you. This does not seem to be a good faith argument and your remarks come awfully close to being personally insulting to me.
One of the reasons people talk a lot about the lack of women in tech is that it is a highly desirable job. You know that. You know that janitorial work and plumbing is not nearly as cushy, attractive or well paid as IT. You are de facto objecting to any concern expressed about "Why are the cushiest, best paid and most prestigious jobs held almost entirely by men?" and tossing in a lot of flak to distract from that question.
> I understand, I would hate to be proven wrong as much as you have been in this exchange.
What a revealing sentiment. It speaks to your desire not to engage people here, or share insight or build consensus, but rather a desire to score debate points.
What's more, your entire argument is about addressing tangential (and debatable) inconsistencies and not actually addressing the larger point. If you think observers are blind to this, you're dead wrong.
If you really want to argue that there isn't a wage gap, scoffing and sniping won't work. The overton window, as they say, has shifted. The burden's on you now to provide an alternate hypothesis and shift the consensus.
Consider what this website is for. Folks with math, science or computer education are going to demand a higher standard than sniping around the edges of an argument attempting to discourage the debate.
> I am not arguing there is no wage gap, I am stating a proven fact there is no wage gap.
Oh, you have a proof? Can I see the analysis and its methodology that prove this? What techniques were used? What data sets we're incorporated. How did this model interpret attrition?
> Outside extreme left authoritarian circles,
Sorry, but this doesn't work for leftists or arch conservatives on Hacker News. You make an assertion, you gotta back it up. No appealing to "these bad people" politics here. It's quite off-topic, and speaks the aforementioned lack of sincerity in your engagement with people here.
> To narrow the focus more to what we seem to normally come to "Why are there not very many female programmers", that is not a symptom of employment sexism, that demographic is not going after those jobs. Now we can debate the reason for this, often tracing it to High School or other teenage development factors, not to employment sexism.
So, this really isn't the wage gap your aiming talking to. This is that silly, unsourced, appeal-to-fringe-evolutionary-biology argument Damore posited.
But as I've pointed out in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509045), your appeal to a home&hearth bias sabotaging pipines is not really supported in the data. NSF's data shows better enrollment in CS but more attrition, a phenomenon that is striking considering we don't see it in equally difficult and computer-engaged fields.
Ultimately this is a common argument that says, "Women just prefer less valuable work. They love being cheap or unpaid labor." It's a very just-so argument that let's anyone paint a bullseye around any wage gap and say, "Women just prefer it this way who knows why but it sure is lucky for us!" It's striking in the CS world given the staccatto series of sexual harassment and discrimination claims and suits that 2016 and 2017 bring us. Women are saying, in public and in court, that it's not so. But curiously, listening to them brands you "authoritarian left" and "anti-male."
You claim to be a Libertarian in your writing here. Are you sure though? Unfair systemic bias goes against the heart of the libertarian ideals. If you don't have a commitment to meritocracy, what do you stand for?
It seems to me like you're deliberately avoiding the wealth of data showing a 3-7% in-band pay gap between women and men in our industry. Why?
> You claim there is a wage gap, and have no "backed it up" so show me your research because I guarantee any study you post I can show you how your are misinterpreting the data.
Sorry, you cannot respond to a request for proof with a "well you prove me wrong then!" You entered this conversation with the positive claim divergent from the consensus. The burden is on you.
And again, this shows a profound bias in your thinking. You pre-discard any and all evidence. You're here to demand people assume your point of view, not to have a conversation or expose truth. You're here to browbeat people.
> The reason for women are on lower paying job roles can be debated but it is outside the topic of a pay gap.
So demonstrate, with the data, that women's pay follows the same distribution as men's pay. This is not proving a negative, you made a positive claim. You can prove it. Lots of data is public. Go present the evidence and your analysis and demand people refute it. You cannot simply assert it by force of will and expect it to be taken seriously when so many studies exist on page 1 of google that suggest otherwise have survived scrutiny.
> What this conversation is about is an employer paying a female lower wages for the exact same job simply because she is female.
And yet every refutation you have offered takes this substantiated claim as already disproven then searches for a hypothesis for why the average exists. That's bad analysis.
> Again you have conflated 2 things.
I am trying to focus on the wage gap but you've repeatedly broached alternative hypothesis. I'm just trying to keep up.
> You seem to want to expand this discussion to more than just a gender pay gap
Given the substantiation of the existence of a pay gap, I question the value of listening to hollow and unsubstantiated refutations which as a preconception dismiss any evidence as "misinterpreted."
I think you're being intellectually dishonest here. I think you want to disprove the pay gap because you don't like it. But you lack the techniques or motivation to do so, so you are trying to push that forward via pure force of will, inverting the burden of proof as if the null hypothesis is not a testable and verifiable claim.
I've given you a great deal of my time and been as gracious as I know how to be about calling you on these tactics. I will not reply further unless you bring concrete data to the thread. Good luck & good day.
"that’s the median (midpoint) for all women in all jobs, not for women doing “the same work” or even necessarily working the same number of hours. Furthermore, the raw gap for all women is not quite as large when looking at weekly earnings rather than yearly earnings."
"Female bookkeeping clerks and stock clerks actually made slightly more than their male counterparts, for example. Registered nurses made nearly 96 percent, elementary and middle school teachers made 91 percent, secondary school teachers made 94 percent, and police officers made 99 percent."
"however wide or narrow the gap, discrimination by employers isn’t responsible for all of it. In fact, a women’s pay specialist in Obama’s own Department of Labor — even as she was arguing that pay discrimination is not a “myth” — said research shows discrimination accounts for less than half of the raw pay gap."
"flatly wrong to say that women are paid 77 percent of the pay of men for the “same work.” And the fact that women’s median annual earnings are 77 percent of men’s isn’t all or even mostly due to discrimination, as the ad implies."
" Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.
1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.... Additional portions of the
raw gender wage gap are attributable to other explanatory factors that have been identified in the existing economic literature, but cannot be analyzed satisfactorily using only data from the 2007 CPS. Those factors include, for example, health insurance, other fringe benefits, and detailed features of overtime work, which are sources of wage adjustments that compensate specific groups of workers for benefits or duties that disproportionately affect them. Analysis of such compensating wage adjustments generally requires data from several independent and, often,
specialized sources.
"The size and pattern of quantitative results found in those studies and their coherence with the corresponding quantitative results in this study indicate that the results in this study describe wage differentials experienced by people who actually interrupted their careers, rather than wage adjustments imposed broadly on groups of workers with specific attributes"
Basically they conclude that there is a small pay gap, that is often attributable to other factors then gender discrimination such as employers that offer more family benefits longer vacations and have more lack sick time policy often pay less as well. In additional to many women taking more time off for leave after having a child than a man does, this interruption in work experience has a negative impact on earning potential
Time has some good sources
http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/
"No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing."
Not a study but I think it is a good read on the subject (https://fee.org/articles/truth-and-myth-on-the-gender-pay-ga...) and more or less lays what I have been attempting to say, that there likely is sexism but it is not at the employer level at least not when it comes to wage setting
"All the economic studies say is that differences in skills, experiences, and preferences between men and women explain the clear majority of the gap. What such studies do not address is the degree to which the differences in men’s and women’s skills and knowledge (their “human capital”) is due to sexism before they come to the labor market. Nor do such studies ask whether differences in preferences or job experience by gender are also due to sexism or other aspects of socialization.
For example, if girls are told from a young age that girls aren’t very good at math and science, and are thereby discouraged from majoring in those areas and earning higher salaries as a result, those factors will contribute to the 80% figure. But notice, that’s not because employers are discriminating. If sexism pushes women into lower paying fields, that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily being paid less than men for the same work in that field. What’s causing their lower wages is sexism in places other than the markets. "
You are focusing on the aggregate earning gap when you take all the wages of all women, and then compare them to the wage of all men.
While that might have value in social science on some wider scale, in the this topic today it has none as we are talking about a law that prevents potential employers from asking about previous wages and how that can "help solve the pay gap", that type of pay gap does not exist female programmers do not earn significantly less money than male programmers at the same company, with the same experience. The problem is not a employer pay gap, but the fact there are not as many female programmers
Go work on that, not attempting to solve a none problem of a mythical pay gap
I don't have any problem with being proven wrong. You haven't proven anything I have said wrong. You are merely being contemptuous and not engaging in a good faith fashion.
Which false narrative is this? That women get paid less?
If an average exists then an average exists. We can talk about how it's structured, but the existence of an average pay gap is hard to dispute at this point.
If you find that narrative offensive, ask yourself why. I suspect the motivations are not very laudable.
> Why are you so eager to assert the labor of women is obviously worth less?
What an insane and condescending assumption.
I support focusing effort on training women for high paying jobs. I support researching why women don't study STEM degrees as much as men, and working to mitigate that gap.
I do not, however, support paying those that study less valuable "feel-good" degrees more money just because more women choose to go down that path.
And finally, I don't need to actively "support" women making the same as men within the same professions, because that's already the reality we live in.
The next step I'd like to see is for them to prohibit asking where you went to college. You still need to show credentials, but if you went to an accredited 4-year institution and got a BS in, say, chemistry, you would say you had an accredited BS in chemistry, and there would be a gov't database against which that claim could be checked. Someone who couldn't afford the tuition at a ritzy private school but still completed the same requirements for a BS in chemistry from an accredited state school would have the same access to jobs requiring an accredited BS in chemistry.
The next step after that would be for accreditation to be made more flexible, accommodating combinations of work-study, self-study, community college, private lab classes, and standardized testing to qualify a person for an accredited degree without having attended a traditional university at all.
Competition for admission to expensive, elite schools that apparently don't teach any better but simply pick the applicants who have already made themselves elite and charge them exorbitant fees to grant a brand-name credential which then boosts the value of the brand itself is distorting actual EDUCATION beyond all recognition.
The sooner employers have to judge applicant quality by means other than perceived eliteness of their school, the more diverse the paths to employment success can become, which ought to be a goal of both the left and the right politically.
> The next step after that would be for accreditation to be made more flexible, accommodating combinations of work-study, self-study, community college, private lab classes, and standardized testing to qualify a person for an accredited degree without having attended a traditional university at all.
You can already get an accredited 4-year (or graduate) degree without traditional University; e.g., through Western Governor's University, which is an accredited but non-traditional, competency-based, online school that’s been operating for almost 20 years.
This seems like a very low-impact way to ensure that your past salary history is not used against you. Why should it be? And what is the burden of simply disallowing a line of questioning, with no burdensome reporting or auditing requirements?
> It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something
Well if the objective assessment of the evidence didn't reveal a wage gap based on gender, then maybe we could agree.
But it seems, left to their own devices, many companies perpetuate the wage gap.
So what this does is further increase the cost of doing already shady and illegal business by making a practice that's almost universally bad for workers anyways and made that illegal to.
These laws don't result in jail, they result in fines. So it's the government engaging in it's population-mandated practice of making illegal practices more expensive.
I don't see a problem with it. I never saw the reason why any employer needed to know what someone was paid before. A job is worth around $X to your company to be performed. What I was paid in my previous job has absolutely no bearing on that.
I've also been told that they would verify it before, so that would be out.
The law also requires that a pay range be provided by the employer upon request. I'm completely in favor of this law. Those who are strong negotiators will still be able to negotiate how they wish, and those who are in less fortunate positions won't have their pasts come back to bite them.
Because your current employer may report salary information to one of those data brokers like Equifax and your prospective employer requests that information for verification. Lying on a job application is a good way to get get denied the position.
I am curious as to why this makes it more ridiculous? If you think it is government micromanaging, wouldn't it be that no matter what issue they were trying to solve?
37s/basecamp uses Radford for market information - what is the going rate for a person with X responsibilities. This law bans the use of an individual's salary history to make a salary offer to that individual.
This is a ban on employers -- afaik, recruiters can still ask (and many probably will ask). But, IANAL. (Correction: It looks like recruiters fall under this prohibition too, if they are acting as agents of the employer.)
I personally never answer questions about my previous salary or my expected salary. When HR has given me forms to fill out that have questions about either I just leave them blank, and they've never made an issue out of it.
Some recruiters tend to be a lot more pushy about it, but I just stick to my guns, and refuse to budge on the issue, telling them that I cosider that information confidential. A couple recruiters have refused to work with me because of this, but most are much more understanding. There's certainly no shortage of recruiters out there, so I really don't feel deprived of many opportunities just because a couple have walked away.
I've had one recruiter insist on it because they said they were paid by employers to get that number. They're basically insisting that I participate in a free salary survey for them, for which they'll get paid. Maybe if they shared their cut of what they were getting for that information, I'd consider giving it to them, but otherwise naming a number first will put me in a weaker bargaining position, so I don't.
There's a flip side to this, however -- whether to share salary information together with other employees. In the US it's frowned upon, but I hear it's quite common in Europe. I've also heard it argued that employees knowing each other's salaries makes it harder for employees to get taken advantage of by their employers -- which is probably why some employers have tried to forbid their employees from talking about their salaries with other employees, and why I've considered doing so myself, though I haven't yet. It's just such a taboo subject at work. Nobody talks about what they make.
About to get a hell of a lot harder for contract recruiters to match candidates with expected salary, and match companies with candidates that fall within the salary bounds.
Only solution is probably to stress to their clients to just set a max salary and expect to pay it.
Because every time I told a candidate a range, I'd hear back "ok so the salary is {{max_salary}}, cool."
Nobody in the contracting world wants to undersell themselves. If somebody on the team is getting 75/hr, everybody better get 75/hr or hell gets raised. This is why the O&G industry out in Houston pushes back hard against any salary-sharing.
