Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings
forbes.comIndividual states’ pay transparency laws are already applying upwards pressure on salaries across the country.
My company has multiple groups in different states including Colorado, and in anticipation of needing to post salary ranges for our open positions in Colorado, my group (with no positions in Colorado) preemptively bumped up everyone’s salaries to the midpoint of their pay bands to avoid anyone becoming frustrated if they learned they were in the bottom half. Despite the preemptive adjustments, a colleague of mine became angry and quit when they found out their salary wasn’t at the very top of their position’s pay range.
So pay transparency laws are having a big impact—not only in the obvious cases of candidates negotiating salaries in the states that passed the pay transparency laws, but also for average employees in other states who didn’t even need to do anything except learn how much their labor was worth.
I'm leaving my company because it took so much "upwards pressure" to make this happen. Literally hundreds of people screaming in a townhall that the companies wages were so low that housing was eating up most of their paycheck while mandating a return to work from the top. This is in the Bay Area. I do think there's something to be said about a company that does not tend to the needs of its flock proactively.
What company?
I see what you did there.
I’m not sure why the company is responsible at an individual level for what’s going on in the Bay Area. They can’t tell you how to manage and interact with the expenses of your life.
If you’re mad at anyone, walk down to city hall and tell them to build more housing.
You say this as if companies don't chose where to have their offices and their attendance policies.
If a company places it's headquarters in a HCOL area and requires everyone come in 5 days a week, then yes, they have a responsibility to pay a salary high enough that their employees can survive there.
If employers don't like the fact that COL is too high, THEY can go ahead and march on city hall to advocate for political action. Companies have a MUCH larger sway with local politicians than the average employee does. That, or they can increase the salary or change the attendance policies.
Companies may have more sway than an individual employee, but that sway is still close to zero. Why? Because everyone knows that once enough key employees live nearby, they can't just pick up and move the company somewhere else.
Google, for example, has been trying for over a decade to build some medium-density housing near its campus. This goes beyond just advocating for political action (which they're also doing) -- they're actually offering to finance the project and assume all risk -- all the city has to do is stop saying no.
But every time it comes up for approval, local residents show up to complain, and the city council finds some arbitrary reason to say no.
Google still has options (which, granted, they've exercised) including adding more remote offices.
They don't want to do that because they've already spent a bunch of money on their fancy HQ and don't want to see it empty out.
There are plenty of employers with < 1000 employees, however, crowding these downtown areas. They have way more flexibility in being able to move out of these city centers and into more affordable locations for everyone. They don't because part of the reason for their offices in these downtown location is rich people showing off to other rich people. You gotta "look" successful.
> They don't because part of the reason for their offices in these downtown location is rich people showing off to other rich people. You gotta "look" successful.
If an office is moved to a less densely populated area, the average commute time of all employees collectively ends up increasing.
The way rich people actually show off to other rich people is by doing what's right for their companies, thereby increasing the value of their equity - which then allows them to buy luxury goods and impress other rich people that way.
>If an office is moved to a less densely populated area, the average commute time of all employees collectively ends up increasing.
Not necessarily. I've lived in rural areas and the number of miles you could travel per minute is significantly higher than the miles per minute in an urban area. My current commute time would be the equivalent of around 15 miles in the very much less urban area. Also when you factor in that property is cheaper for things like parking and factor in extremely easy door to door parking, commute times drop down even more. At one point I lived in a condo and had to walk 8 minutes from my condo door down the garage to my parking spot. I now have a house and my car is directly out my side door.
Population density relative to commute doesn't seem to be such a clear cut relationship. In theory in a dense area you have to travel less, in reality people work where they can and don't want to move constantly so commute times can get quite long.
>>Because everyone knows that once enough key employees live nearby
It is almost like, in any context, centralization is bad. I am not sure why we has a civilization have to keep learning this lesson, over and over and over again
Anytime you centralize anything it results in bad outcomes.
Diversity, Diversification, Distributed Models, etc are ALWAYS preferable, I dont care if you are talking about Stocks, People, Housing, Power, Government, you name, Consolidation and centralization is always bad
Centralization of people into cities led to many, many, many historical advancements in arts and sciences.
Decentralization of cities - competition - sometimes helps even more, but the societies that never centralized never got as far. (And that decentralization can backfire sometimes too, e.g. military competition instead of economic.)
Societies that never centralized didn't get far mainly because they were conquered by the societies that did. But I don't think it's reasonable to consider that an advantage of centralization - it's more that it turns out to be such a huge disadvantage, it spills over to your neighbors even if they don't like it.
Decentralization of people and housing == suburban sprawl, car dependency, tens of thousands of fatal collisions, the climate crisis, etc. Decentralization shifts the difficulty into communication/coordination, which is sometimes more tractable but also sometimes not.
Centralization of people is not "good" for the environment either, People are polluters, high levels of people in an area causes pollution as well
This is my problem with the studies on suburban sprawl is they do not factor in all of the things, they are generally only looking at one thing namely car and home pollution
Then you have Higher Crime, and a whole host of other matters that come with Dense Urban Centers that you do not get when people spread out.
On Balance I will take suburban sprawl over Urban Density every day, and twice on Sunday
What specific forms of pollution besides transportation and home energy use do you think are important here? Humans are mainly polluters by virtue of our homes and cars, which a lot more intense in decentralized environments.
Suburbanites are at very high risk of life-altering consequences from the actions of other humans. Many of those actions are crimes (DUI, distracted driving, reckless driving), but worse, some are not even crimes (incompetent driving, tired driving, intentional killing of annoying cyclists). That we feel so differently about these compared to more traditionally urban forms of crime is just cognitive bias with a helping of racism.
The environmental impact of the average NYC resident is among the lowest in the US.
And with respect to density, produce for NYC was grown within sight of Manhattan as late as 1960. The impact of the belt of suburbia from Richmond, VA to New Hampshire is far more harmful that the cities.
The greenest place for humans to live is in dense cities. https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1418581766047105025
Centralization is just a tool (if methods of organization are tools).
Sometimes, it's clearly the right choice (where are program settings settings? `~/.config`).
It's also VERY simple. If all you want is client/server version control, and you don't mind the constraints, SVN's UX and learning curve beats git's by a long shot.
Decentralization buys you flexibility, but entails tons of complexity.
your case to prove centralization is sometimes good is SVN over git
I can not envision any scenario in which I would choose SVN over git
If you don't need decentralized version control, why wouldn't you? Have you ever used SVN? It's much easier than git. :D
> they have a responsibility to pay a salary high enough
No, they don't. The employee gets to decide if the salary is high enough to meet his needs. If it isn't, the employee can negotiate for more, or go elsewhere.
Nobody is obliged to work for a company they find unacceptable.
They don't have a responsibility to the employees, but from what I understand having all your staff walk out is generally seen as bad for business.
They have a responsibility to their owners to pay enough to be successful - but the thresholds for "mass company-ending resignations" vs "complaining on the internet" are very far apart.
This is correct. The most "obligation" that an employer might have is to pay the employee for the value of their work, and even that's dubious. (show me the source for your moral argument) They certainly have no obligation to match CoL.
If an employer doesn't pay their employees enough, those employees should leave, their employer will eventually die, and that'll add another data point to tell the shareholders to either elect CEOs that will pay more or to stop backing companies in high-CoL areas.
Supply and demand. COL is a downstream price signal as far as a rational employer is concerned. While they might try to influence it to alter the supply of potential workers in their favor, it is by no means their responsibility to do so.
And saying companies choose where the highest concentration of available talent resides is dishonest.
They don't have a responsibility to do so, but they shouldn't be surprised when employees are angry at them if they don't do one or the other
> While they might try to influence it to alter the supply of potential workers in their favor, it is by no means their responsibility to do so.
I don't see why employers can have efforts to address climate change and social justice problems, but cost of living for their local communities is too much.
Because their efforts for climate change and social justice are just cheap words?
> Supply and demand.
Yup, there's a low supply of employees and a high demand for them. So guess what the absolute dumbest thing is an employer can do when employees start clamoring for COL adjustments?
There are so many other factors in play than whether "employees start clamoring for COL adjustments" or not, so the correct course of action when that happens might very well be to reduce wages or do nothing.
Because the company chooses to have a policy that mandates employees live within a viable commute radius of an office located in the city. I don't know why companies can't just take responsibility for their decisions.
Or the company can walk down to city hall and tell them to build more housing, because they're unable or unwilling to pay enough for people to live in a viable radius.
Or the company can relocate or establish a satellite office in a lower cost of living area.
Or the company can pay people commensurately with the cost of living in the area.
Or the company can deal with the inevitable attrition of their workforce as it happens, all the while denying that they have any agency and deflect blame onto individuals.
The last one seems to be the most popular choice.
They can’t tell you how to manage and interact with the expenses of your life.
No, but they can move to a lower cost area, allow WFH, or gasp pay a fair wage for the region. Employers don't have a right to cheap labor
It's the employee's job to remind an employer that they don't have the right to cheap labor by leaving. The market is two-sided.
It isn't. Nor should the company expect people to keep showing up if they are not being paid enough to live in the area where their offices are.
This is just suppliers (of labor) advising that their costs are going up, and thus so is the price of their economic input. It's just business.
Companies are responsible at an individual level for understanding the state of the environment they chose to do business in. You seem to be implying that people in the Bay Area are just bad with money and if they weren't, this wouldn't be a problem.
Some day soon, hopefully, companies that fail to do this will fail to stay in business.
Why artificially constrain the action landscape? In the realpolitik world of getting desirable outcomes, if forcing companies gets the results, then it gets the results.
