Companies usually exclude Colorado from remote job listings so they can post a separate Colorado-specific job posting that complies with the laws in that state. It doesn’t make sense to post the Colorado-specific pay range and job posting to every other state, especially when salaries vary so much between locations.
In my (limited) experience hiring Colorado employees remotely, we had to make several different job postings with various ranges to make sure we didn’t exclude any possible applicants for having too high or too low salary bands. If someone applied for the $200-$300K job description but didn’t have the right experience or performance during the interview, we could offer for them to “reapply” to the $150K-$200K job title and pick up there. It felt like a lot of formality with no real benefit to either side.
The Colorado law also doesn’t stop at the job listing. You have to follow specific procedures for various things after the employee is hired, too. I could see companies excluding Colorado just to simplify their operations and avoid opening themselves up to another state’s different employment laws.
> It felt like a lot of formality with no real benefit to either side.
Isn't the intent to benefit third parties though? I thought the point of pay transparency is to provide information to people who don't have the connections to know what the "real deal" generally is, so they can negotiate on an equal footing as other applicants when they have the opportunity.
I'm glad CO passed this law, but this post really shows how hostile employers are to job seekers and employees. It also highlights why we really need federal action on this to provide the intended benefits to them.
Which part(s) were showing hostility towards job seekers and employees?
If an employer has a need for a level 3 software engineer (whatever that is for them), should they post in Colorado the salary range for that role in Colorado? Or the range for that role in Elbonia on the low end and Palo Alto on the high end? Would the latter pass muster with CO?
If someone aspirationally applies for that role and the interview process places them as a promising level 2 software engineer, what should the company’s answer be? “We regret to inform you that we will not be making a level 3 offer.” Or is the candidate better off if they then continue to say “we invite you to apply for consideration for a level 2 role by clicking this link: xxxx”?
Why would you have such a wide pay range of $150k-300k for a single position? Seems like such a range enables the kind of thing these laws are trying to prevent, i.e. underpaying employees, or gender/racial gaps in pay. That, or just a massive bait and switch.
Surely there has to be a limit on the ranges for salaries posted, otherwise what's stopping an employer from just posting a range of $10k - $1M, at which point the salary information becomes as worthless as having no information.
Suppose I only have one level of employee and they’re all in CO.
To keep the math and my HR processes simple, I pay them all $100K/yr and grant them all initially $200K in shares plus $100K/yr in refresher shares, vesting over 4 years. Someone who just joined will make $150K in the next 12 months. Someone who joined 2 years ago will make $200K in the next 12 months if our stock is UNCH since they joined. If it doubled since then, they’ll make close to $300K in the next 12 months.
Bam, my range is $150K-$300K/yr and I have the fairest, most equitable pay structure I could imagine. Layer on top of that complexities of people actually having different levels of productivity, different amounts of unvested stock appreciation, and you can have even wider spreads. Add to that having had to “buy out” someone’s unvested shares or bonus at another company to get them to switch to yours and the spread gets wider.
Personally I don't care about stocks on a job posting. I consider stocks to be worth 0 when considering offers unless it's a public company with all the information available for me to evaluate the company.
This is because statistically the startup will fail. And there's no way to make a fact based evaluation if it will fail or not until after you are working for them. If you are one of the initial hires it's basically blindly gambling on the founders. The exception being if the founders have previously founded successful startups, in which case you are betting on their experience.
Employers must include the following compensation and benefits information in each posting:
(A) the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range thereof) that the employer is offering for the position;
(B) a general description of any bonuses, commissions, or other forms of compensation that are being offered for the job; and
(C) a general description of all employment benefits the employer is offering for the position, including health care benefits, retirement benefits, any benefits permitting paid days off (including sick leave, parental leave, and paid time off or vacation benefits), and any other benefits that must be reported for federal tax purposes, but not benefits in the form of minor perks.
RSUs are benefits that must be reported for federal tax purposes.
B and C say "general description", while A says "rate" or "compensation"; has the exact meaning of those been figured out yet, w.r.t. what goes in the number and what goes in the text?