That's amazing! There's nothing more frustrating than looking at job postings and having no clue what they expect to offer me until I go through the ENTIRE interview process. It's going to be a huge time waster if they won't meet my salary requirements. I'd like to know that information upfront.
I'm failing to see the problem. They're negotiating. If you don't want to pay them max_salary, then you need to have a reason why not, and counter negotiate.
i was on both sides, if somebody does not have a lot experience or does not know how much they are worth, its easy to exploit, you ask them what they currently earn and what they expected salary is, and on that you can judge the new salary. the last candidate that i hired said something even under the lover range that i expected, so i offered him a decent bump (20%) on that as i did not want to underpay him.
if i end on the other side again i will ask for the upper range for myself and see where it gets me.
Salary range x-y for a position is basically a fixed sum y allotted for doing this work with an ability to dock part of this sum if a worker is not doing all all his tasks, or doing mistakes. Using salary range even before hiring is essentially a possibility to penalize a worker for his future transgressions even before he is employed. Basically - blackmail.
I want this too, as an employee hoping to work with other qualified employees. We just extended an offer to a guy who wasn't well qualified for the role merely because he was the only candidate who requested a salary in the range for the position. The skill set was actually pretty demanding, and the amount budgeted was likely below market. Desperation hire.
Any prospective employee who asks me is going to get an answer that is 20% lower than the other job description they were eligible for prior to asking.
Sure. I can ask for salary history once the individual is no longer an applicant and if I can’t confirm they told the truth, I can fire them on the spot without cause. California is an at will employment state.
Seems like you've stumbled upon an opportunity both exploit your employees and bias your hiring towards candidates who don't realize you are exploiting them!
This seems like a really great way to ensure you never retain any decent employees ever. Who would stick around under an employer who would treat an employee like this, even if they had been totally honest about salary history?
See how long you last playing those games. Who in their right mind, other than the desperate among us, would work for a company that would do such a thing?
Well, I punch people and take their money. Most people complain about morals, but hey this is how I earn the most money. You can't blame me for trying to maximize my profits.
I think this brings up a greater issue, and the purpose of the law in general - companies are motivated to be as profitable as possible, hence laws to prevent, say, a company building a militia and enslaving a state to turn them all into farmers or something (possibly the most profitable route? Who knows).
It doesn't seem to say that you can't ask a person what they wish to be paid, right? A recruiter can ask the company their range, ask the employee what they're looking for (not what they were paid before) and match the two.
Kind of off topic but should one always hide their current salary, even if it's above market rate (given their experience on paper)? It seems as though if an employer were only looking to spend so much on a hire, then if you're already likely above that number, wouldn't it save both you and the employer's time?
I can see the obvious downside of sharing a relatively low salary, but it seems like there could be benefit to sharing a high salary (again, relative to your on-paper experience and value).
No, there isn't, unless you're okay with short-selling yourself.
If you share and your amount is > the employers, you have no job. Bad situation. If you share and your amount is < the employers, you'll be underpaid. Bad situation.
If you share and your amount = the employers, you may have a job, but you'll never know if you left money on the table because you offered first. Bad situation.
If you offer the number first, the employer becomes the customer - and the customer is always right. If you wait for them to make you an offer, they have to make an offer that is compelling, in the same way sales people go above-and-beyond to close their deal.
Literally the only way sharing your salary first is advantageous is if you need a job immediately. If you can wait, it's best to hold onto your number. If they cared so much about "saving time" they would have put the salary range in the posting - the reason they don't is because it's disadvantageous to do so!
I think that holds only if your time is worth nothing. I don't want to go through weeks of interviews just to find out that my salary demands are $50K more than they're willing to pay.
This is exactly why I made the comment. Recently went through 4 calls and a full day on site just to be met with an offer they wouldn't budge on that's 20% lower than what I currently make.
I've been through a similar situation: big mistake. They key is to validate you are in range on salary before committing to an interview process. Companies should have the same goal, but many will waste their own time—as you experienced.
This doesn't mean you should share current salary information, but does mean you should be prepared to state your salary expectations. This can be a good thing, as you can anchor high.
If you're in demand and are taking phone screens on a whim, you can always ask the recruiter to share their range. Odds are good they won't, and you can have some "fun" by expressing concern that they don't know what they're hiring for.
The time everyone puts into it is part of the negotiating process. A company will budge if it's worth it for them -- and your job is to convince them it's worth it.
If the first thing out of your mouth is salary and they balk at that then you never even get to the negotiating phase.
A few failures, like you had, is simply part of the process. I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be successful a job hunting every time you go into the interview process. The time you put in is part of that process.
"Saving time" during the interview process doesn't make sense if you're going to spend the next X years being UNDERpaid at your job.
If we assume that your time has some amount of value, you are always better off withholding your desired salary.
If you want to see whether or not they're going to be a potential employer, ask them for a ballpark of what they're willing to pay. But there is no reason for telling them free information.
This is true - there's a time value included in this. If you can't take off work, or have a family/obligations and need to transition immediately, you may not be able to afford to withhold this information.
> If you share and your amount is > the employers, you have no job.
FWIW, I have never had this happen to me in the Valley. Companies will either make projections on what their stock will be worth in the future to make their offer look as attractive as my current pay, or they'll straight up tell me that they have a leveling chart and $X is the maximum they can offer.
Asking me is a rational thing for them to do because they have nothing to lose - same outcome if I decline, win if I accept.
Exactly, it's game theory. The trick to getting high salaries is not to try to win individual negotiations but to win in the general marketplace. I always disclose and ask for their pay so that we can get that out of the way quickly, and I can move on to somewhere that pays what I'm looking for.
I never consider interviewing to be a waste of time. At the very least I get some very valuable practice out of it, learn more about what's out there, and meet some interesting people.
Even if they wind up not hiring you because they find out you're too expensive for their current budget, their budget might increase in the future and they might try to hire you again. Or the people who you made a favorable-enough impression to want to hire you might look to hire you when they're working for some other employer with a bigger budget. If you disqualify yourself by naming too large a number at the outset you'll never get the chance to make that great impression.
Finally, not everything's always about money. If you wind up at the point where they want to hire you and finally you start talking numbers, if their best salary offer is below what you're looking for there might be able to compensate you in some other ways that you could both find acceptable -- that is the essence of negotiation. Here once again, if you had disqualified yourself by naming too high a number at the outset, you'd never get the chance to negotiate.
> I never consider interviewing to be a waste of time.
Most on-site interviews require you to take a day off. If you've got 10 days of PTO, you can do a maximum of 10 interviews a year, and that's if you don't get sick or take any vacation. There is definitely a cost to interviewing.
The only consideration when it comes to salary should be for the employer to consider how much they're willing and able to pay for the average productivity of the next hire vs. that hire's contribution to the company's profitability. They already have the right to fire at any time thanks to lax employment laws; it's only right that pay reflects the profitability an employee brings to a company (rather than the average market rate for an employee). If that employee isn't profitable, then they can be fired. If they are, then they'll be paid commensurate with it. Everybody's happy.
I kind of consider salary numbers posted in job ads to be a bit of a red flag. In my experience, when that happens, the company's usually trying to preclude negotiation on a salary that is way below market rate -- and there's amost always room for negotiation, so I see companies that try to do this as probably kind of sketchy (except in the case of some government jobs where they may be required by law to post salaries, and there really is no room for negotiation as their salaries are also set in stone).
The other situation that I've seen this in is job ads posted by recruiters who post way-above market-rate salaries and then try to bait-and-switch you when you answer the ad. Also a big red flag.
Mostly, though, I am interested in negotiating, and don't want to commit to a number even before I've had a chance to make a favorable impression on the employer, because then they could say "well, you knew ahead of time what we were paying, so why are you trying to negotiate?" Well, if they had posted a realistic number or their best possible offer, maybe there'd be no need to negotiate -- but that is virtually never the case.
Posting a range "job pays X to Y" runs the risk of every candidate assuming they'd be on the "Y" side, not the lower "X" side. If a candidate wows you, you want to impress them, so you have to have room to go above your posted range, in that case. But then you're being less transparent, once again.
"Posting a range "job pays X to Y" runs the risk of every candidate assuming they'd be on the "Y" side"
Employers know this, so they just adjust their advertised range downwards so that the "Y" in "X to Y" is actually at the low end of the range they're actually willing to pay.
Yes, I mentioned that, but how does that help the candidate filtering lack-of-transparency problem? I as candidate no longer know their real range, so I have little useful information. I as employer can't win sharing the true range or the false range.
I've always been upfront and honest about my current salary and expectations. It keeps me from getting lowballed on an offer, and reduces time wasted in talking to employers that can't meet my expected salary. The starting point is what I'm being paid now, plus a bit. Then we can negotiate additional salary, benefits and perks. My salary growth trajectory has been good over my career as a result.
When I made below-market rates, I withheld any salary data whatsoever. Now that I'm well above the median, I tell them as soon as they ask so as to avoid wasting my time.
Your future salary expectations likely have a basis in your current salary. Prospective employers know this. Prospective employees know this. If expectations are stated, with that understanding, then your current salary should be irrelevant. If you're having trouble signaling your value to a prospective employer, then your current (good) salary, seems like an easy way to communicate your value, but it's flawed. Salary is far too reductive of a valuation of yourself. If your value is so difficult to communicate, then perhaps a little self-reflection would help you to pinpoint your strengths to better showcase them.
Further, there are few positive reasons for a prospective employer to seek that number. While it offers them market research into salaries to be competitive, it mostly lets them optimize their offer for the bare minimum to bring you on board. It lets them offer in such a way that you'll compromise your expectations for something slightly better salary-wise and different. I liken it to purchasing a vehicle from a dealer and knowing their margins before hand. This is an oversimplification, and they can say 'no' to a low margin, but it's far easier to persuade them to say 'yes' when you still know they're getting something positive out of it.
> Your future salary expectations likely have a basis in your current salary.
Not necessarily true. My future salary expectations (or _needs_) may have to do with a previous salary, my cost of living, my recent experience or education, or my financial situation.
I've worked in different cities with different COL and also taken cuts in a down-turned market. My current employer is getting a bargain.
If I apply for a job and am asked for this information, I may say, I make $X but I need $2X for reasons A, B, C.
This benefits me because the response tells me if I am out of their range or if they can help me pay my bills, potentially.
If you’re far above (outside the range of most positions) it can be useful to disclose but only from a time saving perspective. It’s generally a poor tactic for optimizing salary.
> It seems as though if an employer were only looking to spend so much on a hire, then if you're already likely above that number, wouldn't it save both you and the employer's time?
Do you think you'll be able to convince an employer post-interview that you're actually worth that much? If so, then don't let them decide otherwise before they actually interview you.
In the US, it is flat out illegal to place any prohibitions on employees sharing salary data with one another, obvious caveats about "at-will" and employers lying about why they fired you notwithstanding.
Recruiters need to find candidates for a given range.
Considering the breath of paygrades for even similar experience level jobs across the tech sector it’s not that surprising.
If a company looks for some one for say 100-120K you are wasting your time and the recruiters time if you won’t take any offers below 180.
Whilst you might find an employer who’ll be willing and able to go 5-10% over the max it’s not likely that you’ll find many who’ll be able to go 50% over max unless it’s a blanket employment without fixed ranges for both experience and salary.
The truth is, employers are willing to pay $180k, but if someone would work for $110k[1], they'd rather find that out in advance.
Btw, I've had a recruiter from GooglAmaFaceSoft tell me in advance the max may for a position.
[1] I consider this to be a bad idea. An employee who won't negotiate a higher salary will often instead test his or her market value by interviewing elsewhere. Because these employees feel uncomfortable in salary negotiations, they are surprisingly likely to simply take the new job as a way of getting a raise. I think the reason this happens a lot is that negotiating types, who often end up in management, have trouble grasping that someone would actually quit and find a new job for a 10% pay raise rather than simply asking.
> The truth is, employers are willing to pay $180k, but if someone would work for $110k[1], they'd rather find that out in advance.
That is exactly why I refuse to negotiate over compensation: I don't want to work with people who have that kind of cheapskate attitude. If they want me, they can express that by making a good offer. If the offer is low, none of the possible reasons are good for me. Why waste time haggling? Better to just move on.
There are plenty of employers that can't afford to pay 180k, not everyone works for Google, Amazon or Facebook.
Here in London you have a lot of companies that look for people with similar experience that have huge pay ranges.
A Sr. Engineer can be making anywhere from 40-45K to 110-120K a year (in general health care pays the least, fintech/finance pays the most, startups in the UK often underpay and equity is a joke if they'll even give you any (like 0.5-1% to single digit employee's straight after the accelerator).
Yes when you break it down not every company gets the same level/quality of talent but the requirements on paper are the same.
As for Salary ranges in the UK most of them post, but the ranges can be pretty huge (my company has a range of 65-110K for Sr. Engineers (which overlaps with both engineer III and Lead Engineer), and while it might appear that it's "well they are willing to pay 110 but they rather pay 60" deal there is another side to the story.
Headcount doesn't makes sense, quite often you might get a head count for a specific position say a Sr. Engineer but the team doesn't need one backfilling positions with lower grades isn't always possible so what end up being is that they'll hire people with the bare minium amount of experience needed to pass the HR filter at the lower end of the pay grade spectrum to keep enough money in their budget for pay rises or to hire external consultants.
So while huge ranges can lead to what some people see as underpaying because some one didn't ask enough or didn't had a large enough salary previously to get more it's also the case that these ranges allow teams and departments to navigate through the corporate bullshit of arranged headcounts and stupid ratios.