> I’m not sure why the company is responsible at an individual level for what’s going on in the Bay Area.
No, but it's responsible for not paying well, while mandating that everyone working for it must live in the most expensive region in the country.
> If you’re mad at anyone, walk down to city hall and tell them to build more housing.
Or walk across the street to a competitor. It is the Bay area, after all.
Mandating? Every employee at the company voluntarily agreed to the terms of their employment, the wage, the location, etc. prior to starting.
It's a mandate. They could have mandated that remote work is acceptable. They didn't. They are now surprised that people are leaving.
Just like how if you don't like the mandates issued by your government, you are free to move to a different country. Or to petition it to change them. They are still mandates, though, despite you choosing out of your own free will to submit to them, by virtue of not leaving.
This website also has mandates about how its posters are expected to behave, that you submit to - despite being here voluntarily.
I'm a citizen of the country I was born in, which I did not choose. I can leave the country physically, but that itself doesn't invalidate my citizenship, or my obligation to pay taxes.
You choose the company you work for, and you can leave at any time, and you don't owe them a thing.
So no, it's not at all "just like"
If the people in the company want to be good (and they should, because being good makes you happy), they will ensure the financial success of their workers. If the people in the company want to be bad (and they shouldn't, because being bad makes you unhappy), then they will callously disregard the needs of their workers, and say it's someone else's fault.
As the Baltimore philosopher Butchie put it: "Conscience do cost."
Feeling good makes people happy. What's measured to produce that feeling is the outcome of the am-I-good thing in your brain's evaluation of whatever you did, and Goodhart's law is always in effect. You can pay the cost of being good and earn a good evaluation—or you can do whatever you want, enjoy the rewards, and trick the am-I-good thing into always saying yes.
Since the latter method makes you feel good cheaper and faster, I'd expect it to be fairly common. In my experience it is.
So it's really option 3: do bad things and don't feel bad, with views on right and wrong aligned suspiciously precisely with your personal interests.
(Hopefully I've made it clear I'm not endorsing this, just describing it.)
Yes, it was clear that you aren't endorsing this. However, people who behave badly usually have to face consequences from other people. The selfish person is rarely just selfish at work. They take it home to their families and live with the consequences of pretty weak relationships. The greedy are never satisfied with what they have, so they're in a constant state of wanting. That's a pretty unpleasant place to be.
That’s a pretty cynical and reductionist approach.
Why not just leave the company? I understand in many industries jobs are hard to find, but tech jobs are a dime a dozen.
As another commenter pointed out to you, I already said I'm leaving.
> tech jobs are a dime a dozen
Be that as it may for some, I am a mix of a software engineer and a systems engineer. It's difficult for companies to find a place for me, much less test me. Personally, I'd like this saying to die, because even in a white-hot market like I started my search in it still takes months of rigor to filter out the BS and find a company that isn't going to string me through the ringer just to dump me at final interviews for something entirely arbitrary while giving me glowing feedback along the way.
> Why not just leave the company?
The first words were “I'm leaving my company”. Am I missing something?
> my group (with no positions in Colorado) preemptively bumped up everyone’s salaries to the midpoint of their pay bands
Uhh, surely I'm not the only one seeing the obvious flaw here, right? Is the inevitable outcome here that pay bands will now cover a range where nobody is actually in the lower half, ever? That lower half of the range will just be there as a sort of psychological buffer?
So the pay bands go up. Everyone gets paid more, board salary go down a bit, and things hopefully become a bit more event. Sounds good? Things have been going the other direction far too long.
Board retainers aren't significant expense anywhere as far as I'm aware. Often their stipends are less than an employee's pay.
For example, Google's board stipend is $100k, which is about half the median total comp of an average employee (less, counting benefits). Walmart I think pays their board $60k.
You may be thinking of executive comp, but even then it is generally not significant amount. You could completely eliminate and redistribute executive compensation at Wal-Mart and it wouldn't really make a measurable difference in employee hourly salaries.
That's not accurate. The board meets maybe 4 times a year. Let's be generous and say they work one full calendar month of the year. That means their pro-rated stipend is actually 1.2 M/year. Google employees who only choose to work one month of the year can do so, but the median salary would be 16k dollars. AFAIK board members don't put in a month's worth of work so that 1.2 M/year is an underestimate. They also can sit on multiple boards simultaneously whereas moonlighting in multiple companies is not generally possible in the same way.
We're discussing whether redistributing the board stipends would change individual salaries and the clear answer is it will not, even in the most extreme situations.
But, to your point regarding prorated comp: I've been a salaried employee at a company like Google. I've also been a board member.
First, like many senior tech employees my total comp market rate is in the seven figures. A pro-rated 1.2M stipend would be appropriate to compensate me for my time. The average board retainer for less profitable companies is closer to $30k/yr. These are not entry level positions and the retainers are shockingly low in the vast majority of cases. (In my case, I'm on the board of a non-profit and I actually pay them)
Second, I think you are underestimating how little some salaried workers actually work. I think if you try you can find more than a few Google employees who only work one month a year ;) Conversely: I work far harder in my role as a board member than I used to in my salaried role. It's different for everyone of course, but I assure you no one is seeking out board seat retainers as a way to get rich. It's just not worth it.
>but I assure you no one is seeking out board seat retainers as a way to get rich.
Can they be leveraged for networking to get a CEO job in the future?
The pro-rated version is irrelevant, since the comment was talking about board salaries going down in order to fund higher salaries elsewhere.
I did not read it as "in order", but rather "and". So both happen, but I did not see a causation in the post.
Walmart is a bad comparison there; they have an enormous headcount of low-paid staff. Many tech companies are far lower headcount, but with high executive pay.
Looking at some other companies, Activision-Blizzard's CEO alone makes enough to pay every employee a $15,000 bonus. Reed Hastings at Netflix makes enough to pay every employee $3800. And that's not counting any of the rest of the executive staff, or all the other ways money flows out of a company to non-employees, like dividends and stock buybacks.
https://www.equilar.com/reports/83-equilar-associated-press-...
I think there's certainly a lot of room for wages to go up, though i'm skeptical that it will come at the expense of things like executive pay or share buybacks.
Activision-Blizzard's board get 350k. If they earned $0 instead, this would only give each employee an extra $35 per year. That's including their stock compensation.
As you say, most goes to investors. Which makes sense as they actually own the company.
OP was talking about executives (CEO, VPs), not board.
I am OP's OP and I was talking about the board.
> board salary go down a bit
The comment referred to specifically said "board salaries", not executive pay more broadly.
I read somewhere that this is exactly what happened when (publicly-traded?) companies were required to publicize executive compensation. And it's a major reason why exec salaries have increased while regular salaries have not over the past few decades.
So... seems fair to me. Maybe salaries will actually increase enough that people won't have to switch jobs every three years to get a raise.
> So the pay bands go up.
They can't, though; if you do that, now there are people in the bottom half, and they're upset that they're 'below average'.
You basically need a vanity range for pay.
It's not a vanity range if it's leading to real-life salary adjustments.
Vanity clothing sizing leads to real life changes in clothes measurements too.
More like: Pay bands go up. Company cuts 15% of workforce "to achieve better numbers"
Every time you read that headline, the company could have just cut pay by 15% and gotten the same profitability. Higher pay will force medium-small companies to hire less people
Some SV companies make Billions in profits per quarter. Some don't. I've seen far too many employees try to justify why they should be making Meta compensation elsewhere. It doesn't and shouldn't work that way
How does that follow? They will just lower the bottom of the pay bands, and now people who in the bottom third are at the midpoint without another dollar being spent.
And then, because law is not code and being technically correct is frequently not the best kind of correct, the question becomes "OK, are there actually any employees at that point in the pay band?" and folks start tugging their collars and going "well..." until that activity becomes disallowed, either via judicial interpretation or legislative amendment.
That's very common in anything that has a range. The pay bands will shift to compensate for it.
We all now work at Lake Wobegon. Which means salaries will be set to average value of the position and lazy people will be subsidized by hard workers and better contributors. Not everybody contributes the same value.
All existing remuneration levelling mechanisms (such as salary bands) contribute towards the creation of two classes of workers, and pay transparency laws do the same. You end up with people who are happy to be in their salary band, and people who become contractors.
Every place I’ve worked for the past 10 years has had salary bands, and I’ve always been paid far more than the highest band offered. Because I’ve never been an employee, it’s simply never applied to me. I don’t get counted in the diversity statistics either, which is also great.
I guess transparency regulations take the feeling of pressure off those who aren’t competent negotiators, but if the goal is to decrease inequalities, they won’t accomplish that.
>> quit when they found out their salary wasn’t at the very top
Such an elegant implementation of the 'no assholes' policy.
The noncompete thing is actually a much, much bigger deal than the pay transparency thing. I have a friend who is waiting out a 2Y noncompete that he foolishly agreed to in Texas.
So he’s getting paid full salary for two years and doing nothing? Sounds like a dream!
I sort of doubt that's how it works in Texas, but in Germany that's the law! A company can only prevent you from working for a competitor by A) keeping you employed by them; or, B) paying what the competitor would pay you.
When I was an employee in Germany I always thought it would be fun to get stuck in B) and get an "offer" for like 5x my current salary and see what happens.
It’s a right to work state, so maybe there is more to it than a vanilla NC?
I don't know anything about Texas non-compete law, but "right to work state" refers to restrictions on unionizing. It has nothing to do with non-compete clauses.
The "right to work" is about restrictions on making unions mandatory, so you are correct but glossing over an important details. In practice it generally means that forming an effective union is much harder and thus harms workers, but theoretically it could be paired with other laws that supported unions but that didn't centralizing their power and removing worker choice.