Further, why is pay tied to location anyway? Just because I chose to live in a cheaper region doesn't mean I can't produce the same value to the organization as someone in, say, SF. Are we to believe that employers are paying more in HCOL areas out of the goodness of their hearts?
The company is paying you the market rate, i.e as little as they can get away with, not how much value you create. Your location is one of the variables in calculating your market rate.
Who knows , with remote work this may disappear, but I doubt it's what workers in the USA would want. I live in the UK, salaries in the USA are way higher. Then look at India.
My feeling is when people say location shouldn't matter then mean as long as the location is in their country.
By all means, if my employer can find someone in another country that they think can do as well as I do for less money, they ought to hire them. It would be foolish and (frankly) shitty to feel otherwise, especially for folks like me that are in the US purely by luck of birth.
If they're from a real poor country, maybe this practice will help their economy (not that that's a reason to do it necessarily).
> The company is paying you the market rate, i.e as little as they can get away with, not how much value you create
"As little as they can get away with, not how much value you create" sounds like a recipe for exploitation and dissatisfied employees. Which I suppose is exactly what we have.
It would also seem to create a strange incentive for people to move to places where the cost of living is higher.
People have been moving to the Bay Area chasing higher tech job pay since at least the late 90s. This doesn’t seem like anything new; companies have to pay you enough that you take a deal that’s better for you. You have to take low enough that the company still thinks it turns a profit by employing you.
With remote work becoming more common, I'd expect to see companies that embrace it refuse to hire remote-only workers who live in HCoL areas, or at least cap the number they're willing to hire.
That's assuming that companies will pay more for workers in HCoL areas. I don't see why that will be the case for remote work unless the company specifically wants to have workers in those HCoL areas.
If you are in say NYC and a company is trying to hire specifically in NYC you can expect to be paid enough to live in NYC. It doesn't matter that the company could get the work done for 1/4 the cost if they were OK with the work being done in Smallville, Kansas. You aren't competing with the Smallville programmer. Your only competition also demands NYC level pay.
When the company doesn't care where the work is done other than broad limits like "should be in the US" then you are competing with the Smallville programmer for the job. And with some dude in Hooterville. And in Lake Wobegon. And in Mayberry. You are in a market with a lot of people who will accept less than NYC salary.
Actually this isn't all that different than how companies handle pay within metropolitan areas now. For example a company in downtown Los Angeles isn't going to have a different pay scale for their employees that live in Compton and the ones that live in Malibu.
Cost of living is only a small part of the pay differential. Strong candidates with large scale prod experience are concentrated in markets where these skills are most valued and attainable. You can fill headcount for less by hiring out of smaller markets, but not if you want the same candidates big tech is competing for.
If everyone goes remote-first someday, market rates everywhere will equalize, but this hasn’t happened yet.
> I’m under the impression that London’s tech market isn’t particularly hot apart from finance.
This is because FAANG refuse to benchmark against finance, because it would cost them too much money. Like they wanted me to move from Dublin to London when I was at one, but the salaries were identical, but the living costs definitely were not (salaries were the same, but a FAANG salary in Dub puts you much closer to the top of the local income distribution than one does in London).
> Why would you have such a wide pay range of $150k-300k for a single position?
Because we’re hiring good candidates at various experience ranges.
If someone shows up with the most impressive resume and portfolio I’ve ever seen, I don’t want to lose them simply because our job description doesn’t have a salary high enough to convince them to join.
Likewise, if a college grad shows up with a potentially impressive but short resume then we might want to take a chance on them, but not if we’re forced to pay them senior engineer money because that’s what we put in the ad. If I have to pay senior engineer money, I’m going to wait until a senior engineer applies.
I'm struggling to see how you could write a job ad that both a college grad and a 15+ years' experienced lead would both apply to. It would have to be ludicrously vague.
At least in SV, many of the larger companies, startups and more established firms, interview candidates for multi-team group and then match candidates more specifically based on interview performance. Part of that process is leveling because many startups throw out senior titles like candy.
Last time I interviewed at Square, for example, after passing the interview for a particular group I met with several engineering managers within the group to understand my fit within their teams. That matching was a result of what teams the group thought I might be a good fit for based on the interview.
They're all like this. I know what the company does because I do my research, and I know what tooling they're using because that's 90% of the job description. I have no idea what problems the team currently faces.