When you need to have 2 engineer II for every 4 engineer I, and 1 engineer III for every 5 engineer III and 1 sr engineer for every 3 engineer III and so and and so forth you really needs these huge and overlapping ranges to actually be able to hire people in a way that is sensible to the your team / department needs.
On the more anecdotal side this is what currently actually helped my team a lot we need a Sr Engineer but we don't have a headcount, but since Engineer III on the top end is about the middle field of the Sr. paygrade we can use that with a signing bonus to get the people with the experience and skills we need rather than just effectively waste money on a person that we will not be able to get from.
I've joined as a Sr on an intentionally downgraded backfill on a recommendation from a friend who works in the same department since the pay would be identical near the top end of the pay grade but having another tier to "grow into" would allow me to get a bigger raise in the future since a grade promotion has a 12.5% pay raise by default which means that if I can't get the raises I would like I can always be internally promoted to for a bigger raise, and it's much easier to be promoted from Sr to Lead than taking the tech expert or manager roles since those require more years of experience in the company for an internal promotion (again dumb policies but you can't always fight the system).
I don't know why everyone thinks Google pays well... It was only a few years ago that they gave everyone a 10% raise across the board to address issues of underpayment. That was probably due to the Facebook threat. In addition, lest we forget, all of the big tech companies colluded to depress wages as well.
This is consistent with my experience. Was making 175k in a lower cost of living area. Google wanted to pay 190k and require relocation to Mountain View. Had an offer in hand from another company for 240k. Google refused to negotiate.
What a waste of my time. Never again.
The two people I know who came to Google as juniors are forever typecast as such and are also not being paid well.
Not Google continued to treat me better after as well. If it's bad going in it's going to stay bad.
At Google the recruiter put me in the SRE/SWE track which I was skeptical of and communicated to them. I also communicated about the compensation issues in advance saying if I got a bad offer it wasn't going to happen. Still wasted my time.
It's high for the industry if you consider the entire US or the world. The solution there is pick the right employer. The right ones are not that much harder to get into than the wrong ones especially if you play the interview game. You also need to not get caught location based comp schemes.
It's not high for a big corporation that is doing well. They just want you to think it's high so they don't have to pay and the small fry want you to think it's high because they can't afford it. These are all just line items in a budget.
So I read your comment history and it looks like you changed jobs quite a bit to get to the higher salary. Do you also focus on a particular niche or are you just a general senior engineer?
I am not doing this as a generalist. I picked a specialization and within that specialization I picked a specific ecosystem and then ground out some seniority in that ecosystem.
Once I had that I could pick from anyone who is invested in the ecosystem.
I don't believe that has actually heavily impacted what I am paid in the sense of the credentialing being worth more to individual companies it has just made it easier to get through hiring filters and interview loops. That has made it possible to focus on companies that pay well.
I don't know I don't work in SV I work in London, here Google and Facebook are on the upper end of the spectrum above them most multinational banks and just below fintech and investment/exchanges houses.
> I don't know why everyone thinks Google pays well
Because strong, senior engineers who have been at the company for a while (say at least 5-6 years) can get total comp that is in the upper six figures when everything is factored in. That's well higher than the vast majority of other employers.
This is a valid concern, but a much more appropriate way of addressing expectations is to simply say “This role pays 100-120k depending on experience. Is this acceptable?”
This is how it used to roll for me when I was a contract recruiter, and 99% of the time the candidate would say "So the role pays 120k, got it."
Salary ranges are pointless, I always tried to tell my clients this but for some reason they always would give me a range. I gave up ever giving the range to my candidates and just told them the max (hard max, contract O&G, so they wouldn't try to negotiate above, it'd be pointless).
> In the US it's frowned upon, but I hear it's quite common in Europe.
It's frowned upon by (most, not all) employers, but they are legally prohibited from banning sharing of employee salaries (as long as you are sharing your own information, not others). The culture of not sharing salary between employees is more an artifact of American culture to limit discussion of politics, religion, and money to those you are closest to (which has been changing to varying degrees).
From the Atlantic article: Gag rules are a "widespread, illegal problem that the law has failed to address for decades. Gag rules violate a fundamental labor right and allow for discriminatory pay schemes."
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In the UK, apparently the situation is similar. From http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1811 , "The Equality Act 2010 makes it unlawful to prevent employees from having discussions to establish if there are differences in pay. However, an employer can require their employees to keep pay rates confidential from people outside of the workplace."
Thanks very much for those. It's very interesting to see how despite the legislation, it's still commonplace for pay-talk to be frowned upon in the workplace.
There was a fun Quora post not too long ago about someone asking "I made up a number, now they want proof as part of a background check, what do I do?" My own strategy I intend to apply in the future is to give my base salary + bonuses etc. If they never clarify I can only assume they had meant total compensation, not base, and who am I to complain if they offer me my current total as my new base?
I did the same. Every time I moved jobs I got a pay raise because the number I provided was above what I was currently making. In a few cases, they offered well above what "I wish I had," which was a nice bonus.
And that's why it was a company I was talking to, and not a company that I worked for. But, I recognize that I was in a fortunate position, and I did not currently need a job then. Had I been in a less fortunate position, things could be different.
I think recruiters would be covered under the "through an agent" part, especially as most/all are compensated by the employer.
When asked about salary I say that I consider my previous/current employer's salary information to be proprietary & confidential information and I would be violating the agreement I signed when I joined that company to keep such information private, by revealing it.
I basically present it as an ethical issue, and effectively say, "I feel I would be doing something unethical by revealing that information. You're not going to ask me to do something I consider unethical, are you?"
Of course, if they say yes, that tells me something else entirely too, and also something I'd like to know before I start working somewhere.
"When asked about salary I say that I consider my previous/current employer's salary information to be proprietary & confidential information and I would be violating the agreement I signed when I joined that company to keep such information private, by revealing it."
Such agreements are not allowed in California. It would be illegal and unethical for a company to ask you to sign it.
Source? Noncompetes are disallowed in CA, and federal (and probably state) law prohibits a ban on employees sharing salary information amongst themselves. But AFAIK there is no direct prohibition on a contractual obligation not to disclose salary to a third party. You could of course be cute and merely disclose 1040 income or somesuch.
My answer is : i'll tell if you tell me what your salary is. In france people tend to be very uncomfortable with it and that settles it or reveal quickly the real person in front of me.
Just to clarify in understanding why recruiters are so adamant about this information. For said job they are trying to fill the budget pays $X dollars, if you're asking for $0.85X then they have a 0.15X margin to work with. Depending on how much that is reveals how lucrative filling you into that role would assume and whether it would cover their costs and what not. It's not uncommon for recruiters to retain 25-30% of the billing rate the company dishes out.
>Some recruiters tend to be a lot more pushy about it,
The simplest solution for recruiters is to lie. Best case scenario you get a much higher offer. Worse case scenario you have to explain to someone at the job that there must have been a misunderstanding between you and the recruiter (which isn't a lie, as their was a misunderstanding since the recruiter thought you were telling the truth). You never have to lie to the employer.
How do you feel if you think you are being paid well compared to the market rate? Do you think there are cases where sharing your current/past salary can be a benefit in negotiations?
I'd prefer to see this go in the other direction and make all salary information public.
Right now, employers have far more information than employees, and I don't think this law will do much to change that. To me, it's similar to real estate - imagine if only sellers had access to the database of exactly what every house sold for and when, but buyers had to go with unsubstantiated, scattered rumors. Or vise versa. The side with information would have a monumental advantage.
This law won't do much, if anything, to change the basic dynamic. For what it's worth, I work for a public institution and my salary, and the salary of all my coworkers, is public. The sky hasn't fallen.
If tech companies balk, one approach would be to say that any company using the H1B or other work visas must make all salary information public as a condition of using the visa. After all, if you're experiencing a desperate shortage of workers, it's reasonable for the public to know what salaries you're paying these desperately needed workers in short supply.
My salary is private. I do not want my family and friends to know how much I make.
I also have never told a potential employer my salary. I believe it stopped things from going on to the interview stage but the way they took my refusal made me assume they paid under market rate.
>My salary is private. I do not want my family and friends to know how much I make.
But have you thought about why you feel this way? I assume you are American, as am I, and so I understand we've been socialized by our culture to feel this way, but it really makes no sense. It's just a way to harm workers by keeping us from seeing when we're being screwed. I'd even go so far as to wager that this entire concept of salary being private was fostered and encouraged by employers for that very reason, because it gives them enormous leverage.
>>But have you thought about why you feel this way?
Yes. I don't want to increase my attractiveness regarding a house robbery, as I live well below my means in a developing neighborhood, amongst other reasons.
I very much understand the concept of leverage and have no problems privately discussing my salary amongst groups that I trust. That doesn't include the entire Internet.
A lawsuit is a bigger risk than a house robbery, IMO. A big reason why people don't get sued is because they aren't a defendant you can get a lot of money out of. Publicly showing off a top 2% salary or asset level will change that.
Like, if you own your house outright, it's often worthwhile to get a HELOC without ever drawing from it. That way, when an attorney tries to figure out if you're worth suing, it doesn't look like you have six figures worth of housing equity to go after.
Its possible the wage increases vastly outweight the insurace you would have to purchase to shield yourself from those consequences. If this information raises your wage 10%, its worth all the rest combined.
I feel like this is kind of silly. Anyone could make a reasonable estimate of your salary based on your job, which is easily discoverable. At least enough to make a decision "should I rob this house." What are we even talking about here?
>>Anyone could make a reasonable estimate of your salary based on your job, which is easily discoverable.
That would require two things, I guess. My name, and the ability to estimate my salary based on the company I run. I am pretty sure even if I told you both you'd miss by a significant amount.
I feel like this is kind of silly. Anyone could make a reasonable estimate of your salary based on your job, which is easily discoverable. At least enough to make a decision "should I rob this house." What are we even talking about here?
>> Yes. I don't want to increase my attractiveness regarding a house robbery, as I live well below my means in a developing neighborhood, amongst other reasons.
The entire point is that it's deeply screwed up for you to need to hide your wealth from your neighbors--or from some set of neighbors but not others--for fear of being robbed.
>> The entire point is that it's deeply screwed up for you to need to hide your wealth from your neighbors--or from some set of neighbors but not others--for fear of being robbed.
That's not the point of the commenter. Secondly, I reject your summary opinion that lacks evidence, but you are welcome to your own feelings.
> The entire point is that it's deeply screwed up for you to need to hide your wealth from your neighbors--or from some set of neighbors but not others--for fear of being robbed.
That's a normative statement, not a positive one. I don't consider it at all screwed up or intrinsically wrong to want to hide my income from my neighbors.
The positive statement is that transparent pricing is going to raise wages. There's little doubt about that. I dont know what magintude it could be, but it might end up being significant.
And if it is significant, it would probably be worth a lot more than the security cost. Its economically senseless to reject a better job position for the fear that someone might notice your increased income and rob you. For the vast majority of people that would be utterly ridicolous.
There is a big portion of people who declare their income publicly and nobody robs them based on this information. Robbers don't work that way, instead they try to find out and target who has unprotected stuff - unlocked home, locked home with owners on vacation (targeted by spotter), open car, car on unguarded parking with known vulnerability etc. etc.
There are tens of thousands very rich people in any country and nobody robs them specifically, despite only several percent of them using active guards or security. They are robbed with the same chance as anyone else.
Living below my means doesn't mean I live like my neighbors. My house is roughly the same as everyone around me. The contents of the house are not (and they are private), and yet I still live well below my means. I have a semi-nice TV, and more importantly, expensive computers like pretty much everyone on HN to do my job.
Their entire point is that publicizing their salary eliminates that privacy by telling people their income. It's a proxy measurement. Even if all they have in the house is a can of beans, publicly making more than their neighbors puts a target on them.
Because robbers tend to rob wealthy people? You get looted or shot more likely, because the robbers don't know this guy lives a humble life. They think this guy must have cash and big TV.
ah yes, the booming American kidnapping business. /s
Seriously though, it's not hard to find targets for this sort of thing by looking at census data and sales records for nice homes, yet it really never happens in the US. WHen was the last time you heard of some random lawyer, ceo, or banker getting kidnapped in the US?
I mean yes, if you can imagine a crime, surely it has happened in a nation of 350 million people. I think my point stands that it's an extremely rare crime, that's hard to commit, harder to cash in on, and harder still to get away with.
How about service providers like car repairmen and house contractors ripping people off? How about gold-diggers pursuing people on false romantic pretenses? How about just people gossiping about you out of envy?
Doesn't that already happen? And what evidence do you have to suggest that known income would make it worse on average? What about cases where a contractor would presume a client is wealthy and try to rip them off, but income data would show that they are actually not as well off as appearances suggest?
But I haven't really bothered to think through any of that, because my point was about kidnapping, which almost never happens in the US. Fewer than 100 people are kidnapped for ransom in the US every year.
I have no idea the mindset of these robbers who seem to be after your paycheck, but I do know that Norway has made salary information public [0], and they have a very low crime rate [1], in fact it's far lower than the U.S. crime rate.
Not really sure how I store my money is relevant; are you insinuating that my neighbors and potential regionally-available criminals can get my demand deposit and IRA balances at will?
EDIT: Ah, I see, you were making a snarky joke about them breaking into my house and stealing stuff. I do have nice things in my house, yes, not cash under my mattress. Just because I live below my means doesn't mean I don't have things I wouldn't want them to steal. Expensive laptops, computing resources for work, and, oh, I don't know, just not a fan of people breaking into my house in general regardless of what I have?
