"Companies are excluding Colorado from their remote employment opportunities in order to avoid sharing the salary range of their open positions" - https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/about
"Companies are excluding Colorado from their remote employment opportunities in order to avoid sharing the salary range of their open positions.
In May of 2019 SB19-085, titled the Equal Pay For Equal Work Act, was signed into law in Colorado. It's a fairly short read if you're not familiar with it, but its main goal is enabling pay transparency to allow for people to know if they're being discriminated against with their wages and file a complaint with the CDLE.
The law went into effect January 1st, 2021.
The most visible part of the law has been the requirement for all job listings open to a CO resident to contain a salary range. If you've seen an increase in salary ranges on job postings recently you have this law to thank.
Some companies however have decided that excluding all Colorado residents for a remote job that can be filled by someone in any of the other 49 US states is better than sharing how much they're willing to pay..."
Only if the advertised minimum has to be the actual minimum someone at the company is making, and not a theoretical minimum that the salary band encompasses.
Because if it's a theoretical minimum, I don't care about it; I want to know what the maximum is. If it's an actual minimum, I also don't care about it, but the person earning that might.
If a company offers $1 as their minimum, then applications will know they are a joke. They will have to keep moving this minimum up and up to be taken more seriously.
If a company offers $50k as a minimum for a role that most people earn $200k for, then they probably will not get many good people responding to it since who would want to work for a company that could lowball you by $150k? And another company can see that and up their minimum to take advantage.
It just helps weed the garbage employers out quickly. Perhaps it will not be as useful in a situation where employers have all the negotiating power where they can list $1, but at least now there is some time saved.
In theory the minimum and maximum are pretty detached from the actual salary negotiations - since you can bargain up the salary (at least within the range). However, it's like screening resumes by tech keywords - sure that C++ Systems Programmer with 20 years of experience as a senior dev might be able to pick up Java in like a week - but the algorithm didn't see Java anywhere in the resume so into the bin it goes.
This is basically just letting employees do a similar first pass of employers that employers are doing on us - if your salary range is bonkers and your senior dev has a low range of 30k then I'm not working there - I don't care if you offer me 150k, you clearly have something toxic going on with your culture so into the bin you go.
I think many of these companies are simply too lazy to have their compliance department review listings, and have chosen to pull them instead. Which still reflects just as negatively on them, but isn't quite the same.
This law is absolutely a great step forward, but I've seen plenty of roles listing pay ranges like "Minimum - $30,200/annual Maximum - $289,200/annual," so I struggle to believe that the actual information disclosure is the issue at hand.
I had a recruiter e-mail me once to pitch a 6-month PHP programming contract that expected a Master's degree and 5 years experience that was only going to pay $15/hr.
My guess is it has less to do with laziness and more to do with the financial cost of opening yourself up to lawsuits if you can't prove the wage difference isn't due to sexual discrimination.
While I like the idea of forcing these companies to list salary on job posts I'm not sure I agree with the reason the bill was put in place.
If I were a company I'd avoid CO as well. Plenty of other places to pick up employees.
>My guess is it has less to do with laziness and more to do with the financial cost of opening yourself up to lawsuits if you can't prove the wage difference isn't due to sexual discrimination.
Why would they not be equally open to that risk right now? I am not seeing any special connection between publicly listing a pay range and an applicant's gender.
>Wage discrimination based on sex - complaints - civil action - exceptions to prohibitions against wage differentials - prohibited acts of employer - employment announcements required - enforcement - rules. The act removes the authority of the director of the division of labor standards and statistics in the department of labor and employment (director) to enforce wage discrimination complaints based on an employee's sex and instead authorizes the director to create and administer a process to accept and mediate complaints of, and provide legal resources concerning, alleged violations and to promulgate rules for this purpose. An aggrieved person may bring a civil action in district court to pursue remedies specified in the act.
Wouldn't it leave them open to "I have above the minimum qualifications and experience and yet your offer is near the bottom of the range, not near the top" discrimination suits (in addition to the status quo risk of lawsuits if the company actually does pay similarly qualified men more)
I do not know if that would be an issue, but I do see CountDrewku's point that the job listing itself might cause problems the way the law was enacted:
Averages have nothing to do with it and I don't know where you're getting that from.
The goal is to limit the amount of discretion companies can exercise on a per applicant basis by forcing them to provide a salary range up front. Even if you don't care about discrimination for some reason the law should still have a positive effect on wage transparency which should benefit anyone who works for wages.
I have always wondered whether I was in the minority in caring a lot about these, as companies tend to talk about the "challenges" and "mission", and while I enjoy those, I also chose this field in part because I want a comfortable life.
I enjoy CS, don't get me wrong, but I also enjoy history.
I think working for an employer because you identify with their “mission” is deeply unhealthy for both individual employees and for society at large. In almost all cases, employment should be a purely financial transaction, and if you’re looking for something “deeper” you should probably work for yourself or start a new company.
Is wearing a sports team jersey deeply unhealthy? What about wearing a political hat?
People like being in tribes, and they like standing for something. They love signaling those affiliations.
If someone can get paid to join a tribe on a mission they identify with, if they get to say things like “We are accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable transport!” without the extraordinary stress of being an entrepreneur, why quash that?
Because being a fan of a team or particular political view is a choice you make - people can shout "Hey - you're not a real sox fan!" all they want, but you've chosen to be a fan of them - and you have the ability to withdraw that support if you like. Thus, building up an identity that includes that facet is healthy and empowering - you can get ungracefully fired from your position or laid off though - and that can cause emotional distress at a time you're also suffering financial distress. That's not a healthy scenario to set yourself up for.
Your work and your life are two quite separable things - when you're young it's easy to be entirely consumed by work, but you'll grow out of that hopefully (whether or not you have kids - you can also just start valuing yourself more). The more they are intertwined the more you're putting yourself at risk of a serious sudden life shock.
I think being a founder is a bit easier life-shock wise - things can definitely go horribly wrong (they usually do in fact!) but you get a lot of warning and you should see the end coming before it slaps you in the face. If your company graduates to being a full corporation with a board and such - I think that's the time when you should regroup and step back a bit - since you are now a disposable employee.
I've worked jobs with a healthy social culture (most people are nice & respectful) and unhealthy ones (most people are cold, calculating, and don't give a crap about you), as well as worked on things I would deem "interesting" (brain stimulating, not "fun") and "boring" (not solving problems, just doing legwork, without the creating novel solutions part, more or less). When I was younger, I worked at a carwash where the work was repetitive and mind-numbing and where the people were unkind to each other. I lasted several months until I found a better place to work for, but what I learned from that and later experiences is that I really don't want to work at a job that has a "I'm just here for the money, so why bother making friends?" type of attitude for very long.
I didn’t mention any of the stuff you’re defending; my comment was specifically about working for a place because of “the mission”. A job being transactional doesn’t prevent it from being fun or friendly.
To my knowledge it only requires sharing the salary range with people once they have an offer in hand, if that person asks for it. It does not require making that range publicly available to anyone seeing the job listing.
>California law requires employers to provide job applicants with the salary or hourly wage ranges for positions upon the applicant’s reasonable request, provided the applicant has completed an initial interview with the employer.
> Doesn’t California have a similar pay transparency law?