We basically keep job listings limited to "we're writing cloud software using Angular, Spring, and relational data". We're a large company, so other teams do it differently, but my team tries hard to not put ceilings or floors on experience or skills. We've hired everything from summer intern to Principal (Staff) Engineer using the same job req. We also don't limit the listings to a specific functional area - we might hire Ops, Front or Back End, Full Stack, Test, Autimation, etc, using the same req. We also actively look for skills we don't currently "need", on the hope they will widen the practical experience of the team.
Honestly, truly, does all that extra detail around experience, "job duties", micromanaged required skills, etc, actually add any value to the listing? Does "Agile experience preferred" even mean anything?
You do have to put a salary in the offer letter, so at some point you decide what their level is based on their qualifications and pick a corresponding salary. If you really want to funnel all your candidates through one job description, write a list of levels and salary ranges in the description.
If you pick the salary without leveling first, then it's not based on their qualifications, and that's the type of discrimination these laws are trying to counteract.
>Honestly, truly, does all that extra detail around experience, "job duties", micromanaged required skills, etc, actually add any value to the listing? Does "Agile experience preferred" even mean anything?
Nope, but the "x years of experience" does. IME teams that have the wrong balance of experience tend to go way off course. I worked on a team with a lot of juniors that put out a similar advert (HR snafu) and we were flooded with even more. It was a struggle to mentor those we had let alone do actual work.
I probably would apply to such jobs if I were really desperate but if salary is left out I assume it's a lowball negotiating ploy and ignore them. I believe absolutely that in spite of all protests to the contrary that it absolutely is in all cases. No shame in that either. You might score somebody senior for cheap.
There are plenty of roles these days that are up-front about what they are, though.
Do you believe everyone deserves to be compensated equally? What about their experience? Is someone can do 2x the work or positive impact on my business, I'll happily pay them more than someone less capabile.
Why not just make one post, say "salary range $150k-$300k, dependent on location, experience, and interview performance"? Seems like you're making multiple posts in an effort to have your cake and eat it too, and then blaming the laws for the extra effort required for the deliberate choice you made. Which, let's be honest, is a very anti-employee choice.
At this point when I receive a note from a recruiter, I let them know I need to know the name of the firm (not "top firm in your field"), the full job description, and the compensation range. If they do not provide that, we are wasting each others' time and I will not correspond further. I understand that third party recruiters don't want to give away some information so that applicants won't end-run and apply directly to the firm. But, look at the job market. Games are not going to work right now.
For me, in case it’s Oracle. For others, they have other companies they’d rather not work for. Some here don’t want to work at Amazon; others not at Facebook; others not at Google…
It also ends the BS of recruiters who don’t have any listings at all and just want to have engineers they can blindly pitch to companies, hoping they can score a low-effort placement.
I can’t comment on how working internally in Oracle is, but between many of its products and how they do business, they tend not to be well liked in the tech scene and people will voice their discontent. See also: Facebook/Amazon and defense contractors.
The ethics of all these companies are debatable. As a customer, my relationship with Google sure has burned me the most times (moreso than even any human relationship I've had).
Between the frequent cloud outages, product cancellations and rollbacks, secret government deals (project Maven) and the creepy privacy aspects fundamental to their bottom line. IMO, Big G takes the cake!
My googler friends except those totally cuffed by golden dollars have largely already moved (now xoogers).
(Anecdotally, they also broadly seem happier, less stressed, and more fulfilled post-/gpart-um.)
> What is wrong with Oracle? I have worked here for almost 20 years and love it.
I know a lot of people that work at Oracle, and by all accounts they enjoy the environment and have quality peers. I also have been involved in dealing with renegotiating an Oracle contract at a customer of Oracle's. After that experience not only will I never work for Oracle, I will never again do business with Oracle as long as I live. No other company I've ever engaged with has brought lawyers to a sales conversation, but Oracle loves their lawyers.
It's actually saved me a lot of time and led to several high-quality conversations with recruiters since then, which I would have missed out on otherwise.
Such a shame, but expected, that Texas does not have any such law.