Your neighbors and regional criminals don't need to check your balances to determine if they should rob your house.
They have your address and can quickly get a name from that, and probably find bread crumbs of work history, or that you're a "founder of a sports science" company.
Without even knowing the dollar amount of what you make, there's plenty of info on you that already exists in order to determine if you're a good target.
It doesn't seem like that link controls for the area you live in. I don't think it addresses the concern of being conspicuously wealthier than your neighbors.
You'r right but it does say that if you live well below your means (more in poverty) your chances of being robbed increases. Living among poorer people than he can actually afford does increase the crime around him and probably subjects him to more crime as well (I didn't research this last correlation, just a practical guess. If you can provide research pointing otherwise please do, it will be an interesting point to know).
There is definitely an increased risk of lawsuits or robbery. However it has to be weigh in to the expectancy of a wage increase.
You have already decided to not pay for extra security by being in a poorer neihborhood, so we know safety is negotiable. What is that price to you? What if wage transparency increased your salary 10%?
>>You have already decided to not pay for extra security by being in a poorer neihborhood
I mean, that's not really true. I live in a poor(er) neighborhood but have cameras, an alarm, and home defense weapons. I still don't want my house being broken into.
>>What if wage transparency increased your salary 10%?
As my other comments (or my bio) will illustrate, these examples aren't too good. I am the founder of a small business who makes my wage public to my employees and offered to make their wages public to everyone, which was overwhelmingly voted down, even when I told them about the benefits.
People value their privacy in this country. It would be a mistake to assume that everyone is stupid for doing so.
I dont think they are "stupid" on this, just prejudiced. People dont intelectually know that there is a tax for this privacy.
Its like when people think that the tax incidence is always paid by the one that writes the check to the IRS, even though economists categorically say thats not how it is.
I am confident that if people had the choice at hand of a 10% increase or privacy, the majority would sell their privacy. We are used to sell it for a lot less than that! Even for a virtually free credit score.
Its an implementational challenge. The IRS can always just disclose everything, so the state can nuke this issue. A lighter approach might be making it opt-out in the future when you are employed: a lot of people would not care, and if you have 30% salary transparency, im sure everyone gets most of the benefit. And a private market approach might be for a site like glassdoor to only show real salary data when people send verified wage documentation.
That's a legit concern. Assuming it was possible, if only those in your company could see your salary (and you could see their salaries), would you be in favor of it? I'm also assuming that people in your company don't live in your neighborhood/wouldn't be burglary threats.
I am the founder of a company and I have told my employees my salary, so this isn't really a theoretical question I guess. So, yes. I have no problem disclosing it to those who matter. The reason behind me disclosing it was to show that I was not the highest paid person in the company per salary. I have asked my employees if they want their salaries shared, they have overwhelmingly voted against it, even when I bring up negotiation power.
If your coworkers know it, everybody knows it. Not only are there blabbermouths and gossips everywhere, a coworker may have an axe to grind against you and will surreptitiously leak the information.
We were talking about your friends and family knowing. If you're concerned that your friends and family might rob your home if they knew your salary, you've got larger problems than talking about it.
You're being quite biased towards people with normal family lives. Haven't had deadbeat parents or relatives demand your time or money for free simply because you make more money?
It's hilarious really. A home robber isn't going to download your salary history prior to robbing your house, chances are a lot of the money has gone into big heavy things that they aren't after anyway.
Thieve's are opportunists, they only question they ask is "how easily can I get into that house without getting caught?".
I'm gonna split the difference on that - casual thieves are attracted to stuff, organized thieves do some research. I know about a pattern of robberies of film crews (an industry I used to work in) in my area - these can be profitable because camera gear in particular is quite expensive so a small well-equipped film crew is standing on the street with $10-20k worth of poorly-secured gear, which they probably don't care about losing because it's insured. The modus operandi is consistent enough that I'm fairly sure the thieves are working from city-issued permits.
That would not be the result of publishing salary information. It might be a drop in the bucket for equality at best. And you're speaking to someone who consistently votes and donates to democratic socialist candidates and causes.
That happens now anyway. My branch of my extended family is fairly well-off relative to the other branches, and so my whole life I'm used to my parents being asked by their relatives for money/favors/etc. I'd guarantee they don't give out their actual salary information to their relatives, but it's obvious they're better off.
Knowing or not knowing the specific number doesn't change anything with regard to relatives/friends bothering you for money. People who know you see how you live, where you live, etc and know generally where things stand.
And who doesn't have at least one person like that in their life? Although it definitely wouldn't be limited to just jealous or spiteful family. Public salary information for all people would cause routine problems between friends and family across countless situations and issues over a lifetime. It's a recipe for social disaster.
Tax information, which is both salary and wealth information, is public in Norway since some years now, in electronic form. Media did a bunch of useless posts about celebrities for a while. But apart from that I cannot think of any bad outcomes, certainly not a lot of social disasters.
Norway - Scandinavia in general - has a distinct culture that isn't shared by any other region on earth.
Some things that are perfectly normal in the US or South Korea or Colombia or China or Japan or Zambia or Saudi Arabia or India are without a doubt not considered acceptable or comfortable in Norway. That's how cultures work. What you're describing is an extension of Scandinavia's culture.
The hours worked in Japan or South Korea are culturally acceptable. They would not be in eg France. One could spend an immense amount of time listing the thousands of famous cultural variances between major nations, in regards to things being acceptable in one place but not in another.
Money is also the root of a lot of strife, both within families and beyond, both for people who have money and those that don't. People should have a right to privacy in their financial affairs.
All Americans have a right to privacy. Their reason for privacy doesn't matter and doesn't need to make sense to you.
Compensation is an important conversation to make sure a job is a win/win. I think "What would you like to be paid?" is the most relevant question anyway.
> All Americans have a right to privacy. Their reason for privacy doesn't matter and doesn't need to make sense to you.
Seeing how the right to privacy is not specifically enshrined, I would argue that the reasons for keeping some things private is very much at the heart of the matter. For instance, why does the government not think the benefits of transparency outweigh the disadvantages when it comes to individual reported income, versus say, divorce records (most of which will include income, among many many more private facts said in court).
It's not specifically enshrined because it doesn't need to be. It's implied under the bill of rights: "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ... nor deny any person the equal protection of the laws," (Amendment 14 Section 1).
Again, then it is a worthwhile argument to ask why certain things are enshrined when others are not, if it is indeed possible to base a legal system upon what reasonable minds agree is "implied". For example, most people today would agree that not enslaving humans is implied under the equal protection clause., and yet, we have a specific amendment that had to be ratified, stating "No person can hold another as a slave..."
Like most implied rights, the right to privacy is weak specifically because it is not enshrined. Even the explicitly stated rights have limits, particularly when they butt into the other explicitly stated rights.
When the implied "right to privacy" butts into the 1st Amendment rights of freedom of expression and a free press, on which side do you think the courts will err on, on a consistent basis?
But salaries are not really private. The company has salaries. The state often makes their salaries public.
The IRS has that information. Credit agencies do, etc.
The state has gained an absolute right to know your wage, which one could argue that abolishes the private nature of that information, much like your gender, or your face.
The price of your house is public, the value of your car is public, and most people can roughly guess what your salary is based on your job title, geography and experience level.
It should be private information so long as it's not considerably out of the ordinary (that could easily be a listing requirement established by an exchange). Just as in the case of eg acquisitions, which often will be or must be reported in specific financial terms if they're above a certain size.
If an programmer makes $100,000 in a company where programmers regularly earn that, it should not be public information. If the programmer is earning $2 million, it may be material to the shareholders to know that depending on the size of the company. If the company is Google and the programmer is regarded as extraordinary for some reason, $2 million (vs Google's overall financial picture) isn't a huge sum. If the entire sales of the company are $30 million, it blatantly would be material.
As a shareholder of Google, you do not have access to every individual $100,000 expense they have across a given year (much less an explanation of exactly how it was spent, why it was spent, when it was spent).
The most obvious argument against it, is that people aren't always rational (and are regularly irrational about things like money). I'd argue they frequently aren't able to accurately assess their own financial value (in either direction). It opens a pandora's box within corporations about why X person is worth $Z, while Joe or Jane thinks they should obviously be paid more vs X person. It's not easy to maintain harmony within organizations, that would make it far worse.
What would be the value gained from making all individual employee salaries public (within a public corporation)? It would have to be immense to offset the friction it would cause.
>> I do not want my family and friends to know how much I make.
> But have you thought about why you feel this way?
Not every family is healthy. Some become _decidedly_ unhealthy as soon as money comes into play, and having precise figures available can be really destructive.
It might work better in more egalitarian societies, where the difference in pay is less to begin with (eg Scandinavia). But that's not a road the US (and many other places) is willing to take.
>and having precise figures available can be really destructive.
How? It doesn't change anything with regard to this specific concern about family. They already have an idea about how you live and how much you have from knowing you. They might not have a specific dollar amount, but they'll have a good idea.
A bit of ambiguity about certain things is an important lubricant for almost all non-romantic relationships. My family has a good idea of my salary (as pointed out elsewhere: they can see my house and my car) but I keep the specific number to myself. They're left with just a vague notion rather than anything they could do math with. It's much the same as how they only have a vague notion about what I do in the bathroom. They can use their imagination if they'd like and infer it from various things. But I shut the door so the obvious isn't rendered so plain to see as to become a topic of awkward (and sometimes destructive) conversation.
People aren't rational. "Works a high paying job" feels different from "makes $120000 when even the most highly paid people in my long forgotten rural town make only $35000", and so the response will be different.
That said, I don't think it should be necessary to defend privacy. The idea proposed up-thread is to publish all income data on everybody. Not merely to encourage people to share their income data so they can reduce the information differential with employers, or some central opt-in system to make it easier to compare the numbers. It's about fully _enforced_ transparency.
A proposal for such forced loss of agency needs explanation and must be defensible against scrutiny, not the request to leave people alone just like they're used to.
It's called "privacy". You might want transparency "for the greater good" - I just want to be left alone. I'm not in public position, and I prefer not to disclose information about myself I don't have to disclose, thank you very much.
As my siblings have said, arbitrary people knowing how much money someone has makes higher income and net worth people targets, not to mention unfairly weakens their ability to negotiate practically anything of substantial value.
There are practical considerations beyond weird cultural mores.
One possibility is that extended family may feel that you make more money than a person could possibly need, and ought to share it with them. Easier to avoid this tension if you don’t let on how well you’re doing.
Well, a hard-figure is not really required to cause jealousy and tension. Simply not struggling like the other family member is a signal. Or perhaps a nicer car, latest gadgets/tech, etc. Unless you never enjoy your wealth, people will notice it.
That's more a cause of the culture than the result of it, though. If all salaries were made public tomorrow, yeah, there's going to be the bit of occasional strife, but more than there is now over the long term? Hard to say.
I am very well compensated for bringing a lot of value to my company. The exact details are private between the company, me/my family, and the IRS.
It's not going to benefit me one bit to have my financial arrangements made public. I'm more than happy with the deal I've struck; the company's leverage is not reduced by 3rd parties knowing the numbers.
The more open attitude you described seems to be on an upward trend in the generations born in the ’80s and beyond, but by and large we Americans do not talk money except with the closest family and of course one’s professionals. Even asking how much someone paid for a big-ticket purchase such as a house, car, horse, land, etc. is considered rude. I wouldn’t ask about something as small as a TV. Even verbalizing that someone is better off or little comments like “no big deal because they’re rich” is awkward for at least a couple of reasons: it leaves the “complimented” person feeling a little embarrassed and then also wondering why the other person is thinking about someone else’s finances.
My parents don’t know my income. My siblings don’t. I know a good bit about my mother-in-law’s income and net worth, but it’s because she is single and has asked for specific financial advice. My parents have recently been going through estate planning paperwork, and I suspect we may have discussions about finances in the next few years.
There are of course exceptions. Within niche hobbies, people may be a little more open after they know each other well about how much goods and services cost, but still not about income. A n00b walking up asking those sorts of questions may still get pushback — depends on how he asked.
I’m on the senior management team for a small technology company, but even though we can all see everything, we don’t discuss each other’s compensation directly and sort of pretend not to know.
The stereotype is definitely incorrect. Americans find it incredibly uncomfortable to talk salary. It's considered pretty rude to ask, if someone's going to, it's usually preceded with an apology or a 'if you don't mind me asking'.
No, that's very wrong. Talking about salary or really money in general is rude and kind of unseemly. You generally would never ask someone how much they make in social situations, and only assholes would brag about their salary to others.
It's no good to share your salary. My reasoning goes like this. Information is better used by those in power. If I a share my salary data with other workers, we will avoid some to be screwed. But the employers will be able to screw us all in slight, imperceptible ways.
I can see an argument for forcing public companies to post anonymized data about salaries, perhaps including gender, race and age. Thus ensuring employees or advocates can understand if they are being treated fairly. But, My salary is very private. Exposing it means I have less leverage in some negotiations. Not just wage, but sticking with that example, what if employers created a cabal that said "hey, we're not going to give anyone more than a 10% raise for jumping ship to ensure that theres still some incentive, but less, for 'disloyalty.'" This isn't exactly speculation either, there have been numerous reports of companies creating back door policies not to hire away from each other, which ultimately only hurts the employee.
You make it sound as if Americans were more open about salaries as the rest of the world. My impressions up to now were opposite - Americans super open and others not much.