California’s is “on applicant request” not “in advertisements”. Though the California Equal Pay Act has had annual amendments for the last several years so I wouldn't be surprised to see it picking up a Colorado-style disclosure rule soon.
no, as someone who lives in Colorado, and is affected by this law, which was something widely reported on, nor was it bipartisan, it's not too early to form a judgement on this.
I would insist that it is. If other states follow CO with this type of legislation, it will result in all (most) companies deciding to do what many people consider the right thing. If they do not, and CO remains alone in this requirement, then the longer term conclusion will look different.
I'm sorry if that comes at some personal cost to you, but there are very [ EDIT: few ] social changes that don't cost someone something.
It's always great, as long as it's someone else paying the price.
Put it another way - the positions that this law are impacting around positions that lack a competitive market for people. This isn't affecting people who want to know if McDonald's or Taco Bell pays more. It's affecting people who are looking for high paying software development and management roles.
There is a constant pattern of the last decade of different institutions running special bills in Colorado before rolling it out on the west cost. This is just another example.
This bill might have made sense when everyone is going into offices. It makes no sense now.
> That's all about to change. A growing number of states are enacting measures known as "pay transparency," which force companies to disclose their compensation levels. New laws set to take effect in Connecticut and Nevada next month, and in Rhode Island in 2023, require employers to provide applicants the salary range they pay for each position at some point in the hiring process. Four other states and two cities have enacted similar mandates, some of which also require employers to disclose their pay scales to existing employees.
The challenge with that is if you can't get the Department of Labor to institute this (under a favorable administration), Congress is mostly deadlocked until the makeup up representatives turns over (through voter turnover). Alternatively, you could target enough states to pass this law that it would be useless to avoid listing your jobs in those states, as you'd be excluding excessive candidates from your candidate pool.
California, Oregon, Washington state, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York would be ideal next states to push this legislation. Texas and Florida would, of course, not be likely to pass such legislation although they each have large populations that would benefit from such pro labor statute. Turn the ratchet.
You're right. It's kind of like marijuana legalization. The feds refused to but it's almost become defacto law of the land when enough states do it themselves.
Avoiding the so-called 'Law of unintended consequences' is used a lot to try and justify races-to-the-bottom. A jurisdiction could require better environmental safeguards, encouraging high-polluting employers to leave that jurisdiction for [$name-of-jurisdiction-with-more-lax-environmental-regulations]. That doesn't mean the environmental safeguards should never be promulgated.
This is a predictable consequence of a shortsighted legal requirement. How many people will be deprived of work opportunities because of this law? How many jobs will Colorado lose over the next decade or more until the legislature realizes what they've done?
I have to hard disagree here. There are a lot of bad actors and abusive/manipulative people who would use this information to unfairly pressure someone if they knew how exactly much they made.
If they had the ability to pressure someone, why would they not simply be able to press them to show them their tax returns? And would this happen with sufficient frequency to negate the benefits of price transparency?
Norway has had public tax returns for a long time.
Does anyone who lives in a country where tax records are already public have any insight on whether this happens with any non-pro-corporate-fearmongering frequency in those places?
Conmen still definitely exist and they will target the recently rich quite frequently. "Oh did you just get a big options buy out - well I run a wealth management fund that can help grow that sustainably..." these sorts of schemes hurt people bad but because the people had a boatload of money they tend not to raise as much media attention - also IMO America is socially accepting to people who fleece others out of their well-earned cash, if the fool was parted from his money then the benefactor is clearly "more deserving" of it.
I think statistically it's not the case that wealthy people are more targeted, but I know wealthy people who'd rather live under the radar wrt their wealth.
The last thing anyone wants is efficient markets in labor. It would make unions illegal, for example, as the entire raison d'etre of unions is to use market power to raise prices in a coordinated manner. So let's not start pushing for "market efficiency" arguments because those will really come back to bite the proponents of this bill.
An individual may not want efficient markets for their short term interest. A society most certainly benefits from efficient markets in the long term by properly allocating labor resources.
The bottom income/wealth deciles should definitely welcome price transparency, unless they are "temporarily" embarrassed members of the upper income/wealth deciles.
It's not at all clear that society benefits from efficient markets in labor, or that efficient markets theory is something that can even be applied to labor markets in a consistent and logical manner.
Efficient markets assume an infinite amount of indistinguishable goods sold by an infinite amount of producers with only marginal costs. This theory is useful because in many situations (e.g. commodities markets) this is a reasonable approximation. That is very different from how labor markets work, even in theory. Labor is not a commodity, there are heavy fixed costs (the costs of skill acquisition), and search costs dominate labor markets.
I do not see how a society would not benefit from a more efficient labor market, almost by definition of efficient.
It is the whole reason why top down control and fascism or communism or Stalinism or Maoism are not ideal, because there is no better signal of supply and demand curves than prices.
The way prices move, over a sufficiently large dataset, indicate the way supply and demand curves are moving, and where the ball is moving so you can get to where the ball will be.
It is not perfect, of course, but it is better than the alternative (which is?).
The alternative to an efficient labor market is an inefficient labor market. One with regulations, unemployment insurance, unions, all kinds of subsidies (education grants are subsidies for the labor market) etc.
Indeed, worrying about the efficiency of labor markets is a mug's game. We should be worrying about creating productive ecosystems and acquiring skills, and leave the labor market to be inefficient.
Those can all co-exist with price transparency to create a more efficient market than without price transparency. I fail to see why society would not want to benefit from the price signals and have as much of a head start as possible on adjusting labor supply and demand rather than failing to and then having to suffer while trying to correct.
Here is a real world example I know from someone suffering due to their lack of interest in real world prices. Pay for most pharmacists has been flat since 2011, and declining since 2016. This is known from pharmacist sharing their pirate offers on pharmacy forums.
However, 22 year olds entering pharmacy school were not paying attention to this information, and instead were relying on the BLS's predictions that pharmacy demand would go up 10% and the schools' marketing showing that even though they will spend $200k on tuition, they will come out with amazing pay.
Now, if you read the forums, they are full of pharmacists regretting going into pharmacy, being crushed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and not doing their jobs properly of double checking prescription medications in order to ensure they still have a job because they have that student loan debt gun to their head.
So due to lack of pay transparency, there are tens of millions of Americans going to CVS and Walgreens getting medications from overworked pharmacists who themselves admit cannot properly vet the prescriptions to the degree they should. In the meantime, the schools that inflated tuition and class sizes got to benefit and taxpayers are left holding the bag by subsidizing these student loans.
Exactly. We should also require by law that candidates provide the range of salaries they're willing to accept on their resumes before submitting any applications. For efficiency's sake, of course.
Depends on how the rest of the country plays it. We can leave Colorado devs for dead, or speak up about this practice and get the needed changes nationwide, fuck, even globally.
We’re all doing the same job, and I have no idea how the argument for geographic based pay holds water.
In a broader sense, this is one thing that can literally save the middle class. You can live anywhere, get the same pay rate, and actually buy that house in an affordable place instead of fighting for your life for your whole life.
It's very simple. It's to a company's benefit to miss twenty qualified applicants than to hire a single unqualified one. It's to a company's benefit to miss twenty qualified applicants than to reveal their salary range during negotiation to a single one. It's to a company's benefit to lose twenty qualified employees than to promote anyone from within. You can justify just about any industry practice by saying a dramatic number while wearing a smart expression on your face.
> It's to a company's benefit to miss twenty qualified applicants than to hire a single unqualified one.