I work for a big corporation in Texas, and have found myself trying to determine what will my next steps be. Employees have a tool to browse the job openings, and the responsibilities of the positions, but again, salaries are given in ranges, so wide indeed, there is no real answer to the question "would my wages be raised if I switch jobs inside the company", which is ridiculous.
I could also find myself making less money than someone who technically is on a lower leven in the hierarchy, even if we both are doing the same job.
So every year, when my supervisor asks me where do I want my career to go to, I'm stuck between what I want to do, and how much more I want to earn, which is not great.
I find myself cross-referencing salary information on Glassdoor. I'm thankful people share this info on Glassdoor but it does seem like an imperfect kludge for simply demanding an answer from HR that they just refuse to give.
The Robert Half recruiting agency's salary guide can also be useful when making the case for a raise or CoL adjustment, especially if you're in a market that levels.fyi doesn't have data for.
If you're ready being paid below the RH data, your bosses probably don't think those high numbers from e.g. levels are real, so the RH data can still give you something to take into compensation discussions. Also, if RH only includes base comp...
Frankly, you should just ask your manager what the comp change, if any, would be if you switched roles. This is a normal question in all but the most dysfunctional companies.
Agreed. As a manager, I’m acutely aware that you are working here because we pay you. So am I. We can talk about non-financial benefits and how we’re making customers’ lives better, but at the end of the day, if I stop paying you, you’ll quickly stop working.
Why there’s so much taboo/avoidance of talking about money I have no idea, but if you need some information to contemplate a career change in our company, I’ll do my best to get it for you.
In many big corps, managers, or more accurately, middle managers, do not completely understand how level compensations work. At the end of the day, they manage people, but they have little control over wages, which are determined by other managers and non human factors.
I'm guessing it is done that way so there is little room for favouritism and/or nepotism.
I was excited about Colorado's law, though for the most part there's very little value. Companies either exclude candidates from that state [1], or provide cop-out salary range information of $x - $3x/yr [2]
Summarizing here: Google listed salaries from 125,000 to 250,000 (excluding one presumably mistaken entry), for roles from L4 (L3 is new grad, L5 is Senior) - L8+ ("Director"). These don't include bonuses or equity. Bay area salaries would be something like 10-20% higher.
Facebook listed salaries from $111,000 (E3, new grad) to 239,000 (Director, E8?). Similar caveats to Google.
Microsoft listed $115,700 - $224,500 across a number of roles, again salaries higher in the bay.
Amazon, surprising no one, listed a range from 122,000 - 160K (their cap on salaries outside of the bay, where I think the cap is 175K).
Lyft and Uber didn't list roles. Stripe, Netflix and Dropbox listed remote roles but without salaries, probably violating the law. Salesforce had really low ranges. Oracle wanted me to email them, which I think also violates the law, but also I didn't want to do that.
As far as I know, the Colorado law has been interpreted (or at least theirs claimed intent by the Co legislature?) that you can't refuse to offer a remote job to Co employees to get around the law, although this only matters if you already have Co employees, in which case other provisions of the law also apply, so it's tricky.
For our entirely remote company it has only been a hassle, I’m sure many places will just skip Colorado entirely. These kind of stupid laws always backfire in such a way. Like not interviewing black candidates for fear of a lawsuit if they don’t get an offer.
I think pay transparency is a good thing. Companies should say pay rates. Other than irritating companies because they can't hide their pay rates, what is the problem with the colorado law in your opinion?
For one, the law is ambiguous and seems to be written to cover the case that people are paid mostly hourly or in salary and requires numeric figures there but permits “general description” of bonuses, RSUs, and the like. If a company genuinely seeks to comply but their “general description” is later found to not be specific enough, are they on the hook for damages (or even defending against a frivolous lawsuit)? That one seems fixable by the CO legislature.
Two, whichever state pioneers here risks making it just risky, uncertain or a pain in the ass enough for companies to nope out of hiring in CO. This one isn’t easily fixable except by a many-state compact, but being first will hurt some of your state’s residents.