Definitely not what I see. Talking about salary among Americans is moderately taboo; among the Russians I know, it's a perfectly natural subject of conversation. It always feels weird to me because I mostly grew up in the US, but I definitely think the Russian approach is better: you get a real idea of what different companies and specialities can pay, and you'll know if people are trying to underpay you.
It's generally considered pretty rude to ask about income in America. My wife knows how much I make, of course. I told my parents what the pay was when I got my first career-job almost 10 years ago.
I've got vague impressions about some family members, friends, and coworkers, but nothing solid (unless I wanted to look up the pay scales for the few with government jobs, I guess). I could probably get accurate answers from close friends if I "needed" to, but it would be an uncomfortable conversation.
Scandinavian, apparently. Someone earlier in the thread mentioned that tax filings in Norway are public information, and that they include salary and wealth information.
Maybe American ideas about money work, given that we're the wealthiest[0] and most innovative people in the world. It seems that, barring good evidence to the contrary, the presumption should be in favor of how things are done in America.
[0] Among countries of substantial size. Countries that can have their entire economy based around a few niches aren't useful comparisons.
As a counterpoint, if it wasn't for all the friendly people on HackerNews and similar places talking about how big their salaries are, I would still be stuck in Eastern Europe happy to write code for $7/hour.
The biggest capitalist victory has been convincing people that sharing salary information is impolite.
It benefits "the ruling class" in several ways. First it prevents people from realizing they're underpaid and encouraging each other to get better rates. Second it encourages people to spend money on luxury and luxury-ish goods as a way to signal their welloffness to each other.
Because at the end of the day, everyone is still curious about this info and almost everyone likes to feel like they're even just a little better off than those around them. It soothes the ego.
It benefits the "ruling class" because it benefits people who know how to negotiate and use information asymmetry, and those people tend to wind up in the "ruling class".
They don’t need to ask you anymore. You self-reported it to a credit agency and friends, family, potential employers can get that plus other financial information from these agencies.
Where are you seeing this? There is zero income information on any of my credit reports. In addition, if it was so easy to obtain how come my credit card bank still constantly begs me to update my income information?
Basically if this doesn't already exist I could start a business tomorrow recommending salary offers to employers based on position and applicant.
Possible sources of salary info include
Job sites where people review and report on salary at their employer, even if anonymous its super likely that figuring out exactly who you are could be less than rocket science.
Credit reporting agencies.
Bullshit surveys where people answer questions like how much money you make.
Really smart educated guesses based on analyses of known good data from your own and similar employers/employees.
Big employers. As long as the data isn't directly shared with their fellow companies and only in fact with me they stand to benefit from me knowing how much they and their competitor pay so I can recommend the lowest salary an employee is likely to accept so they can minimize cost.
In short your employer doesn't know how much you make but I do and recommend based on that info. Further I can even perpetuate racism and sexism! If minorities and women are currently paid less I can let you know to offer less and still get applicants. If I train a computer to make that determination it can even decide such without me explicitly telling it to and we can blame the algorithm instead of me!
Go technology and go capitalism. High five!
This is of course entirely hypothetical but sufficiently trivial that I find it hard to imagine people not doing it.
> The bill also would prohibit an employer from seeking salary history information about an applicant for employment and would require an employer, upon reasonable request, to provide the pay scale for a position to an applicant for employment.
They're not allowed to try to find out from someone else, either.
They don't have to find out they just have to employ someone who can do so because they aren't beholden to california. You contract out to me wanting only to know how much you should offer. I give you a number. You offer your applicant that number.
I'm not a lawyer but that doesn't seem to be illegal or even a loophole its out of scope.
The info is supplemental to what is considered to be a credit report, and thus does not have to appear on your pulled credit reports.
Similar to how your FICO score is not part of your credit report; it's a separate paid service that the credit unions pay for so they can charge their own customers.
That data has been breached but it hasn't (and likely won't considering it was most likely a nation-state actor who was responsible) be released to the public. Even if it were it takes some sophistication to find the torrent, download it, import it into a database, and query that database. There's nothing easily accessible about it.
They also know how much credit has been extended to you. Credit card companies and mortgage lenders know your income when making a decision to lend. You can probably work backwards from that info to salary within a +/- 20%.
Certain visas such as the E3 publicly disclose what the salary is for a given position. Workers in the federal government also have a public record of their salary.
We could still do a better job of sharing this kind of information in an anonymized way. It definitely gets tough when it's a small organization, but simply knowing what the salaries are for every employee in a department could make a huge difference.
Just thinking, but could you pool the anonymized salaries of all small orgs together? For instance what if all YC start-ups pooled salary info together under normalized job titles? Then they wouldn't be able to pay under market, but the data could be made public without ruining anyone.
I believe that's part of the reason it's not really possible to get numbers like 5 times the average salary in Norway, while it definitely is as a software engineer in the US.
What you pay in taxes is public (anyone can look it up), and it's normally easy to calculate taxable income from that. (Not always, there could be various events that throws the calculation off).
Although in recent years, all lookups are logged and displayed to the other party, which has a chilling effect. I would like the old system back.
You bring up a very good point, but I'm not sure I see an inconsistency here,
Tax records are records owned and controlled by the government. It's information that has already been collected, and is accessible by some institutions, but not others, creating an imbalance in information.
I want government to be transparent, and I generally support initiatives to make information public. But I'm not sure I like the idea of the government or some other big brother type knowing who is accessing what information. I say that as a general principle, with notable exceptions.
Yes, and excellence is not rewarded in such societies.
Edit: Look at how pay works in countries where such information is public (i.e. Scandinavia). My understanding is that within a given line of work, everyone makes just about the same amount, adjusted for seniority, regardless of performance.
That's a bit different than "excellence not being rewarded" isn't it? Salaries in general seem to be very non-meritocratic, and there are other ways of compensating exceptional people that don't wind up in the check.
This happens also in germany and spain and europe in general.
Its just america that pays so damn much for developers, because of the competing capital. Price transparency is definitely not harming employees, and its also not harming companies in the long run.
And doctors and lawyers, and everyone else on average too.
And while average pay is higher in America than in any other large (i.e. necessarily general purpose) economy, I'm specifically pointing out that performance/merit reward is greater in America.
I'll disregard the use of merit, but how do you measure performance to make this claim?
Im sure there are less performant lawyers in america that have a higher pay than performant lawyers in europe. AFAIK high salaries in the U.S. dont come at the expense of low salaries of the low performing.
Doctors have constrained supply. Lawyers have a sort of costrained supply (your degree will determine your employment). U.S. has a peculiar law system and company sizes that allow payouts not possible in other countries which affect pay(corporate lawyers make the most money).
But again, almost surely, this is not due to information asymmetry in favor of the employer. Public wage data would almost unequivocally increase wages. The question would be how much.
Greenspan talks about how in a desire to punish high salary CEO's, they forced their salaries to be public, and they ended up exploding up because of it.
I think people would find disparate outcomes among gender/race/etc. and claim discrimination. This will lead to more uniformity as employers try to avoid legal and political liability, however unfounded the claims of discrimination are. The not-so-subtle point that unequal outcomes don't mean discrimination seems to be totally lost in political discourse.
You're right that doctors and lawyers are not great examples for the reasons you state.
If everyone knows what everyone makes, it becomes much harder to give an excellent employee more money. Everyone thinks they deserve a raise, so now a manager has to confront the rest of the team when he gives one person a raise. Envy is a very powerful force.
Performance for this purpose doesn't need to be measured in OneTrueWay, the market provides a better solution: at what point your employer is willing to see you walk to another job instead of paying you more. (They may have their own formal performance ranking system, but if it's not very good they'll lose the battle for talent.) This has the side effect that assertive people are at an advantage, but I don't think that's a bad thing.
As for CEOs, that's a very interesting point. My intuition is that it's a totally different kind of market. The CEO is the boss, not one among many equals. And you can't deny that the information has stirred up animosity and resentment toward the CEO class, however ill- or well-founded that sentiment is.
> If everyone knows what everyone makes, it becomes much harder to give an excellent employee more money. Everyone thinks they deserve a raise, so now a manager has to confront the rest of the team when he gives one person a raise. Envy is a very powerful force.
I think economic modeling moves towards the opposite direction. First, people assume that other people make and still have that envy, and in that assumption they make mistakes. But there are severely underpaid people that would immediately get a better deal.
There are other interesting externality is that knowing what people make would allow people to jump jobs a lot clearer. One of my crusades in public opinion in argentina is that the salaries of college graduates is absolutely unknown, making it impossible to gauge how valuable each college degree is worth. Hence, lots of people commit to dead-end careers. If it were known how much the graduates made, less people would go there, and more people would go to the paying ones.
Same with jobs: knowing other company pays substantially more will move you, increasing the salary of the low paying companies and lowering the salary of the high paying companies.
In a very naive way, the lack of information prevents market efficiency, because if the information where there, people would do more and different trades. And this is algo good for companies in the long run, because they would more effectively attract the appropriate talent.
Think of it as any other market: housing for example. Is housing clearer or worse by having house sale prices open?
This doesn't happen in practice though. 99% of adults realize that different performance leads to difference in salary. 99% of adults can understand why their coworker gets paid more than them.
The "market solution" only awards to the best negotiators.
99% of adults? Tell that the "70 cents on the dollar" people. Half of America is walking around believing that women get paid 70 cents on the dollar for equal work, when that is not the case at all. The data is that the average pay of all women is 70% of the average pay of all men, which doesn't even try to account for the nature of the work, and is obviously highly confounded by career choice.
I think public wage data is more likely to reduce that kind of misconception than accelerate it.
Personally I think I've gone a bit deeper in this topic, because I also think that if taxes were public, people with the same job but different tax situation will have a different bargaining position, meaning salaries will be affected by the actual tax rates people pay.
I'm also interested in the visible effects of wealth and income regarding wages: do people with some money in the bank earn more money in general? (would it thus mean that the best investment is to get some cash first ?) etc.
For the more emotional argument, wouldn't public wages also prevent people with lower incomes giving money to higher incomes? Something that happens often is many human relationships where wealth can be hidden? Wouldn't you tip higher to the waitress you know is gaining well below what you think she would, and wouldn you demand more of your boss if you knew exactly how much more they made?
I'm not going to say its strictly better for everyone to have the information public, but I can rarely fathom believing that hiding information leads to better decisions. And isn't that what its all about. At this moment all these objections are a sort of growing pain, not objections for the long term.
I'd laugh my ass off if the CEO/upper management of any company in the US had to actually report to their employees how much they made, and not just through salary. There would be an uprising.
Compensation packages for CEOs and upper management for public companies are, in fact, public in formation (in most cases, there are some exceptions). This sort of thing is routinely reported on by the press. This has been true for a long time.
It's the Lake Wobegon effect. No company wants to say their CEO is below the mean, and pay is a signal of CEO quality, so every company is always trying to pay above the mean, and so the mean inexorably rises and rises.
Ah yes, of course, Norway is a rational nation and others are not. For whatever value of "rational" there is. Maybe you mean Norway exceptionally tightening immigration rules after the Swedish terror attacks? Or is it just public reporting of salary you like so much?
I like tightening immigration too. I wasn't saying that the US or other western nation wasn't rational. I was just saying that other countries that have their shit together as well make the exact opposite decision about salary transparency(or more correctly tax transparency).
First of all, if you mean public as in "the whole world can know", I can't imagine anyone being comfortable with that. Advertisers, family members, people who don't like you, etc... surely you see the problem here.
If by public you mean "only within the company", even this approach will create resentment and hundreds of hours wasted in discussions and negotiations instead of doing productive work. People will constantly argue that they should be paid as much as "X", and then "X" will complain that she needs to be paid as much as "Y", etc...
As someone running a large organization, this is also a logistical nightmare since I usually have very good reasons to compensate X more than Y even if Y might think they should be paid the same amount.
Back to the topic, I've never cared what someone was paid at a previous employer, mainly because they can lie and there's no way to know. Besides, even as a hiring manager, I really think it's none of my business how much that previous employer valued this person.
What matters is here and now. I just ask people how much they want then I counter with what we're comfortable paying, and then we negotiate.
The only thing from past employers that matter is what the person used to do there.
> As someone running a large organization, this is also a logistical nightmare since I usually have very good reasons to compensate X more than Y even if Y might think they should be paid the same amount.
That's the key. I want to know what reasons. It is the best possible feedback for me. If you want to earn X more, you need to do this and that like this colleague does.
It will force management to have better salary policies. I have seen people getting offered almost doubling their salaries when they say that they are leaving. Just because they were badly underpaid to begin with.
Openness forces for better justifications of your actions.
> Besides, even as a hiring manager, I really think it's none of my business how much that previous employer valued this person. What matters is here and now. I just ask people how much they want then I counter with what we're comfortable paying, and then we negotiate.
That's a really good approach. And looks like you are someone that will easily be able to justify the salaries of your hires. But there is a lot of managers that will not, and they will need to get better at their jobs if salaries where open.
> It will force management to have better salary policies.
Totally agreed. Quite often the reason X gets paid more than Y is that X demanded the money and had the social power to get away with it.
This is, of course, a really bad idea. If one believes in salary as any sort of incentive for specific behavior, then it encourages people being aggressive and demanding. It also encourages people to create situations where they are necessary, irreplaceable, and noticed due to regular heroics. While discouraging people from being polite, unassuming, dedicated team players who work hard to share knowledge, improve truck factor, and invest in long-term sustainability.
See the little role play I offered in my other answer.
It's not always the best possible feedback for you.