This isn't true outside of FAANG.
I've seen past employers hire 20 unqualified people to fill the role of 2-3 qualified people who left. Often paying more in aggregate, but getting a "better deal" on each employee. Heck, the manager now gets promoted to Sr. Director for having so many people under them.
This pre-supposes that doing anything pro-applicant is somehow a benefit to a company. Many of the things you've said are a benefit for the company, but many are not and are instead cultural.
"It's to a company's benefit to miss twenty qualified applicants than to hire a single unqualified one." This one is true, but not universally. The assumption baked in is: Interviewing more candidates is less expensive than hiring an unfit candidate and then letting them go. That's usually true, which is why this piece of advice is brought up so frequently.
"It's to a company's benefit to miss twenty qualified applicants than to reveal their salary range during negotiation to a single one." The assumption baked in is: You "the company" will save money by never revealing salary info; by revealing salary range you're giving up dollars you could have negotiated for with the candidate. The money spent interviewing candidates who you can never hire is less than the money you'll save through the lower salaries you can negotiate for because you don't reveal pay info. This is also mostly true, since you can save so much over time through negotiating a lower salary.
"It's to a company's benefit to lose twenty qualified employees than to promote anyone from within." The baked in assumption is: Promoting from within is more expensive or yields worse results than hiring externally. In general, this is usually not true to a point. I'm not saying hiring a factory line worker to be the new CEO is a good "hire from within" practice. Hiring from within when there are jobs based around similar skill sets but variations in focus area/responsibility level is probably a good idea. After all, why spend a lot of money looking outside for someone who is good at X when you already know a load of people who are good at W or Y, which are very close to X. It's the same reason that referral programs are such good ways of finding candidates: it acts as a fantastic filter. The reason it's often not done is largely because skill gaps (or perceived skill gaps) are too big for a role change.
The Colorado law to me strikes me as a pretty huge government overreach. I fully believe in minimum wage laws, and that feels like an appropriate regulation to me, but this just feels like it's almost attacking these companies, interfering with their hiring processes, and I fully see why companies would rather not bother hiring in what boils down to 1 mid-sized metro area than deal with the consequences.
How can anyone come between me and another adult trying to exchange services and money like this? It’s kind of insane if you think about it through that lens.
If you wanna pay your neighbor's kid $15 for 3 hours of lawn mowing, you still can. Unmediated transactions of a certain scale don't require any government oversight, it's only when you start breaking out taxable income that it become a problem.
>> Unmediated transactions of a certain scale don't require any government oversight
What is this scale? As far as I know you only get away with this because no one knows or cares to enforce the law in that case. But police have been known to shut down kids lemonade stands for not having all the right permits, so I don't believe this is actually true in the law.
I would be happy if this was the case: I used to hire people all the time to do odd jobs for me, but I feel like it's too costly and too legally risky to actually be worth it for me, so I just don't do it anymore. And the people I used to hire aren't exactly relieved.
> If you wanna pay your neighbor's kid $15 for 3 hours of lawn mowing, you still can.
Can you, though, legally? Or is it just unlikely that you'd get in trouble for it?
This also raises the question of why it's even ok to do this. Isn't this is why labor laws exist? I imagine if you called up a local landscaping company and asked them to come do 3 hours of lawn mowing, they'd charge you something on the order of $300. I think it's pretty safe to say that they're not doing 20x the work your neighbor's kid would do, or would do it 20x better. Even if you were to find an adult handyman on Craigslist or whatever, I expect you're not paying less than $15/hr for that, and often will be paying quite a bit more.
So for some reason it's socially acceptable to pay kids a pittance because they have no leverage or negotiating power, and because they're "learning responsibility" (sounds like "we should be able to use your professional photographs for free because it gives you exposure" or "this unpaid internship will give you valuable experience!"), and well... they're just kids, so who cares? It's kinda gross when I think about it.
When I was in high school (14-17 years old), I was a referee for my local youth soccer club. I took the same training (with annual refreshers) the adults took, worked alongside them, and got paid the same amount for the same work. The pay varied by the age level of players (older kids play longer games and the expectations for referee rigor are higher), but for most games ended up being around $25-30/hr, which was pretty good for a part-time weekend job in the mid/late 90s.
Because the two adults aren't coming together from equal positions.
The worker needs to work to make money to buy food and shelter. Without a minimum wage, unskilled labor reaches a race to the bottom on wages. It's exploitative to allow an employer to pay $1/hr because no matter how low you go, you'll find someone willing to accept less because they're that desperate to survive.
It seems insane to you because you have a very valuable skill and the means to easily shop around. It's less insane when the job market is restricted to a single employer in an area, employees lack the means to relocate, or really anytime there's a massive power imbalance between employer and employee. See the company store on wikipedia.
Minimum wage basically states "A human's time is worth at least this"
Do you see a better solution to sweatshops and other indentured-servitude-like setups?
(If you don't think those sorts of things need solutions, then I expect we're not going to find any common ground, though.)
> It’s kind of insane if you think about it through that lens.
No, it's not. If that's the case, then you also have to believe that any kind of regulated commerce is insane, and I don't think that's a reasonable position to take.
Look at it from another angle. We know, as a fact, that if companies pay below a certain level, then their workers end up using public funds for help - food vouchers, subsidies, housing benefits.....all because they aren't being paid enough.
So basically, you as a tax payer, as subsidizing someone's business so they can have cheap labour.
It's kind of insane if you think about it through that lens. Social benefits exist to help those who fall on hard times, not to give shitty companies cheap workers.
I also think minimum wage laws are BS - but unfortunately if your society doesn't ensure social services then minimum wage steps in to pick up the slack - ideally earned income could be directed entirely toward luxuries, then workers would be empowered to properly balance their life and work... However, at the moment you can end up working a job that results in you not being able to sustain yourself - that's silly, you might say, nobody would take that offer! But someone will accept it without realizing the full depth of pain the debt forced on them will end up extracting and they will suffer for it.
> This law vaguely benefits workers who are nowhere near the poverty line.
Unless I'm misunderstanding it, Colorado's new law applies to salaried jobs in all income brackets. For someone who's poor and desperately job hunting, knowing whether a job's salary range is 20k-30k versus 25k-35k before having to go through a gauntlet of interviews sounds like it could make a big difference.
I don't believe that's up to the government. The government regulates the lowest allowable wage, anything above that should be between the employer and the employee.
What is and isn't government overreach is a contentious topic, and I can't say your personal opinion is invalid.
But to be clear, you're just saying one of those is OK for the government to do and the other isn't. That's not an argument. Do you have some rationale behind that, like a philosophy or a reference to some constitutional clause? Or is that just how you feel?
If nothing else, this is ensuring a fair, competitive marketplace. Requiring employers to share more of their information with prospective employees makes a more efficient market. This is a move preserving and encouraging competition. It only stands to make markets more efficient and I hope more states follow suit and make such a rule the de facto standard.
Anything that brings clarity with no cost is not an overreach. I don't even apply for companies that do not list salaries. Why would I waste days of time going through an interview process only to be offered burger flipper wages? The only companies complaining about this are shady scum who are embarrassed by their salary offers.
I think companies should be free to post their salary ranges. If you’re talented, and you care about posted salary ranges, and companies want talent, that could be a useful tool.