I think your example might be more of an exception than a rule; the last company I was in that introduced pay bands only bumped up people who were below the bottom of the band.
The only people who were upset were those who found out some people were way over the new pay band and generated a bit of gossip over how those people were way overpaid for the quality of their work
> Microsoft said it would disclose salary ranges in all internal and external U.S. job postings no later than January 2023. That date is when Washington state, where Microsoft’s headquarters are located, will start requiring employers with at least 15 employees to disclose salary ranges for each position.
In other news, Microsoft to comply with a new law.
> In other news, Microsoft to comply with a new law
Microsoft is under no obligation to comply with Washington law outside Washington. That's what they're doing here.
Since their largest workforce is in Washington state, it's probably just less risky to make this their overall US policy. Making a different policy for HQ vs everywhere else could easily lead to mistakes and accidentally breaking the law.
It can't be that hard to follow this law in specific places. This is a meaningful policy decision, not just following risk.
> It can't be that hard to follow this law in specific places.
Directly from the article: "Pay experts have long predicted companies would not want to mess with different practices in different states. Doing so not only complicates hiring practices for human resources departments, ..."
There is probably a lot more nuance and qualifications of when it's necessary to disclose and from a company that employs more than 150k employees (according to a quick google) there's probably even more complexity and chaos.
> It can't be that hard to follow this law in specific places
The problem is that 'specific places' very dynamic, and is hard to pin down when it comes to employment. A candidate/employee may move to/from jurisdictions where this is a requirement, and job postings may or may not be shown across different jurisdictions.
Does Microsoft want to invest time wrangling in court concerning a Colorado resident not seeing the pay range when they are using a VPN? Or when a candidate becomes a Colorado resident some time between the phone-screen and the first interview? Should Microsoft recruiters stop using external job-boards, and instead wait for a salary geo-fencing feature to be implemented in their internal jobs tool? What is the case law for out-of-staters who will be moving into a state with such a law for employment? How about remote candidate in Texas, working for a team based in Washington - and the reverse? There are dozens of edge cases, and for a company the size of Microsoft, can easily result in hundreds to thousands of infractions per year - the juice may not be worth the squeeze.
There will be an army of lawyers trying to monetize any errors by companies, since the WA bill 5761 allows a job applicant to sue for potential lost wages plus interest. Microsoft is just getting ahead of the lawsuit curve.
I think you'd be surprised. Though the problem isn't that it's hard to follow in the general case, but that things could potentially slip through the cracks.
Corporations are risk averse, they don't want to have to deal with potentially getting sued if a job opening starts out in one area and then moves to another one where suddenly the way the opening is described is illegal.
It's just easier to do it the same everywhere if the advantage they're giving up is small.
In my company ranges are posted and they are $150k to $250k USD.
Not terribly helpful.
thats not true and they already have to comply with alot of different laws around the globe. please dont make up random stuff.
This article [1] seems to state pretty clearly that the law applies to all job posting by a company in Washington state. Any sources saying it's only about jobs open to Washington residents?
[1] https://www.dwt.com/blogs/employment-labor-and-benefits/2022...
> sources saying it's only about jobs open to Washington residents?
Washington state can't regulate how Microsoft hires people in Texas.
Microsoft Corp. isn't even a Washington legal entity. (EDIT: Never mind, I stand corrected [1]. In any case, the broader point stands. Delaware doesn't get to regulate how its entities hire outside Delaware. This is well-settled employment/interstate commerce law.)
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/789019/00015...
Legally, a company is subject to state laws of their state of incorporation (usually Delaware, for various reasons) _and_ their state of 'domicile', usually where they are headquartered. They are also subject to state laws in states where they operate.
So yes, in this situation, even if MS were incorporated in Delaware, Washington state could pass laws that bind how the company acts anywhere in the world.
Washington also isn't the only state passing this style of law. Putting up the systems and processes to comply with this law only for Washington-based positions would probably not be worth it.
> even if MS were incorporated in Delaware, Washington state could pass laws that bind how the company acts anywhere in the world
This is not true [1]. It's especially untrue with respect to employment, a domain in which federal statute has a lot to say about who can regulate whom.
You are misreading this. The Dormant Commerce Clause is relevant when talking about applying laws unequally for the purpose of protecting in-state commercial entities. For instance, if companies based out of state were subject to salary disclosure laws, but Washington based companies were not.
In this case, Dormant Commerce does not apply since the salary disclosure laws apply to any company operating in the state, regardless of where they're headquartered or incorporated. It applies equally to all.
That's specific to state protectionism though. The law applies equally to jobs posted inside and outside the state so the Dormant Commerce Clause is not relevant.
I pretty sure if you headquartered your marijuana company in a state where it's illegal you'd run into problems, even if you didn't grow or sell it in that state.
I don’t think that’s true?
"Conspiracy to commit drug trafficking" would probably fit the bill. I think they could just call in the feds because from the state and federal perspective you are running a drug empire from that office.
Nah, state level would have no jurisdiction over the criminal action and feds arent caring right now, but focusing on the state level you can also just form a branch
So you go online and fill out an LLC for another state, and just say you are licensing your brand name to that LLC in another state that is doing all the sales in that state
"Your honor, this man, doing business as "weed.com", collected the proceeds from four thousand individual sales of marijuana from his office at 123 Fake Street."
It's illegal to do that. What's the defense, it's legal to do that somewhere else?
That part of the justice system doesn't play around. There are people in jail for felony murder for selling the baggies to the guy who sold the drugs to the guy who overdosed.
It’s legal to license a brand name to an organization in another state
Thats the only action that occurred in the state
But it’s not trafficking if you don’t move it across state lines?
But your state of domicile would happily seize your ill-gotten gains the minute you try to bring the money home. You may not be moving the drug across state lines but the money certainly would.
Pretty sure you’re just making that up. That doesn’t make any sense. State laws don’t declare something is illegal anywhere. They declare they’re illegal within that state. It’s perfectly fine to do such things in other states.
The feds don’t seem very concerned with marijuana lately
That's hardly the point.
What are you even talking about?
> Microsoft was incorporated in the state of Washington on June 25, 1981; reincorporated in the state of Delaware on September 19, 1986; and reincorporated in the state of Washington on September 22, 1993.
https://app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadFiling?webmasterId=9...
Washington (State or Other Jurisdiction of Incorporation)
Just to take this a bit farther... if Washington state can regulate Washington incorporated entities, can it regulate them to act in a way that would violate laws in other states?
Here's an example.
California passes a law, and because doing business in California is good for the bottom line they will comply with the law, and in so doing set a new defacto national standard. But, if this burden becomes too onerous, the business can simply not do business with California or move out of California. But, California is such a large market it's quite a high burden to reach.
This isn't epwr's claim. His claim is that Washington has written and passed a law that binds Microsoft's operations outside Washington state, which I'm pretty sure would violate the commerce clause.
> His claim is that Washington has written and passed a law that binds Microsoft's operations outside Washington state, which I'm pretty sure would violate the commerce clause.
The commerce clause does not prevent states from having laws which impact interstate commerce unless:
(1) They are preempted by federal exercise of commerce clause powers (though that's really a supremacy clause issue), or
(2) they discriminate against or excessively burden interstate commerce (the dormant commerce clause doctrine).
Wouldn't this qualify under the dormant clause if it protected firms in Washington state by making it uneconomical for recruiting firms from elsewhere in the country to enter the Washington labour market? This isn't just about listing wages for positions in Washington state - it would be viral and would contaminate a business's operations everywhere. It would be very cozy for recruiting businesses that operate in Washington state exclusively.
This would kind of be like the Exxon case, but if Maryland had tried to prevent Exxon from having gas stations ANYWHERE in the US if they started doing business in Maryland.
"Enter if you dare, but all your business in the rest of the nation will be affected and you will lose your competitive edge vis-a-vis recruiting firms that stay out of Washington!"
> Wouldn’t this qualify under the dormant clause if it protected firms in Washington state by making it uneconomical for recruiting firms from elsewhere in the country to enter the Washington labour market?
The upthread claim is that it globally binds Washington entities, not that it globally binds foreign entities doing business in Washington. If it did the latter, and the practical impact was as described, it might be considered an undue burden. It might not. Its a lot easier to find cases finding substantial but non-discriminatory burdens on interstate commerce not to be violations of than to find ones holding them in violation of the dormant commerce clause, and this clearly isn't a discriminatory burden in the sense that it would place restrictions on out-of-state actors that are not placed on Washington-based actors.
> This would kind of be like the Exxon case, but if Maryland had tried to prevent Exxon from having gas stations ANYWHERE in the US if they started doing business in Maryland.
I think that’s a wildly invalid analogy, and, in any case, what you want in an analogy to make your case is an analogy to a case where the courts found a dormant commerce clause violation, not a analogy to a hypothetical variant of one where they did not where you conjecture that they might have ruled differently.
They cannot just like they can’t regulate activities of private individual when outside their state of residence.
California does regulate private individuals that lived in California in the past. It also does regulate private individuals with residence in California and working in a different state. Just saying.
If you do that only for jobs in Washington state it is only a question of time until the first discrimibation law suites are filed. Plus it is easy good press.
> you do that only for jobs in Washington state it is only a question of time until the first discrimibation law suites are filed
Discriminating based on an employee's state of residence is totally fine. Californians get different disclosures and rights compared with say Nevadans. Nevadans can't sue for those benefits; they're not entitled to them.
and then the law would get struck down because, as said, washington state isn't allowed to regulate interstate commerce.