Three, what range would I post for lead singer of rock band? My high school buddies (also decidedly Not Sammy Hagar) play dive bars for $100, unlimited wings, and three buckets of beer, while Is Sammy Hagar commands significantly more. If I can post a range that’s wide enough to cover my expected range, which reflects the expected range of productivity of programmers, does it really tell anyone anything that they can’t get quicker from levels.fyi than from scanning my job listing? If the law changes to require me to post a tighter range per position, then I need to manage multiple listings and still nobody learns much of anything they don’t already know. (Assuming you think there’s at least a 2x spread from the least effective but employable SWE and the top SWE. I think it’s well over 5x, but surely at least 3x.)
How much people pay in income tax is public information in the Nordics, meaning it’s trivial to compare yourself to coworkers or the names of people you interview with etc. Or neighbors, and so on.
That only works if these people only have one source of income, though, right? If people hold more than one job, or have a part-time side gig, or have investment income, that would inflate their income tax paid, and you wouldn't know what portion of that is paid against the salary for the primary job that you're curious about.
Well, US companies give RSUs to their workers in Europe. But don't Spotify, for example, also give them? (sorry, I don't know any other big public IT companies)
One of the reasons why listed salary ranges for a role may be very wide initially is that interview performance can determine your level and hence your compensation. So you really have to wait until after you interview to know your true compensation range. Many companies usually don't disclose level outright when you are applying, it's usually a more general application you fill out initially (you'll almost never see an "L5" job listing). Once you know the specific level though, you can get much tighter ranges (by looking at sites like Levels.fyi – disclosure: I'm a founder). But even then, there are also out-of-band offers that companies can give out if you're a really strong candidate or have a valid enough reason (ie to buy out your unvested stocks etc), so should this be reflected in the range too? Then the range listed would become even wider and can misdirect people's expectations since not many people would actually get to that high end.
But then again even knowing that range is super helpful regardless, and the Equal Pay Act has been instrumental in helping candidates not get lowballed. And before that, employers basically always asked what your current salary was, which is still unfortunately almost a required question candidates have to answer in other parts of the world. So all steps in the right direction, but there is some level of nuance where job listings as they are today are slightly divorced from the actual role / level / team that you end up at.
We're working on building a job board specifically to help solve this. We plan to have roles within specific levels of experience and with much tighter ranges using the leveling standard we've developed as a backbone: https://levels.fyi/standard/
The Colorado law is silly, arrogant, unhelpful. And, it's backfiring in all sorts of ways. I have many friends in Colorado who are having a hard time finding work because they think that any company who "refuses to comply" with the law must be a terrible, unfair, toxic place to work. They've taken a moral high ground, preaching pay transparency and cataloging job descriptions from companies who aren't "following the law" and reporting them to the bureaucrats.
There are many reasons a company doesn't list salary ranges on job descriptions. Hell, most companies don't even know the damn law exists—they're just hoping to hire good people to do good work.
Yes, the hiring process at a lot of companies is not awesome. Yes, recruiters are useless, and technical interviews suck. But there are a lot of great companies out there that pay really well and care about their employees. If you want to talk about salary, put in a good application, make a good first impression, and you can talk money early on in the interview process. I've hired a lot of people throughout my career. These days, I'm absolutely dumbfounded by the amount of applicants who don't seem to care about anything at all—sloppy résumés, half-assed and poorly written cover letters, days go by in between scheduling emails.
You want to make $200,000 a year? Become a better writer and don't be a fucking idiot during your interviews. Stop swaying in your chair, and playing with your hair, and reprimanding your dog. Fix your lighting and your audio, put a clean shirt on—take things seriously. You might be "qualified" for the role on paper, but no one wants to work with unthinking slobs who seem completely uninterested in actually getting the job.
The longer people whine and complain about "pay transparency", the longer they'll remain unemployed.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadIn my (limited) experience hiring Colorado employees remotely, we had to make several different job postings with various ranges to make sure we didn’t exclude any possible applicants for having too high or too low salary bands. If someone applied for the $200-$300K job description but didn’t have the right experience or performance during the interview, we could offer for them to “reapply” to the $150K-$200K job title and pick up there. It felt like a lot of formality with no real benefit to either side.
The Colorado law also doesn’t stop at the job listing. You have to follow specific procedures for various things after the employee is hired, too. I could see companies excluding Colorado just to simplify their operations and avoid opening themselves up to another state’s different employment laws.