I think transparency laws are a lot more important than minimum-wage laws. Give people information and you give them options; they can see at a glance if there's a better job out there than their current position, and avoid wasting time applying to jobs that won't pay better. Force people not to work at certain prices and you take away options.
Minimum wage employees aren't earning minimum wage because they are unaware other jobs pay more, they're earning minimum wage because they're unable to get those jobs.
At that end of the market the pay rates are generally pretty transparent anyway, because there's no negotiation and no "10x dishwasher" that the company worries about deterring if they disclose what the existing staff earn.
If one believes in the theory of free markets, this moves the labor market closer to the ideal market by forcing more transparency. I don't like government overreach because it usually makes the market less efficient, but in this case I believe it's doing the opposite. Or at least, it WOULD be doing the opposite if it was universal, but it's not, so yeah some Prisoner's Dilemma-like game theory comes into play.
It it applying symmetry to an asymmetrical relationship.
One company can go pretty long without hiring a given position.
One person cannot go very long without taking a job.
It is a detriment to the worker to not have good salary information, and the cards are clearly stacked in the employers' favor. Thus, government action.
This is analogous to disclosure laws which forces companies to disclose company information that may influence investors decisions. If it makes sense to force companies to disclose financial information to potential investors then it makes sense to force companies to similarly disclose salary ranges to prospective employees.
Regulation rarely leads to more efficient markets. If you believe in markets, then if pay transparency was beneficial, companies would already be doing it. The market clearly does not favor it. And forcing it already has negative consequences -- see the article for companies that are refusing to play ball in Colorado.
> If you believe in markets, then if pay transparency was beneficial, companies would already be doing it.
Companies are the ones gaining from the market failure. Why would they want to empower employees to better know their worth? Obviously companies don't want to support legislation that hurts their bottom line, even if it makes markets more efficient.
I don't disagree with government regulation, it certainly has its place. I think employers should be forced to pay a living wage if they want to hire employees in America. That's a regulation I think is fair and helps prevent exploration.
I also think it's useful for consumers to know how many calories are in their food.
And for small restaurants, the overhead of computing calories is actually onerous. They are exempt.
With wages, the bar is that you must pay the minimum. Anything more I think is onerous and not the role of government to get involved in, and should not be applied.
In a hot job market this will not affect overall unemployment in Colorado. In a severe downturn, Coloradans will probably be at a major disadvantage. We need a recession to figure out the real consequences. Who knows when that will be.
I’d love to see a law that goes a step further and also mandates that everyone’s salary be public knowledge to everyone else within the same company. If this generates resentment, it means the company is poorly managed. The company would therefore either be compelled to fix their pay discrepancies (thereby allaying the resentment) or risk losing resentful employees to other companies.
It would also be great if this current law forced companies to disclose accurate ranges (e.g. ±1σ from the median pay for a given title). Otherwise, they can specify arbitrarily huge ranges and make the whole thing meaningless.
Such a law would seem unconstitutional. It is one thing to regulate commercial speech to the public -- as Colorado is doing -- but another altogether for the government to compel private speech about private individuals.
Even if you didn't give specific dollar per person. I agree. There should be known ranges for a position and years of service as minimum
Similar to military if you know someone's pay and years. You know their minimum. But they might get additional amount for other reasons.
I think a good starting place is say position x pays between 35k and 40k for 1 to 5 years in position.
Its removes a little burden on jealously of knowing exact amounts. And the range must be small enough to be reasonable. It can't just be between 30k and 300k. Or as GP said. Give a +- from median.
I know its be easier for some to say they make higher end of their range or above max than it is to share specific dollar amount.
There can be 'levels' that is semi-independent from 'job title'. As this is commonly the case in many companies.
Many companies have multiple levels for a given job title. Everywhere I've worked in software has had 'levels' with a finite range, and as you reach the upper bound of the range, you move to the next 'level'. There is some overlap in the level's ranges. Also as I originally stated, this is the 'minimum' for simply a starting talking point, it will still allow some to be hidden/obscured. There is always 'additional bonuses/awards' on per project basis. e.g. Project ___ grants an additional $$$ either 1 time bonus on start, on complete, or recurring.
If someone's value production is greater, than they should be promoted to the next 'level' which comes with increased compensation.
I'd like to see a law forcing companies to pay everyone $1,000,000/year. Then we'd all be rich. It's so easy, I can't believe no one has thought of it before. Just force people to do stuff.
Definitely overkill for the website itself but I also built it as a learning opportunity so it's a react frontend with Tailwindcss, Golang + gRPC gateway, hosted on an EKS cluster and backed by serverless Postgres Aurora. I hope the stack holds up with eyes from HN :D
I clicked through some Accenture links (#2 on the list) and they clearly comply with the Colorado hiring law. They even have a section dedicated to the Colorado law and the wage range:
> As required by the Colorado Equal Pay Transparency Act, Accenture provides a reasonable range of minimum compensation for roles that may be hired in Colorado. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific office location. For the state of Colorado only, the range of starting pay for this role is {$215,000 - $324,999 } and information on benefits offered is here.
How are you generating this list? The first link I clicked on showed the exact opposite of excluding Colorado hiring due to the law. Are these listings compiled by searching for generic terms like “Colorado”? Is anyone verifying them?
> I clicked through some Accenture links (#2 on the list) and they clearly comply with the Colorado hiring law. They even have a section dedicated to the Colorado law and the wage range:
> > As required by the Colorado Equal Pay Transparency Act, Accenture provides a reasonable range of minimum compensation for roles that may be hired in Colorado. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific office location. For the state of Colorado only, the range of starting pay for this role is {$215,000 - $324,999 } and information on benefits offered is here.
> How are you generating this list? The first link I clicked on showed the exact opposite of excluding Colorado hiring due to the law. Are these listings compiled by searching for generic terms like “Colorado”? Is anyone verifying them?
> How are companies and listings added?
> Job listings are currently user submitted with a manual review process to verify that a job listing is excluding Colorado. Anyone can submit listings to /new and our team will frequently review the submitted listings to see if they should be listed on the rest of the website.
>Position is available for remote work in the following states unless otherwise specified. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
Hawaii is excluded as well. I wonder if it for legal or timezone/travel/covid reasons.
edit - looks like they have a fair amount of openings, and all the remote ones have CO excluded.
The site is great! Fantastic idea. Awesome work on the responsiveness, too.
Unsolicited opinion on the design: The mid grey text on the light grey background (e.g. as seen on the about) isn’t a great design decision imo. I know it’s really fashionable right now for some reason, and while it may meet sufficient contrast for accessibility guidelines (I didn’t check), I found it quite hard to read. That colour text signals to me the same thing the grey-on-grey Ts&Cs footer on most websites signals - ignore this text. Grey on grey is one of my personal pet peeves so maybe I’m reading into it too much.
This is simply a consequence of the law not being a federal law. If it was they would simply suck it up and post the damn salary range. However, since its only local to Colorado, then the easy route is to simply avoid hiring there.
BUt iF It wAz A fEdERal LAw tHey WoUlD lEAvE tHe US
Context: Colorado’s Equal Pay Act requires jobs ads to list a salary range [1], which companies generally don't want to do. Excluding CO residents is one way companies are avoiding the law.
They're avoiding the other elements of the law. It institutes a few other things besides just salary transparency. Companies also have to maintain a record of salaries/wages in order to prove they didn't discriminate based on sex and they have to announce advancement opportunities to existing employees (something many companies shy away from).