Nit to pick: States can and do regulate interstate commerce all the time. California once banned the import of foie gras into the state, and IIRC are planning a law banning the import of foreign oil. Some states ban the import of firearms they don't wish to exist.
Whether they should be allowed to engage in the regulation of interstate commerce for activities that occur entirely extra-state is probably more along what you intended, but even that you could probably find allowed or as-yet-indeterminate exceptions to.
> States can and do regulate interstate commerce all the time. California once banned the import of foie gras into the state, and IIRC are planning a law banning the import of foreign oil.
This is fine. Sacramento can regulate what's coming into California. It cannot set food labeling requirements for Michigan.
> Sacramento can regulate what's coming into California.
It can regulated what is sold or produced in California, but, because of the Commerce Clause, it's more limited in regulating what comes in to California.
> It cannot set food labeling requirements for Michigan.
It absolutely can set food labelling requirements for food commercially produced in California, except to the extent such regulations are preempted by federal law, whether or not it will later be shipped to Michigan.
> California once banned the import of foie gras into the state
No, it banned sale of foie gras entirely (it did not single out importation), and even so the ban, to the extent that it prohibited individual consumers from buying it for import from out-of-state vendors, was struck down by a federal trial court in 2020 as a violation of the dormant commerce clause, a decision this year upheld by the Ninth Circuit, so it's probably not a law you want to point to as an example of the state being free to regulate interstate commerce.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/07/california-f...
> and IIRC are planning a law banning the import of foreign oil.
Even if it was true that someone in California was planning on trying to pass such a law, it would be an even more clear, bright-line dormant commerce clause violation than the foie gras law.
I appreciate the clarity on my clumsy post. I knew of the added detail on the foie gras case but didn't bother making the more direct point I was trying to make is more that they _can get away with_ moreso than _they are clearly allowed to do_ these things.
We all have opinions on what states can and can't do, and while I agree that precedent should prevent something like this, the fact remains that while you and I agree that they shouldn't be able to, there's nothing to stop them trying, and even perhaps succeeding (at the very least, for however many years it takes for someone to show injury and maybe get it overturned.)
Sincerely, I appreciate you.
Yes, that is fair.
They can even regulate interstate commerce in ways that discriminate between in and out of state companies (IE something that seems a very clear commerce clause violation), though this is historically limited mostly to alcohol shipment :)
Honestly, though, the current SC seems much more likely to strike that all down than they have in the past, and give much brighter lines.
Washington has actually successfully enforced some of its worker protection rules on a national scale in the past. As a condition of having the harsh penalties for their in-state violations dropped, they got fast food companies to agree to drop non-compete agreements from all franchise agreements nationwide[1]
Whether it happens as a direct consequence of the word of the law feels less relevant than the fact they made it happen in practice via a settlement.
[1]: https://table.skift.com/2018/07/12/some-fast-food-chains-dro...
> and then the law would get struck down because, as said, washington state isn't allowed to regulate interstate commerce.
It isn't allowed to discriminate against or unduly burden interstate commerce; it can generally regulate the behavior of Washington persons (including corporations) in interstate commerce where such regulation does not discriminate against such commerce (which is clearly the case where the rule is identical to that for in-state commerce of the same type.)
The exception would be if the federal government preempted the kind of regulation Washington sought to make by exercise of federal commerce powers.
What are your qualifications to be dispensing legal advice in this area, if any?
Yes, a company headquartered in california is (in many cases) still bound by california law even if the employee is located in another state. The obvious example is non-compete clauses, a california company still usually cannot enforce a non-compete even if the law permits it in the employee's state.
However, this situation is what's called a "conflict-of-law" and it basically comes down to the way the court interprets it.
Take it from the actual lawyers:
> The circumstances that present the strongest case against enforcement of such an agreement involves a noncompete agreement between a California-based employer and a California-based employee. But not all cases are that simple; whether California law applies depends upon the application of “conflict of law” rules.
> “Conflict of law” rules allow courts to determine what state’s laws apply when the laws of more than one state might apply to a dispute but would produce different results. For example, a noncompete agreement between a California-based employer and a Nevada-based employee that was signed in Nevada could be construed under Nevada or California law, depending on the circumstances. If Nevada law applies, the restrictive covenant might be enforceable against the employee. If California law applies, it will not be enforceable.
> Because of these issues, parties often include choice-of-law provisions telling a court to apply a particular state’s law rather than determine what state’s substantive laws apply under a conflict-of-law analysis. In most cases a court will readily accept a choice-of-law provision and apply it as the parties intended. But that’s not necessarily so in the case of a noncompete agreement.
> Like other common law doctrines, conflict-of-law rules vary from state to state. Most states will not enforce a choice-of-law provision that would violate the public policy of a state with a “materially greater interest” in the dispute or where the parties do not have a “substantial relationship” with the chosen state. In other words, a California employer cannot get around California’s prohibition against employee restrictive covenants by requiring his California employee to sign an agreement that includes a Nevada choice-of-law clause.
https://www.bonalaw.com/insights/legal-resources/is-my-out-o...
So yes, employment law in state X usually does bind a company headquartered in state X even if the employee is working in a completely different state. Doesn't matter where you live, you are employed by an entity in state X.
(or rather, it does matter, you still have to pay taxes in state Y and state Y also gets to pass rules of its own governing work in that state... practically speaking what you get is the union of the two sets of rules, you get the combination of both. In the event of a full-on "state X requires A, state Y forbids it"... then the lawyers get paid.)
I believe it is a WA corp.
It's probably a move just to make it easier on themselves.
They want to streamline the job posting portion of HR. They don't want to have to worry about whether or not they have to post the salary range, so they just do what the most demanding law they deal with requires.
Now they only really have to deal with areas that have laws that contradict with laws in other areas. Then you'd default to the law that benefits you the most and deal with the contradictory areas explicitly. Since you have to do the work anyway.
For example, let's pretend that California had a really stupid law that forbid salary ranges from being posted on job listings. Now Microsoft has to be careful about how and where they post jobs. And since it's beneficial for them to hide the information, they'd likely only post the salary ranges where they were required to.
But absent that, don't do work you don't have to do.
It also makes sense when you realize more and more jobs are "Location, or remote" and "or remote" would cover Washington and Colorado.
My guess is they see the writing on the wall with this one. Colorado and Washington both have laws about this now. I wouldn't be surprised to see California and New York implement something similar in the next year or two.
> I wouldn't be surprised to see California and New York implement something similar in the next year or two.
California started the trend with its “on reasonable request” pay range disclosure law, and has an proactive disclosure bill that has passed the Senate and is pending in the Assembly this session (DB 1162). But even without a proactive disclosure law, voluntary proactive disclosure reduces the request load for on-reequest disclosure, and consistency is cheaper to implement internally.
Probably easier to just do it for everybody than have two separate listings for WA and the rest of the US. I wonder if this is TC or just salary?
Everything I’ve seen so far is just salary. Which is kind of a huge loophole for tech companies where 20-60% of compensation is often in the form of stock and bonuses.
I am curious what level of details the text of the law requires:
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?billnumber=5761&year=2021...
https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2021-22/Pdf/Bills/Se...
>disclose in each posting for each job opening the wage scale or salary range, and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation to be offered to the hired applicant.
What is general description? Is that how many RSUs? Does it require showing what metal level health insurance is offered and specific the employer paid proportion?
Doubt it, assuming the law is similar to Colorado’s. A Colorado job listing for a FAANG that eventually offered approximately $270k in total compensation was roughly worded like this:
“Colorado residents: Pay for this job starts at at $100,000/year commensurate with experience, plus additional compensation through bonuses, restricted stock units and a comprehensive benefit plan.”
It's simpler and easier to do it this way. Which is what they're doing here.
“Software Engineer I - 40-250k”
anything preventing them from doing very large ranges like that?
Yes, it would discourage some candidates from applying if they see the average within that range is lower than the average they could get anywhere else. Dirty tricks are also a red flag for candidates.
However, while that range is an exaggeration, the truth is that salary ranges for positions are actually much wider than candidates may expect. There's a misconception that open positions have a single "correct" salary and that the negotiation process is all about getting the company to reveal that maximum number. It's not true, though. Ranges exist because even within a certain title, candidates have a wide range of skills and locations (especially when hiring remote/international) really do matter, whether or not you think they should.
More broadly, the salary range isn't even necessarily the only range they'd be willing to pay you. It's actually not uncommon to interview someone and realize that their career level is either above or below the position they're interviewing for. In that case, you "decline" the candidate for the position/title/pay range they applied for but continue the interview for a different position.
For example, if someone applies for SW ENG II but their compensation ask is in the range of SW ENG III (and their talents match) then you just bump them up. Conversely, if someone applies for SW ENG II but they're interviewing below the level of your SW ENG II candidates, you offer to continue the interview at the lower SW ENG I title/salary if they're willing.
So the ranges are still just a starting point. There is no magic trick to force a company to reveal the maximum number they'd pay you specifically. It's still a negotiation, but at least you can order job postings somewhat.
I actually think the bigger problem we're going to see is companies bait-and-switching candidates by putting a huge upper range number in the job posting but then offering them the bottom end of range while claiming that they can work their way up the range later. A lot of eager candidates are going to be pulled into companies who claim to have high upper limits, but who tell them they need to start at the bottom of the range and move up.
Yeah, I expect it will turn into a game and companies will just explode the number of positions so "Software Engineer 1" will become
Software Engineer 1a (60k-70k) Software Engineer 1b (70k-80k) Etc...
If someone is a III and applied for a II, the company would likely hire them as a II.
They'd likely offer at a II but reoffer at a III if there were competing offers, or really wanted the employee.
