https://www.inc.com/melissa-angell/new-nyc-law-will-require-...

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/new-york-city-council-p...

> In providing the salary range, an employer must use good faith to determine, at the time of the posting, what it believes it would pay for the advertised job, promotion, or transfer opportunity.

As a former lawyer, I would say the phrase "good faith" is the operative one here. Companies will want to stay far enough from the line so that they don't get sued.

idk what legal precedent is, but if i was hiring i could make a large good faith salary range.

job candidates are different. post a large but meaningful skills list youre looking for and be willing to hire the right person that doesnt meet all your bullet points. a college grad with 0 experience or a no-college with 4 years of experience or a college grad+4 years exp all might be the right person, but deserve significantly different salaries.

What'd be interesting would be how often a company offers near the top of that range, or potentially beyond it. I'd think the frequency of offers (either far below the maximum or actually above the maximum) would make a potential case against a company for not listing ranges in good faith.

(ianal)

But the possibility otherwise satisfied employees being paid a market wage commensurate with their experience might see ads for jobs similar to theirs and conclude they're being systematically underpaid and motivated to take legal action is definitely a negative second order effect of the law...

If you've ever been a part of the performance review process, you will know that people will go very far to justify a raise. Looking at the current job listings on your company's career section will be the very first thing that everyone will do if those salaries were to be made public.

This right here I think is the real reason companies do not disclose compensation in their listings. Their current employees fall below the range and they do not want them to know. This is unfortunately a widespread problem in tech, where companies constantly offer more for new hires than what they pay their own employees for the same work. The new hires that have joined will then find themselves in the same position next year when their compensation falls below what someone will be hired at that year! And the cycle continues. It's absolute madness if you look at it from the big picture perspective and there are some fundamental problems with the way HR orgs are structured that need to change. From an employee perspective, the most optimal thing you can do for yourself is to move companies frequently and that is the reason for the crazy churn we see in this industry.

My current employer isn't willing to raise the salaries of its current employees, not the market ones, but to the level of what they are offering to new hires. This, in my opinion, is wrong. This also inevitably leads to eventually paying everyone at market value (old employees leaving replaced by new ones with up-to-date salaries) except that you as a company lost a lot of business experience in the process.

Even in the case that no company on earth would disclose salaries, workers will inevitably learn about what their current market value is and to some extent what new hires and colleagues roughly earn. Because they have friends and colleagues that are open about disclosing their salaries. Trying to hide salary information is just lying to yourself (as a company).

Companies should budget for hire once their workforce is roughly on par with the market, salary wise. It's not the only factor but they would be able to retain much more talent and expertise inside the company and eventually be able to generate more value. This situation in my opinion is one of the big reasons (out of many others of course) why most companies eventually turn bad after some time.

For most companies, this will make them less resistant to boom and bust as they'll be forced to offer big annual payrises which they won't be able to roll back when the market contracts.

You can use a bonus to cover fluctuations without hurting morale too much.

Plus you don't have to give everyone an automatic raise If you post new jobs at a higher rate. Just give them a new title, and allow current employees to apply for them.

GP didn't say that there are good reasons to underpay experienced staff compared to new staff, he said that there are good reasons that salaries cannot be raised across the board.

No. This is exactly what GP said:

> there were reasons good reasons why salary couldn't just be raised across the board to match new hire rates.

There is not a single company I can think of (other than FAANG or unicorn startups flush with VC money) that can raise salaries across the board, they simply do not have the cash-flow to do it.

I get that the short-term justification is "we can get away with paying the former less because enough of them will be afraid to leave."

But is there another justification?

In my experience, at large companies "cash flow" would not even vaguely register the difference of increasing salaries for experienced people you want to keep, and it would be a marvelous signal to the rest.

I agree, but the reality is that raising salaries across the board would kill the company immediately, while having ONLY inexperienced staff might happen, and even if it did, it only might kill the company.

Another factor is that a lot of the staff just won't move, even if they know they are being paid less.