It should be, but companies, like people, aren't as rational as we'd like to believe them to be. For whatever reason there is a tendency to keep people who aren't on leadership tracks (which often means getting picked by a leader above you) where they are and with minimal pay raises. But then they hire new people at higher rates (because you have to, to get them in the door). This law makes that much harder to accomplish without creating conflict. You announce a new job paying 20% more than your current employees get in that position, they'll know they're getting screwed.
I'm curious if the other workaround will just be to have Junior Software Engineer I ($60K-$65K), JSE II ($65-70), etc. and post them all via the power of automation and just down qualify candidates from JSE VIII to JSE II because of the lack of 20 years experience in Rust. They still get to low-ball people. I really wish software had some more abstract certifications like other professions do, including things like journey-man drywaller.
I think the trade style apprentice to journeyman process is great. I've seen it deployed in the govt and it worked quite well. I think it could be pretty helpful in a generalization sense, but we would run into issues with so many people doing things outside of one discipline.
That's what my company does. Well, they don't publish the salaries externally, but I believe they're accessible to managers. I switched BU's inside my company and had to essentially "apply" to this new job -- I tried to negotiate salary and was told "No, they're fixed to a certain amount, +/- a tiny wiggle room, by HR at the corporate level based on job level - best I can do is offer the top of the range for this position". I've been told that they try to accommodate location-cost-of-living; not sure how good or bad a job they do.
Doesn't this basically show the stupidity of local regulations? Make these kind of laws federal if you want them to stick or at least coordinate with the big states. Looking at Wikipedia Colorado doesn't have the economic power to dictate anything.
On the other hand, when done well, this lets individual states experiment with new policies before you make them mandatory everywhere. Would you push a new release to 100% of traffic immediately?
This is a great list of companies that I will avoid applying for. I don’t live in Colorado, but there’s something kind of I don’t know, petulant? Childish? Willfully insulting? to the phrase “ Remote work location is flexible if approved by the Company, except that position can not be performed remotely from Colorado.”
I think what really sticks in my craw about that statement is that it’s a bold-faced lie. If a company were to say “we are unwilling to share how much we’re willing to pay because we’d prefer to underpay every person possible “ I’d respect it more than “this remote job is impossible to perform because of, uhhhh, geography”
That was my feeling as well. They don't like the rules of the game, so they're taking their ball and going home. It's always really telling to me when a company tries to avoid a law that genuinely provides for a more level playing field for existing and/or potential employees. I don't live in CO, so this wouldn't affect me, but seeing a company take this attitude is a red flag about their take on the employer-employee relationship. And as a software developer, I'm lucky that demand is high enough that I have no need to bother with companies who wear red flags like that on their sleeves for all to see.
Regarding remote jobs and geography, there are also nexus laws to consider. Companies are sometimes only set up to have employees in certain states. The larger the company, the more states they will have nexus in. If a company hasn't already set up nexus in a state, and if it's for just one employee, they might not want to set up nexus there, for tax reasons.
I was told this when I was considering moving to another state (in the US), and asked my employer. I was told no based on that they did not have nexus in that state, and it would be a hassle for them to do so. What I learned from that is that remote doesn't necessarily mean work / live anywhere, even if moving within the same country.
> Regarding remote jobs and geography, there are also nexus laws to consider. Companies are sometimes only set up to have employees in certain states.
It is a true statement that there’s an extant possibility that some businesses are incapable of operating in the state of Colorado for reasons that have nothing to do with artificially depressing wages.
My comment about not wanting to work for or with these companies is due to them nakedly advertising that they’re valuing the artificial depression of wages. While it’s a neat thought that there maybe exists a universe where it’s a coincidence that “anywhere in the country but Colorado” became a common phrase in job postings, I’m not really sure why entertaining that fantasy is useful.
To clarify, I’m directly addressing clearly worker-hostile behavior that I can see happening plainly, not a theoretical that could be happening at a business inside of a thought experiment.
I doubt these businesses will suffer without my being employed with them so I don’t really care.
One of the top results, Accenture, seems to have evolved to provide a very wide range for Colorado instead:
"As required by the Colorado Equal Pay Transparency Act, Accenture provides a reasonable range of minimum compensation for roles that may be hired in Colorado. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific office location. For the state of Colorado only, the range of starting pay for this role is $62,100 - $122,799 and information on benefits offered is here."
That seems like a reasonable range, assuming the candidate really could have a wide range of levels of experience. Putting "20,000 - 300,000" would be taking the piss.
I yearn for the day that businesses will truly fear public exposure like this. There is a deeply seated hope in my heart that our world will one day see businesses that use practices like these punished.
"(2) AN EMPLOYER SHALL DISCLOSE IN EACH POSTING FOR EACH JOB
OPENING THE HOURLY OR SALARY COMPENSATION, OR A RANGE OF THE
HOURLY OR SALARY COMPENSATION, AND A GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF ALL
OF THE BENEFITS AND OTHER COMPENSATION TO BE OFFERED TO THE HIRED
APPLICANT. "
Nowhere in the document do they define the term "range".
If an employer wants to discriminate, couldn't they just give a wide range?
Yes they could theoretically, but the problem is if you put "$0.00-$100,000.00 salary" people will assume you're trying to rope them in with a high potential number and then give you as little as possible. You'd get around the law, but you'd also get most potential applicants to say "fuck that" and you're more likely to get unqualified people apply, which is worse than not getting anybody to apply at all.
There are many other requirements of the law. If I read correctly, it also allows any job applicant to sue in civil court, requires companies to maintain new salary records, and post all positions internally.
I have to admit I don't understand why companies are so opposed to this. Companies I've worked at have ranges of salary internally, which presumably they could share. The ranges are large enough that I think employees would struggle to use them to negotiate very well. And employees talk salary to each other and have other ways of getting that info anyway.
Edit: someone else pointed out that Accenture does this in one of their listings:
I'm not an economist, but I imagine it's similar to disclosing any product margin or cost of goods. It's probably more about what it does to the perception of the producer vs. the consumer.
It may lead to increased cost (paying higher salaries) if the market is not competitive and companies are leveraging the obscurity. But it may decrease cost if things are over valued.
The question is, is the labor market over or under valued? If it's over-valued then disclosing may actually cause salaries to equilibrate/come down -- which would be to the company's advantage. Does it imply that companies think the market is over-valued and aren't wanting to increase competition (both internally amongst current employees and externally with new hires)?
Honest question, as this is related to something my company's HR department is grappling with (I am not involved, I'm just a lowly engineering manager): How does this law interact with companies whose pay range is location based? I.e., the starting salary band for a Silicon Valley-based candidate would take into account SF cost of living, and therefore be significantly higher on paper than the starting salary band for, say, an Arkansas-based candidate.
Obviously it would be impractical to list all the possible geo-based salary bands on a JD. Is the intent to "shame" such a company into picking a single salary range that doesn't take geo location into account?
I feel as though that would either lead to (1) everyone being paid Silicon Valley wages (which has a number of consequences of its own, both good and bad) or (2) companies which can only afford to do so for certain positions, losing out on otherwise qualified candidates who happen to live in a higher COL area.
I know there's an argument that if the company can't pay competitive wages, then they shouldn't be in business. But it feels like in case (1), candidates who live in high-COL areas are actually getting penalized. Some of them could move to lower-COL areas and get the net benefit, but others may not be able to move.