Or, sometimes, the fight was already done internally for a III and the manager wouldn't want to lose that, and so will hire at a low III.
I am told that judges tend to be unimpressed with technically following a law in a way that blatantly ignores the intent; I suspect that if you tried to claim a larger range than actually exists in salaries you actually pay then they'd still find you to have broken the law. But IANAL and know nothing of the specifics; take with large grain of salt.
It says you have to post "the" salary range. So you can't have an actual salary range and then post something different. Most corps will have realistic salary bands and when they create job reqs it will be for a specific level. It's possible that some will call everyone engineers and have a band like that when you include interns. But that's not how most of them operate.
> So you can't have an actual salary range and then post something different.
If it's a new position that's different from the roles your currently have, sure you can.
Nothing I see in the bill [1] says what an acceptable range is.
1: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5761&Year=2021...
The state could publish an executive order stating "pay ranges for a given job post may not simultaneously cover three or more public servant pay grades".
FWIW the similar Colorado law prevents this
How do they prevent it?
"Any Job ... 0-1B"
It's incredible in these comments that so many of you who work in the industry on the employee side are arguing against having more transparency for the employee, and for having more leverage in the negotiating process for the employer instead. I want all the advantage as an employee that I can get. Any secret withheld from me is not to my advantage.
In 2022, you have to assume a fair amount of activity on popular boards/forums/subreddits/twitter etc. has been purposefully influenced by nefarious parties.
In more concrete terms, I do think there are a fair amount of bots/paid-commenters on HN who push for anti-progressive agenda which helps maintain status quo.
I mean, you don’t even need to reach that far.
Many commenters here are either currently on the employer side of a salary negotiation, or imagine that they will be some day.
The temporarily embarrassed millionaires ;-)
It's the old, "what if one day I'm the billionaire, then it might harm me!" combined with pride if they already have a high salary (in their opinion).
I think for most people external tools like levels.fyi are already good enough in that they provide a salary range with sufficient accuracy. Of course these same people would hope that the other candidates haven't heard of levels.fyi so that companies can lowball them to have more budget for the salaries of those who have heard of levels.fyi.
It's just selfishness, not collective action.
It's misguided selfishness because other people raising their price would raise yours too.
You also see this sentiment with other topics related to hiring, like working 2+ jobs. Somewhat amusing.
Given that most big tech companies' base salary tends to plateau and total comp begins to be dominated by stock grants and performance bonuses, just how much real transparency is actually going to be provided?
More people work for Microsoft than just engineers. This applies to all of their US job postings. Just because you specifically don't get much benefit doesn't mean it's not a good thing.
Agreed 100%. At big tech salary is close to useless and rarely the primary number that changes during negotiations. My highest paying job -- a 3.5x raise -- came with a $75K salary cut compared to my previous job.
This should be, by far, the top voted comment. I don't think MSFT sharing salary ranges is consequential in any way.
Sure it is.
If more start to do it, it becomes an arms race. If a company is loading the compensation in other ways and coming in light on salary then their job posting becomes much less compelling for job seekers. So they have a choice: disclose the other compensation (in order to compete with the salary numbers of the other companies) or adjust their compensation to be heavier on salary so their numbers are in line with others.
I'm sad more companies don't up their 401k contributions, most people don't realize their employer can put in 40k a year (!!!) into an employee's 401k. Due to the wonders of tax law, that is equiv to 60k cash, and that isn't counting the earnings or the flexibility to reallocate 401k investments w/o having to pay taxes on earnings when changing where the money is invested.
One benefit of not working for Big Tech and instead for a privately held company, instead of stock grants I get 120% match up to 6% of my salary and an annual 4% profit sharing bonus into my 401(k). Sure, my actual salary could be higher working for a "proper" tech company, but I get more employer contributions into my retirement savings than the Google's, Microsoft's, and Amazon's of the world will give to an employee capping their contributions.
It's hard to see how this would beat Big Tech, where the standard match is 100% up to the 401k limit ($20,500) irrespective of income. Say your salary is $200K at private company, would be $240K at Big Tech. You'll be getting 1.2 * 0.06 * 200 = $14.4K in matching funds. The Big Tech employee would stash the full $20.5K into their 401K, get $20.5K match, and then end up about $35K ahead on post-retirement income.
You might want to go check the match of the big tech companies again.
Google: Greater of 100% up to $3000, or 50% up to contribution limit (whichever is greater)
Amazon: 50% up to 4%, vests after 3 years
Microsoft: 50% up to contribution limit
Facebook: 100% up to half of limit, 50% for the rest
Netflix: 100% up to 4%
I also don't just get the 120% up to 6%, I also get a fixed 4% of my salary contributed every year. So it's a hyothetical
200 * .06 * 1.2 = 14.4 200 * .04 = 8 14.4 + 8 = 22.8Still have trouble seeing how this comes out ahead. Say you're at Google or Microsoft where it's 50% up to contribution limit, and you get $10K in match. That puts you down $12.8K vs. your hypothetical. If you're getting paid $45K more at the FANG, you pay 35% taxes on it, which puts you $30K ahead after-tax, and then you invest that in an after-tax 401k (or even just a normal investment account), after which you're in exactly the same situation but about $17K ahead each year.
Also, FAANG will negotiate offers against fringe benefits. They won't cut you a custom 401K deal, but they will beat any offer by 20%+ and include the post-tax cash equivalent of better retirement packages in that beat. If you ask for it and if they want you badly enough.
Assuming you can get a gross offer that matches net, having the money in post-tax accounts is better because the tax rate on the 401K at withdrawal will likely be higher than the 15% capital gains rate.
If Microsoft put 40k a year into everyone’s 401k they would immediately trip the Highly Compensated Employee test and have the IRS breathing down their necks.
If microsoft put 40K a year into everyone's 401k it would be impossible for them to violate the HCE test, as every you'd have non-HCEs with a 401k contribution of 30% or higher, something which HCEs are literally unable to match.
> Due to the wonders of tax law, that is equiv to 60k cash
And equivalent to 0 cash for paying the rent. I suspect that’s why it doesn’t seem to be a prominent concern in discussions about tech compensation.
I don't know about you, but with tech salaries, rent is the least for my concern. I think that's true for most people that don't live in ridiculously high cost of living areas.
Perhaps, although until COVID (and we'll see what happens with remote work compensation in the long term) nearly all people with huge big tech compensation packages lived in ridiculously high cost of living areas. I suspect a very large portion still do. In the Bay Area I've heard no shortage of stories of couples/families with two big tech salaries still spending very large portions of their paychecks on rent/mortgage.
BS. There's nothing stopping you from maxing your 401k and then pulling it back out taking the penalty. This applies to a ton of benefits people naively don't take advantage of from HSAs to employee stock purchase plans to 401k. It's almost always beneficial to maximize your tax advantaged accounts even if you're paying penalties on the back end.
Seriously! I've considered going back to contracting just so that I could fully fund a 401k account.
Solo 401ks are a thing of beauty
That depends on what the other things are. Most years I get half of my take home pay in December because of my bonus (some of that is my 401k maxing out in November), there have been a couple bad years where the bonus was less, but at least I was able to keep my job. Keeping my job is a factor as well, since I have a family to support, if I'm laid off (like most companies do all the time) that means I'm scrambling to figure out how to get cash, while I can live off of the smaller paychecks I get.
That is me - what is the above worth to you? If you are risk adverse like me, then you like that plan. Others want the cash now but can accept the risk of losing their jobs. Some have a high risk tolerance and like getting their money in stocks - in the best case this is the most money, but in the worst case it is the least. There is no right answer.
In the end you need a certain amount of money to live. That is different from your actual value.
This would be included in total compensation (which should include non-renumerative benefits as well). In sales, where total comp could be mostly commission (I've seen a 25/75% split in some cases) the company should have some idea of what the bonus/commission range is.
Out of curiosity, why does your 401k max out in November? If your employee does matching then wouldn’t you want to spread it as evenly as possible throughout the entire year?
November is pretty close to the whole year. If you choose a fixed % per paycheck and have a bonus that's not perfectly amortized then being off by a month is actually pretty good.
I assumed that employer contribution matching is generally a fixed percentage of the employee’s salary each pay period, which means that if you don’t contribute in one month you forfeit that percentage of your salary and thus about 8% of your total possible employer matching.
At least in my case as an engineer at a smaller tech company my 401k (and corresponding match) maxes out each January because that's when bonuses are granted.
Note: you can set your contribution % to 0 in January and then change it in February. This can be worthwhile because you then DCA throughout the rest of the year. On the other hand, by contributing everything in January, you get the employer match earlier. And over a 30 year career it's likely a rounding error.
I've seen it work different ways and different companies. It's either a % of salary or a % of your gross paycheck. In the latter case, bonuses can mess things up.
If you assume a bull market it's best to max out the 401K ASAP, because if stock prices rise throughout the year you want to buy stock early before it gets expensive. A lot of FANG employees max out their 401K in January because they set their bonus 401K percentage to 100% and just fully fund their 401K from the bonus.
This strategy is getting reamed this year, but it's historically been a good bet about 85% of the time.
Every company I've worked for accounts for that. I get my full match no matter when I max my 401k out. Of course different companies work differently.
For the longest time, Amazon's cash salary cap was well-known to be in the middle $150K range. I don't see any evidence that hampered their ability to attract job seekers.
Arms race (which will lead to bigger salaries) or price collusion (salaries stay the same)?
Wouldn't be the first time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I think its more likely to be an arms race now that the "remote work" dam has broken and work location is not as important as during the time of the previous well-known collusions.
