I will repost a comment I made here a while ago on a similar discussion. Salary non-disclosure is a dealbreaker for me since being through the situation described below:
A few years back I wanted to get out of the work situation I was in. I looked around, had some interviews, had some offers. None of the postings had salary ranges, as is common where I live.
My eyes, however, were set on a specific small company because I liked their product. The process was long and involved multiple meetings, a take-home problem, and stretched over 2 or so months. I was upfront about what my salary expectations were (wasn't looking for a raise, just a lateral move). They said we discuss salary when you meet the founders, i.e. the last step before getting hired, but they also didn't tell me that my range was way off.
Turns out I had played this 9 week game and turned down other offers just to be severely low-balled by them. Maybe they saw that I really wanted the position and thought they could get away with a low offer.
Obviously, I rejected their offer on the spot. I also promised myself to never, _ever_, be fooled like that again. We talk money before I invest any significant amount of time or I walk.
I've done worse than that. I've taken the job on a lower salary, being told I'd get a promotion and pay rise in 6 months. That didn't happen. And then when it didn't happen at 18 months they dangled the carrot of a promotion up two levels. After a few weeks of not hearing about it I popped a resignation letter in the post one morning, went into the office and had an email to say the promotion had "gone away".
Then they went legal trying to prevent me working for a competitor.
I actually got what I needed from the role anyway, but it was a lesson to heed the red flags. I've not heeded that lesson a couple of times recently, just because the market seems to be toast, but it's not been worth it.
A friend that works as a manager told me that companies stretch the interview process on purpose so that at the end you will accept a lower offer that you normally would because you are exhausted by the process.
> A friend that works as a manager told me that companies stretch the interview process on purpose so that at the end you will accept a lower offer that you normally would because you are exhausted by the process.
1. It depends on how desperate the applicant is: if they're searching while still employed then they can walk (like GP did).
2. Even if they are desperate, they may take the offer… for now… so they can start getting a salary again, but that won't prevent them from continue to look. In which case you're paying for them to learn a job which they'll leave and you'll have to pay someone (else) a second time to learn as well.
bingo. hiring is expensive, onboarding is expensive, offboarding is annoying and has non-trivial-risk, and dragging it out means work isn't get done in that position.
unless you're looking at VP and up level roles where there may be a significant delta in risk, cost, and pay it's probably not worth it.
I've mentored a lot of young engineers and something I often point out is that there is practically zero risk in accepting an offer. Many companies also do not even present the full paperwork to sign until your first day or two.
You don't have to show up on the start date, though you do have to be mindful of the bridge you may be burning. But it is totally reasonable to show up to a few days of work, and declare "you know what, I don't think this is a good fit" and no one will be offended. They don't have to know that you already accepted another offer.
Exploding offers, low-ball offers, all bullshit. But you don't have to play their games.
This is certainly valid in "right to work" states like Pennsylvania. If there is no notice period, then there is no penalty from accepting multiple jobs. Having accepted a job, there are also various ways to push the start date forward.
Some corporations will exploit whatever advantages they perceive. I overheard one hiring manager refer to their process as "the hunger games".
Usually the manager doesn't care about this though - a p-number is a p-number, it doesn't matter if they are paying them $200k or $100k (assuming the salary range for the position was that large).
If anything the manager would prefer a higher offer that the candidate is likely to expect than a low-ball which they reject and then the hiring process has to continue.
it also just gets to the scammer end of the "who is stupid enough to keep doing this to the end". The point of a lot of scammer's poor grammar, huge red flags, etc, is _they_ dont want to waste _their_ time with someone other than the biggest marks in the world.
I just thought it should be clearer how many of these businesses likely operate to filter out.
A lot of places are looking for unambitious, mediocre, status-quo following bodies to fill seats and follow arcane bureaucratic processes. Too much critical thinking is bad. Ability to deal with long drawn out bullshit is good.
I'm saying business managers tend to follow patterns that gets them to the numbers on their paper. What you, or a single employee, sees as counter productive is often just a means to an end.
They'll spend 5x your ask for a raise finding someone to fill your position because denying you keeps the rest of their payroll in line. And if you consider these people communicate across their industries, they will make informal cartels that depress all employee wages.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there was just a natural way to filter our employees who would be to demanding by making them jump through more hoops.
> companies stretch the interview process on purpose so that at the end you will accept a lower offer
That doesn't pass the smell test. That would mean those companies do not care about filling a role of hiring competent workers. If your guy is willing to wait two whole months for your offer, you are either Google or you are trying to hire a dude who no company on earth wants.
If your salary depends on how many underlings you have you want them to do as little useful work as possible. Hiring becomes is a very time consuming delicate process, you need 3 full time employees to find those 5 perfect sheep men.
This is what car dealerships in the US do too. Waste a ton of time and keep you there for hours to fatigue you into accepting whatever bullshit they throw at you in the "close".
These companies aren't Google. There is no valid reason why it should take so long to decide on candidates for a position. It is not necessary to have more than two interview sessions. I bail on any company that subjects people to this garbage.
Google is a very large company. They have capital on hand and an established, well-worn process for onboarding. It costs them comparatively little to hire.
For a small company, an engineering hire is a big investment. They don't do it as often, so it costs them more in terms of both direct costs and indirect costs - like the time it takes their existing team to go through the process and bring the new hire up to speed.
I recently had a small company take a month and had after the final two 'interviews' with the CEO and CTO were scheduled a week apart, realized this is almost certainly a stalling tactic to have a couple more candidates in the pipeline so they can pick the best.
Agreed, when I was recruiting for a small company (where we could be easily outbid), the only tool I really had was that the process was 1 interview and I made a decision. This was before remote absolutely exploded but I was able to successfully recruit some really bright young developers and, I hope, kickstarted some incredible careers for them. Granted, I’m not confident I could do it now, as the gap between what the company could afford and what you can make working remote is much too large now!
Similar experience, multiple tech rounds all completed with excellent feedback from a company which approached me. Mentioned my ask and no indication of the range being a problem (but no firm approval either).
Based on that, assumption was the budget would be adequate. Final response was that they would not even mention the salary because it was too far away.
Following week they posted the job advert for same staff engineer role but at under average eu minimum wage.
It's risky if no salary is listed but do not ever proceed if they don't openly accept your ask without any doubt.
yep - never interview - if salary range is not disclosed by the hiring manager or recruiter. if hiring manager can't discuss salary - the hiring manager is a lame duck and won't push anything but just take orders.
with regards to uk tech companies - they have salary ranges like 60k-75k - where someone might have spent time in a role at 63k e.g if the average tenure within a certain position is 3 years, 63k - then when you join they will say new joiners start at 60k.
Just to add a little bit of perspective here. When I was a manager, if a candidate reached an interview with me, they had already had an interview with the recrui-I mean, "talent acquisition expert", with whom the compensation had already been previously discussed. I often had no idea what was the salary offered and I could not negotiate on it.
That was the other guy's job, and it as a prerequisite - they would not reach me if the compensation was not to their satisfaction. My job was to determine whether the candidate could perform at the offered post. If I needed to discuss compensation then someone before me would have screwed up.
I don't mind the company that makes me wait long, and in many cases prefer it. Just I reject any take home if takes more than few hours without communication, and I reject more than 1 round of interviews done by someone junior than me.
I like giving interviews. It gives me insight into their thinking and the company.
I think the GP's point is that if you give the companies the opportunity to do that earlier, instead of only later, you get to save a lot of time dealing with the honest low-ballers.
There's nothing you can do about the dishonest ones.
It really should be against some kind of employment standards to do this sort of bait and switch
There are apparently some new regulations in Canada to protect job seekers from this, but it's not a clean line in the sand. It seems like companies won't likely be held accountable unless it is a pattern of hiring like this, but how do people establish a pattern when most people still won't discuss salaries?
Most companies want the new joinees to be satisfied, and if the reason is "we don't have budget" that might be acceptable. But if the reason is "we are lowballing you specifically because we can" that would just create spite in candidates mind and the company has to pay the price for the process if a candidate dropped off or joined temporarily while looking elsewhere.
Yea, it's basically a question of respect. The second somebody disrespects you you walk away, hard line. Going along with it and playing their games, as described above, just prolongs the inevitable.
Don't want to act like an adult and tell me how much money I'll make? I'm out, good luck.
I have always felt that job ads should include salary information. The main reason is not to waste anyone's time. Often a narrow salary range or a clear link between requirements and salary are much more informative than a job description. I have experienced to apply to a job opening and go through one or more interviews only to find out that the company is actually hiring for a more junior position than the ad copy implied.
A second reason is to avoid discrimination. Applicants that feel disadvantaged, even if they are actually qualified, may hesitate to negotiate for a higher salary in the same way that a other applicants would. The consequence is that they start with a lower salary. This applies specially to women. Plenty of research shows that they are less likely to negotiate their salary.
Research[1] suggests that pay transparency leads to lower average salaries because employers avoid paying higher wages to any one employee to avoid costly negotiations with others. The effect is small, around 2%, and it disappears with increasing degree of unionization. In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
When hiring I don't have a narrow range in mind, it can be 50% or more. I look at the individual and make a judgment call on their impact to the business. For software we don't have a widget factory where employees are easily substitutable.
I've tried the opposite, paid everyone the same. But there were clear differences in ability and more importantly outside options. It became a problem when it came to retention and the business didn't have the ability to overpay everyone to keep the top performers.
You're describing levels. If your range is so wide the top of the range is double the bottom of the range, you're hiring at multiple levels, and you should just say that. You should also have more detailed descriptions that help you and candidates differentiate what those levels are.
More broadly than that -- it's not that you need to pay everyone the same, it's that you need clear structure around how your pay works.