I don't know the answer here, but I'm curious to see how others in the industry are thinking about the situation.
Presumably you could list the entire range, assuming you can reasonably show that it actually is truthful when challenged. (potentially it could be an issue if the upper end is not available to all locations? Although I'd question if that is a sane policy to have either ways)
206 comments
[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 572 ms ] thread"Companies are excluding Colorado from their remote employment opportunities in order to avoid sharing the salary range of their open positions.
In May of 2019 SB19-085, titled the Equal Pay For Equal Work Act, was signed into law in Colorado. It's a fairly short read if you're not familiar with it, but its main goal is enabling pay transparency to allow for people to know if they're being discriminated against with their wages and file a complaint with the CDLE.
The law went into effect January 1st, 2021.
The most visible part of the law has been the requirement for all job listings open to a CO resident to contain a salary range. If you've seen an increase in salary ranges on job postings recently you have this law to thank.
Some companies however have decided that excluding all Colorado residents for a remote job that can be filled by someone in any of the other 49 US states is better than sharing how much they're willing to pay..."
Because if it's a theoretical minimum, I don't care about it; I want to know what the maximum is. If it's an actual minimum, I also don't care about it, but the person earning that might.
If a company offers $50k as a minimum for a role that most people earn $200k for, then they probably will not get many good people responding to it since who would want to work for a company that could lowball you by $150k? And another company can see that and up their minimum to take advantage.
It just helps weed the garbage employers out quickly. Perhaps it will not be as useful in a situation where employers have all the negotiating power where they can list $1, but at least now there is some time saved.
This is basically just letting employees do a similar first pass of employers that employers are doing on us - if your salary range is bonkers and your senior dev has a low range of 30k then I'm not working there - I don't care if you offer me 150k, you clearly have something toxic going on with your culture so into the bin you go.
This law is absolutely a great step forward, but I've seen plenty of roles listing pay ranges like "Minimum - $30,200/annual Maximum - $289,200/annual," so I struggle to believe that the actual information disclosure is the issue at hand.
While I like the idea of forcing these companies to list salary on job posts I'm not sure I agree with the reason the bill was put in place.
If I were a company I'd avoid CO as well. Plenty of other places to pick up employees.
Why would they not be equally open to that risk right now? I am not seeing any special connection between publicly listing a pay range and an applicant's gender.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb19-085
Here's the bill's summary:
>Wage discrimination based on sex - complaints - civil action - exceptions to prohibitions against wage differentials - prohibited acts of employer - employment announcements required - enforcement - rules. The act removes the authority of the director of the division of labor standards and statistics in the department of labor and employment (director) to enforce wage discrimination complaints based on an employee's sex and instead authorizes the director to create and administer a process to accept and mediate complaints of, and provide legal resources concerning, alleged violations and to promulgate rules for this purpose. An aggrieved person may bring a civil action in district court to pursue remedies specified in the act.
https://www.colorado.edu/hr/colorados-equal-pay-equal-work-a...
Won't this just lead to:
"hmm, I'm not a white male and I'm making less than average white male salary, therefore I'm being discriminated against"
"hmm, I'm not a while male and I'm making more than average white male salary, therefore I'm not being discriminated against"
The goal is to limit the amount of discretion companies can exercise on a per applicant basis by forcing them to provide a salary range up front. Even if you don't care about discrimination for some reason the law should still have a positive effect on wage transparency which should benefit anyone who works for wages.
> Companies are excluding Colorado from their remote employment opportunities in order to avoid sharing the salary range of their open positions.
A few restaurants around me have started listing their starting pay, plus sign on bonuses, so they are finally feeling the heat.
I enjoy CS, don't get me wrong, but I also enjoy history.
People like being in tribes, and they like standing for something. They love signaling those affiliations.
If someone can get paid to join a tribe on a mission they identify with, if they get to say things like “We are accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable transport!” without the extraordinary stress of being an entrepreneur, why quash that?
Your work and your life are two quite separable things - when you're young it's easy to be entirely consumed by work, but you'll grow out of that hopefully (whether or not you have kids - you can also just start valuing yourself more). The more they are intertwined the more you're putting yourself at risk of a serious sudden life shock.
I think being a founder is a bit easier life-shock wise - things can definitely go horribly wrong (they usually do in fact!) but you get a lot of warning and you should see the end coming before it slaps you in the face. If your company graduates to being a full corporation with a board and such - I think that's the time when you should regroup and step back a bit - since you are now a disposable employee.
I've noticed that at local fast food places here in the SF Bay Area for a few years.
They believe they’re entitled to the best tech team at Walmart cashier rates
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/new-wage-range-disclosu...
>California law requires employers to provide job applicants with the salary or hourly wage ranges for positions upon the applicant’s reasonable request, provided the applicant has completed an initial interview with the employer.
California’s is “on applicant request” not “in advertisements”. Though the California Equal Pay Act has had annual amendments for the last several years so I wouldn't be surprised to see it picking up a Colorado-style disclosure rule soon.
I'm sorry if that comes at some personal cost to you, but there are very [ EDIT: few ] social changes that don't cost someone something.
Put it another way - the positions that this law are impacting around positions that lack a competitive market for people. This isn't affecting people who want to know if McDonald's or Taco Bell pays more. It's affecting people who are looking for high paying software development and management roles.
There is a constant pattern of the last decade of different institutions running special bills in Colorado before rolling it out on the west cost. This is just another example.
This bill might have made sense when everyone is going into offices. It makes no sense now.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pay-transparency-salary-rang...
> That's all about to change. A growing number of states are enacting measures known as "pay transparency," which force companies to disclose their compensation levels. New laws set to take effect in Connecticut and Nevada next month, and in Rhode Island in 2023, require employers to provide applicants the salary range they pay for each position at some point in the hiring process. Four other states and two cities have enacted similar mandates, some of which also require employers to disclose their pay scales to existing employees.
California, Oregon, Washington state, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York would be ideal next states to push this legislation. Texas and Florida would, of course, not be likely to pass such legislation although they each have large populations that would benefit from such pro labor statute. Turn the ratchet.
Norway has had public tax returns for a long time.
The bottom income/wealth deciles should definitely welcome price transparency, unless they are "temporarily" embarrassed members of the upper income/wealth deciles.
Efficient markets assume an infinite amount of indistinguishable goods sold by an infinite amount of producers with only marginal costs. This theory is useful because in many situations (e.g. commodities markets) this is a reasonable approximation. That is very different from how labor markets work, even in theory. Labor is not a commodity, there are heavy fixed costs (the costs of skill acquisition), and search costs dominate labor markets.
It is the whole reason why top down control and fascism or communism or Stalinism or Maoism are not ideal, because there is no better signal of supply and demand curves than prices.
The way prices move, over a sufficiently large dataset, indicate the way supply and demand curves are moving, and where the ball is moving so you can get to where the ball will be.
It is not perfect, of course, but it is better than the alternative (which is?).
Indeed, worrying about the efficiency of labor markets is a mug's game. We should be worrying about creating productive ecosystems and acquiring skills, and leave the labor market to be inefficient.
Here is a real world example I know from someone suffering due to their lack of interest in real world prices. Pay for most pharmacists has been flat since 2011, and declining since 2016. This is known from pharmacist sharing their pirate offers on pharmacy forums.