The side effects of this move are probably bigger than the move itself. Hopefully this induces other companies to advertise their salary ranges as candidates (it's still a candidate's market out there) use Microsoft's ranges as reference for negotiating salaries on other non-MS jobs.
Essentially this will push salaries up to match the massive inflation we've seen recently. Likely this will result in a homeostasis at some future point.
Yeah without TC this isn't really all that useful.
Not for Microsoft though; their stock grants are :peanut_emoji: compared with other top tier companies (Source: levels.fyi); so this probably a good thing overall...
EDIT: just found out HackerNews is stripping out unicode emoji characters from comments.
This is the way. We need more of this.
I'm at a point where if a recruiter messages me "about an exciting opportunity" without any salary information, he/she will not get a response.
While there are some jobs that maybe I would consider a pay cut for, I generally want to make more money because that allows me to invest more so I can be free one day.
No not necessarily. Let me go over some scenarios:
Bob contributes 1. I contribute 1.25. Units don't matter, I contribute 25% more.
It used to be maybe the salary band is $100k to $130k. Bob gets $100k. I get $125k. My employer gets a total value of 2.25 for $225k.
Now my employer has to disclose salaries and has 2 options:
1) Don't make out salaries the same, Bob quits, now the employer has only 1.25 when they need 2.25 and have to go re-hire ($50k or more in a lot of times).
2) Make our salaries the same, so now Bob also gets $125k and employer pays $250k for 2.25. This is what will happen in the short term and what attracts people, but in the long term what will happen is
3) Make our salaries the same but slow raises so gradually they go to the inflation indexed amount of about the average, so $112.5k more or less. Now employer still pays $225k for 2.25. But now I am subsidizing Bob the less productive worker for $12.5k every year.
A lot like unions, making things more uniform often comes at some expense to the top performers. I always sit near that top so I say no this is stupid and I hate it. I don't give a shit what Bob is paid and I give even less if it costs me money for him to get more.
1b) Bob actually has a bit of self-awareness, nothing happens.
1c) Bob gets annoyed and tries to leave, but all the offers aren't really better.
On HN a lot more than half the commenters believe themselves to be one of the top performers.
I can believe that people who spend extra time like that skew to above average. Hn is not a random sample, it is very self selective.
[citation needed]. Is there no market here? No other companies which sees the opportunity to grab you?
I get ~4 recruiter emails a day and I don't think I have ever seen the salary in the initial job description. If the job looks interesting I will just reply asking what the salary is. Usually they immediately call me rather than respond via email which is pretty annoying.
This is why I stopped putting personal info in my resume. I once had a particularly aggressive recruiter try and recruit me for a contracting position (I only consider full time roles), and when I repeatedly declined his offer, he actually found my resume somewhere and just called my phone. Needless to say it was incredibly annoying and ever since then I've kept all contact info out of my resume.
I put my Google Voice on my resume (and other places like my .sig) and I generally just forward all GV calls to VM.
If they care to leave a message or send a text, I may read it. If they don't then I ignore (unless I'm expecting a call from that number in which case I'll call back in a day or two).
Sometimes (like when we were looking for a nanny a few years ago) I may let GV actually ring on my main line.
Pretty common sales tactic. They want you to invest as much time as possible because generally the more time you invest the more likely they are going to make a "sale".
I'm not sure if this even works for devs as there is so many opportunities.
Of course, they already know what they will get, it is a fixed price. Anything they don't pay whoever they hire is money they get to keep. (they can't hire a junior engineer to a senior position - if the contract allowed that they would though). I've seen cases where someone doesn't know their value and thus accepts a very low offer.
The whole prudish / secretive attitude around salaries has got to be one of the most annoying parts. Just get the formalities over with instead of wasting time, please.
If you do follow up and eventually ask for a salary range, expect vague terms like “competitive” or “market rate”.
The correct way to interpret this is "Silicon Valley competitive/market rate".
The reaction you'll get is hilarious in some cases.
I just reply to everyone with my expected salary, which is 30% increase of my current salary. If they are not close to that number, then it is better to not waste our time.
I've been in the employer position (as a hiring manager) and in the Employee position. I know how much I am worth (or what I want to be worth), so I don't really care about playing games and haggling. I'ts ok, my value might become lower in a recession, or when trying to get into new verticals. When that happens, I'll adjust my expectations.
Do you reveal your current salary? Or give a ballpark?
I'll respond with a slightly different answer: In my country, not only it is NOT illegal for a company to ask you for your current salary. They can actually ask you to provide a pay slip!!
So, I give CURRENT_SALARY*30% and tell them it's that.
There are a ton of people here who probably make 6 figures complaining about pay ranges in job postings.
I am not sure I fully see how this is a problem, any minimum wage job says pay range (or a specific rate), any job for dish washers or line cooks say $18 a hour or what not, a tech job with a six figure salary should at least say a range, since it varies based on skill and department.
I haven't read a single response that I agree with as to why this is a negative? Can someone provide some insight in to why people seem to be against this? Also the silly comments about well $5 to $5 million is a range are just silly. They are going to provide a range like $42k to $55k. Because it is based on skill to some degree (7 years in the industry should pay more you more than 2).
At the very least, MS is probably just "collateral damage" of a law which could help low earners gain more transparency. If you're already working at MS or any big tech, odds are you aren't part of the target audience. Doubly so since information from big corps is pretty readily shared and available already.
At some point as a high achiever you end up worrying about the ceiling rather than the floor.
For example, let's say a software job is listed with a range of $200k to $250k comp. And you want more than that. But will the employer be willing, or allowed, to negotiate with you an amount over $250k? After all, the job posting says $250k is the top of the range. Maybe it would be illegal to pay you more! But at a company that does not list salary ranges, maybe there is more wiggle room.
Transparency is good for people who are average at their jobs and get average pay. For other people, the benefits are unclear.
It should be noted that a lot more people think of themselves as "high achievers" - or, more often, anticipate becoming one "eventually" - when it doesn't really apply to them.
They can always give you a title increase. Some companies have 8-10 engineering levels mow because of this effect.
i don't think the salary has to be in the range, its just that the range is based on current salaries.
> I haven't read a single response that I agree with as to why this is a negative? ...They are going to provide a range like $42k to $55k
Why? Its like prop 65 cancer warnings being on 100% of the products and buildings in CA. Its just a thing you do so as to avoid liability. Now, we have these useless warnings pasted everywhere that have no meaning beyond compliance. Is CA better off with these warnings? I can't imagine so. Will companies post very broad salary ranges? With certainty, whats the downside? Will the ranges correspond to reality? Probably not. Are we better off forcing companies to do this? I'm not sure.
I'm sorry, I don't see how this is the same. Will you explain why you think they are similar?
What is the incentive for companies to put down meaningful/useful information? If that incentive exists, why weren't they doing it before the law was enacted? Alternatively, they weren't doing it before, so a priori I'd wager that the opposite incentive exists (to hide information from candidates). This law isn't changing incentives so behavior won't change beyond nominal compliance with the law.
This is going do to absolutely nothing. Most of this legislation does nothing to really address the potential for folks to just advertise incredibly wide potential salary ranges, to say nothing of alternative ways that they can change total compensation "for the right candidate," if you catch my drift. I would suspect that the biggest effect of this is to actually lead to overall greater distrusts, as folks will make all sorts of assumptions based on the ranges they see for jobs at their companies, based on their own biases. True transparency which would require something like disclosure of average/median total compensation at the company for that role, for instance, would be incredibly meaningful, but it will never come.
All regulations have limited effectiveness. This one is a step in the right direction. The tech industry tends to dismiss government action as misguided, unenforceable, or watered down. Meanwhile, the free market gives us Ring cameras where the data is fed directly to the state for illegal surveillance.
Regulations are an integral part of a free society.
I live in CO and we recently had a similar law pass that required companies to disclose salary ranges. Like you said it does absolutely nothing, companies will list "Senior Software Engineer" with a salary of "$70k - $240k". This often times isn't even the range for the current position, but the "entire range" of offers they extend to any level of SWE.
That is explicitly called out as not being allowed:
"An employer cannot post a $70,000-$100,000 range for a junior accountant position just because it pays senior accountants at the high end of that range. But it can post $70,000-$100,000 for an accountant if it does not limit the posting to junior or senior accountants, and genuinely might offer as low as $70,000 for a junior accountant, or as much as $100,000 for a senior one."
https://cdle.colorado.gov/equalpaytransparency https://cdle.colorado.gov/sites/cdle/files/INFO%20%239_%20Eq...
Seems impossible to enforce in practice
Due to my recent job search for remote positions in the US, I've seen a lot of postings in CO which include the salary ranges. While some do use stupidly wide ranges, most companies post more reasonable ones. I'm able to filter out those in the former group because this law they have has effectively exposed their dishonest hiring practices, and the companies that aren't trying to obfuscate their pay have also been exposed.
Can they just audit the actual salaries paid vs the range listed at the end of every year?
That sounds like an incredible amount of work. Who is "they" and who is paying them to do all of this auditing?
One "they" is the state government, who happens to already have the info sitting in their databases due to W-2s being reported.
Even so, the bright side is that the applicant’s expectation of the low end has been set.
Without this broad range, someone new to the industry, like a college grad, has no idea what the low range is. This at least prevents those people from getting lowballed and finding out later.
I’ve seen smart techies who are bad or oblivious to money subjects get way under paid, only to learn later, huge discrepancies in pay with the same or lower grade position due to other factors like gender, race, etc.
Even if the range is too large it is still extremely useful; it shows the company doesn't want to post a meaningful salary range which means salaries offered will be in the lower portion. Companies that are prepared to offer a competitive salary have every incentive to make the lower number higher than their competitor's listings.