An example that became a problem with one previous employer was that they kept saying "performance" was their only determining factor for pay, after it had come out that exactly one person on our team had been offered bonuses as a performance incentive.
It's not actually performance-based if you have different and better reward structures, or if you can't/won't explain why gaps exist.
It's mainly specialties, not just levels. Are you a graphic designer that can also build your designs for the web? Were you previously consulting for our largest customer? Do you speak Welsh for our important client in Pembroke? Did you previously work in tech stack X and want to get back to it, and could lead our effort into that market? I'll pay more for these even if they come in at the same grade. Pay is very subjective, it is a prediction about the value an employee can or does bring balanced against their next best option.
Many of those things you can still just say, in a job description, as details that make you stand out. Many of those specific details do have tangible value (though I'd still say if you include words like "lead" you're describing levels), and you're not necessarily just describing vibes, but what you also aren't describing is a reason why you wouldn't have some idea of what you would pay someone in normal circumstances.
Say that no one you interview has those particulars, and you hire someone who's just -- by your regular, baseline standards -- qualified for the job. Do you have a cutoff for what you would pay those people? Then you should probably post that, and then just act like companies that comply with this stuff already and include some kind of disclaimer, that extraordinary candidates may still fall somewhere outside that range.
Because I could write 5 pages filled with these potential factors and it would be confusing to most candidates. Why specify Welsh when less than 1% of staff or candidates speak it?
> Because I could write 5 pages filled with these potential factors and it would be confusing to most candidates. Why specify Welsh when less than 1% of staff or candidates speak it?
You want to set laws that hurt 99% of employees for a theoretical benefit to a 1% case for the employer?
"level" can be an internal designation to communicate to others about the problems you can take on. Says nothing about pay. Many ways for a company to operate.
People seem very attached - emotionally, almost morally - to a model of hiring that looks like this:
* The company decides to open a specific position, which it will fill no matter what.
* The position will pay the same amount no matter who fills it.
* There exists a binary condition called "qualified" which people metaphysically are or aren't.
* The job must not go to an unqualified person, but could go to any qualified applicant.
* Society may instruct you to use certain non-merit-based criteria to prefer some qualified applicants over others, but hiring managers and teams must not use their own subjective feelings or relationships to do so.
I can understand how a civil service or other massive bureaucracy full of principal-agent problems arrives at these rules, but they are obviously not the only valid way to assemble a high-performing team or the best one in all circumstances.
Then you should have more defined roles, even if organisationally they're the same, i.e. there's very clear expectations of differences in salaries (and business impact) between junior, mid and senior developers.
The point is you should be putting out different job postings when you are looking for different personas.
I'm not answering a pitch that says "$100K-$350K salary, final decision based on vibes" but I will if it says "$250K-$270K salary, needs 10 years of experience leading X kinds of projects and proficiency in Y, Z".
This is an ideal state, for sure, but it's also where corporate bureaucracy gets in the way. It's FAR easier to have a catch-all, pretty generic posting for a category of role than to get approval for discrete postings for each conceivable instantiation of that role category within a hiring org. This is also why many [tech] companies will include leveling information in the posting in addition to a salary range, so candidates will know that they could be considered whether they slot in as, for example, an IC4 or IC5.
Posting a job ad isn't the onerous part of the process though to be fair.
It does make me wonder what would happen if you put out 100 different job adverts split apart by £1,000 increments. I'm sorry you aren't suitable for the 100k job you applied for but would you consider our 97k role instead?
It makes sense for multiple job ads if there are completely different roles applied by completely different people. But, for the sake of hiring, it doesn't make sense to invent new titles just to justify differently negotiated salaries. For example, I was once hired as a "Senior Software Developer" who essentially got paid twice what the least senior Senior got; they were to some extent mislabelled: They were senior in another capacity than software, and had transitioned inside the company but kept their titel because people are vain. Our responsibilities were vastly different: He was a frontend tokenmaxxer, and I migrated strategic customers to on-prem Kubernetes by negotiating contracts, bootstrapping clusters, and adapting applications to run without autoscaling. They could have given either of us a different title, but for the sake of the value we added, the salary made sense.
A title like "Senior Software Developer" can range from 5 years of general-purpose web development experience to 20 years of highly specialized experience. Those "Principal" and "Staff" titles don't necessarily make sense outside of larger corporations.
Most recently I've seen salary ranges up to 30% of the upper bound. Completely reasonable.
Maybe you should, one for each expected level, with a description of the expected qualifications of each and how much you’ll pay for those qualifications? Sort of an “if X, then Y, but if also Z, then W” thing? Like a company should?
That's impractical most of the time. It's much more efficient to handle leveling during the interview process, and to coach the technical recruiter to use screening questions that give a decent indication of where a viable candidate might slot.
It's also easiest for candidates. If you are faced with 2 job postings about the same org at a company you may not have any experience with, how will you decide whether to apply for the lower or higher level role? It's not always clear.
How does the seniority requirements work? I've seen 1 year junior better than 8 years senior; 5 year senior with no difference to a typical 2 years junior and everything in between.
If I'm building a team, I don't need everyone at the exact same level. I want a mix. I want some juniors, some seniors and a tech lead. The job description is the same, I'm not writing 3 or 4.
But a team of SWEs at different experience levels for the same role won't be different job descriptions.
I'm in this situation right now, I have a minimum requirement, it could be MET with someone with 1-2 years of experience or 20 years.
But that is the MINIMUM, if I find someone that meets that minimum but I get a lot more, I will pay more. But I'm still not making multiple job descriptions with different ranges.
You could just put multiple ranges and add additional details for what seniors/leads look like. You would have minimums for what those things are too, and those qualities would actually overlap a lot with a previous level's nice-to-have items.
There's valid conversation around the nuances of "what if this need isn't specific to a level?" but those don't excuse keeping people in the dark about what the job offers or requires.
> But a team of SWEs at different experience levels for the same role won't be different job descriptions.
Why would you put people with different experience levels in the same role? You'll have three classes of people, only one of them "happy", for the others it'll be too much or too little. You cannot put a junior in the same position as a person who wants to be tech lead?
I think maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because having one job description for those three roles don't make much sense as I understand it currently.
I'm probably not explaining myself well, but besides from FAANGs that use levels, this is how every company i've worked at does thing.
We need a team of X people, we have minimum requirements. We are open to anyone as long as they are close to the requirements (100% match is never possible).
We evaluate the comp based on interview feedback... then as the team gets filled what we look for starts to narrow to "fill out the bench" so to speak.
But we won't ever go back and update the description or pay-band, no need.
Operational flexibility is a thing. A small company could be looking for competent and motivated people in general and adapt their internal processes to match the hire's experience level.
Couldn't you have a single job advert with a wide range and in the description say that you're looking for juniors, mid, and seniors and that you'll tell people early on where you think they'd slot in?
No, work with a recruiter who understands your business and is similarly aligned to spotting value at a good price. By the time I have an initial phone screen with a candidate I know their CV and their salary expectation and I have agreed to be in range of their expectations. Direct inbounds go through a 10-minute screen with a recruiter to collect additional details.
No, it sounds like there are clear differences in abilities.
If you think every junior/senior/staff has the same ability, you're delusional. Two people can broadly fall into the same bucket but be very different in terms of output.
I often look at a CV and notice specific skills that can benefit the business even if they aren't part of a normal job description. Imagine a software developer who used to be a graphic designer. I can save handoff time and have this person take on additional tasks, but it won't be in the job ad because the hit rate is too low. I can afford to pay that person more than others with comparable programming skills.
Or, I find value in areas that get overlooked in the market. Career transition people for example might not have many other options and I can take a gamble on how fast they ramp up.
> When hiring I don't have a narrow range in mind, it can be 50% or more.
As an occasional hiring manager, having this sort of flexibility sounds really nice!
Unfortunately I have to define my requirements and justify a fairly narrow range when I want to add to my team, so it's not something I get to enjoy. There have definitely been candidates who stand out from the crowd and have higher expectations, that I have not been able to offer to.
I've always asked, and then get the generic "for the ideal candidate we are prepared to go very high", which I tactfully point out as the BS it is - there is no role that has ever been advertised without a manager or director-level sign-off on the range.
I usually reply to the brush-off with "I only ask because the seniority level is reflected in the salary, not the role or the advertisement."
I say that because it is, in fact, true: the seniority/skill required for the role and duties/responsibilities dictates the pay, the bullet points in the advertisement and the role description is often completely divorced from the level of seniority or skill required in the actual role.
IOW "We're hiring a Senior dev" might have me respond "That's a Junior pay-bracket".
This is a non-problem: if a candidate approaches you for Role A, and you decide they'd be a great fit for Role A+B, then create Role A+B, and perform the perfunctory interview, then hire them at the new role.
There is no (and I feel comfortable with this absolute) scenario where you need to keep the salary range hidden, or where a published salary range prevents you from hiring a candidate for an expanded role. None.
The only thing transparent pricing does is result in an informed participant in the market, which is pricing signals and thus something Capitalism.
Once you go down the route of asking for special exemption to make your business work in an open market, you're not doing Capitalism anymore.
It's a bureaucratic problem. Getting a headcount approved for a specific role is a non-issue. Getting HC approved for something brand new might be impressively complicated. Especially at large companies, listed postings persist for many months sometimes and stagnate because functions, dynamics or org alignment shifts before anyone is hired. It's much easier to write a generic-ish job posting and just coach the recruiter/screener on updated specifics than it is to retract a posting, rewrite it, and repost it. This happened to me frequently when I was a hiring manager at Google, for example.
This works for some orgs but not for ones where roles require significant negotiation and sign-off. That can take weeks or months and by that point an attractive candidate has moved on.