So the point of not listing the salary is to attract highly qualified candidates who don't know they're worth more than the role pays? That doesn't seem to be a good thing.

I would say "this new position you are hiring for gets paid more than I do for the same work" is a very good justification for a raise. :)

If companies can be held accountable for injustices like this one, that can only be a good thing. Well, except if you're scared your employees will catch you out.

For the record: I've played the part of the employer in this specific issue and learned my lesson.

I think this is missing the point. Do you think employers coercing employees into accepting conditions below what they should normally get is not a thing that happens? The employer, as opposed to the employee, has the power to manipulate the socioeconomic circumstances around the employee. They can (and do) prevent employees from discussing politics at the workplace or unionising, they can (and do) hide (and manipulate) information about who is getting paid what, they can (and do) decline additional compensation when it should be given (overtime), and this is the least of it.

You might think, “well, the employees should just get a different job then!”. But don't we want to fix the underlying problem instead of just churning our way through countless jobs? Sometimes it doesn't even work — you are often compelled to stay at a job for various reasons (you relocated with your family, you've worked there for a long time etc.), and you might not even realise this manipulation is happening to begin with.

The above comment said that employees will go very far to justify a raise. Don't you think that, if employees had all of the information their employers had, a lot of employees _would be_ able to justify a raise that they deserve, perhaps even without having previously realised this because of the information asymmetry? That sounds like an injustice to me.

To work at a job is to actively consent to that job.

It's hard to make an argument that you owe them notice if they didn't give notice of a significant change in working conditions.

We're not talking about coercion. Concealing the wages of other people in the organization is not coercion.

> You might think, “well, the employees should just get a different job then!”. But don't we want to fix the underlying problem instead of just churning our way through countless jobs?

No, we don't. The way we fix the problem is by choosing with whom we do business. "countless jobs" is a straw man.

The problem is, this often doesn't happen. The employee being paid too little (or working too long, or being otherwise treated poorly) might not know they are being coerced into this bad position, might not know how much their employer is hiding from them, may not want to go through the considerable effort of interviewing for another job, may not have the financial stability to put their family through that period of job hunting, or may just be of a non-contrarian disposition and enjoy having their stability in the current job.

There are a million reasons an employee would not respond to a blatant injustice by precisely identifying it and demanding it be righted or otherwise quitting. If you do do this, I truly think that is fantastic and I commend you. The ones who stay in these jobs, however, are being badly treated, at the employer's benefit. I don't think that's right, and I don't think they can be fully blamed, because a lot of these problems come from how adept the employer is at manipulating the situation. If you say “no, we don't want to fix that”, I'm sorry to say I can't agree with you.

You assume:

a) Companies will by necessity pay people doing ostensibly the same thing different amounts of money

b) People do not necessarily wish for their salary to be made public

c) Making a salary range requires the lower and upper bound to be equidistant from the expected starting pay

d) Making too narrow a salary range would therefore reveal pay, in contradiction to b).

Therefore, it is a necessity of employees' desired privacy and employers' ability to advertise the lowest, er, "most competitive" wage possible for the company to have a wide salary range.

EDIT to add: I think your argument still falls a little flat, because salary ranges should still be accurate. "We would consider hiring someone with slightly less resume experience for the bottom range, we would hire a rockstar demigod at the highend, and just what we're looking for somewhere around the middle".

I'm not sure if it has changed now, but Gitlab used to have a big problem with the way they calculated compensation. Their calculations were very heavily weighted against the Numbeo rental prices, which meant you had someone living in London, UK would earn 40% more than someone living in Bristol, UK, even though the cost of living in both cities is pretty similar.

Never lived in Bristol, but I can't believe this. The calculations are heavily weighted against rental prices because accommodation is a large part of most people's expenses.

No it's not. If you are paying under average salaries, why do you deserve above average talent? ... Unless you admit it's just another rigged game (masked as meritocracy). It's sad.

So, out of accounting spite, many companies are opting for churn instead of stability by simple raise vs new hire policy, making it worse for everyone.