Not only are the salary bands meaninglessly wide, but I'd bet that if someone was really great and justified more than the upper bound, the company (Microsoft, but any other rational company too) would, of course, pay that higher amount since it's in their interest to do so.
They are not meaninglessly wide. These laws are of great benefit to those earning the least in society. They get to easily see which occupations and businesses pay more and where their labor should be allocated.
I want to be snarky and compliment you on your clairvoyance while pointing out that you are only guessing, and instead I'll just ask why you think this kind of thing is never coming, given that some companies already do this.
I tend to assume that, at best, a company advertising a range of X-Y is going to offer something around (X+Y)/2. So if you tell me some ridiculous range, I'm going to assume your offer will suck, and I'll just skip it.
Everyone is better served by accurate ranges, it avoids both sides wasting time because of mismatched expectations.
Internally, salary ranges at MS are quite narrow by job and level. Particularly since they're more compressed toward zero than at the FAANGs and Unicorns. Why would they invite trouble by not simply publishing those?
Is this for like a level 6 dev?
Will someone applyling know if they are a level 4 or a level 7 dev? How?
I can see some heartache if they advertise the range as between $X to $Y and then they make an offer that is much closer to $X.
Possibly, but that's basically the applicants choice to go ahead and apply (within the normal confines of "choice" in work). At lest there is a bottom they can expect. This won't even be that often if the company is actually upfront about how it determines pay: Higher for x qualification, lower without the optional qualifications/experience.
On the other hand, some folks will be happy about that bottom since it will be either more than they expected or more than they are making now.
Job posts with a pay rate get about 28% more applications than those without. Some job boards that syndicate jobs from other job boards will insert an "estimated salary" or "industry salary" just to get more clicks if you don't include a salary.
Source: my company does recruitment advertising for many other companies, and including salary is something we coach our customers to do.
Just to play Devil's Advocate: being explicit about salaries is the kind of practice that sounds amazingly good on the surface, but might have some unintended real-world consequences.
For instance, whereas before when salaries weren't explicit, a weaker candidate with some good qualities who was on the bubble for consideration might be able to get a job if the salary was more favorable than the company was initially planning. With explicit salary ranges, if the candidate isn't deemed good enough to warrant hitting that predefined range, they might be unemployable in that field and not gain the experience needed to progress. In the past, a weaker candidate might have been able to go for a lesser salary range, get the job and gain more experience, and maybe make it up down the line. Maybe that's no longer a path forward for a lot of people on the bubble.
And stronger candidates who are perfect fits and world-class performers might be lost for a lot of companies because the company has the excuse of a pre-defined salary range. So maybe firms miss out on some genius, perfect fits, because the bean counters can't be bothered to assess everybody's merits individually.
Most companies have explicit and firm salary ranges for positions already -- I would bet MS is one of them. They just didn't put them in the job postings until now.
We just made an offer to someone that was far more than asked, our salary range doesn't go that low. It is to our benefit to give a fair offer as we will train this person and want them to stick around not leave in a year when they get a better offer.
Most companies the size of MS, yeah
>they might be unemployable in that field and not gain the experience needed to progress
This is why we have different types of skill levels. If you can't hire the person as a medior but you have a junior position open, surely you can tell them with the associated benefits. If its a problem, surely you can justify given the requirements.
Hiding information only to waste people's time upfront isn't helpful when society expects job searching to a part-time job on the side of another job. Maybe this is too aggressive a measure, but getting "competitive" as an answer sure isn't helpful either.
>And stronger candidates who are perfect fits and world-class performers might be lost for a lot of companies because the company has the excuse of a pre-defined salary range.
I doubt you're going to pass a great candidate because they exceed your mentioned range when internal budget can still be stretched. At worst you could argue the high earners aren't going to pick your job because your range is too low, which can be solved by simply adjusting your range. If budget can't be stretched, odds are you weren't going to hire them anyway.
Yes, these are both real risks.
There are potential solutions. There are so many job levels at big companies like Microsoft. A candidate who is weaker could interview for software engineer 3 (made up title for example) and be offered a software engineer 2 position with the understanding that the company sees potential, but wants to start the person at what they see as an appropriate level.
The high performing candidate may ignore a job listing for a position which doesn't have a high enough top end to the range, but perhaps if they are being recruited rather than approaching the company, the recruiter could recognize the value of the candidate and find a higher role which would have a more competitive salary range.
Some companies can only hire specific advertised roles, but in many cases they advertise for one role/level and end up hiring candidates for others. Big companies could also have open reqs for more levels than they think they need, and then slot the candidates in to the level which makes sense.
Another approach they could take is to make the published salary ranges more broad than the are in practice. Hotels in many places have to publish the room rate, but typically this is an insanely high number which only happens when there's a special event or something.
What do you think happens now?
Because that is pretty much what happens now, except now the applicant doesn't know the range.
The only thing that can happen with this is that people who think they're worth outside the range won't apply. And this isn't that much of a problem.
If the employer finds they aren't getting the quality of applicant they desire, they have an option: increase or change the range.
There is a lot of information asymmetry in hiring and most of it benefits employers.
I can only speak for when I was a hiring manager and we called them bands, but it was essentially the same thing. We attached a band to every job posting and we would occasionally interview promising candidates and offer them the top end of a lower band or we'd offer them a more junior position with a promise of an early promotion review. Some took it, some didn't.
I feel like most places would be open to hiring a senior in place of a principle if they felt either, the senior could do the job well enough.
At some places I've worked, level was determined after the decision to hire. A position would be open to levels I, II, & III, and a panel of people would determine which level they felt the candidate would come it at.
Job postings with a range use the term range in a much looser than the mathematical sense. In mathematics, if I say the range is 100-200, I'm telling you that 95 and 205 are not possible. In job postings, if I say the range is 100-200, 95 and 205 are still possible. 100-200 was just a (hopefully) good-faith estimate of the range.
It's really the low number I want. What is the least you would offer someone who can fill this role? Jobs can have dramatically different expectations depending on the company and that number helps me understand what your level of expectations are.
I don't think any of these ranges are binding. They simply give the candidate more information to negotiate with. So a company could end up offering more or less than the range, but they need to be ready for a conversation as to why.
Salary is just one component of total comp, and in my (tech) experience not generally the biggest one.
The problem you mentioned is already solved using the contracting system.
What's the actual problem that including salaries tries to solve? IMO if used strictly, it could only limit the talent pool (consider if someone more skilled than expected applies, but won't accept at or below the stated upper salary bound; the company won't be able to pivot and hire them).
Including salary could let applicants avoid underpaying companies before they embark on a lengthy application process, which is beneficial, but don't companies already have strong incentives not to exploit people in this way since they'll only leave shortly afterward and those onboarding costs would be false economy.
> What's the actual problem that including salaries tries to solve?
It tries to solve pay equity problems. https://hr.uw.edu/comp/pay-equity/salary-setting-guidance/
> Employers must provide equal compensation to similarly employed workers
The kicker is "similarly employed". I've seen people with the same job title earn a differential of 3x, but that's simply because one negotiated better and was more economically valuable (had about 1.5 more decades' experience) than the other, yet they had the same job title. I guess we could argue to control for years' experience, but I've seen people who were better at a job after 6 months than those in the same job were after 10 years. There are even jobs where people get worse over time, which isn't intuitive but easy to find examples (e.g. you forget documentation if life gets busy for a year or two, and you're less effective because of that).
I suspect "similarly employed" is indefinable in any realistic sense. I'm not against trying, just very sober about the probability of crafting a policy that outperforms the imperfect but free-ish market.
Beginner microeconomics courses teach that for the best allocation of resources, a market must have price transparency. How else are market participants supposed to ascertain the movements of supply and demand curves?
> How else are market participants supposed to ascertain the movements of supply and demand curves?
The problem is jobs aren't homogenous, so comparing salaries is meaningless, not only for applicants but also for the company itself. Imagine you find 10 people whose resumes look similar on paper, but after you interview all ten you realise there are some you'd hire in an instant, others you think are just okay, and some you think are awful. It's so obvious why their salaries would differ, and I find it very challenging to make any good argument otherwise.
So, how can market participants ascertain supply and demand (and hence, price)? The answer is they can't, but they're no worse than companies, academics, government or anyone else - without assessing the individual, I don't think it's possible for anyone to know.
Hence a salary range. No one is forcing anyone to pay everyone the same, even if it is the same job title. The most important part of these laws is actually just the minimum. People need to know which business and employers to avoid and which to go towards. Sorting job listings by bottom of the pay range can help them save time.
In any case, for any marker, the more real time information, the better.
But what’s the actual problem?
Pay inequity is an actual problem.
If your job posting doesn't give some indication as to the possible salary range, I'm just not going to apply.
What? I'm going to go through some bullshit interview process that includes some esoteric algorithm problem that has nothing to do with the actual position in question and, even if it did, I could "npm install"/google my way out of only to find out later on that the job pays the same (or less) than what I make right now?
That's just a waste of everyone's time.
About salaries at Microsoft. I interviewed with them this year.
I did a Codility test, followed by four interviews with four US based teams.
I got an offer which is 5 to 6 times what they pay in US.
I live in a country in Eastern Europe, and prices are a bit lower. I would have expected a lower offer, but not that much lower. It was less than I already make so I had to wish them good luck in finding another person and was feeling sorry that I lost so much time in the interviewing process and also invested a lot of energy.
I presume you mean 1/5 to 1/6th.
Maybe the low offer was due to an off by order of magnitude math mistake?
Now you know to ask for compensation up front.