First, because you might think the feedback is not justified. Your manager will tell you that other person is better than you according to some metric and you are very likely to disagree. And then what? Anguish, stress on your end. Resentment of your manager, your peers, your job. You'll start losing sleep over this and you'll probably quit because you feel you're not being appreciated.
But assuming the feedback is warranted and you are mature enough to take it as a positive criticism that you're going to work on. You will then probably expect to get that raise that evens out your salary with that other person, but what if you never do? Again anguish, resentment, etc...
There's really hardly any chance anything positive comes out of this kind of transparency.
> First, because you might think the feedback is not justified.
That is a clear signal that there is a misalignment between my expectations and company expectations. It is important to clarify the point. And to see how it can be resolved so I can offer to the company what it's expected from me.
> Your manager will tell you that other person is better than you according to some metric and you are very likely to disagree.
Maybe it is because "Sweden". But I have had really interesting discussions with my direct reports about this topic when I was a manager. And it was my job to explain what they could improve and to do it in a way that they will understand. You are right that I didn't always manage at the first attempt. But, usually, I was at fault for not giving clear enough metrics.
That's why transparency can improve a company so much. It forces management to be more data-driven and to have better metrics. When a company doesn't know how to set salaries they need to improve.
> But assuming the feedback is warranted and you are mature enough to take it as a positive criticism that you're going to work on.
Do you hire people knowing that they are not able to react positively to feedback? That's a mistake. A non-blaming feedback culture will help the company and employees to improve drastically their skills and output.
> You will then probably expect to get that raise that evens out your salary with that other person, but what if you never do? Again anguish, resentment, etc...
Of course, I will expect to get the same salary if I improve to the point that I'm seen as someone as good as my colleague. Isn't that fair? Isn't that the correct point where the company pays for what it gets, and I get paid for my productivity? What is the reason to not get a salary accordingly to my seniority, expertise and work output?
> There's really hardly any chance anything positive comes out of this kind of transparency.
If the company wants to underpay people and lie to get away with it. It may be seen bad by the company. But it will still be a good thing, because it will force it to improve.
>What is the reason to not get a salary accordingly to my seniority, expertise and work output?
I've said this many times and will say it again, most people's salaries are more closely aligned with their leverage than their output. Now leverage can be value too, so it's a complicated picture to unpack and I won't get into it too much.
People who are benefitting more so from leverage (which tends to be the people with the best salaries) will HATE this move. Salary transparency would take away their leverage and they would have to focus more on their output to justify their high salaries.
Scandinavia broadly has a culture that isn't replicated anywhere else on earth. There's a strong argument to be had that such very long established cultures cannot easily be shared or adopted, that they build up over hundreds or thousands of years from thousands of impossible to duplicate events and contributions.
There are various traits that Scandinavian people also take with them in regards to culture. For example, second and third generation Scandinavian people in the US have been known to do particularly well financially, beyond what the typical person in either America or Scandinavia does.
It's not unique to Scandinavia of course. Japan as another example has their own highly distinct, long established culture that leads them to behave in numerous unique ways vs other developed nations.
Simply put, due to its culture Norway may be entirely comfortable with one of its norms, while few other nations will be. People aren't just people, so to speak, they're products of the cultures they grow up in; the learned and preferred things acquired in that process, tend to be extremely difficult to alter, even under conscious effort.
"As someone running a large organization, this is also a logistical nightmare since I usually have very good reasons to compensate X more than Y even if Y might think they should be paid the same amount."
So what stops you from sharing this 'hidden' metric with Y? If there was some weasel reason X would have never recieved package in the first place if everything was public when he got his package.
Now, the reason X got his comp is therefore sane and you can just explain to Y what he needs to accomplish to reach X:s level.
I wish everything worked like this. The reason it would be insane is it would be massively filled with x got a raise because he hangs out with y after work, y slept with so and so, w has a penis, z has big boobs, g was hired by h who sucks at negotiating, b completely oversold himself but wasn't bad enough at life to actually fire.
Good. Get those worms on the floor so you can stomp them out.
If the "you" in this situation never hears that they need to work on their code quality or their attitude, then they'll never know what needs to improve.
As a manager, it's my job to open those cans of worms. It's also my job to be continually helping people improve, so that issues like this never get to the "can of worms" stage.
I think there are plenty of ways to tell person A that they should learn from person B without pitting them against one another.
Normally I talk about this in terms of rubrics for roles and levels. E.g., it's not about Amy versus Betty; it's about how Amy can get from SWE 1 to SWE 2. In the course of that discussion I am totally willing to say, "Pay more attention to the code Betty submits for a code review. She's a solid SWE 2 and you could learn from the way she does X, Y, and Z."
Actually in this case it’s the buyers of labor (employers) that have all the market power. Denything them this additional information gives the producers of labor an edge through asymmetric information, theoretically. In practice, I don’t buy it. Sophisticated entities with lots of resources (aka employers) will always find a way to game any situation to their benefit. They could simply use this as a reason to pay everyone less.
I’m all for empowering employees but this doesn’t seem like quite an improvement.
It isn't just an information problem, it is a leverage problem. Suppose a company has 100 employees; if an employee leaves, they are down 1/100 of their productivity while they find a replacement. If an employee if fired, they are down somewhere between 50% and 100% of their income, depending on family status.
A single job is simply more vital to an employee than it is to a company, so the company has the leverage.
Also, when an employee leaves a company, there's usually a line of 100 others out the door who would love to have the job. The reverse isn't as often true--that there's a line of 100 employers fighting to pick up that employee.
Salary information, with names and job titles, is public for most (all?) state employees. You can, for instance, look up the salaries of Berkeley professors.
Exactly this—we've essentially already done parent's suggestion for public employees, and nothing negative has come of it.
It's amazing how many of the comments here are making hyperbolic suggestions about all the terrible things that would happen if salary data were public -- considering the data, these comments are not only misguided, but experimentally proven to be incorrect.
What do you mean "nothing negative" has come of it? I agree that the scenarios of robbers targeting folks based on an income database are far-fetched, but I interpret "negative" to include more subtle, systemic impacts, such as furthering the bias against haves/have-nots, or at least making it easier to shame/doxx people.
It's also important to note that public employee salaries are within a specific domain with specific features. Among the most important: public agencies already have to publish pay schedules, so it's always been possible to guesstimate what someone makes given their job title. And there's the moral argument that citizens have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent.
Mostly skills like the power of being able to work for under market wages for headhunting firms that make campaign contributions or who provide employees for firms that make campaign contributions.
>>> This law won't do much, if anything, to change the basic dynamic. For what it's worth, I work for a public institution and my salary, and the salary of all my coworkers, is public. The sky hasn't fallen.
Are you a schoolteacher? There is a widespread public backlash against the salaries of schoolteachers, which are perceived to be too high. This has dramatically affected the ability to attract good people.
I think that how public perception affects public sector salaries varies from one job to another. The public loves the salary that we pay to our state's college football coach.
Or a slight variant. Base salary grids, and confidential discretionary compensation.
Whatever gets negotiated on hiring in term of variable comp rolls off relatively quickly and then it's up to individual performance. Salary grids remove any curiosity, jealousy and other distractions on that topic for employees. It also avoids a negotiation on hiring, or leaving too much discretion to the employee making the hiring (and possible discrimination).
Lets you still reward performance while eliminating discrimination on hiring.
Visa salaries and job titles already are public, but anonymized. It's also not too hard to connect the dots when you've only got one Application Security Cloud Architect because you had to make up a position specific enough to disqualify domestic applicants.
California has something similar for “state employees” which include university professors and high school teachers among others. It’s called Transparent California.
All salaries for everyone should be public. Come up with whatever excuse you want, and it can be countered. And I am a socialist, not a libertarian. The more data that comes to light, the more we will have equality for equal work.
For H1B workers years of education and education is also provided. In most cases it's enough information for de-anonymization.
On the whole you may be right about making salaries public. Norway's made tax return public [1] across the board and the sky hasn't fallen in. Though to be fair in the Norwegian model you find out who has been looking at your salary info.
The counter-argument is that a system like that could allow criminals to target their victims more easily. Kidnappers could steal an SSN or other identifier to scope out victims (without a trail leading back to themselves). I also saw a scary article on HN a week ago about the guardianship industry in FL and how it targets seniors with assets to drain.
Salaries in US Congress are also public and it's not a big deal. A lot of people don't like the idea of public salaries but I am pretty sure it would be to the benefit of the employee.
Salary negotiation as an accountant should be pretty since you know exactly how much people make.
The main reason for public salaries for gov employees/law makers/etc. is that they are payed through taxes, employees of other companies (unless they do contract work for gov most of the time) are not.
Probably. My point was that a) it's not a big deal, nobody really cares and b) that public salaries are great for employees who want to negotiate. Confidential salaries are mainly a tool for employers to keep employees in the dark.
That is correct, no names, here is a sample [1]. Unless the specific individual you are querying about gives up their H1B case ID number, there is no way to be certain (unless you luck out and triangulate with physical address information, for example).
This is how you empower the envious to bring everyone down to their level of mediocrity. The vitriol directed at the successful is already damaging us, why should we further encourage it?
>I work for a public institution and my salary, and the salary of all my coworkers, is public.
This disclosure is a measure put in place to audit some of the spending of the government. Because citizens are compelled through threat of violence or denial of liberty to pay tax it's pretty reasonable for citizens to have access to what their tax money is being used for.
This is not going to be nearly as helpful as people think, as long as it's still legal for employers to verify salary once it's been revealed.
People who know or suspect that their salary is above the average applicant's will volunteer it to the prospective employer. Other people will choose not to disclose.
We will reach an equilibrium where non-disclosure will be an honest signal of lower current salary.
The main difference from the current state is that employers won't know the exactly salary of the lower non-disclosing applicants -- this helps people at the absolutely bottom of the 'non-disclosure' range, but hurts those who are just below the average salary. It should have no strong effect on people with above-average salaries who choose to disclose.
Of course, if employers aren't allowed to verify voluntarily disclosed salary, then many people will just lie.
Oh, I didn’t know they verified it. I’ve never disclosed, but if I was pressed I figured I’d lie because it’s none of their business anyway. I can’t see why your current employer would verify that, though. Plus it’s a dead giveaway that you’re looking to leave... this just seems sort of crazy to me.
They can't really verify, because many have large non-salary compensation structures, comprising somewhere from 10% to 1000% (or even much more) of their base salary.
Repeat after me: "Well, taking into account my current schedule for divestiture and estimated market positions I would need X to match my total compensation package."
Really wish this would extend to apartment rent applications. I'm fine with a credit check, but they don't need to know how high they can increase my rent before I'll need to move.
edit
I am referring to my experience renting apartments from Property Management run communities. (Think Essex or Prometheus) Rent increases every year with them.
Yeah, a PM company around here (Olympia, WA) had two separate websites, one targeted at renters, one at landlords.
Nothing was mentioned on the renter site, and verbal promises (worth the paper they're written on, etc., etc.) made to renters said that they "heavily discouraged arbitrary rent increases as they felt properties were priced fairly in consultation with the owner"...
Meanwhile on the owner / landlord site: "We ensure you get the maximum return on your investment, including yearly rental increases of the maximum allowed by law or as close to it as possible".
Awkward moment for the PM showing me a place when I showed her that website and asked her to reconcile the two positions.
They really do that in America? I rented a lot of apartments in my country and was never asked about my income, or had a credit check. The usual way of avoiding not paying renters is requiring first rent plus guarantee deposit (usually equal to the one month rent) in advance. No further proofs of financial credibility required.
There's strong landlord-tenant laws in most parts of the United States that make renting to a stranger a risky venture. You can't just show up and move all their stuff to the curb and change the locks if your tenant stops paying rent - you have to go through a court process which can take a while. Landlords are looking for tenants who are likely to pay rent, it makes sense they want to rent to people who actually have the means to pay rent. We are in the age of Big Data where background information is widely available for a small fee, it makes sense they want to get as much information as possible on prospective tenants.
I've never rented where I wasn't required to pay first month's rent and a security deposit as well.
Though it would have to be an insanely hot market for this practice to work - vacancy is extremely expensive for a landlord and the margins on being a landlord are fairly low (despite what the guy giving the "I'll teach you to be rich" presentation at the Holiday Inn will tell you). In fact, I've heard of landlords keeping rents to long term tenants a bit under market price just to keep them, I rented for six years without a single rent increase.
The money in renting is if you own a gazillion apartments and can easily weather losses in one or two properties. It's hard to see the appeal of being a small-time landlord.
I've never rented an apartment in the US where they didn't do a credit check. Some places want a pay stub or some other proof of financial means. In a lot of parts of the US it can take several months to evict someone.
How fast can a non-paying renter be legally removed from the property in your country? In the US, someone with no legal skills can drag it out for 6-18 months by asserting various nonsense.
Why is the comment downvoted? It's not wrong. Sure, it's not common but it can and does happen. People who work the system are called "serial evictees."
>Depending on the vigilance of the landlord, a seasoned serial evictee like Getzow can get away with a minimum of 45 days and sometimes up to a year of free rent. The actual number of serial evictees operating in San Francisco is difficult to track, but some attorneys who specialize in representing landlords estimate there are between 20 and 100.
Thanks. The people in the unit adjacent to one of my dear friends are serial evictees. At this point, they haven’t paid rent in 8 months, and the landlord is totally on it, working to get them out legally.
That's ridiculous. Landlords need to know that you're financially able to cover your rent. Typically, that's a rent of up to 1/3 of your monthly gross. You can generally also show a landlord that you have a significant amount in liquid assets in lieu of providing your salary information.