To be honest, the places I’ve worked for that could do this were not the best jobs I’ve had. That flexibility can sometimes point to other organizational issues.
That said I think Jury is still out on pay transparency mostly because there isn't that much practical data. The EU has been navigating it for a few years but research is still ongoing.
One paper (which is more focused on pay gap reporting, which is longer implemented and seems to have limited impact) suggests salary disclosure in job ads actually increases wages.
It's definitely obvious that internal salary transparency will a) act to normalise salaries over the long term and b) generally depress salaries. But disclosure at the job as stage is less clear.
We've had decades of salary suppression already, supported by a culture of "Don't tell your coworkers what you earn." I'm not seeing how making full disclosure mandatory would generally depress salaries.
The people whose job it is to measure this have explained it and it's linked above - because it changes employers' incentive to negotiate and makes them more reluctant to give any raises because those raises would be visible and trigger more raises being requested. This can reduce inequality but bring the averages down (some might argue that's an acceptable tradeoff).
There's a difference between coworkers talking to each other and the system being set up in a transparent way where everyone can see everyone else's salaries, these two aren't the same thing.
Generally that's basically how socialism works: if you make things more equal, they tend to be smaller on average. Sometimes that's a reasonable trade, but it's worth acknowledging.
Price transparency is better for society, as price movements are the signal to buyers and sellers for which way supply and demand curves are moving, and hence resources can be allocated more efficiently.
A more real time view of the change in people’s pay to quality of life at work ratio can help people decide what to train in and how much to invest in the training.
People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
We will invent narratives to protect our ego and will happily keep other people down (including ourselves) instead of confronting this.
"He just got promoted because he's more outgoing, he's not more talented than me!"
Ok let's assume thats true. But if your job involves spending 40 hours a week with someone (more than your family), it turns out humans value being around charming, outgoing people. Is this wrong or is it the market accurately assessing relative value in the context of the actual work (collaborating with other humans)?
>People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
Mediocre and average employees like the idea of reducing inequality, because the mediocre employees stand to financially benefit and the average employees can expect little to no change in compensation while reaping emotional rewards.
For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.
> For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.
Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality.
Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others. If you want to pay someone outside of band, give them a different title.
If someone performs unexpectedly well, give them a bonus/promotion etc.
It's deeply sad (but unsurprising) that so many people can only focus on their particular benefit (especially when the vast majority of that benefit is context dependent).
Like, if you hired John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard and just told them to take tickets, they'd probably be an average performer at best. If you told them never to take initiative, they'd perform badly. So lots of performance is dependent on context, there are very few "good" employees in a vacuum.
> it's unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others
No its not. This is a skill that is useful when exchanging value with other entities (the basis of the economy). You're being compensated for having that skill.
Would you hire a salesperson or head of procurement or media buyer with bad negotiation skills? How about a developer who can't properly negotiate with teams demanding their time to properly allocate themselves where needed?
>Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality. Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others.
Then give your money to people who don't negotiate as well. In practice, you don't: your revealed preference speaks louder than your stated preference does.
Just because someone is 'good' at negotiating higher comp in the interview process, doesn't mean that will have an high impact on the business.
As an EM, a person's current salary is an anchor. If someone is paid at the bottom of the band, but then later the company learns about their high impact, they aren't given a raise, they are told to push harder and get promoted.
And then when they are promoted, they are probably at the bottom of the next band.
if a person threatens to leave, the EM (rarely) can magically wave a wand to increase the salary, but they can promise to put them up for promotion next cycle.
If they're truly high impact and high competence they should be able to signal that value in high impact high competence ways.
The reality is that in most industries competence and impact has very little to do with compensation. Compensation is the result of political status games, not demonstrable ability.
> People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
It goes other way round too. It might just be that the your higher salary is not rational, you got lucky or got unfair advantage.
Like, in the bottom of your comment, you made up situation that might just not apply. Or might just not counteract anything
Or, might be directly damaging - agreeing with everyone makes you popular, but causes a lot of damage in the long term. Lying about important stuff makes you popular, but causes damage to company and everyone else.
People go out of their way to rationalize and defend unfair or damaging systems.
My point was that the "you got lucky or got unfair advantage" narrative that people use to explain why other people are successful and they are not is motivated reasoning.
So it's far more likely these comments are over-indexing on the "its all luck/unfairness" explanation than the "it's all rational" explanation given there's 100X more people who will have their egos protected by the former positioning (the ratio of executives to worker bees is like 1:100).
It’s more that the “i work hard and hustle everyday” narrative from successful people is to protect their little egos from the realisation that 90% of their success is pure luck / chance / chaos.
Yes, both parties use motivated reasoning to protect their ego.
But there's 100X more of the worker bees than there is of the uber-successful.
Therefore any discussion like this one will over-index on the luck explanation.
We're obviously not at risk of assigning too much agency to successful people here on HN, an internet forum filled with frustrated leftist upper middle class last men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
And my point was that "no he was not lucky, it was entirely fair with no luck or advantage (and no fraud, lies etc)" narrative is frequently motivated reasoning too.
> the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
I'd like the boss to do his work and write down the rationalization. Then, when we have an objective measure of the rationalization of the wage, I can work towards getting a higher wage myself.
The biggest opponents of wage transparency (and many other things) are incompetent managers refusing to do their work.
About 30% of modern economics is dubious studies that demonstrate that things which hammer profits are Bad For The Little Guy.
See also: hiking the minimum wage (possibly the most obvious example of academic corruption), rent controls, taxing the rich, etc.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary ones are 1) economists also respond to incentives and those think tank jobs pay really well and 2) prestige in the industry is also a commodity - a commodity which can be bought and sold. The level to which money talks in this industry is reflected by the wages - always higher than all other humanities.
As an example the freakonomics guys popularity are to popular economics what k pop is to music: a slick, highly refined, marketed product from a superbly well oiled marketing machine.
You're disagreement with the outcomes of studies, does not mean there is widespread corruption. Rent controls, are just obviously awful things, and the data supports this. You create a lottery system, and disincentivize capital creating more supply causing a supply constraint raising prices in the long term. Minimum Wage being set to $X means prices must raise to allow that increased cost, or they will cut the position. A job a business would be willing to pay $5 an hour for gets cut when the minimum wage is $15 an hour, and just have 1 person do the work of 3. Many grocery store jobs that people used to be able to get at 13 or 14 have disappeared with the higher minimum wage for example. Taxing the rich lowers the velocity of money, disincentivizes capital to search for more profit seeking enterprises.
>Minimum Wage being set to $X means prices must raise to allow that increased cost, or they will cut the position. A job a business would be willing to pay $5 an hour for gets cut when the minimum wage is $15 an hour, and just have 1 person do the work of 3. Many grocery store jobs that people used to be able to get at 13 or 14 have disappeared with the higher minimum wage for example
What actually happens is that profit margins get hammered (notice how you forgot about those? you were supposed to) and those businesses that rely upon minimum waged labor complain bitterly.
Very low margin businesses do raise prices but in the study I saw that looked at profit margins ans prices only two examples of price raising from a survey of about 50 were, like, nail salons and catering.
In the well designed studies where they measure job losses they found essentially negligible job losses. These studies caused a lot of drama in the economics community - a lot of them acted like they'd been told that their god didn't exist. It was replicated though.
Some other studies say "look! restaurants go out of business when the minimum wage is hiked! job losses!" but neglect to mention that when restaurant A goes out of business and is replaced with restaurant B (which is what often happens), servers and cooks just switch jobs.
The whinging manifests as money piled into lobbying and public outreach to prevent this type of thing from happening again and the result of that public outreach is how you formulated your opinion about what happens and why you forgot that, for example, profits can also decrease when price goes up.
My point is that we should be able to distinguish between the studies that are dubious and the studies that are solid but go against out assumptions. And if our assumptions are that that economists are just protecting corporations, we'll end up rejecting claims that might be true, and end up with policies that sound like they protect the little guy but are actually harmful.
It's not that simple. Every study takes assumptions, simplifies things and is limited by the range of real life conditions the authors know about. It's also influenced by the economic doctrines everyone learns in college and most never question after, because they're often presented as laws of nature.
I think the most common "mistake" is that most economists are used to thinking about money in absolute terms, but in real life it's a lot more useful to treat prices as a percentage of your income. That means the utility of money is not linear, so redistribution is good by itself unless it hurts growth so much that average incomes start going down in real terms.
The other one is way deeper and harder to fix but I don't think a lot of people actually believe it, they just use it implicitly in their research. It's that the goal of economics is to maximize efficiency (measured by ROI = profits), not to deliver the best outcomes for the greatest amount of people.
From this point of view a platform like Doordash is efficient because they underpay workers and overcharge customers, and so are surveillance data brokers. That's clearly not a perspective that gets us into a better society. But measuring quality of life is much harder than taking two numbers every company is legally required to count.
I always found the question “what is a good life?” to be one of the most interesting and consequential philosophical questions.
People have found very different answers for this over the millennia.
Sure, ideally you should dig deep. I did that on a lot of the minimum wage papers and discovered just how deceptive and misleading they were trying to be - mostly using carefully crafted data and assumptions which were patently unrealistic. Sometimes they would smother those wrong assumptions with incredibly elaborate math.
Not everyone has the time, energy or patience to do that though. Journalists certainly don't and the general public is more inclined to be drawn in by a nice clickbaity story that makes them feel smarter than their friends (which is the market segment freakonomics services).
Point being if you were to make an assumption, "pop economist says that popular thing thing that is bad for profits is bad for you too is probably bullshit" is actually a fairly safe one.
Economics is a noisy subject where you would expect some studies to get plain incorrect results, and lots of them to be incapable of measuring their object. Even by no fault of economists at all.
That said, your 3 examples are very well studied, and rent controls are completely different from taxing the rich and hiking the minimum wage.