Isn't the intent to benefit third parties though? I thought the point of pay transparency is to provide information to people who don't have the connections to know what the "real deal" generally is, so they can negotiate on an equal footing as other applicants when they have the opportunity.
If an employer has a need for a level 3 software engineer (whatever that is for them), should they post in Colorado the salary range for that role in Colorado? Or the range for that role in Elbonia on the low end and Palo Alto on the high end? Would the latter pass muster with CO?
If someone aspirationally applies for that role and the interview process places them as a promising level 2 software engineer, what should the company’s answer be? “We regret to inform you that we will not be making a level 3 offer.” Or is the candidate better off if they then continue to say “we invite you to apply for consideration for a level 2 role by clicking this link: xxxx”?
Surely there has to be a limit on the ranges for salaries posted, otherwise what's stopping an employer from just posting a range of $10k - $1M, at which point the salary information becomes as worthless as having no information.
To keep the math and my HR processes simple, I pay them all $100K/yr and grant them all initially $200K in shares plus $100K/yr in refresher shares, vesting over 4 years. Someone who just joined will make $150K in the next 12 months. Someone who joined 2 years ago will make $200K in the next 12 months if our stock is UNCH since they joined. If it doubled since then, they’ll make close to $300K in the next 12 months.
Bam, my range is $150K-$300K/yr and I have the fairest, most equitable pay structure I could imagine. Layer on top of that complexities of people actually having different levels of productivity, different amounts of unvested stock appreciation, and you can have even wider spreads. Add to that having had to “buy out” someone’s unvested shares or bonus at another company to get them to switch to yours and the spread gets wider.
Personally I don't care about stocks on a job posting. I consider stocks to be worth 0 when considering offers unless it's a public company with all the information available for me to evaluate the company.
This is because statistically the startup will fail. And there's no way to make a fact based evaluation if it will fail or not until after you are working for them. If you are one of the initial hires it's basically blindly gambling on the founders. The exception being if the founders have previously founded successful startups, in which case you are betting on their experience.
That’s not the way I read it:
Employers must include the following compensation and benefits information in each posting:
(A) the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range thereof) that the employer is offering for the position;
(B) a general description of any bonuses, commissions, or other forms of compensation that are being offered for the job; and
(C) a general description of all employment benefits the employer is offering for the position, including health care benefits, retirement benefits, any benefits permitting paid days off (including sick leave, parental leave, and paid time off or vacation benefits), and any other benefits that must be reported for federal tax purposes, but not benefits in the form of minor perks.
RSUs are benefits that must be reported for federal tax purposes.
My feeling is when people say location shouldn't matter then mean as long as the location is in their country.
If they're from a real poor country, maybe this practice will help their economy (not that that's a reason to do it necessarily).
"As little as they can get away with, not how much value you create" sounds like a recipe for exploitation and dissatisfied employees. Which I suppose is exactly what we have.
It would also seem to create a strange incentive for people to move to places where the cost of living is higher.
If you are in say NYC and a company is trying to hire specifically in NYC you can expect to be paid enough to live in NYC. It doesn't matter that the company could get the work done for 1/4 the cost if they were OK with the work being done in Smallville, Kansas. You aren't competing with the Smallville programmer. Your only competition also demands NYC level pay.
When the company doesn't care where the work is done other than broad limits like "should be in the US" then you are competing with the Smallville programmer for the job. And with some dude in Hooterville. And in Lake Wobegon. And in Mayberry. You are in a market with a lot of people who will accept less than NYC salary.
Actually this isn't all that different than how companies handle pay within metropolitan areas now. For example a company in downtown Los Angeles isn't going to have a different pay scale for their employees that live in Compton and the ones that live in Malibu.
If everyone goes remote-first someday, market rates everywhere will equalize, but this hasn’t happened yet.
This is because FAANG refuse to benchmark against finance, because it would cost them too much money. Like they wanted me to move from Dublin to London when I was at one, but the salaries were identical, but the living costs definitely were not (salaries were the same, but a FAANG salary in Dub puts you much closer to the top of the local income distribution than one does in London).
