https://www.natlawreview.com/article/california-latest-state...

Only solution is probably to stress to their clients to just set a max salary and expect to pay it.

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.

Too bad I don't live in CA.

if i end on the other side again i will ask for the upper range for myself and see where it gets me.

You are free to offer less money, and the candidate is then free to not waste their time talking with someone who will underpay them.

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

If I'm currently employed, that saves me taking time off for interviews, etc.

Depends on how desperately you want to leave, in that case, I guess.

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.

If I don't share and my amount is > than the employer's, I still have no job. The sharing just saves time.

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.

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.

Well, at no cost. Whether you can do more without adverse employment consequences depends on your company's unpaid leave policy.

Of course, if you only have 10 annual PTO days, that's a problem in itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

Do you have a source for this?

here's the executive order mentioned at the beginning of the linked PDF: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/0...

here's NPR on the topic: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/301989789/pay-secrecy-policies...

here's the atlantic on the topic: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/when-th...

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."

here is the paragraph of UK law referred to: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/77

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.

Such agreements are not allowed in California. It would be illegal and unethical for a company to ask you to sign 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.