Everyone always says this is a RED FLAG, so I've hesitated to do this myself. But I value my time more than I care about being "flagged" as a dissident against company interests. So I do that now with the initial HR interview. The energy put into this can be completely insane as per the GP's experience.
What we need is just a certificate that proves competency, so we can remove all these exams, quizzes and foolishness. Typically, that was a computer science degree, but there wouldn't be enough degree holders to fill all the roles, and wages would skyrocket. So some sort of interview meatgrinder it is I suppose.
As a result of all this, I wouldn't do this career path over again, and won't be recommending it to my kids. Companies will have to reap the rewards for their downward pressure on wages by going to India. They will continue to have to hire there for the next 20 to 100 years. And once the Americans are out of the industry, I think the Indians won't always take things lying down like we do in the US. I suspect they'll unionize and make life hell for these corporations. I hope the Indians become insanely wealthy from it, and US corporations will deserve it.
Indians are already making life hell for US corporations. That’s one of the reasons they’re looking more to East Europe even though they’re more expensive.
I used to work for Microsoft and was prevented from starting bigger projects as they didn’t want to expand the US team, instead wanting to expand their Chinese and Eastern European teams as they were cheaper.
Microsoft is a big, inefficient, and amoral company. You could have taken advantage of that and once inside and after a few years of demostrable good work and in making friends you might have been able to score an internal move to the US with the associated pay bump. I’m not saying it’ll be easy but there aren’t many ways to 5x your salary. US kinda sucks right now but money can generally shield you from a lot of that.
Microsoft is known and memed on the "big tech community" for paying "peanuts" (less than other tech companies). Is the rest-and-vest kinda of place, or so they say. I'm sure there are some teams that work pretty hard, is a big company.
Interestingly enough, I know MS (engineering) managers in other European satellite offices that make absolute bank. Easily 4-5 times more than comparable jobs at domestic companies.
I see many concerns here mentioning how this may not be a useful law because the company may create very wide ranges. It sounds like there are some restrictions in the law that try to prevent that, but I wonder if we should be looking at it a different way -- provide both the salary range for the position and also the range of the salaries of the existing employees in that same position.
Can a company make an offer outside its stated range?
E.g. What if Microsoft has a job opening with a range of $110k - $170k, and the candidate they selected used to make $180k and would like $200k? Will Microsoft offer him or her the 200k they seek or offer 170k and lose their candidate?
If salary ranges can be bypassed, then they are not really useful, and if they can't, by law, companies could skirt the law by offering higher bonuses and more stock, or else lose on talent. Or the company could close the job opening, and create a new posting with an updated range for the sole purpose of being legally able to hire their candidate. Which would still invalidate the spirit of the law.
I'm not sure these salary transparency laws are good for workers or companies alike.
> E.g. What if Microsoft has a job opening with a range of $110k - $170k, and the candidate they selected used to make $180k and would like $200k?
If I was reviewing job descriptions, and the max of the posted range is less than my current salary, I'm probably not going to apply.
Another situation: You make 160k, the max range is 170k, but you'd like more than the max range. In the old world, this would work. You would gain more comp, and your new employer would acquire your talent. It's the free market at work. In the new world, neither of those will happen. I'm concerned about the consequences of that on economic growth and innovation.
Salary bands are tied to title. If the max range of the listed position is $160k, and the company wants to hire you for $200k, they will just hire you into a more senior title (which has a higher range).
This is how it happens now, and how it will still happen. Disclosing the initial range target does not prevent it.
Are you saying that the employers won't give 170k+ if the disclosed max range is 170k? I highly doubt that, the only change here is that the range that was previously only visible to the hiring managers within the company is now also visible to the candidates. If they could go beyond the internally visible range before, they would surely be able to do it now. The only difference is that before the candidates would have no idea whether they're already maxed out on the given range or if there's still plenty of room to negotiate.
I don't buy it either. I think overall more people will be lifted up, than some guy that wants 200K and the highest paid employee is currently 160K, will be held down. In fact, I think that's blatantly obvious. Companies are going to lose with this because this industry has so much exploitation going on, that San Francisco alone isn't counterbalancing it or even close.
> If salary ranges can be bypassed, then they are not really useful
Sure they are. With common sense and fines for clear ongoing breaches it will do as planned.
There are always exceptions so if occasionally a salary is bypassed to match the candidate, higher or lower this is going to happen and be reasonable.
If 30%+ of candidates get paid less than the advertised role there is a clear case of bait and switch for authorities to show a court type deal.
I feel you need to approach this from altitude rather than individual cases.
> E.g. What if Microsoft has a job opening with a range of $110k - $170k, and the candidate they selected used to make $180k and would like $200k? Will Microsoft offer him or her the 200k they seek or offer 170k and lose their candidate?
They can also negotiate seniority/level. So if they really wanted that person, and they were originally planning on hiring as a Level N Engineer, they could negotiate to hire at a Level N+1 engineer that has the desired salary.
Probably easier to have multiple reqs for the same job under different titles to cover a broader range or throw perks of hard to define monetary value at the wall until something sticks than to go through whatever process would be required to offer outside the range.
Or $170K is the most they're willing to offer for a particular position. And, if someone wants significantly more, they'll just pass. Companies will find ways to make exceptions for someone they really want--including creating a new position for them. But companies won't always salary match.
I wish all companies included pay ranges. When I was a junior / mid level dev I was lowballed more times than I care to admit. Nowadays if some recruiter messages me I ask for the range immediately, and I end the conversation if I don't get a straight answer.
Does anyone know if popular job platforms out there use your location to determine whether or not to show the salary information for a job posting? Or is it usually something that have to request once you can establish that you're a resident of Colorado?
Colorado's law is written so that it would apply to any job that can reasonably be done by someone residing in the state. So if you're hiring for a remote position, under CO law you have to provide a salary range. It doesn't technically matter where _you_ are located.
As a result, some companies have started explicitly excluding CO from their job postings. I'm not a lawyer, but I think there's probably latent lawsuits there. Especially if they employ anyone in CO already.
> I'm not a lawyer, but I think there's probably latent lawsuits there.
I hope not. We've got states trying to regulate things like abortion rights across state lines, too. I prefer states not have the same reach as the federal government, because some of them are especially crazy.
How do the Washington/Colorado salary disclosure laws interact with bonus structures and stock grants? A staff engineer might make $250k/year in base salary, but their total comp could be much higher.
"250/year with bonus and equity options" is what I'd seen - not very helpful.
These laws apply to all jobs, not just tech jobs.
I wonder why only the US. If they believe pay transparency is the right way forward, they should do it globally. Surely there's no legal hurdles in posting pay ranges for any country.
For the US it may be this is the easiest way to comply with Colorado's law. Worldwide may be rolled out later, but those are probably separate business entities that have to work it out.
As with all negotiations, once you've stated a number you've put a lower (or upper, depending on the side you're on) bound.
I believe WA has a similar law going into effect. Since they're based/domiciled(?) in WA the state laws apply I believe. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
They don't believe pay transparency is the way forward - they're just fending off some US laws and trying to gain kudos for doing so.
As you mention, if they really wanted to be transparent, it would be global, but I doubt they want to expose those differences.
Unfortunately, some countries actually prohibit publishing employee salaries.
But will it include stock ranges too? This is where the huge discrepancy occurs between candidates.
Salary is almost always in a tight range at Microsoft at a given level -- but external candidates can get anywhere from peanuts (a so called "tier 1" offer) to jumbo stock allocations (a so called "tier 3" offer).
Pay ranges for positions are vast and overlap to a massive degree. They also are skewed with CoL variations to make comparison difficult. They were not include discretionary add-one like cash bonuses and RSUs.
Microsoft already posts salaries for remote or potentially remote positions to comply with Colorado law - but I have not seen Meta, Netflix, etc doing the same under similar circumstances.
I wonder if this applies to contractors working at their campuses. From what I've heard, here in Fargo most of the people working at the Microsoft campus work for Archway
This will work for a while, but have a look at how this has played out in other situations: 1) college tuition cost of attendance calculators (shit goes up every year), 2) federal pay scales (completely immobile), 3) healthcare standard charges mandate. This will eventually become oppressive as the powerful learn to communicate with this new node in the network.
edit: not sure why the downvotes. Making information public increases market efficiencies, but market efficiencies don't always transfer to the workers. See: the last 30 years.
Are they going to take a look a TC? Their "highest we can go offer" was 100k below everyone else in my region (seattle)
I would have been paid less in companies I worked for under this system.
Be careful what you wish for.
Is it going to be salary or total comp?
Why only in the US? Why not everywhere?
Does this include executive roles and total compensation or just the base salary?
Awesome. I love this. This just granted +100 goodwill to MSFT.
Read this as "our initial offer"
Any tips for landing a MS interview?
$100k - $5 Million is a valid range
Pay bands are the minimum and maximum that employees at a specific level are paid. So this only works if a company is legitimately going to hire people for $5MM a year and/or have existing employees at that level paid that amount.
Also, such large pay bands will raise eyebrows, as they are indicative of discrimination. Why such wildly different wages for the same role?
Because humans aren’t interchangeable cogs?
Let’s consider the range of compensation for the “CEO” role.
These laws are not intended to help CEOs or people in tech already making 6-figure salaries before other compensation.
These ludicrous edge cases are not a "gotcha" for a type of law that greatly helps pay transparency for the vast majority of the population.
Even in tech this is helpful. What's the going rate for a new-grad SWE in Nashville TN? I certainly didn't know when I graduated. I had to get all the way to the offer stage before any numbers were discussed at all. Also no equity was involved anyway.