Believe the parent is referring to year over year increases, which are quite common in hot markets. A lot of landlords will jack up rents when it comes time to renew your lease, especially if they know there is room to squeeze you.
The first contract term is. The implication is by knowing your salary they can do a much better job guessing how high they can raise your rent the next year (or whatever) without you leaving.
At apartments organized by property management companies, the rent typically goes up every year. By providing your income, you give them a maximum they can easily creep the rent towards.
You can always write a salary lower than what you make..
Regardless, it's rarely in your own interest to conceal it unless you have privacy concerns.
1. Landlords are going to prefer candidates with higher salaries.
2. It's really unclear to me that landlords use your salary to determine rent increases. e.g. My rent has always been well under what could be covered by my salary and I'd move long before it reaches that point.
> You can always write a salary lower than what you make..
It's... optimistic... that you think they're going to take you at face value when you do so, rather than requiring employment / income verification.
And in most cases, "the information on this application is true to the best of my knowledge and I understand that my application may be rejected if I provide false information"...
Do you have any reason to think they do this? With "this" meaning "give higher rent hikes to tenants with high incomes than they otherwise would've." It doesn't sound remotely plausible to me.
I guarantee it. Some PM companies I'd rate lower than debt collection agencies on the ethics scale. See my sibling comment, promising owners they'd find ways to apply the maximum possible rent increases.
"It sounds like something those jerks would do" is the absolute least persuasive reason you could've given.
Here's why I think it's implausbile:
* It's hard for me to believe this practice would be profitable. The revenue would be pretty small (since it only applies to lease renewals, not the initial lease at the advertised price), and it would presumably increase turnover, which is one of a landlord's biggest costs.
* If this is common practice, why is it not common knowledge? It would be clickbait gold, and any two tenants in a big building full of identical units could compare notes and put two and two together, to say nothing of the hundreds or thousands of office workes in property management companies that would have to be aware of it. I looked around for about two minutes and didn't find any articles denouncing it, so it seems likely to be either false or the subject of a remarkably effective cover-up.
There is a simple solution to the salary problem... Make salaries public. “You can’t make private firms publish salary data,” you may say. True, but local, state, and the federal government can say that any business that does business with them must publish all salaries. The only way to make wages fair is to expose them to the light of day.
I suspect that any medium-large company would simply spin off a tiny firm that solely works with the government.
They could then contract out as much as possible, including some of the development, back to the parent company.
The net effect would be that you have a handful of project manager salaries in the public eye at the cost of an additional step in the procurement process.
Salaries are public in Finland. Fines are based on your salary, which is how it should be. Making a lot of money affords you many things. Getting out of feeling the pain of wrongdoing should not be one of them. Just one of the many benefits of public salary data.
I don't think this is a right way to go about trying to narrow the gender wage gap.
Half of the reason we have one (a wage gap) is because it's taboo in America to reveal how much you get paid with your co-workers. It makes no sense to me why that is the case, all it does it allow the company to screw you over more.
The solutions should be to have each company come up with there own publicly available pay scale that says you make this much and every year it will go up by X as you gain experience. AKA how to government does things, I'm not saying it's the best system, but you know if they are a gs13 step 5 they get paid X dollars regardless of anything.
It is a good step towards that. Although top management in companies wants to bridge the gender gap but when it comes to hiring, the HR & recruiters get biased and tend to be biased towards candidates with lower salary expectations. They want to check how much the candidate was getting paid, which gives them more room to bargain with salary expectations.
IMHO, the salary of a job should be based on how much the company is willing to pay to get the job done. It should not be dependent on how much the candidate was getting paid by previous company. What if the previous employer was harassing or taking advantage? how does it matter if I was in my previous job working at McDonald's and getting paid peanuts? Selection of a candidate should be purely based on talent, skills & Merit.
why I suggested each company have there own pay scale, like google will pay 60k for a programer, microsoft 65k and maybe they scale different, but it should be searchable. (numbers made up)
And that's how you end up with a system which very few top performers want to work under.
I positively shudder at the thought of a system which coupled my compensation to years of experience. That is in no way a reliable gauge of ability and smart companies know that.
Nor do I want my coworkers knowing what I make. That fosters an atmosphere of competition where anyone who makes less than me is jealous.
Because everyone is a super awesome top performer? I think not, if anything the right way would be to have a balanced team with each person being experts in there own field.
Also, from my experience going from meh to top performer boils down to motivation and not skill. Among some other minor things.
While you don't want co-workers knowing what you make, I assume because you think/know you make more than them? what happens when you find out you messed up and everyone you work with makes more than you?
Regardless of that answer as long as wages are taboo to talk about or "fosters competition" there will ALWAYS be a wage gap. whether it's because of conscious or unconscious bias.
And I get it, right know I'm the lowest paid worker on my team, while generally outshining the rest on my skill. I just don't have a degree, and not that much "professional" time in the field. <-- but that's another problem in it's own right.
While agree that is a problem, I also think that if you gave that power back to the employer you would end up seeing a wage gap form as they give raises people who they like/shoot the shit with/are the same skin color as them/the list goes on.
Possibly a dumb question, but can any lawyers here speculate as to whether this law will pass constitutional muster? Is this a form of prior restraint that violates the first amendment? Comparing to things like protected categories (age, gender, religion, marital status, etc) my understanding is that it's not illegal for employers to ask these things, but doing so potentially opens them up to discrimination lawsuits if the person is not hired.
I've been confused about how this law (and/or similar laws in other states) applies when the applicant is not in the state. I'll be interviewing someone who currently lives in North Carolina, for a job in Washington, another interviewer is in South Carolina, and if hired the employee will report to someone in New York. Looks like none of these states have a law like this, but if any of them did, how does it work?
I've never once answered such a question and never understood why anyone would. When they ask, you tell them you don't give out that information. I've never even had someone question that or ask twice.
I once had a recruiter (contracted) get angry and berate me when I refused to answer, then finally gave in and gave him my full compensation figure from when I worked at Google. He said I was lying and nobody would hire me at that rate. Needless to say I let him know what I thought of him and ended that contact, letting the HR department at the company for whom he was recruiting know what a jackass he was.
I also had a recruiter (in-house, working for the company) become difficult when I refused to provide current salary. She tried several times to suss it out of me and when it didn't work, discontinued the engagement, at which point the interviews stopped. I think I may have dodged a bullet.
I'm pretty sure companies have ruled me out from even contacting because I left past salary blank. I didn't check their hr boxes and that was likely one.
I doubt this will work as intended. Candidates who have been well paid and know it will volunteer this information. Candidates who do not, one could assume, have a lower salary history.
Not having salary history increases the risk of a bad hire. Hence, I expect offers in general to be lower under such a law to compensate for the extra risk.
For comparison, in Finland all salaries are made public by the tax authority. Annual salaries are printed in the newspaper annually and traffic ticket fines are proportionate with your income.
Before the tax info was public, they still fined people based on their income; they just expected people to tell the truth. They have even gone back and re-fined rich people who they found to have lied (back before officers could look up the info in real-time).
And that's exactly how salary negotiations work now -- the applicant can name an expected salary, and the employer can respond accordingly. The only thing that's changed is that what you've been paid in the past doesn't have to be a part of that discussion.
Is this actually happening? After a good interview, qualified employees are being turned away by companies in the later stages of the interview/employment process, simply due to candidates refusing to divulge their current salary? I mean, I'm sure it _has_ happened, not sure if that's a strong argument though.
Impossible to know, because employers are not required to share the reason for dropping candidates from consideration. Candidates would need to speculate about the real reason, but I can tell you with pretty high certainty that it has happened to me at least once.
I'm sorry if that may have happened to you. In my experience, this has never happened and, if anything, I was given a substantial bump above the number I gave as a current salary. I guess one anecdote vs. another. I dunno, we'll hopefully see whether or not this actually achieves its intended goals or not.
I'd be interested to see if this ends up playing out like ban the box (banning employers from asking about former convictions), where it ends up hurting the applicants the law intends to help.
Although banning the box unintentionally hurt those that it attempted to help, it may ultimately be the right move if the problem of the resultant discrimination can be tackled also. A one step back, two steps forward situation.
So, the moral of your story is: minority employees are underpaid because they never say "no" to low salary they are offered? Or maybe you are saying that possessing some basic negotiation skills you don't have makes me evil? I don't follow your logic here.
Every single state employee’s salary in the state of California is public. Look it up yourself: sacbee.com/statepay (warning, horrible search mechanism).
The UC system alone has 250,000 people. Student salary data is the only data anonymized.
Making salary data public is the only way to go. Anything else is a poor half measure that will probably not solve the problem they are trying to address.
I don't see this is a big deal. You don't have to answer this question, I regularly deflect the question and tell potential employers that I'll be happy to give feedback at the offer point.
The question is asked initially before interviews in most cases and therefore I tell them my expectation is to remain competitive based on what I bring to the table.
This is a great move! Many a times, a company will set your salary by incrementing your current salary by 10% (say). This is demeaning. The future employer is basically saying that we want you to work for us at as low a wage as we can possibly pay, while not being stupid. Any negotiation comes back to why your existing salary is so low, implying that there must be something wrong with you.
The new law forces an open discussion where both sides can decide what they want to pay/earn and start the negotiation from there. The negotiation then follows the track of who has better opportunities. That is a better market dynamic.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out when I look for my next job. :)
Not really. Employers can say whatever they want, and here’s how. All applicants apply for Job Description A. If applicant doesn’t ask for pay range, they might be hired into the better paying Job Description B. The man who makes more than every woman for equal work has one additional duty for Job Description Super Omega X. My point is, you can’t legislate morality, and equal work for equal pay is a moral issue. Those without morals will find a way around any barriers imposed by legislation.
I've had companies asked for tax documents prior to giving me a formal offer. They didn't specify the purpose ("it's our process") but I suspect that it was to make sure the current salary I claimed was genuine.
I've done the same, on one occasion I still got the offer. The only time I've given tax info is when I was working for an industry that mandated it (due to working on critical infrastructure and DOE regulatory requirements).
That sounds nice, but it seems like most if not all work relationships are based on at least dishonesty through omission if not outright lies.
Employers rarely give a full and true picture of what it's like to work somewhere. It's mostly "everything's great" and "all the people are great" and so on. You might get a bland "we need to work on X" if you press them, but they're very unlikely to be direct about the day-to-day drudgery, dysfunction, etc.
Due to the asymmetrical power relationship of employers/employees, I can't see a real ethical problem with lying in response to a question they shouldn't be asking in the first place.
But then you lose the chance to negotiate up. Any number you state can be interpreted as the highest you will get offered. In salary negotiation, make it so the employer presents the first offer, and then negotiate up.
I've never found a range to work. They will immediately go to the bottom of your range or even below. So, the range you give better start at the top of your ideal range. Or, more preferably, don't name a number.
Could be considered fraud. This law removes a lot of concern by providing clarification. Some employers ask for pay stubs, but I agree with you, making up a number should have been OK on the grounds of privacy. Even creating a fake pay stub for this seems reasonably moral if the sole purpose is to set the salary expectation at a new job. Current salary and value aren't necessarily correlated and hires should be judged on their skills and value.
lying about your salary is not fraud. it has no impact on your performance or ability to do the work. your employer has no right to know your previous salary and your previous salary has no impact on what you're worth at a new position.
NY has this in effect, but quite a few companies whose headquarters are based in NYC still ask applicants for their prior salary range on their applications. I hope this is just a lag, not ignoring the law deliberately.
Also, we should outlaw employers from asking applications their desired salary range; the negotiation should happen after interviews. Employers should either specify a range or give a figure in the job description to save time.
> Also, we should outlaw employers from asking applications their desired salary range; the negotiation should happen after interviews. Employers should either specify a range or give a figure in the job description to save time.
I've been curious about some of these things too. My employer is HQ'd in CA, which forbids non-compete clauses in contracts, but I work out of the WA office, where non-compete clauses are ok, and my contract has one. I don't know of any former employees sued so I'm not really concerned about it but I always wonder if it would hold up in court...
As a relatively success California (SF) based software entrepreneur, I have to say that new companies would have to be crazy to move to California to start a business.
Raise money here, then leave if you know what’s good for you. #protip
(These type of policies may be good for employees but are a nightmare for management..)
I understand that this would reduce the benefit on the employer on assymetry of information, but wouldn't it be the best to go the exact opposite direction and try to get all salaries to be public?
I'd love a deeper analysis of how this law will help.
Someone's target salary is dependent on their current. Non-savvy negotiators will expose this number.. in which case they aren't going to end up any better.
If you are significantly underpaid, the solution today is just to get two offers to ensure your BATNA is based on an alternative offer, not your current situation.
I suppose this gives more negotiation leverage to the employee, but I don't see it helping Silicon Valley based devs much. It seems the beneficiaries are mainly lower earnings who lack time/ability to source multiple offers.
By disclosing really wide ranges (which, IME, companies with internal salary ranges that are not disclosed to employees often have to start with, because they want some controls, but also to give management flexibility in recruiting and retention, so it's not even dishonest.)
> The goal is to narrow the gender wage gap. If a woman is paid less than a man doing the same job and a new employer bases her pay on her prior salary, gender discrimination can be perpetuated, the bill’s backers say.
Is it also banned for an applicant to inform the employer of their prior salary? If not, it would appear advantageous for non-below-average-salaried employees to being doing so, negating the effects of this intervention.(And for employers to silently discard applicants which do not voluntarily reveal salary history.)
If only above-average-salaried employees reveal salary, and companies discard applicants that don't voluntarily reveal salary history, then that just means that companies end up paying more because they'll only hire people that got paid more than average in the past.