Can you share your research, because a lot of what you say goes against common sense and empirical data we have available. You seem to be very adamant that you are right, but with nothing but your word for it.
The first thousand USD/mo a person earns has a different meaning to them than the second thousand, and the third thousand, and so on with diminishing returns. The point of minimum wage should be that no one is constantly fighting for their life, because a person in that situation is usually a harm to everyone.
That's literally how a minimum wage works legally: you can have the nicest work environment and biggest flexibility and awesome training (or not), but if the money part of the job is below some minimum, the job is banned.
Granted. But that means that there are negative effects to at least some hikes of the minimum wage. So now the discussion can be had about what the effects are and when which effects kick in and how much.
> we could just gradually keep hiking it until it starts impacting employment and then stop.
Why are people so focussed on employment? Employment is only one area that minimum wage affects, and as you say, with moderate minimum wages and an otherwise functioning economy, employment effects are relatively minor.
> stage 1 is it hammers profit margins <-- for 95% of businesses we are here.
Businesses adapt, raise prices and do more automation to keep their margins, which have been remarkable stable if you look back. The losers are consumers and workers, because everything costs more and salaries don't rise as fast.
> Stage 2 is then it increases prices <-- only affects very low margin businesses which are a small minority.
Every mom and pop shop is a low margin business. Most business are low margin, only a few have a really high margins, the ones we all know and talk about.
>Stage 3 is it triggers job losses <-- to my knowledge it's never been raised high enough to make this happen. maybe $50 / hour would be the threshold.
I can only recommend you expanding your knowledge. It's like saying why do we need car seats for babies, because when we were younger we didn't have them and did just fine. Of course those that didn't make it aren't here to tell their story.
Taxing the rich seems like an example where you’re obviously correct.
I’m more skeptical of the minimum wage one, I think the details there matter a lot, and raising the minimum wage too much too fast can indeed be worse for just about everyone.
But rent control? Really?
It’s also interesting to me how a certain segment of the political persuasion simply cannot resist the allure of price controls, and no amount of data or historical experience seems to convince them that it’s generally a bad idea.
> Taxing the rich seems like an example where you’re obviously correct.
Really, can you at least provide some napkin calculations to see the cons and pros? Some countries have tried it, notably France. It backfired as expected and they had to revert.
My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.
From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.
Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.
> My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?"
The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.
So now in my initial intro call with any recruiter I just tell them my minimum, fully knowing that becomes the maximum offer. If they're ok with that we can keep talking, if not, that's cool, we both avoided wasting time.
That's why it's important to ask the recruiter, rather than wait to be asked.
That way you can respond to their range with something along the lines of "that sounds roughly what I was expecting", "okay, I'd probably be looking for the top end of that", "that's perhaps a little lower than I was expecting - is there enough room for flexibility for us to be able to continue talking?" or whatever. It's too early in the conversation to be doing a full salary negotiation, you're just making sure the role's at the right level.
There's a big problem with employers writing a senior-sounding job ad for a junior role - the salary range is a much more accurate indicator than a job description.
> The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.
Disagree, I've had "my range is X-Y", and the recruiter told me "for this role the range starts at Y+20%, are you ok with that".
It depends on the recruiter and how they work - someone asking for $X-Y when the role is $1.2Y could indicate that there's a role mismatch or a duty mismatch.
Heck, my experience lately has been that recruiters (or independent headhunters) are completely up front with the salary range explicitly because they don't want to waste anyone's time... and because there -- in tech especially -- can be enormous ranges of compensation for similar responsibilities.
That matches my experience - and I'd treat a failure to give a straightforward answer as a strongly negative signal, and would immediately concentrate my efforts on other opportunities.
I suspect we're pretty lucky in tech, though. Anecdotally, I've heard that in fields such as sales and marketing it's much more the norm to treat potential new hires in a much more adversarial manner.
After a bitter experience early in my career I _never_ “negotiate” the salary. When that conversation comes up I ask for the range they have for the position. If they are not willing to give that, it’s a huge red flag for me. It means that either the company _doesn’t have a range_, or they’re hellbent on hiring the cheapest person for the job. In both cases I don’t want to work there anyway.
I agree that Jobs should disclose pay upfront before anyone wastes any time. However, quite often pay does not hit the level necessary for me to move from my current role. It is then up to the employer to decide if they want to make the offer better to have me move.
I hold no opinion on whether this is fair is not. Another applicant who is single, low mortgage may end up with more disposable income for less pay and subjectively be "better off" and effectively undercut me and my dependents that I support.
No system is fair. My only personal opinion is that any employee should be able to have representation in employment negotiations. That does not mean just unions, although they work for some, rather they could be a family member or a paid agent.
At my last 2 jobs (Yelp and Grab), employers gave same level the ~same~ pay, but vastly modified the bonus reward structure so the top 10% (that quarter/half) is rewarded.
This always enabled the company to shift around who is the top 10% (whereas salary is locked in).
If these companies are just measuring salary and not considering RSU grants and bonuses, then you may see an overall reduction on salary, but (potentially) a collective increase on total compensation.
In general, a free market only works (even in theory, let's not even get started on the practice of it...) when _there is no assymetry of information_. Otherwise it's just fraud, one party mispricing things because the other party knows something they don't.
It's why we require public companies to disclose their finances. How could a person, even in theory, know whether to invest otherwise? It's why we require sellers of houses to deliver an independent inspection report. Etc etc.
The converse is also why HFT companies make more money than croesus.
At the very end you can see what states they’re talking about and it’s basically just New York and California (no other state enacted a law 3 years before 2019).
California’s median income increased 17% from 2016 to 2019 (the 3 years following the law).
New york income increased 17% too.
Federally it increased 5%.
I think using some random spreadsheet as your data source just isn’t a great idea. NBER should be aware the IRS will let people have access to income data for research purposes.
This should not even be a band. It should be exact number and that's it. So that anyone applying knows what they are getting into and whether at that price point it makes sense for them at all.
Salary is a range because experience and skills are a range.
Employers are willing to pay more for someone who can hit the ground running and contribute meaningfully to the team's output in week 2 vs someone who has the basic skills and a couple years experience but will need months to come up to speed on industry-specific knowledge.
But "week 2" people are hard to find, so they often settle for "months" people just to keep work moving along.
In purely theoretical terms I agree, but I don't think that's practical given that you be open to someone more or less experienced, and slightly change the role based on who's available. Experience-based salary ranges are everywhere, even in highly-regulated roles like the NHS in the UK. The key here is the low figure, which will let you know whether they might try to lowball you (presuming there's enforcement if a role is advertised at £X to £Y and they then offer you £X - N).
>In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
That theory rests on the assumption that your salary is based on how good you are at your job. But if that were the case then corporate life wouldn't be full of people complaining "my boss is an idiot and yet (s)he makes ten times what I do".
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
> perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
> The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales
Maybe I've been lucky to work for moderately reasonable companies, but I've never seen that.
For example in my current company, yearly raises are directly tied to performance rating. And while there is subjectivity in the rating, it is basically impossible to squeeze in a high performer rating for someone who doesn't do anything even if I wanted to (which I don't). It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
The correlation will never be a perfect 1.0, but it is closer to 1 than to 0. Low performers end up getting low to nothing in raises, and the high performers get a multiplier that increases their raises.
> It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
I work at a smaller company now, with a lot of very good people, so I've been happy enough with my rating and bumps.
When I was at "bigcorp", I was still as good at my job, but I didn't play the game very well. I presume I was not visible enough to be rated highly by my peers (peers aren't those in your team, but outside your team) and so I didn't see the rate of progression I think I merited, and eventually left.
I'm pro salary transparency, but both things are true and OP should not be downvoted:
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments, underwater social entitlement systems and mass riots. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
Now you've permanently handed power to employers to claim every year is "a tough year" and pay people less, while tricking people into uprooting their lives and taking jobs under the pretense of "the salary is low but you usually get a crazy big bonus!"
Let me guess, your next rebuttal:
> "But then we'll create more policy to try to stop the downsides of the first policy we created!"
Now you have a patchwork of 48,000 regulations all collectively harming the efficiency of the economy and creating all sorts of weird un-intended consequences and loopholes for low-trust people to game instead of rewarding honest people for doing the right thing like you intended.
The thing about employee ownership is that, almost by definition, employees don't have much capital (that's why they live by selling their labour) and businesses need capital to survive. That capital has a cost, either interest on loans or profits going to outside shareholders.
My actual response "But then we will have to deal with biases, discretion and management collecting their 10mil bonus by giving the juniors a pittance"
The flip side of course is people who actually work in bonus heavy revenue generating roles - where the impact is easy to measure - tend to leave if they are not valued and take their clients with them.
Things work a lot better in a healthy economy with competition and low friction for people to move around - exploitation blossoms when people are trapped by economic circumstances
This is the lump of labour fallacy, right? Companies don't actually have to have fixed labour budgets; indeed ideally firms should be always willing to hire/retain a worker at a salary less than that workers marginal revenue product, as this is profit maximising.
Apart from the general difficulty of organising like this and actually evaluating the marginal revenue from an additional employee (it's hard enough to attribute to your existing employees!), this marginal revenue is likely to have diminishing returns as the company grows and from a risk management point of view you will want to have some margin so that you don't flip into losing money as soon as business slows a little.
Companies can decide to do it however they want. They don't have to conform to a platonic ideal of a bureaucracy. A company expecting to grow its market share will give it's managers more leeway than one that's under financial difficulties.
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
I can imagine that this is the dynamic which for actual x10 developers makes flexible YC-style startups more appealing than rigid FAANG-level companies.