Because we’re hiring good candidates at various experience ranges.
If someone shows up with the most impressive resume and portfolio I’ve ever seen, I don’t want to lose them simply because our job description doesn’t have a salary high enough to convince them to join.
Likewise, if a college grad shows up with a potentially impressive but short resume then we might want to take a chance on them, but not if we’re forced to pay them senior engineer money because that’s what we put in the ad. If I have to pay senior engineer money, I’m going to wait until a senior engineer applies.
Otherwise, if you allow that situation to happen, well, you allowed it to happen.
Last time I interviewed at Square, for example, after passing the interview for a particular group I met with several engineering managers within the group to understand my fit within their teams. That matching was a result of what teams the group thought I might be a good fit for based on the interview.
You know a high performer from a low one. Anything in between is anybody's guess.
Salaries are reflections of the negotiation market, which reflects merit, but only barely.
We basically keep job listings limited to "we're writing cloud software using Angular, Spring, and relational data". We're a large company, so other teams do it differently, but my team tries hard to not put ceilings or floors on experience or skills. We've hired everything from summer intern to Principal (Staff) Engineer using the same job req. We also don't limit the listings to a specific functional area - we might hire Ops, Front or Back End, Full Stack, Test, Autimation, etc, using the same req. We also actively look for skills we don't currently "need", on the hope they will widen the practical experience of the team.
Honestly, truly, does all that extra detail around experience, "job duties", micromanaged required skills, etc, actually add any value to the listing? Does "Agile experience preferred" even mean anything?
If you pick the salary without leveling first, then it's not based on their qualifications, and that's the type of discrimination these laws are trying to counteract.
Nope, but the "x years of experience" does. IME teams that have the wrong balance of experience tend to go way off course. I worked on a team with a lot of juniors that put out a similar advert (HR snafu) and we were flooded with even more. It was a struggle to mentor those we had let alone do actual work.
I probably would apply to such jobs if I were really desperate but if salary is left out I assume it's a lowball negotiating ploy and ignore them. I believe absolutely that in spite of all protests to the contrary that it absolutely is in all cases. No shame in that either. You might score somebody senior for cheap.
There are plenty of roles these days that are up-front about what they are, though.
It also ends the BS of recruiters who don’t have any listings at all and just want to have engineers they can blindly pitch to companies, hoping they can score a low-effort placement.
Ours differ and that’s ok.
I can’t comment on how working internally in Oracle is, but between many of its products and how they do business, they tend not to be well liked in the tech scene and people will voice their discontent. See also: Facebook/Amazon and defense contractors.
Between the frequent cloud outages, product cancellations and rollbacks, secret government deals (project Maven) and the creepy privacy aspects fundamental to their bottom line. IMO, Big G takes the cake!
My googler friends except those totally cuffed by golden dollars have largely already moved (now xoogers).
(Anecdotally, they also broadly seem happier, less stressed, and more fulfilled post-/gpart-um.)
I know a lot of people that work at Oracle, and by all accounts they enjoy the environment and have quality peers. I also have been involved in dealing with renegotiating an Oracle contract at a customer of Oracle's. After that experience not only will I never work for Oracle, I will never again do business with Oracle as long as I live. No other company I've ever engaged with has brought lawyers to a sales conversation, but Oracle loves their lawyers.
It's actually saved me a lot of time and led to several high-quality conversations with recruiters since then, which I would have missed out on otherwise.
I work for a big corporation in Texas, and have found myself trying to determine what will my next steps be. Employees have a tool to browse the job openings, and the responsibilities of the positions, but again, salaries are given in ranges, so wide indeed, there is no real answer to the question "would my wages be raised if I switch jobs inside the company", which is ridiculous.
I could also find myself making less money than someone who technically is on a lower leven in the hierarchy, even if we both are doing the same job.
So every year, when my supervisor asks me where do I want my career to go to, I'm stuck between what I want to do, and how much more I want to earn, which is not great.
The data is many years out of date and drastically under market.
Check levels.fyi and teamblind.com instead.
The Robert Half data is very significantly under market for the skills that the majority of readers here have.
https://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guide/specialization/techn...