However, 22 year olds entering pharmacy school were not paying attention to this information, and instead were relying on the BLS's predictions that pharmacy demand would go up 10% and the schools' marketing showing that even though they will spend $200k on tuition, they will come out with amazing pay.
Now, if you read the forums, they are full of pharmacists regretting going into pharmacy, being crushed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and not doing their jobs properly of double checking prescription medications in order to ensure they still have a job because they have that student loan debt gun to their head.
So due to lack of pay transparency, there are tens of millions of Americans going to CVS and Walgreens getting medications from overworked pharmacists who themselves admit cannot properly vet the prescriptions to the degree they should. In the meantime, the schools that inflated tuition and class sizes got to benefit and taxpayers are left holding the bag by subsidizing these student loans.
We’re all doing the same job, and I have no idea how the argument for geographic based pay holds water.
In a broader sense, this is one thing that can literally save the middle class. You can live anywhere, get the same pay rate, and actually buy that house in an affordable place instead of fighting for your life for your whole life.
This isn't true outside of FAANG.
I've seen past employers hire 20 unqualified people to fill the role of 2-3 qualified people who left. Often paying more in aggregate, but getting a "better deal" on each employee. Heck, the manager now gets promoted to Sr. Director for having so many people under them.
"It's to a company's benefit to miss twenty qualified applicants than to hire a single unqualified one." This one is true, but not universally. The assumption baked in is: Interviewing more candidates is less expensive than hiring an unfit candidate and then letting them go. That's usually true, which is why this piece of advice is brought up so frequently.
"It's to a company's benefit to miss twenty qualified applicants than to reveal their salary range during negotiation to a single one." The assumption baked in is: You "the company" will save money by never revealing salary info; by revealing salary range you're giving up dollars you could have negotiated for with the candidate. The money spent interviewing candidates who you can never hire is less than the money you'll save through the lower salaries you can negotiate for because you don't reveal pay info. This is also mostly true, since you can save so much over time through negotiating a lower salary.
"It's to a company's benefit to lose twenty qualified employees than to promote anyone from within." The baked in assumption is: Promoting from within is more expensive or yields worse results than hiring externally. In general, this is usually not true to a point. I'm not saying hiring a factory line worker to be the new CEO is a good "hire from within" practice. Hiring from within when there are jobs based around similar skill sets but variations in focus area/responsibility level is probably a good idea. After all, why spend a lot of money looking outside for someone who is good at X when you already know a load of people who are good at W or Y, which are very close to X. It's the same reason that referral programs are such good ways of finding candidates: it acts as a fantastic filter. The reason it's often not done is largely because skill gaps (or perceived skill gaps) are too big for a role change.
How can anyone come between me and another adult trying to exchange services and money like this? It’s kind of insane if you think about it through that lens.
If you wanna pay your neighbor's kid $15 for 3 hours of lawn mowing, you still can. Unmediated transactions of a certain scale don't require any government oversight, it's only when you start breaking out taxable income that it become a problem.
That's illegal just unlikely to be enforced.
The fact that it isn't enforced doesn't make it not-illegal.
What is this scale? As far as I know you only get away with this because no one knows or cares to enforce the law in that case. But police have been known to shut down kids lemonade stands for not having all the right permits, so I don't believe this is actually true in the law.
I would be happy if this was the case: I used to hire people all the time to do odd jobs for me, but I feel like it's too costly and too legally risky to actually be worth it for me, so I just don't do it anymore. And the people I used to hire aren't exactly relieved.
Can you, though, legally? Or is it just unlikely that you'd get in trouble for it?
This also raises the question of why it's even ok to do this. Isn't this is why labor laws exist? I imagine if you called up a local landscaping company and asked them to come do 3 hours of lawn mowing, they'd charge you something on the order of $300. I think it's pretty safe to say that they're not doing 20x the work your neighbor's kid would do, or would do it 20x better. Even if you were to find an adult handyman on Craigslist or whatever, I expect you're not paying less than $15/hr for that, and often will be paying quite a bit more.
So for some reason it's socially acceptable to pay kids a pittance because they have no leverage or negotiating power, and because they're "learning responsibility" (sounds like "we should be able to use your professional photographs for free because it gives you exposure" or "this unpaid internship will give you valuable experience!"), and well... they're just kids, so who cares? It's kinda gross when I think about it.
When I was in high school (14-17 years old), I was a referee for my local youth soccer club. I took the same training (with annual refreshers) the adults took, worked alongside them, and got paid the same amount for the same work. The pay varied by the age level of players (older kids play longer games and the expectations for referee rigor are higher), but for most games ended up being around $25-30/hr, which was pretty good for a part-time weekend job in the mid/late 90s.
The worker needs to work to make money to buy food and shelter. Without a minimum wage, unskilled labor reaches a race to the bottom on wages. It's exploitative to allow an employer to pay $1/hr because no matter how low you go, you'll find someone willing to accept less because they're that desperate to survive.
Minimum wage basically states "A human's time is worth at least this"
(If you don't think those sorts of things need solutions, then I expect we're not going to find any common ground, though.)
> It’s kind of insane if you think about it through that lens.
No, it's not. If that's the case, then you also have to believe that any kind of regulated commerce is insane, and I don't think that's a reasonable position to take.
So basically, you as a tax payer, as subsidizing someone's business so they can have cheap labour.
It's kind of insane if you think about it through that lens. Social benefits exist to help those who fall on hard times, not to give shitty companies cheap workers.
This law vaguely benefits workers who are nowhere near the poverty line. Just let the employee and employer figure out wages!
Unless I'm misunderstanding it, Colorado's new law applies to salaried jobs in all income brackets. For someone who's poor and desperately job hunting, knowing whether a job's salary range is 20k-30k versus 25k-35k before having to go through a gauntlet of interviews sounds like it could make a big difference.
But to be clear, you're just saying one of those is OK for the government to do and the other isn't. That's not an argument. Do you have some rationale behind that, like a philosophy or a reference to some constitutional clause? Or is that just how you feel?
Can you explain why you feel that way? It just seems like something similar to price transparency to me.
I don’t see any value in mandating it.
At that end of the market the pay rates are generally pretty transparent anyway, because there's no negotiation and no "10x dishwasher" that the company worries about deterring if they disclose what the existing staff earn.
One company can go pretty long without hiring a given position.
One person cannot go very long without taking a job.
It is a detriment to the worker to not have good salary information, and the cards are clearly stacked in the employers' favor. Thus, government action.
Companies are the ones gaining from the market failure. Why would they want to empower employees to better know their worth? Obviously companies don't want to support legislation that hurts their bottom line, even if it makes markets more efficient.
I also think it's useful for consumers to know how many calories are in their food.
And for small restaurants, the overhead of computing calories is actually onerous. They are exempt.
With wages, the bar is that you must pay the minimum. Anything more I think is onerous and not the role of government to get involved in, and should not be applied.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb19-085
This is about more than just salary/wage transparency.
It would also be great if this current law forced companies to disclose accurate ranges (e.g. ±1σ from the median pay for a given title). Otherwise, they can specify arbitrarily huge ranges and make the whole thing meaningless.
https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/
Similar to military if you know someone's pay and years. You know their minimum. But they might get additional amount for other reasons.
I think a good starting place is say position x pays between 35k and 40k for 1 to 5 years in position.