How well correlated are the highest paid employees to the best employees, though? My guess would be that salary correlates strongly with self-belief, charisma, and negotiation skills
These very much tend to strongly correlate. You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill as your leverage.
That’s not at all the case. Five of us recently moved internally via a remapping and they gave us pay rises. I negotiated 15% more than the initial offer, everyone else took the initial offer. Roughly same ability.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
I would speculate that 10x devs' underestimation primarily concerns their percentile ranking relative to peers, not necessarily their absolute skill. Comparing yourself to the likes of Carmack and Wozniak is what pushes you to become cracked in the first place.
Imagining this problem is just a sign that your company can't do pay grades or job titles properly. Or work out the concept called a "bonus".
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
Cautiously pleased about this. Some companies in UK pay senior devs £30-35k. And some companies won't discuss that until v late in the process, while importing US-style multiround interviews. It's pretty silly when people get 3 rounds in, take time off work for the interviews, then find out their expectations are so far apart.
It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
It is your fault if you allow the recruiting process to get to the third interview without at least knowing if the salary range is acceptable.
If you lack confidence in talking money, here is what you say:
"I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer."
You might add:
"$120K is my minimum but I am really hoping to find a role at the higher end - $130K is what I'm aiming for, depending on the job."
If, after saying all this, you get lowballed, then you have good reason to be very annoyed, and express calmly but clearly that you have had your minimum salary on the table since the first phone call." At that point you withdraw from the process and go look for a job with a professional company.
This sounds great in theory. I've had a ranges that was very healthy on application, gone through a lengthy process including showing work examples and meeting the team to be offered below the bottom of the original offer - "We feel like this is a good starting sallary, we will review it in 6 months" - "The company has changed its investment direction so this is a revised number" - "We've created a new role that better fits your needs" etc etc...
This law will force them to actaully stick to a number.
If the law is worth its money, than you can start working in this position, wait for the trial period to end (or until they let you go) and then sue for the compensation stated in the job ad (well, in a country with some level of work place protection you could).
Or play their game, sign the contract, keep your original job, not show up and later tell them why they did waste their time themselves. If they then threaten you, you can point at the law.
Some recruiters get paid on commission, meaning after 6 months of you being in the role they get paid. Other internal recruiters don’t work that way so they have no incentive to get you in the door for a minimum term.
The law will make it visible how much a company values someone with those skills. Companies won’t advertise the salary though, they will advertise the range.
I have never applied to a job in the UK (or in USA), and wonder why you are being voted down. Is that not an appropriate question? Or will the employers and hiring managers not give answers?
They more than likely will not answer or will dodge the question entirely. This is so ubiquitous that if you decided to only go through processes that do answer this question, you might not get anything at all. In many cases when they do answer, it is a bold lie; and if challenged "who told you that range?", "well if you hit certain performance parameters by year three your total package may be x...", "that's for the senior position, we are offering you the standard position".
Do your due diligence and research companies that behave in this manner via platforms like Glassdoor. AI makes this process much easier. And always publicly call out companies that do this instead of sucking up.
You will basically have to be willing to walk away to get an answer other than "tell me what you're looking for and we'll let you know if you're in our range", which basically loses the negotiation. Most people are not comfortable doing that.
Also, large parts of the UK culturally have difficulty talking about money. (Exceptions are Yorkshire, which is proud of it's difference here, and (parts of?) Scotland). That's not going to change overnight, so making disclosure a legal requirement is a fair solution.
I'm in the UK and always ask about salary range and if the role is remote before I agree to do an initial interview. It saves everyone involved from having their time wasted. The first contact is usually a recruiter though, I don't mention pay and benefits in interviews.
It isn't uncommon to be given an acceptable figure, go through several rounds of interviews and end up with job offer but with a lower salary than initially agreed because the recruiter padded the numbers.
> You will basically have to be willing to walk away to get an answer other than "tell me what you're looking for and we'll let you know if you're in our range", which basically loses the negotiation.
No, it doesn't lose the negotiation. What makes you think so? Setting anchors and controlling the document is very powerful.
But yes, you need to know what you can get, and you need to be able and willing to walk away.
They're already anchored, because they know what everyone else is making. You won't kick them loose unless they are teeny tiny. The advice in this thread is basically straight from the patio11 blog post.
The suggestion that it's OP's/the candidate's fault jarred me a little. In my experience this is such a common situation in the UK that you could be jobless for much longer if you insist on early salary disclosure.
> I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer.
> But in the end, if you provide a quote, they may save themselves money if you value yourself below market.
There's no single market value for workers, because there's no one archetypical worker, especially not for the kind of knowledge work many people here do where you have salary negotiations at all.
So it's your responsibility as a candidate to portrait yourself as the highest and most valuable kind of worker and ask for compensation that's commensurate with that. That number is also part of the signalling.
> Or they can just lie and say yeah we cover that.
Well, you'll detect that lie at the latest when it comes to signing the contract. If you do, that's a big red flag and you will save yourself a lot of hassle by walking away.
> I find it easier to lie on a yes or no question, than a question of quantity.
I'm not sure that makes much of a difference. But let's grant it for the sake of argument: in that case, you giving them a number also has bigger signalling effect.
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
For me, being fresh out of university, I didn't really think to press on salary too much and was just happy to land a job. In my first job, I recall not knowing the salary until I got the contract and offer (luckily, it was surprisingly above average pay).
When I moved into the software industry, I started to realise my worth a bit more and job-hopped for 10-50% pay bumps on an annual basis for the first few years and just started chasing higher salaries and turning down interviews unless they were in my desired range.
I know many other engineers who never changed this behaviour (or were never taught to be more ruthless and know their worth) and were just happy to receive any increase in salary - and as a result had 10+ years in the industry and had utterly pitiful salaries due to their employer simply taking advantage - you'll never receive the same increase in pay by remaining loyal to a company versus job hopping. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing in the UK or what but this is the type of advice that should be given in schools more IMO.
Yeah, this is my experience too, trading up every couple of years (though sometimes I've taken a sideways or slight downwards step to broaden my experience or work for somewhere that I thought was interesting or worthwhile). I've had a couple of longish spells at companies, 7 or 8 years, and in both those cases I left because my pay wasn't keeping pace with the market or my growing responsibilities and management wouldn't budge. The irony being that at those places i was at my most valuable because of my institutional and political knowledge. I think companies greatly undervalue the benefits of long term employees.
Same here. You don't even know what you're worth if you keep working at the same company. And even then, if you don't know what you could ask, you will never know how much you're really worth.
Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.
Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.
Just taking what you're offered is understandable when you're young and don't know any better. I think a lot if not most people had that experience with their first job(s). But there's no excuse for not taking agency over your own life when you're a bit older and more experienced. These people have to grow up and stop acting like kids, or accept that people will take advantage of them.
From the article, this self disclosure of range is part of the problem. People who have been given lower salaries in the past for discriminatory reasons may well low ball themselves if they offer up the range.
It's also within your power to negotiate price of emergency treatment.
If they want too much, just turn and walk away. Look for a professional clinic. Firmly stand your ground.
Consider that a lot of people don't have the luxury of just not working until proper work appears. Because they have to pay for housing and food and if they don't have work, they would not be able to.
In software or other high paying jobs where you have experience in the industry this is true.
There are plenty of jobs where that is not true. I think the article using a picture of a jobscentre as a stock photo should give you a clue as to who it is there to help.
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
Sure, but the first phone call happens after you have already spent potentially hours putting together a tailored resume, cover letter, and 3 creative writing prompts about how you resolved a conflict with a coworker.
That's a pretty bad comparison. You aren't agreeing to work without knowing your pay. It's more like looking at a house before you know it's price.
Depending on your circumstances, that might be reasonable. If most people aren't quoting pay ranges and you need a job, not applying because of that isn't very smart.
I would make sure I knew the pay range before going through all the interview rounds, but not sending your CV in sounds too limiting to me.
Recruiters at big companies will be told to advertise the role within the payband (the min to max pay for that role at that pay band)
So if you see a top end number and think you’ll get that, you probably won’t it will be around the middle of the range.
At that point you go back to the recruiter and state that you would expect the top end of the range. They may agree with you but then keep in mind that may also impact your salary increase at the end of the year, meaning a smaller increase for you compared to your peers which over several years would even out and out you back in the middle of the payband like your peers. This is why the common idea is to jump roles every few years.
It's the reality when everybody uses AI to slop out a JD (which is only marginally better than before — where the poor sucker just human-slopped out something instead)
There are job ads in Canada for "senior" devs at non-tech shops for $70-$90k. There are signs you'd be the only dev at the shop (or one of very few)
Huh, I thought I was paid on the lower end for my field. Well, I suppose I still am (working for a NGO), but £30-35k is absurd. That's not reasonable for any skilled role, really. Why do people accept it? Are salaries for software in the UK generally very low? Even lower than Canada? I find it hard to believe, but then, I have no data to go off of.
There are pros and cons of working with external recruiters, but that they will know (and be willing to disclose) the salary range is absolutely one of them, as they don't want their time wasted either.
Besides ‘salary disclosure’, one other law that really helps improve salary is to ban potential employers from asking candidates’ current/previous salary. This avoids potential employers from offering just marginally better than candidates previous roles…
I got this once. I was equivocating, and then the guy was like, well, you're gonna give us your P60 when you join anyway, so you might as well tell me.
I was like, okay, fair enough.
I played it completely wrong though. I should have just reframed it and said, well, I paid this, but you're not competing against my current employer, you're competing against Meta, who I'm also interviewing with this week.
"A Chinese wall or ethical wall is an information barrier protocol within an organization designed to prevent exchange of information or communication that could lead to conflicts of interest. For example, a Chinese wall may be established to separate people who make investments from those who are privy to confidential information that could improperly influence the investment decisions. Firms are generally required by law to safeguard insider information and ensure that improper trading does not occur."
"Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage states that the metaphor title "derives of course from the Great Wall of China",[2] although an alternative explanation links the idea to the screen walls of Chinese internal architecture.[3]
The term was popularized in the United States following the stock market crash of 1929, when the U.S. government legislated information separation between investment bankers and brokerage firms, in order to limit the conflict of interest between objective company analysis and the desire for successful initial public offerings.[4] Rather than prohibiting one company from engaging in both businesses, the government permitted the implementation of Chinese-wall procedures."
though I still don't get the China reference, Great wall of China never really helped against any attacks or exchange of information, so I still don't get the etymology
I have never visited but I imagine two people one on either side cannot hear each other even if they shouted, and of course cannot see each other. The etymology need not be based on history or practical use.
I've lived in China and visited multiple times and you could certainly shout and hear someone from the other side (if you are not in touristy noisy section), it's really not that huge while you are right under the wall. I mean if you can shout in mountain and someone can hear you hundreds of meters away, they can certainly hear you over some 2-3 floors tall building.
Yep, the advice I always give people for this question is to respond:
"My current salary is xyz, but I'm currently interviewing with several companies, so my salary expectations are tied to what I'm worth in the market, not my current pay. My specific ask will change as interviews progress"
HMRC seem to be able to provide a new employee's correct tax code almost instantly these days (part of the Making Tax Digital programme, maybe?).
I changed job last year and wasn't asked for a P45 by my new employer. Despite starting near month end, my first month's payslip already had the right tax code.
The days of being stuck paying emergency tax for months finally seem to be at an end!
i don't know what a P60 is, but you are unlikely required to give them anything except background checks and proof of qualifications until the salary is decided and the contract is signed.
Wow, I didn't know there is a whole service to share employees' data with corporations!
As an European, I find the idea that I can't keep my salary private repulsive.
i'd also like to ban asking for a salary expectation. it puts you in a very weak bargaining position. also my expectation depends very much on the type of work i'll be doing. i'll accept a lower salary for a good job and work environment, but i won't know that until after some interviews.
A candidate can just make up whatever number they want to respond though. Most candidates I interview usually say what they want to get, not the real number.
For instance, to compare with a contractor's day rate or an American view of "total comp", a UK employee will have to take their headline salary and add the value of all benefits, paid holiday days, employer pension contribution, Employer NICs, and potentially even the additional value from being able to take certain benefits through salary sacrifice.
Very few people who're used to being on PAYE will do all of that. They'll either just state the headline salary figure or stretch it a bit to cover some (but typically not all!) of the benefits. In other words, it's usual for many people in the UK to under-state the value of their total package even if they believe they're over-egging it.
I am not sure about other EU countries, but in Germany you have the right to lie in this situation since the question was very likely illegal in the first place. There are other topics which an employer is not allowed to ask about in German. For example about pregnancy or planned pregnancy. You always have the right to lie when you get one of these questions.
I've normally replied with "I'm looking for X - Y range", and if they push for my previous salary, I say "I make X all in", and include equity, benefits, etc in my number.
In the US, there's a good chance your employer voluntarily reports your salary to private groups, who then sell the data to other employers. So they will know if you're lying.
> The European Union adopted pay transparency rules the following year, giving member states until June 2026 to implement them in national law.
That's the first I've heard of it, and I've seen plenty of job postings the past year for European companies where there was no salary indication. See for example the recent HN Who's Hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50338728
Apparently, in France, the bill is not yet ready, and given the current state of legislative process, I don't think it's going to be ever voted before the next elections.
Again, member states miss European deadlines, but since it has no practical consequences, I don't see a why they would do it differently.
This is also the case in Germany, although here it has more so to do with the current government not wanting to implement this law, so they are dragging their feet and not doing it.
I wouldn't have been bothered if it where some exhaustive reform of the work law, but in practice it would amount to a couple of amendments. Probably could be drafted up in an afternoon.
Does the law, as implemented in their local member country, state that they have to state the salary range on that sort of post. There are a number of possible loopholes I can think of depending on how their regulations are written: it is an international posting, it is an informal/prospective posting, the information is available on their site (which they may or may not link to) etc.
Also “in the last year” means only ~50% of that time is covered by when enforcement started.
Some countries have yet to pass any legislation too, this happens quite a lot if you look into past EU declarations, so companies there might be using that as a loophole to act as if not yet be effectively covered (in theory they could be taken to court over it, but that is can be complicated, or at least expensive, when there is no local legislation yet, so in practise it is far less likely to happen). What action will be taken by the EU to push things forward, I'm not sure, presumably there is some sort of fine for extended non-compliance? The question of who you are advertising to and where from can get a bit complex if you are a company in a member state that has not yet enacted anything, especially when you operate out of more than one territory.
Most of the jobs in that HN thread do give a salary expectation (though a few with a very wide range, which might be outside the rules, but they were US anyway so not covered), I don't think I saw an EU one in my quick scan that did not (at least one UK one, but again those are not currently covered by such rules).
Yes, companies indeed break the law all the time. Most of the time, nobody with any power gives a fuck, and in the rare cases where they do, the consequences tend to be comfortably inside the “cost of doing business” range.
The only real reason companies don’t want to put salary ranges on job adverts is that it triggers difficult conversations with staff they have been taking advantage of.
There's multiple reasons companies don't want to publish salaries, but they almost all boil down to wanting to pay people as little as they can get away with
Good companies see employees as partners, make sure incentives are aligned, and use transparency to empower their employees to make better choices with full awareness of the entire business. It's amazing how much more productive an employee can be if they believe in the missions, understand exactly how their work can benefit themselves, and have genuine trust that their employer has their back.
No, but people will just assume the actual pay is £20k and decide whether to apply for it on that basis.
As an employer that ruins one of the classic ruses that has been going on for a while: take someone through multiple interviews and then lowball the candidate who seems the most desperate.
If you believe in free market economics I think we can expect this to be a mess for a little while and then within a year or two it gets relatively efficient at dealing with the inefficiencies it’s targeting: younger people just not wanting to play the bullshit game where employers dangle generous starting offers, and then rug pull them to 2/3rds of that number; and to fix the gender pay gap (and the smaller reaching ethnicity pay gap).
What do you think the fix to the gender pay gap is relevant to this conversation?
There is no gender pay gap in 20s, 30s with several areas now favouring women. The mean pay gap is entirely due to the percentage of women in their 40s+ taking time off work for motherhood.
The paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children. What percentage should have children? If you want a zero mean paygap, the answer has to be zero.
A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
The paygap is just a dial which controls the rate of motherhood.
There is no "per job" paygap. Nor could there plausibly be. For if any group could be paid less to do the same work, someone en mass would be, thus lowering the pay for that work. (Its unclear how such a rich source of free output from 50% of the population could go untapped, systematically).
Though even if that logic isnt persuasive, there is no measured per-job pay difference at an individual level. The "pay gap" describes a mean difference in pay at population level -- when you control for total hours worked, it disappears.
We do already have this in the UK post partum, although there's also the ongoing matter of childcare, which judging by headcount at school pick-up time still leans heavily female today anecdotally.
Is it not possible to manage childcare around full-time jobs? Let's say dad takes the kids in at 8:45 then heads to work, while mum starts work at 7, finishes at 2:30 then goes to pick up the kids. School holidays complicate matters, but you have clubs and annual leave. And you can also both reduce working hours slightly.
That wouldnt "solve" the paygap, women still need to be out of the workforce for O(1yr) per child. That would be an "individual" pay gap of around 10% for a women who has two children.
So you think the average human female, bearing a child for 9months, should be off work only 1.5months either side of giving birth?
For what purpose are we saying such crazy things? Why is it so important to place all members of the human species on the same rack, stretch them to the same length, and maim them till they fit?
How have we, as a civilisation, become so terrified of difference?
Nothing of the sort; just providing a counterpoint to what was an overly strong/confident assertion that "woman need to be out of the workforce for O(1yr)". Those women didn't feel forced either way - they made a plan with their partner based on what leave they each had available to them and how much they each valued their work vs parenthood.
Also, 1.5 months off prior to the due date is more than normal. Most women work until 2-4 weeks before.
Why is noramlizing a population statistic, like average pay, more important to you than motherhood?
I've never met a mother who wanted to be in work full time. What exactly do zoom meetings, email threads, and spreadsheets get you in life?
I'm not one to say "captialism has gone too far", but perhaps in this case at least, isnt it mad to force average labour hours to be the same across sexes "just because" ?
women who do not want to work are not forced to. this is about women who do want to work but are forced to take the full parental leave instead of sharing it equally with the father because men are pressured to not take any parental leave lest it affects their career.
the goal is to require men to take equal parental leave in order to remove that pressure and put women and men on a more equal position when it comes to children.
today women are considered a hiring risk because they might have children and take parental leave. if fathers were required to take parental leave as well, then the risk would be more similar for both.
> if fathers were required to take parental leave as well, then the risk would be more similar for both
I wonder what the economic implications are when both parents take leave instead of just one (e.g. twice the overhead for finding temporary cover, short-term liquidity impact for employer and public benefit funds)
those are the economic implications for a society that wants to have children. the right for men to take parental leave already exists (in some countries at least). so the economic implications are already a reality. that being a problem is why men are under pressure. forcing leave makes sure that employers get to face the reality. and it puts businesses on equal footing, because now they all need to do that. as a business owner i am no longer at a disadvantage compared to other businesses if i allow men to take leave.
In the UK it essentially is, one of the two parents can take the full parental leave. It does not have to be the mother. Guess who still chooses to raise their kid instead of creating shareholder value in bullshit jobs most of the time.
> The paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children.