Why there’s so much taboo/avoidance of talking about money I have no idea, but if you need some information to contemplate a career change in our company, I’ll do my best to get it for you.
I'm guessing it is done that way so there is little room for favouritism and/or nepotism.
1: https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1395818629657149445.
2: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/careers/coloradoifsseniormanager.h...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28875365
Summarizing here: Google listed salaries from 125,000 to 250,000 (excluding one presumably mistaken entry), for roles from L4 (L3 is new grad, L5 is Senior) - L8+ ("Director"). These don't include bonuses or equity. Bay area salaries would be something like 10-20% higher.
Facebook listed salaries from $111,000 (E3, new grad) to 239,000 (Director, E8?). Similar caveats to Google.
Microsoft listed $115,700 - $224,500 across a number of roles, again salaries higher in the bay.
Amazon, surprising no one, listed a range from 122,000 - 160K (their cap on salaries outside of the bay, where I think the cap is 175K).
Lyft and Uber didn't list roles. Stripe, Netflix and Dropbox listed remote roles but without salaries, probably violating the law. Salesforce had really low ranges. Oracle wanted me to email them, which I think also violates the law, but also I didn't want to do that.
As far as I know, the Colorado law has been interpreted (or at least theirs claimed intent by the Co legislature?) that you can't refuse to offer a remote job to Co employees to get around the law, although this only matters if you already have Co employees, in which case other provisions of the law also apply, so it's tricky.
Two, whichever state pioneers here risks making it just risky, uncertain or a pain in the ass enough for companies to nope out of hiring in CO. This one isn’t easily fixable except by a many-state compact, but being first will hurt some of your state’s residents.
Three, what range would I post for lead singer of rock band? My high school buddies (also decidedly Not Sammy Hagar) play dive bars for $100, unlimited wings, and three buckets of beer, while Is Sammy Hagar commands significantly more. If I can post a range that’s wide enough to cover my expected range, which reflects the expected range of productivity of programmers, does it really tell anyone anything that they can’t get quicker from levels.fyi than from scanning my job listing? If the law changes to require me to post a tighter range per position, then I need to manage multiple listings and still nobody learns much of anything they don’t already know. (Assuming you think there’s at least a 2x spread from the least effective but employable SWE and the top SWE. I think it’s well over 5x, but surely at least 3x.)
Which means it works for 99% of employees in tech and most other sectors and the other 1% are easily spotted.
Why? You don't give mere engineers RSUs in the Nordics?
But then again even knowing that range is super helpful regardless, and the Equal Pay Act has been instrumental in helping candidates not get lowballed. And before that, employers basically always asked what your current salary was, which is still unfortunately almost a required question candidates have to answer in other parts of the world. So all steps in the right direction, but there is some level of nuance where job listings as they are today are slightly divorced from the actual role / level / team that you end up at.
We're working on building a job board specifically to help solve this. We plan to have roles within specific levels of experience and with much tighter ranges using the leveling standard we've developed as a backbone: https://levels.fyi/standard/
We're also hiring! And we list our salary ranges here: https://levelsfyi.notion.site/Levels-fyi-Careers-969edc750f1...
There are many reasons a company doesn't list salary ranges on job descriptions. Hell, most companies don't even know the damn law exists—they're just hoping to hire good people to do good work.
Yes, the hiring process at a lot of companies is not awesome. Yes, recruiters are useless, and technical interviews suck. But there are a lot of great companies out there that pay really well and care about their employees. If you want to talk about salary, put in a good application, make a good first impression, and you can talk money early on in the interview process. I've hired a lot of people throughout my career. These days, I'm absolutely dumbfounded by the amount of applicants who don't seem to care about anything at all—sloppy résumés, half-assed and poorly written cover letters, days go by in between scheduling emails.
You want to make $200,000 a year? Become a better writer and don't be a fucking idiot during your interviews. Stop swaying in your chair, and playing with your hair, and reprimanding your dog. Fix your lighting and your audio, put a clean shirt on—take things seriously. You might be "qualified" for the role on paper, but no one wants to work with unthinking slobs who seem completely uninterested in actually getting the job.
The longer people whine and complain about "pay transparency", the longer they'll remain unemployed.