Ask HN: Are CO salary disclosure laws affecting remote work opportunities?

The tough thing with these laws is that the direction is clearly positive, yet it seems to just harm anyone doing remote work in CO. Hopefully they don't have to wait for the tax base to erode before making adjustments to the law or waiting for the rest of the country to enact similar laws?

Oh wow, here's the disclaimer on a marketing job for Abercrombie and Fitch [1] and [2]:

"This position is not open to applicants residing in or otherwise based in the State of Colorado. The work location is flexible if approved by the Company, except that the position may not be performed remotely from within the State of Colorado."

I looked at one of the links on the site for Spotify, but I couldn't see any mention of Colorado on the job req [3]. Maybe it's somewhere else?? [4]

1: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2818550867 2: https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/company/776 3: https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=11c21b0e0ec9f40d&tk=1fmsmo... 4: https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/company/509

Not sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was.

Yes, it goes into effect on May 15 [1].

1: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...

Yes, it goes into affect May 15: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/new-york-city-to-requir...

Companies aren't going to be able to pull this sort of trickiness for too long -- the job market is too hot and laws like these are popping up in areas they can't afford not to hire from.

> Does anyone have an opinion of open salaries?

There's no such thing as a secret. Anyone, CEO included, that thinks they have a secret tier of comp... we know. We all talk about you and what a sweet deal you got and we make jokes about how your one or two good attributes are worth at least $$$ and we roll out eyes and chuckle. I love gossiping about salary information in the open

"But, the thing about rumors..." Dude, we know what you make. We show each other screenshots. We could get fired for it and we still do it

I suspect that more states are going to go the Colorado model. If a big one like CA or NY adopts it, most tech companies will be forced to reveal.

As to its benefits: it absolutely benefits the workers as employers will need to pre-emptively raise salaries to compete for the candidates they want.

> Does anyone have an opinion of open salaries?

I worked at a large hospital system where our salary "bands" were all a matter of record for everyone else in the School of Medicine and it was awesome. You could see what level people were and what their band range was but not their specific W-2. It was fair and transparent and the bands were small enough ranges that you know when you were a Level A vs a G what you were looking at so you didn't have much cost of living anxiety etc and could reasonably calculate if you could afford to rent a nicer apartment when you got your promotion.

It made the workers have sort of a "yeah we all work here because we love it and we all get paid shit and we still love what we do" type of communal gripes.

By contrast, another large public hospital, one of our competitors, has individual drill down public salaries BY PERSON (you can literally google the docs, plug them in and see their exact specific salary) and that seems imo a bridge too far, at least for private employees to ever accept in corporate world. I thought the "bands" added enough privacy that people were comfortable with it but doesn't let your stalker ex boyfriend in Worchester come snoop your take home pay.

My guess is:

a) First, the company be forced to give raises to all employees so that they match they level of the highest paid.

b) Not wanting to repeat this experience, the company will stop competing for valuable candidates and will no longer reward high performers financially.

> Ray Dalio's radical transparency idea is one example

May be worth to note that, as far as I know, radical transparency at Bridgewater does not extend to salaries. (Source: Was offered a job there about a decade ago). Maybe I am wrong or it has changed since I last checked, but even the link you posted is just a small sample taken from the H1B database, not something published by Bridgewater.

I'm not arguing for or against the idea, I just think its interesting that one of the companies most associated with the idea of radical transparency in the workplace doesn't extend that philosophy to compensation.

My opinion is that hidden salaries skew the edges (wider distribution) and transparent salaries flatten it.

What I mean is, with hidden salaries, yes, the low performers get less. Company is shorting them. But also, the high performers get more.

When salaries are transparent, you start making algorithms for whats "fair", so it becomes impossible to counter offer to keep to talent. You can afford to overpay 1-10% of people, but if paying someone more means paying everyone more, then the high performer salaries go down.

Essentially what this means is that hidden salaries are good for the top 10%. 50% of people think they are in the top 10%, so they think transparent salaries will hurt them.

I worked in civil service (federal university), where the salary bands are public. Because they are public, it was easy to understand, going in, that the profs were rich, and I would not be. So I adjusted my expectation of what I'd get from that job in addition to salary (prestige, ability to be paid for Go when it was rare in my job market, contact with bright students). Worked for me.

This is unfortunately not true. Inertia is a huge problem.

Pretty sure most FAANG companies don't list salaries on their open positions. You can find that info through 3rd party sources like Levels.fyi though.

majority of companies oppose transparency.

Also, transparency is not a technical issue. The people here can easily setup an Airtable spreadsheet where everyone writes the offers they are getting.

There's no such Airtable spreadsheet currently because this is a people issue - we want to know what the companies budget are but want to hold the information to ourselves without sharing that information with anyone else interviewing.

The root cause is us

I'm from the US and I skimmed past this post 6x before finally stopping and thinking about it because I had no idea what CO was. Although it's obvious in context if you're American, without context nobody would recognize state abbreviations, they're far too generic. MS ME MN MA etc could stand for so many things. I thought CO was "Chief Officer" at first.

My personal rule is that two-letter state abbreviations should only be used on postal addresses. For writing, spell it out, or use the longer abbrev. (like Calif., or Colo.)

I live in Ontario, CA. Pop quiz, where do I live? :)

and insane rents

This is the correct way, imo. Why start a relationship with a company that's going out of it's way to pay you less?

This is what I've seen basically. Some companies meet the requirements of the law technically by putting a HUGE range like "75,000USD - 310,000USD". I would argue this is disingenuous by employers, but that is a problem with the law as written based on my understanding.

I support legislation like this, but I think it's actually made some of the bands wider so that companies can continue to be vague. I think California mandates disclosure when a company is asked about a position, but every time I've tried that with a recruiter I get a "well, I've got some really wide ranges, it depends on experience and how the interview and your placement goes, but somewhere between $N,000 and $3N,000". Given that N is often less than my current salary and 3N is way more, this makes the question useless for determining whether proceeding with the company is a waste of time (although I guess you could say it's a waste of time to engage with a company that refuses to discuss salary in good faith).

Most likely the federal government would step in and point out how stupid that law would be. In addition companies outside if Colorado would stop doing business with people inside Colorado.

Your first point is really the most important part for me. I've been in tech now for around a decade; finding new work isn't that hard and I know roughly what I'm going to get paid wherever I go. But "does this company treat its workers well?" is frequently a trickier thing to get good signal on, especially if you don't know anyone there (more common now in the new mostly-remote world), and "role open to any state but Colorado" is now a useful data point (and an immediate red flag).

Some combination of market pressure and regulatory pressure. Market pressure: it'll be harder to attract people to a position without a listed salary band once they get used to listed salary bands. Regulatory pressure: the law in Colorado isn't being enforced too strictly, per bkjelden elsewhere in the comments, but the law does require "the hourly rate or salary compensation (or a range thereof) that the employer in good faith believes it may pay for the particular job"[0]. If you post a ridiculous range, you're playing with fire; one report and one pissed-off regulator later and you might end up being the poster child for the state's enforcement of the law. I would personally not want to be on the receiving end when they decide to make an example of someone.

[0]: https://www.skandslegal.com/sks-blog/2021/1/15/colorados-new...

That's actually a really good outcome, your company gets points for fixing their postings instead of just shutting down the offer.