> A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
Your claims are disproven by your own math.
A paygap over that period would be a 3% to 8% drop due to child rearing, not 10%, if we accept your claims.
In reality, in the US women do not usually take 1 year off per child. Paid maternity leave is 12 weeks by federal law. That creates a "motherhood-caused" paygap of only 0.75% to 2%.
Demonstrably not true. One of the drivers of the legislation is to reduce the number of employment tribunals brought about for cases of pay discrimination where the overwhelming evidence is that women are paid less than men at every level of expertise and age.
We have the data on the average hours women work, it's ~1mo/yr less. We also know the pay gap, its 1mo/yr. The effect due to differential pay is a rounding error.
We can also do the simulation trivially using empirical data, women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career across male/female populations
The claim that the economy sustains a free markdown on 50% of the population's labour is mad. What force of nature is keeping a mass of businesses forming just hiring this cheap labour? Why arent there businesses booming hiring, en mass, women?
Either way, aside from that madness. The effect is, to a significant figure, entirely explained by working duration not differential pay.
And I've personally known no mothers who think the population of women is better served by reducing their part-time work, and having them work more.
> women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career.
And people wonder why professional women don't want to have children any more.
We've created a society which economically punishes people for having kids. I don't think anyone should be surprised that the fertility rate is declining.
The lifetime pay for a median UK worker @40yr @35k/yr ~= 1.4mil
The "cost" of two children, with above numbers, for "mean woman" is 20% of pay -- so she earns ~1.1m
Presented on a deathbed: would you have preferred to earn 1.4mil over your working life and have neither of your two children, or 1.1m and have both?
The question would seem an absurdity. Bearing in mind that 300k comes with a lifetime of zoom calls and emails, and not much else.
Now if you want to pay women to have children, that's a proposal I'd be open to -- it would reduce the pay gap by significant tax rises, and so on. Nevertheless, I've not met any mothers who wanted to work more nor would take the trade for 1.4 over 1.1 (this, of course, doesnt control for tax credits or welfare -- which both perform this redistribution anyway).
We don't have any real firm details yet, the pre-legislative consultation only closed last week.
However that consultation said this:
>We propose to introduce this requirement [pay transparency in recruitment] through a delegated power, enabling regulations to specify exact requirements. For example, the size of a salary range.
Right, we have these laws in my state but they are almost completely useless because of that. Most large companies will post ranges like $100,000 - $200,000, and have a secret internal "real" range that they won't share with you.
it would make more sense to just state median salary for this position in company advertising the job, unless it's completely new position/company, where the min/max would have % limits
That’s as ridiculous as some of the job postings here with a range of $100K-300K. Without bounding the range in some way like you say, this does absolutely nothing.
Used to work in a company where every salary was disclosed for all employees. There was a constant stream of people going to their boss "why aren't I getting what [$EMPLOYEE] is getting?". Most of them didn't like the answer, and the answer was not "[$EMPLOYEE] negotiated better". There were in fact clear milestones, competencies, responsibilities, and most significantly... for want of a better word... "campaign ribbons" that [$EMPLOYEE] had earned, that the eager junior would need to earn in order to get to that salary. Many of these decided they didn't want to acquire them.
Publishing individual salaries is a stupid way to do it. Instead publish salaries for the title/level. It's far easier to justify why one employee is
"senior" and another is "associate". Even more so when there's a well defined career ladder with expectations at each level.
When I’ve raised this to a CEO that was bragging that he gives competitive salaries but can’t disclose it, he said that a person that asks for the range before the interview it’s in it for the money.
Feels like a law requiring prices on shop shelves. Isn't it self interest to put the salary in the ad? So much saved time. And probably more suitable applicants. I don't apply for a job without knowing the salary. Or via recruiters that tell you upfront (they usually do).
My issue with mandated ranges is how to require the range to be narrow enough, without preventing the candidate from negotiating?
If you don't have any narrowness requirements, you can have a job where the range is $50k-500k, which is useless. If you narrow it to — let's say — 10% of the midpoint, you can say $180k-220k, but then you're not allowed to hire the perfect candidate who won't accept less than $250k, even though you would actually want to pay this much given that person's skills. If the candidate is allowed to negotiate upwards, ranges may gradually, over the course of years, drift downwards, with an implicit understanding that they are unrepresentative of the actual salary you are likely to earn.
With an infinite number of employers and an infinite number of candidates, you would always be able to find the perfect candidate for your mix of requirements and pay them the exact salary that matches those requirements. The real world isn't like that, though, and if you, as an employer, have an offer available, you will get candidates who are under and over qualified for the specific offer you had in mind, and you might nevertheless be able to find a spot for them at some salary that both of you are willing to accept.
> My issue with mandated ranges is how to require the range to be narrow enough, without preventing the candidate from negotiating?
So few candidates so rarely have the power to negotiate above what the hidden range already is, that this is a non-issue.
We really shouldn't be deciding policy based on the outliers, besides which those people (the outliers) that can dictate a number higher than the range already set aren't hired from advertisements anyway, making the whole "but we can't do this because it would affect those who don't apply respond to job ads"...
> but then you're not allowed to hire the perfect candidate who won't accept less than $250k
You are allowed to hire whoever you want. How could you come to your conclusion? You are allowed to hire people without making job ads at all, for that matter. You are allowed to hire 10 people for a position even if you only advertised 1. And of course you are allowed to pay more than initially advertised.
I understand the frustration this is born from, but find it hard to imagine a practical rule set that will actually do more good than harm.
1. To be meaningful at all, the legislation must only allow narrow ranges, e.g. 10%, so that employers can't put 30-90K in the description.
2. In addition, you would have to make the application very specific to a given position. If the employer can say "you don't qualify for L7 that you applied for, buuut... we could transfer your application to the L5 track", then we are back to where we started.
3. On the other hand, any super-rigid rule like this will hurt both employers and employees who are actually trying to fill a real position. It will hurt even more the few remaining companies that are looking for people and not just labeled cogs in the machine.
I want this to work, but it has the smell of compliance theater.
I dunno I see a lot of broad ranges in the US but it's still a lot better than nothing. And they can list multiple levels in the job ad. I can see these being pointless but I can't imagine it being harmful.
>2. In addition, you would have to make the application very specific to a given position. If the employer can say "you don't qualify for L7 that you applied for, buuut... we could transfer your application to the L5 track", then we are back to where we started.
In banking, there's various thresholds for transfers or deposits or withdrawals that require scrutiny or reporting. There's also laws that amount to "Don't fuck with us" around deliberately narrowly avoiding those thresholds.
I think that this law could have a similar "Don't fuck with us" clause, where a company can reasonably adjust what jobs they offer people that apply to their posted jobs occasionally, but if they're clearly deliberately misleading applicants, they get penalized enough to make it cost more than they benefit.
In Italy this feature has become mandatory this summer and we've been observing some good patterns (companies that do not find anyone because the salary is too low compared to responsibilities). We have also seen interesting hacks, companies reporting from 20k to 150k for an intership position.
I agree this is overall great, and will work for most companies and jobs. I'm wondering how it will work for companies where bonuses and RSUs / stock is a large part of their compensation. Or companies where their compensation legitimately has incredibly wide ranges. FAANG, big tech companies, banks, etc. can plausibly say "£100k up to [insert absurdly large number]" when talking about engineers, especially if they're hiring specialty roles like PhDs.
We have salary disclosure in our State which requires you to give a "general overview" of other compensation beyond salary. My guess is they'd mandate something similar. What I do still see are the absurd ranges. I think I had a range of something like 70% between min and max in my current role when I took it? The effect has been that the "range" becomes a mandate to post a minimum that you'll actually pay in terms of salary with the max number on the range having little basis in reality.
I am not sure this will do what I think it is designed to do. The current problem is, for example, people who are not confident enough to ask for more money being paid consistently less than others who are doing the same job. These people are likely to be female and/or from a minority group.
The problem is, if you haven't noticed yet, that it might work for a low/semi-skilled job like e.g an estate agent "£25-30K + £10K OTE bonus depending on experience". But it doesn't work for artistic or highly bespoke jobs like doctors, lawyers, some types of engineers etc. where the salary range can be much larger. Does it really help anyone to say, "Wanted: Software Engineers. Salary £25-100K depending on experience and skill"? Lots of ads already show that, people might think they are worth near the top end and get low-balled with an offer (fairly or unfairly) whereas the people who are not confident are still likely to get paid less money.
As for telling everyone what everyone is paid, that opens even more cans of worms. It is not always easy to describe that the other person gets paid £10K more than you because they have e.g. "a better attitude" (says who?), "is more productive" (based on what?) etc. and tbh, it is not usually completely objective.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss. If you are all about money, then ask for what you think you are worth and if you don't get it, move jobs. I think what other people get paid should be nothing to do with you.
> The current problem is, for example, people who are not confident enough to ask for more money being paid consistently less than others who are doing the same job.
As far as I know, women who ask for more money are received less positively than men! So the risk/reward calculus for women and minorities are different, since ambition actually hurts you more.
That's already the case where I live, but some companies use the trick that they
advertise a job with high salary, and once you apply they says "sadly this job
is no longer available, but we have this similar one we haven't advertised yet",
which of course comes with lower salary.
I hope this will a real law, not the phony one passed here. They should literally exile from country the person responsible for that mockery. It goes something like this:
The salary range has to be included in job add or provided to job seeker at the latest upon signing the contract.
That entire sentence could be stricken out and nothing would change.
>The government will soon introduce legislation to parliament making salary disclosures mandatory, Burnham's office said, although it did not provide a timeline.
Can we also make it mandatory to reply to a job application, even just an automated "sorry, your application has been rejected", so you know whether to keep considering that job?