That's even more likely to be the case when there are strict guidelines around compensation (eg: when salaries are public). When your manager has some wiggle room, you might be able to justify a bigger bump than average because of all the extra hard work you're putting in, even if your experience level doesn't qualify you for a straight up promotion.

What you’re really saying is that making the information available makes it harder for companies to retain employees using the status quo tactics. Which increases turn-over, which in reality is the businesses problem not the employees. So from the employee perspective what is the problem in being better informed about the price dynamics within the market?

If you’re asking about listing individual salaries, I think some employees would object and, unless they signed onto the job with that expectation, as an employer I don’t believe I’m morally right to publish their currently private information without their consent, nor tell them “you can quit if you don’t like it”. (I have absolutely no problem with anyone voluntarily disclosing their own information, discussing it, comparing it, whatever.)

I guess I never feel the need to justify a raise. If I need to justify it I’ve already failed I think.

I think this misses the point, and I think the idea of a "huge surface area for conflict" also misses the point.

In the end, unless an entity is a public benefit corp or a not-for-profit, the literal sole goal is to profit. "Reducing surface area for conflict" is one of many steps on the way to the goal for profit, and if cutting out Colorado is less painful to profits than disclosing salaries and opening up that conflict surface, then that's naturally what will happen.

Colorado doesn't really need to apologize. They made a bet that their state was relevant to remote work, and they lost that bet for some number of companies (I can think of plenty with no Colorado carve-outs and with specific disclosures due to Colorado despite not having a presence in the state, so clearly some firms think the talent pool is worthwhile), and that's to be expected given Colorado isn't one of the most populous states in the country. That calculus quickly changes for many more companies if it turns out the population of remote talent in Colorado is trending upward and worth tapping into, or if California etc pass similar legislation.

When trying to build an argument from first principles, it's important not to make a mistake early on. In your case, you use the profit seeking as an argument that this automatically leads to minimizing everyone's salaries.

In reality, profit gets maximized when you have a team full of high achievers and with very low turnover. That's fundamentally not compatible with your original hypothesis.

Where did I say this, or even imply it?

> In reality, profit gets maximized when you have a team full of high achievers and with very low turnover. That's fundamentally not compatible with your original hypothesis.

I mean, if I made that claim, I'd agree with you, but I'm currently quite lost as to how that conclusion was reached. I said and implied nothing about minimizing salaries.

So you implied that disclosing salaries cuts into profits, which I took to mean that you're seeing an inverse first-order relationship between salaries and profits.

> "Reducing surface area for conflict" is one of many steps on the way to the goal for profit, and if cutting out Colorado is less painful to profits than disclosing salaries and opening up that conflict surface, then that's naturally what will happen.

> In reality, profit gets maximized when you have a team full of high achievers and with very low turnover.

Profit is a function with lots and lots of parameters. Who are you to say which parameter has the highest weight? How about market share? How about profit margins? How about illegal deals with public funding? How about marketing? How about creating addictions? How about being niche? How about having excellent customer support? How about having better quality?

Lots of companies make significant profit from a legacy project that's almost impossible to improve, but marketing still finds clients that want it. They don't need a team full of high achievers with very low turnover.

That's less the case when you're constantly challenged with clean-sheet exercises where every single person will produce a different outcome. It doesn't even have to be a super senior job - think of someone writing newsletters. That channel can easily lead to 5% or more of total revenue, and different people will definitely produce different outcomes (just the subject line alone will have an impact). Why pay different people the same rate if their work leads to vastly different revenue?

In other words: "we can't be transparent, it might make us look bad."

"John will ask why Sandy is making more. The truth is that Sandy is more productive, and saying that to John will lead to friction. John will either need to make more money (which will piss off Sandy), or Sandy will need to get promoted to the same level as her manager (which will piss off her manager because what is she going to do now?). So who do we piss off? Wait, why do we need to piss off anyone - let's just keep the salaries private."