Its removes a little burden on jealously of knowing exact amounts. And the range must be small enough to be reasonable. It can't just be between 30k and 300k. Or as GP said. Give a +- from median.
I know its be easier for some to say they make higher end of their range or above max than it is to share specific dollar amount.
Because value production is an exact function of job title and seniority?
Many companies have multiple levels for a given job title. Everywhere I've worked in software has had 'levels' with a finite range, and as you reach the upper bound of the range, you move to the next 'level'. There is some overlap in the level's ranges. Also as I originally stated, this is the 'minimum' for simply a starting talking point, it will still allow some to be hidden/obscured. There is always 'additional bonuses/awards' on per project basis. e.g. Project ___ grants an additional $$$ either 1 time bonus on start, on complete, or recurring.
If someone's value production is greater, than they should be promoted to the next 'level' which comes with increased compensation.
How is open salary information the same as paying everyone $1M/year?
Hi everyone. I made this website a few months ago. If there are questions or suggestions, happy to answer them.
The website was covered in the wallstreet journal and a few other places: https://www.wsj.com/articles/many-companies-want-remote-work...
Definitely overkill for the website itself but I also built it as a learning opportunity so it's a react frontend with Tailwindcss, Golang + gRPC gateway, hosted on an EKS cluster and backed by serverless Postgres Aurora. I hope the stack holds up with eyes from HN :D
Very inspirational to see work from an old colleague at the top of HN. Hope you're doing well!
> As required by the Colorado Equal Pay Transparency Act, Accenture provides a reasonable range of minimum compensation for roles that may be hired in Colorado. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific office location. For the state of Colorado only, the range of starting pay for this role is {$215,000 - $324,999 } and information on benefits offered is here.
How are you generating this list? The first link I clicked on showed the exact opposite of excluding Colorado hiring due to the law. Are these listings compiled by searching for generic terms like “Colorado”? Is anyone verifying them?
> > As required by the Colorado Equal Pay Transparency Act, Accenture provides a reasonable range of minimum compensation for roles that may be hired in Colorado. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific office location. For the state of Colorado only, the range of starting pay for this role is {$215,000 - $324,999 } and information on benefits offered is here.
> How are you generating this list? The first link I clicked on showed the exact opposite of excluding Colorado hiring due to the law. Are these listings compiled by searching for generic terms like “Colorado”? Is anyone verifying them?
> How are companies and listings added? > Job listings are currently user submitted with a manual review process to verify that a job listing is excluding Colorado. Anyone can submit listings to /new and our team will frequently review the submitted listings to see if they should be listed on the rest of the website.
https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/about
https://jobs.lever.co/rackspace/d18e6926-5c2d-49fc-8553-ba61...
>Position is available for remote work in the following states unless otherwise specified. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
Hawaii is excluded as well. I wonder if it for legal or timezone/travel/covid reasons.
edit - looks like they have a fair amount of openings, and all the remote ones have CO excluded.
Unsolicited opinion on the design: The mid grey text on the light grey background (e.g. as seen on the about) isn’t a great design decision imo. I know it’s really fashionable right now for some reason, and while it may meet sufficient contrast for accessibility guidelines (I didn’t check), I found it quite hard to read. That colour text signals to me the same thing the grey-on-grey Ts&Cs footer on most websites signals - ignore this text. Grey on grey is one of my personal pet peeves so maybe I’m reading into it too much.
BUt iF It wAz A fEdERal LAw tHey WoUlD lEAvE tHe US
To that I say, not a chance.
[1] https://www.colorado.edu/hr/colorados-equal-pay-equal-work-a...
Why? Isn't hiring from within a win for employer and employee? I don't speak HR. Training up on culture and product is a huge deal sometimes.
1. The candidate has an opportunity to show how interested and qualified they are (or if the person we had in mind doesn't want the job)
2. Other people we didn't think would be interested have the same opportunity to show they do.
3. No one ends up feeling slighted for having been passed over.
Still, you have my vote!
I think what really sticks in my craw about that statement is that it’s a bold-faced lie. If a company were to say “we are unwilling to share how much we’re willing to pay because we’d prefer to underpay every person possible “ I’d respect it more than “this remote job is impossible to perform because of, uhhhh, geography”
I was told this when I was considering moving to another state (in the US), and asked my employer. I was told no based on that they did not have nexus in that state, and it would be a hassle for them to do so. What I learned from that is that remote doesn't necessarily mean work / live anywhere, even if moving within the same country.
It is a true statement that there’s an extant possibility that some businesses are incapable of operating in the state of Colorado for reasons that have nothing to do with artificially depressing wages.
My comment about not wanting to work for or with these companies is due to them nakedly advertising that they’re valuing the artificial depression of wages. While it’s a neat thought that there maybe exists a universe where it’s a coincidence that “anywhere in the country but Colorado” became a common phrase in job postings, I’m not really sure why entertaining that fantasy is useful.
To clarify, I’m directly addressing clearly worker-hostile behavior that I can see happening plainly, not a theoretical that could be happening at a business inside of a thought experiment.
I doubt these businesses will suffer without my being employed with them so I don’t really care.
"As required by the Colorado Equal Pay Transparency Act, Accenture provides a reasonable range of minimum compensation for roles that may be hired in Colorado. Actual compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific office location. For the state of Colorado only, the range of starting pay for this role is $62,100 - $122,799 and information on benefits offered is here."
Deleted that one quickly.
"(2) AN EMPLOYER SHALL DISCLOSE IN EACH POSTING FOR EACH JOB OPENING THE HOURLY OR SALARY COMPENSATION, OR A RANGE OF THE HOURLY OR SALARY COMPENSATION, AND A GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF ALL OF THE BENEFITS AND OTHER COMPENSATION TO BE OFFERED TO THE HIRED APPLICANT. "
Nowhere in the document do they define the term "range".
If an employer wants to discriminate, couldn't they just give a wide range?
https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/2019a_085_signe...
Edit: someone else pointed out that Accenture does this in one of their listings:
"For the state of Colorado only, the range of starting pay for this role is $58,700 - $94,1999" https://www.accenture.com/us-en/careers/jobdetails?id=964186...
Here we see there's even a benefit: Accenture will save time interviewing people who don't want to work for these horrible low wages.
It may lead to increased cost (paying higher salaries) if the market is not competitive and companies are leveraging the obscurity. But it may decrease cost if things are over valued.
The question is, is the labor market over or under valued? If it's over-valued then disclosing may actually cause salaries to equilibrate/come down -- which would be to the company's advantage. Does it imply that companies think the market is over-valued and aren't wanting to increase competition (both internally amongst current employees and externally with new hires)?
Obviously it would be impractical to list all the possible geo-based salary bands on a JD. Is the intent to "shame" such a company into picking a single salary range that doesn't take geo location into account?
I feel as though that would either lead to (1) everyone being paid Silicon Valley wages (which has a number of consequences of its own, both good and bad) or (2) companies which can only afford to do so for certain positions, losing out on otherwise qualified candidates who happen to live in a higher COL area.
I know there's an argument that if the company can't pay competitive wages, then they shouldn't be in business. But it feels like in case (1), candidates who live in high-COL areas are actually getting penalized. Some of them could move to lower-COL areas and get the net benefit, but others may not be able to move.
I don't know the answer here, but I'm curious to see how others in the industry are thinking about the situation.