Which is to say, no, I don't think it'll work out that way.
That's a good point as far as the employer's behavior goes. It still seems beneficial to the above-average applicant to reveal their salary.
I guess that means employers will assume you're below average unless you reveal your salary. That would tend to lump all the below-average people into the same salary class as far as the potential employer is concerned.
It's still not really in the employee's interest to reveal their above-average salary history until they've gotten a salary range from the employer first. After they get that range, they can choose to reveal their salary history if they think it'll give them leverage in negotiations (e.g. if they want more than the high end of the range), but anyone who's happy with the offer they get won't have a reason to reveal their salary history even if it's above-average.
This is a bad law. This will perpetuate the wage gap between men and women employees. These kind of laws will continue the "don't ask, don't tell" aura around salary information. Instead of making this information secret, salary information needs to be pushed more public, so that when someone is paid less for equal work, there is absolutely no doubt about the salary that each employee receives.
I think it's just the opposite. Allowing employers to ask wage history helps maintain the wage gap. If women are underpaid at their first job, then that will propagate forward to future offers. If they can't ask, then they'll have a harder time knowing whether they can continue to underpay a woman. Having a stated salary range also makes it a little harder for them to play games.
Ethics? Morals? Not knowing exactly what sort of lie they can get away with? Years of training and practice in not lying? Fear of getting caught and not getting the job? Fear of getting caught later and losing the job?
I think there is systematic bias in such rules because employees outnumber employers and corporations can't vote. For example:
1) In such scenarios, I wonder how is it okay for an applicant to use all tactics they want (note: there is minimal if not no regulation on applicants to a position. Okay, let's make this concrete, this new law bans Cali employers from asking applicants their prior salary. There are more laws which ban or force an employer to do something. BUT an applicant is NOT banned from asking any question. This next sentence I might be going out on a limb here, the applicant is NOT forced to do something either (as opposed to a ban on something). This is systematic bias.
2) It's NOT okay for a corporation to discriminate on race or sex, etc. But it IS OKAY for an applicant to discriminate on race or sex, i.e. if an employer is black, I can choose not to work for him just on that basis, or if it's a woman, I can choose not to work on that basis.
You might say the positions of power are asymmetric and in favor of the employer. I'd say you're correct about the former (asymmetricity) but not about the latter. The employer has power by having more money and applicant has power by having more skills. Employers usually respond to such laws as this by coming up with new ways to accomplish what they want, then govt responds with even more regulation. Compliance is a cost which takes away from the pie which any of the stakeholders could've benefited from.
A voluntary unregulated hiring market would benefit all parties involved.
I've recently been on both ends of the table here. I don't share my previous salary but I'm always willing to share a pay range. The range being higher than I'd ever expect to get paid. I find this to be important when discussing salary with an employer because it gives me a baseline to continue discussions. If they can't meet my bottom line then I'm not interested. The reason I give a range is because salary is only a SMALL part of your compensation package. If there is a yearly bonus program, great medical, 401k matching, vacation, etc. Each of these things need to be considered when accepting a position. Hence the range.
I've also come to expect that I'm going to give a candidate a pay range as well. It is one of the first things I do when trying to on board because if they can't afford to live on the range I'm telling them then I don't want to waste either of our time on discussing a position they can't live on. I'm pretty upfront about this because the worst thing an employee working for me can do is have to start budgeting a lot and be resentful about it.
In my mind this law can really hinder that conversation. I like giving a range and asking a candidate if they can deal with that, but it's really nice when a candidate is secure enough to tell me what they are worth up front as well. I would also recommend against giving anyone a fixed value always always give a range.
"I don't share my previous salary but I'm always willing to share a pay range. The range being higher than I'd ever expect to get paid."
That sounds like you are actively exaggerating the amount you have been paid previously to establish a "baseline" of what you are willing to accept as a minimum salary in the job you're applying for. Anyways, from what I understand, the new law does not seem to prohibit you from asking for a salary (range) that the applicant would be willing to accept, just from asking for how much specifically they made in the past.
> Anyways, from what I understand, the new law does not seem to prohibit you from asking for a salary (range) that the applicant would be willing to accept, just from asking for how much specifically they made in the past.
This is a very good point. It's a fine line but I appreciate the input.
I do give a rather large range. It's typically a 20-40% range based on how much I want the job. And I tailor it to every employer.
> The reason I give a range is because salary is only a SMALL part of your compensation package
I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth. Bonus is discretionary (meaning they can give you $0) while salary is not. Salary is a BIG part of your compensation package because that is the primary reason people work. Most would work for salary without medical but not the other way around. Claiming salary is small potatoes is just one of the more insidious things companies and their agents will spit at you to justify paying you less.
Don't fall for it!
It is not a myth. If the company pays out then you make more money. It isn't GUARANTEED salary but neither is stock. Sure it's not worth every dollar they say you might get but it does have a value based on the history of the Company. I've done very well for myself going with a slightly lower salary and accepting a 2x1 ratio on the bonus. I.E. If they offer 100K. I'll accept 90K and a 20K bonus (this advice very much depends on the company). If the company has a history of giving out their minimum bonus every year then you're probably OK. If it's a startup that ratio would go up. 3x1 or 4x1. It's more of a risk so don't take it all on yourself.
Medical can be up 500 per month per person in your family for a fully covered company. 401K can also be a great tool as well.
This is 100% why I suggest giving a range of salaries. Take the bonus at what it's worth to you. Just like stock. It is not a 1 to 1 relationship but it does add value. If you just assume you make what you get in your salary you aren't doing the real math of evaluating what you are really worth.
For that matter factor in commute too! It's time you are away from home.
It is a myth and this is the same shaky reasoning I always hear from people who have been on the "other side" (hiring). I don't blame you for it, it is your job to compensate people as little as possible while extracting the most wealth from them. That said, there are a lot of people who fall for this "if you have a family (of 20 dependents) you totally make up what you lose in salary!" fable and that puts downward pressure on all our salaries.
So you are saying that all that matters when getting hired is salary. That's it, nothing else? If you want your salary to max out be a 1099 employee. You'll make the most money possible and you won't have to worry about pesky things like insurance...
You missed a major point in what I do when I'm being hired. I use benefits like a bludgeon. I get MORE money because of the variety of benefits I've seen over the course of my career. While looking ONLY at salary is simpler to compute and categorize people, that simplistic look at things will reduce your ability to negotiate and get the most out of future opportunities.
I've taken economics in university. I understand this line of thinking. It's wrong.
(twice, btw, once because the negative externalities of "the interview process" are not negligible, and second because the power dynamics of said process are just wrong)
This seems like a big change. I am always curious about what the current state of the art is for modelling second order effects of such a big change. Would appreciate any insights from people who have an insight into decision making at this level (something that affects millions of people in a real and meaningful way).
Most companies that I've worked at require an employee's signed consent before releasing any sort of salary details. Otherwise the only info provided is hire date, term date and position. I'm a Payroll Administrator in Oregon.
I wonder if over time this leads to people making more getting lowballed, and wages actually dropping. The company could say well these people with these qualifications (on paper) took this amount, so you're asking for way over market rate.
Previous title and company will probably become one of the proxy to get a good guesstimate of the candidate's salary. Writing this as the Senior Chief Executive Architect (of that 10 lines bug fix that i just pushed).
The only reason to ask this question is to use it to determine a baseline of how low you can pay the applicant, and unfortunately a lot of young job seekers don't know that it is best to refuse to answer that question.
Also affecting those arriving on H-1B, I bet. If your previous job is in a non-Western, non-Middle-Eastern country (plus Japan, Singapore etc.) your previous salary is likely much lower.
At the same time, salary information for all California state employees, from the governor to university groundskeepers is publicly available online for anyone to use.
I feel like it's disingenuous to the purpose of a "higher education" institution. Would rather they not need to make the money that way - perhaps it is a corruptive influence in that it changes the "goal" of the institution.
I've personally always lied about how much I was making... they think of you as an easy employee, and you can get a nice multiplier on your current salary.
There are external services that'll go through documents like rental credit check applications to figure out your salary even if you don't give an answer to the hiring company. This law forbids those services as well.
Just another reason for the list I give clients to avoid California when they are considering hiring California residents or having an office in California.
"The new bill goes further by prohibiting employers, “orally or in writing, personally or through an agent,” from asking about an applicant’s previous pay."
according to the language in the bill, employers don't seem to be allowed to use those types of Equifax products anymore.
"However, if the applicant “voluntarily and without prompting” provides this information, the employer may use it “in determining the salary for that applicant.”"
They are prohibited from seeking the information by any means (including background checks), except information which is legally public, such as when the prospective employee is a previous/current public employee.
some jobs background checks make sense. do you really want to hire a former bank robber as a teller? or convicted sex criminal as a teacher.
Personally, I would want to do a credit check on a CFO or controller because if they can't manage their own finances how can they manage the businesses.
Just to be a devil's advocate here : in a hypothetical scenario wouldn't this allow a candidate to give a fake inflated salary of his past job being well aware that it's illegal for recruiter or employer to investigate if this number is true?
Edit: I think I misunderstood the new law proposed here. It is not even legal for employer to ask the salary of past job. In that case this situation would not even occur.
The candidate wouldn't need to give a fake inflated salary... the company isn't allowed to ask about salary history at all.
Even if they weren't, I don't see any real trouble with your scenario (other than that I think establishing a pattern of lying in a relationship so early probably isn't great). But if my last job underpaid me, and now I want to earn market rate... I'd be grateful to not have to answer questions about my previous salary.
If the prospective employer can't ask, why would you offer a previous salary in the first place, let alone lie about it? Hiring company states their expected salary range, and you either accept it, reject it, or negotiate for your desired salary.
Can't wait to hear every right-winger I know say how this isn't fair capitalism and not free market, completely ignoring past-wage discrimination and any gender gap... Just like they're instructed to do from Fox News and their opulent pastors.
Lawyers: what are the chances this goes to the Supreme Court? I suspect next to none, since it's just CA, and employers don't care enough about free speech to fight it.
Silver lining: Another straw in the pile to split CA.
Well... there goes your expectation of an increased salary without negotiation.
And they did this to improve the gender wage gap? People who don't negotiate will be stuck with their same salary year over year, while those that negotiate will have steadily increasing salaries.
Salary negotiation is a part of life. People need to learn to at least do the minimum amount of negotiation. If you're making $X and a new potential employer offers you $(0.9X), and you just accept it without countering, that's on you.
People need to get over the fear that they'll lose their offer if they negotiate. The potential employer has already put in a lot of time (and money) to get to the offer stage; they're not going to rescind the offer just because you ask for more ("That amount isn't going to work for me; I was looking for something more like $(1.1X)"). At worst they'll tell you that they can't go any higher than the original offer, and then the decision is entirely up to you.
Salary negotiation is like black magic, and simplistic advice of "oh, just negotiate" reminds me of the "Draw the rest of the fucking owl" meme [1]. Every job offer I've ever gotten has been Accept Or GTFO. Asking for more always results in "That's the offer--take it or leave it!" Whoever you captains of industry are who regularly negotiate your salary, let me subscribe to your newsletter, please!
That's somewhat ironic, as the "draw the rest of the fucking owl meme" is one of my employer's values (which I actually agree with, as long as it's not taken to a ridiculous extreme).
"Accept or GTFO" is a risk you run when negotiating. But it's better than just saying nothing and accepting whatever low-ball offer they give you first, and it costs you nothing to at least do a bare minimum of negotiating.
It really is as simple as saying "I don't think that amount will work for me; I was looking for something more like $X". I mean it: just that sentence alone. Don't demand or be a dick about it, and don't appear meek as if you're asking for a handout, and don't try to justify it with a "I have mouths to feed" or "I'm saving for a house" or whatever. Just state it, and see what happens. That, or something similar, has gotten me a better offer literally every time I've tried it, and I'm honestly probably an average negotiator, at best. It might not get you exactly $X, but that's what a compromise is: meeting somewhere in the middle.
> there goes your expectation of an increased salary without negotiation
I dunno, since the law requires employees to disclose salary ranges to applicants on request, the rule “apply only if (new position salary) > (current salary)” seems to not require negotiation.
OTOH, disclosed ranges from emloyers but no disclosed salary from employees makes salary negotiation a lot easier for employees, too. I don't think the gender wage gap is because women refuse to negotiate, though it's probably at least in part because, in the status quo, they come into it in worse position because of, among other factors, salary history.
How do you figure? I've always negotiated my salary. I've turned down offers that were too low for me. I don't think I've given my salary information to any employer I've been interested in working for. I think maybe the first time I worked with a recruiter I gave it to them, then realized it was a mistake.
Hmm, I'd never thought about that angle,but I guess it makes sense.
No word on if they are allowed to use Equifax, etc to pull salary data from?
EDIT: looking at the bill it looks like querying Equifax is probably also prohibited
> (b) An employer shall not, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, seek salary history information, including compensation and benefits, about an applicant for employment.
As a side note one of the biggest issues macro economists have is that its very hard to prove their theories as you often can't run huge macro economic experiments.....
> Delaware, Massachusetts and Oregon have passed similar laws that take effect later this year or next, said attorney Ben Ebbink of Fisher & Phillips in Sacramento. Philadelphia passed one that was supposed to take effect in May but is being challenged in court. New York City and San Francisco have similar ordinances that take effect Oct. 31 and July 1, respectively.
With the number of states introducing legislation like this it will be interesting to see if you can tease out any state or city based GDP growth/shrinking based on these laws.