The real problem for companies is when the explanation comes down to "Sandy negotiated harder than you", "Sandy got a higher offer from a competitor so we had to match it to keep her", "we're paying you significantly under the market rate and are hoping you don't notice or aren't too bothered by it", etc.

Depending on what you mean by "equivalent", yes it could make some claims of discrimination based on race/sex/etc slightly harder to defend against. It does not "open" a company to lawsuits as opposed to being closed to suits by paying equivalent wages. It is one of many many things that could be a factor in such cases. And a lot of companies decide it is worthwhile to do despite that.

> You can and should ask your peers what they make. This is totally legal and encouraged.

It's not encouraged by many companies, and some try to discourage it including by trying to get employees to agree not to, whether or not it's legal.

What is much harder to accept, and builds resentment and apathy, is something that feels arbitrary or unjust.

Perhaps the more productive worker is more productive because their work is not high-visibility. Maybe it's the arbitrary luck of having been assigned a more successful project.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/california_equal_pay_act.htm

https://www.costanzo-law.com/google-hit-with-lawsuit-over-cl...

It's illegal to pay differently on the basis of sex, race, or other protected classes. It's perfectly legal to pay differently on the basis of performance or anything that isn't a protected class.

The vast, vast majority of workplaces in America pay people at the same level different amounts.

Like if you're able to describe how Sandy is more valuable, you can describe that to John, and he can emulate it, and everybody wins.

But the biggest problem is that if you wanted this "fixed", you can only raise salaries of people who make too little. Lowering salaries of people who make too much is usually a legal impossibility.

So the effect will be that you risk ending up overpaying everybody instead of only an outlier now and then.

Perhaps that's what these laws are attempting to address ;)

What law is this? I have never heard of it in any US jurisdiction.

In the event there is a contract, unless the contract specifies compensation for terminating employment, the employer can always just terminate the employee for the reason of “this employee is no longer worth $x per hour/year to us”. Barring any other union agreements of course.

These secret decisions are not commonly rational like that. Maybe Sandy keeps quiet when they know the boss is wrong and leaves it to John to speak up and stop the whole thing going over the cliff edge.

This system is doomed long-term if it only works because of information imbalance, since ways will be found around that (levels.fyi, random walk across employers, ...).

What makes you think people always discuss salary? Because it seems rational from a negotiating standpoint?

What has that accomplished?

Compensation is not "derailing". It is a core function of the business to pay it's employees. It's a core function of employees to make sure they aren't getting ripped off.

It's plainly ridiculous to be told that what ones coworkers get paid is of no relevance to oneself. This is enlightened self-interest, not guilty grandstanding for some abstract cause or whatever.

The fact is that companies engage and enable each other to perpetuate information asymmetries. They run me through the ringer of hours of take-home projects, algorithm tests, whiteboarding, phone screens, video calls, panel interviews, all in an effort to widen the information asymmetry. We simply ask for companies to reveal what they are willing to pay before wasting our time with bullshit.

A real answer is for software engineers and other knowledge workers to unionize. It's very clear that these companies are willing and able to approach employment relationships asymmetrically. Historically, the answer has been collective bargaining. It took decades for remote work to be "approved" by these companies, and it's clear that reasoning was that the status quo was to the benefit of the companies.

I relish imagining all of these outspoken techy leftists actually putting up and making moves that align with addressing the true center of inequities: economic relationships. I know it's wishful thinking. It's a lot easier to rail against Netflix content and Facebook algorithms than it is to engage in real radical politics.

Not true - I am not saying that the market cannot be whipped into shape. What I am saying is it cannot be done by someone who doesn't understand the market.

It sounds you have a background in engineering - would you let a PR person tell you how to do your work? Obviously not. Well, Jessie Danielson is about as close to recruiting as a PR person is to coding (look up her bio and ask yourself what she's done outside of politics). Why trust that she knows how recruiting should work?

If you applied this ideal generally, you get a really counterintuitive legislative system ("you must elect a medical doctor before any laws regarding medicine can be passed", "only Google and Facebook and Amazon are experts in consumer advertising, so only elected ex-employees can propose consumer privacy legislation"), so it's probably not a very good one.

Based on many of the outputs of the system, I can believe that.

However, based on context of your post, I think you intended to include a negating word in that sentence.

I understand what you mean in regards to a market understanding. I think our comments compliment each other. That includes a lack of faith of government interventions in those types of atomic market relationships. I can't suss out your political leaning. Either my bias gives me tunnel vision or the only viable option is collective bargaining.

As far as collective bargaining goes, I first lived in a communist country, then in a social democracy, and now in the US. I think it could work, but I have never seen it implemented well. My main concern is that China will kick everyone's ass, and the friction that collective bargaining introduces into a system will make it more difficult to defend against that scenario.

It might worth asking laborers if this is worth it for better pay / more pay equality.

If all laborers were happy before and then you introduce transparent pay, and suddenly 90% of people are unhappy - it might seem obvious this is bad.

But that's sort of like saying the truth is bad if it hurts your feelings. Is it?

When doing a monthly/quarterly or yearly plan, there is a budget set for human resources. Theres an allocated budget for each open position, and a plan of when those positions will be opened .

Even at the most chaotic there was something like that.

All companies could easily use that budget as a proxy to provide at least a range for each position.

Most dont do it because they dont want to leave money on the table.

I don’t think Gitlab is anywhere near the most transparent company. I’ve definitely seen companies proudy list all their employees’ salary in a blog post before, so the most transparent companies do actually do that (or they did when I saw their post a while back anyway).

To be fair I’ve never seen it in companies where it’s impossible for everyone to know everyone.

This is not the reality. For instance, here are the salaries of everybody who works at Buffer: https://buffer.com/salaries

Once you step outside of the USA, it becomes more common – for instance, everybody’s taxable income is a matter of public record in several European countries.

It's also one of the first things I'm going to want to know before interviewing somewhere, so I can make sure that I'm not wasting anyone's time.

Here's how it looks:

https://rekvizitai.vz.lt/m/en/company/uber_lithuania_softwar...

You must be joking? You encouraged political activism at work and are surprised it led to problems? Is political activism code for “so long as it follows my politics”? Would you encourage a pro-lifer to be just as active as pro-choices? In any company I’ve worked at, the answer would be no.

People always seem to be surprised that others think differently than they do. I really can’t believe the hubris that goes into that. When talking to people (who suck at discourse) who think they are tolerant, but really aren’t, the conversation almost always devolves to “you’re a Nazi”. When talking to people (who suck at discourse) who think are very right wing, the conversation tends to devolve into something about how God made people/ the world / etc.

The easiest thing is just give people three PTO days that don’t carry that you encourage to use for civic purposes, but don’t enforce, and maybe set up a matching donation up to $X for any org with the valid paperwork.

Airlines pay just like that (as do taxi companies and most other parts of the transportation industry). Guess what you all have in common? Zero agency. So when you take a job where the ideal output of your labor is 100% deterministic, then it makes sense for your pay to reflect that.

Yes, if you have their full and work performance history you can determine their salary. But most people are actually quite uncomfortable with sharing their performance publicly.

I have had the opposite experience. It can result in conflict if salaries are by default kept secretive, and then someone finds out they're being paid much less than someone else. People start feeling undervalued or unappreciated. If salary ranges and structure are out in the open for everyone during the application process, there's nothing to get into a conflict over. Applicants know how the salary structure works and what they'll be making, so it avoid conflicts _early_ because those who might not be happy with the salary information can simply not apply for the job.

Finland makes every tax-paying citizen’s salary public, and their society hasn’t descended into chaos.

And contrary to some (such as yourself), there are people who do not state their opinions with the authority of a subject matter expert when they are not, whether the conversation is deterministic or not.

It's not immediately clear to me what exactly you think the consequences of publishing salaries are, what bad behaviour you think this promotes, and why you suspect this bad behaviour happens. Could you please go into more detail?