For a small business, that's often pretty hard to define. How much is your first marketing hire worth? Depends on how much business they bring in and how much they can get done before you need the second one. You can't identify in advance what marketing work is to be done and how important it will be - that's what you need the marketing hire for!
I'm not saying it's impossible to comply with salary disclosure, but it's harder than people think to make the disclosure "real".
I mean you've got to pay them something while you wait to find out how much business they'll end up bringing in, so you can start with that...?
Unless you're paying on contingency, in which case you can absolutely just advertise that you're paying directly on contingency and provide the formula. That seems fine to me.
This is the only market where people think this is a reasonable thing to do, mostly because it's the only market in which most people are sellers not buyers.
Imagine if the government passed a law saying that when you got to a restaurant (or car wash, or bookstore, etc) you had to declare to the business what you're willing to pay before we see the menu so that the business could adjust their prices accordingly.
Because it's not about who's the seller or who's the buyer, it's about who has a whole institutional structure set up for doing the thing and who is doing it casually. When you walk into a pawn shop or one of those tacky-looking high street gold buyer places, you may sell them your valuables or buy someone else's valuables, but either way the shop is the shop and you are the customer. You don't become the shop when the shop is buying from you.
Pro tip. When a recruiter contacts you with a position, the literal first message you send should be a request for salary range. In my experience they will tell you ~80% of the time and then you proceed normally. This saves untold hours on both ends.
Ha in the European Union, the workarounds are vast and came fast, now it doesn't have to be in the job listing but upon first real interaction or something along the lines, and then I've seen job ads saying 1-5000 euro per month.
Ghost jobs and such practices should demand mandatory time in the slammer and business foreclosure
I suspect the devil will be in the details here. How will it be enforced? Can companies get away with silly wide ranges?
I saw that almost all Netflix dev jobs, regardless of level, advertise as something like $120,000-$720,000. Which… okay, that’s a range but it’s not a useful one.
Maybe one of the hiring managers lurking here can make an exception and admit their true rationale.
For now, I suspect the main issue is: you don't want the fallout of advertising the job at current market rate of £60k when all your existing employees are on £40k for the same position.
Not the reality in sectors that already do this, like the civil service, but it will cap the upper limit that people can negotiate to.
Even if the minimum does apply everywhere, it fixes the inequalities gap that is causing so much economic drag in the UK: white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies. If everyone gets the bottom of the band, at least everyone gets the same, and that’s been an important goal for multiple UK governments of different political stripes over many decades for reasons to complex to go into here (and no, it’s not “political correctness”, it’s far more complex than that).
I also don’t think it likely means average salaries come down, I just think it means the distributions narrow.
> white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies
I think this would be illegal under the Equality Act (which does not of course mean it doesn't happen), can you offer some examples or further reading?
I assume one day the racism and sexism in the commenter you're replying to will be addressed.
Until then, you are quite correct. The pay gap is not a feature of individual jobs, but a population effect due to women in their 40s+ not being in the labour force.
It is illegal in the UK to pay differently, and there are many high profile cases of this being enforced even to the point of absurdity (such as forcing councils to pay bin-men/trash-collectors the same as female office admin workers).
Likewise as the mean pay for women is ~1month/yr lower, the mean hours men work, as a population is ~1month/yr longer. Thus there is no pay gap once you control for hours worked.
Incidentally, the only way there could be no mean pay gap across both populations would be if no women had children. So a non-trivial paygap merely an indirect measure of the birth rate.
My concern is that the pay gap is a population effect. There are "discriminatory" population effects, depending on how you define the issue. I've no stake in that. I am irritated by the claim that its an individual effect, because it isn't and it is such an implausible claim given here in this thread by a racist and a sexist.
There are two elements to women being paid less. Both exist, but they are deliberately conflated for reasons.
One is that women do get paid less for the same job on average.
The second is that jobs which women tend to do get paid less than jobs which men tend to do, either through different industries or through different opportunities.
It’s not as clear as “yes” though, and there is little evidence boiling down to the “same job” disparity.
“Chinese and Indian employees had higher earnings compared with White British employees, while Bangladeshi and Pakistani employees earned less compared with White British employees.”
This is more noteworthy than weaker studies which attempt, often poorly, to assess pay differentials between employees in the exact same role at the exact same company.
No. This claim relies on deceptive definitions of "exact same role".
Employment tribunals in the UK now regularly conclude that jobs which are clearly different are actually the same, essentially as a bung to women. For example, stating that working in a warehouse lifting boxes all day is the same job as working on a checkout till sitting on a seat, or that being a librarian has the same value as a guy collecting garbage. Being a bin man is much higher paid because it's a dangerous, dirty and low status job that people don't want to do, so the incentives have to be correspondingly higher to attract workers, but delusional left wing tribunals declare by fiat that they're the same as highly feminized jobs that are clean and safe.
This is causing chaos in Britain, for example in Birmingham where trash just doesn't get collected because the bin men went on strike:
> The council also says that the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role does not exist at other councils, and that retaining the role opens it up to equal pay claims, since it is performed mainly by men.[2] In March 2025, the council declared a major incident after 17,000 tonnes of rubbish were left uncollected on the streets.
Look at the wider picture of unfair pay employment tribunals that are driving HMG to introduce this legislation and you’ll see the problem is real, systemic and decades old.
I have personally had to advise boards that their discussion of compensation adjustments to women of child bearing age are illegal, it is a rife and widespread practice and absurd.
I've seen that. Cathy Newman being a terrible interviewer doesn't mean the thing they're talking about is actually false. But if we are doing ad hominem against Cathy, I think we should also consider it fair against Jordan: a while after this interview, he went to Russia for medical treatment banned in America and Canada, ended up with a severe addiction to benzodiazapenes and disappeared entirely from public life. He is not somebody I would rely upon for accurate information even though he was good at public speaking.
Given the government is introducing the legislation to stop the cycle of unfair pay employment tribunals (that are often successful), I think you’re not looking at the same data set they are.
People will make out hiding salaries is some grand conspiracy, but if you've ever been on the other side of hiring, people just don't know.
Would you like to have to pin your salary on your CV? Probably you are hopeful you can get as much as possible. And employers look for a deal. It works both ways.
I agree that personally I'd prefer to see the salary on the job advert. But state meddling generally leads to unexpected outcomes.
>but if you've ever been on the other side of hiring, people just don't know.
I've spent my entire career on the other side of hiring and I've yet to encounter a single valid excuse for not knowing, and subsequently not advertising, a salary range. Before you hire, you need to know if you can afford to hire. If you know you can afford to hire, you know what you can afford to pay. It really is that simple.
Affordability is different to declaring your position at the outset.
For example, when I buy a used car or a house, I know what my budget is. But I'm not telling the seller that upfront. Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget. I'd rather pay below my budget if I can.
The only excuse for forcing employers to do declare is that you want to hold them to a higher ethical standard. Not because there's no reason to do otherwise strategically.
>Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget.
Yeah I get the whole "if we advertise a range, everyone will demand the top of the range" argument. Unfortunately, that assumption has never held true.
Few jobs won't have a market salary. I think for exec jobs there could be an exception here. You may want to pay one person double the other and even define different role for them. But for a welder or junior dev it should be easy to define and figure out.
> People will make out hiding salaries is some grand conspiracy
In the US, the National Labor Relations Act covers this situation. The NLRB says that discussing wages/salaries is a covered "labor organizing activity" and it is a violation of the NLRA to prevent employees from discussing wages.
> If you are an employee covered by the Act, you may discuss wages in face-to-face conversations, over the phone, and in written messages. Policies that specifically prohibit the discussion of wages are unlawful as are policies that chill employees from discussing their wages. When using electronic communications, like social media, keep in mind that your employer may have policies against using their equipment for unauthorized use, though it is possible such policies could be unlawful.
> You may have discussions about wages when not at work, when you are on break, and even during work if employees are permitted to have other non-work conversations. You have these rights whether or not you are represented by a union.
I just ignore entirely any job that doesn’t have a range listed in the job description, because unfortunately they try to make it a business deal rather than a compensation for someone’s experience or knowledge at the end.
Even better than salary disclosure is collective bargaining. Then its doesn't matter if they disclose anything, you'll get the industry agreed salary matching your seniority - and then you can negotiate from there.
In America companies love to play games, maybe it’ll work in Britain though.
I firmly believe the salary should be fixed, non negotiable and public information.
Cash > equity. But in America workers have no real rights, even with proof your boss lied to you to deny your right to equal pay not many options exist.
Wage theft is the number one form of theft in the US.
as with anything, use it as a signal upon which to filter or rank opportunities. its wise to invest our time on those who demonstrate they value us the most. simply reciprocate back. why? life short, time precious.
meaningless legislation if it means, employer can just publish range somewhere between legal minimum wage and let's say double of what they will pay you, so you will gain absolutely zero knowledge what is the actual range
if the law wasn't toothless they should make it mandatory to publish median salary for this position in specific advertising company, then you would know median of your future colleagues (and so would they)
There are all kinds of reforms needed in that space; like whether a position is eligible for internal hire or not, requiring that a job posting must lead to someone being hired, making it illegal for jobs to be posted on fake foreign job sites in order to claim no native job demand exists as justification to import foreign labor, requiring a 100% visa employment tax on the fully burdened rate, making all executive bonuses taxable at 100% for any company that hires Visa/foreign labor, etc.
Such laws do not really help in practice. Does a 60-90k range in EU, commonly given to engineering roles, offer any real guidance? A better system would be publishing the average salary for a similar role, but that would be a privacy problem for a low headcount team, or if the role doesn't exist yet... This is a really hard problem.
It's actually not hard at all, it's only a problem for companies if they fail to keep it secret. Norway has had their tax records public for ages https://www.weforum.org/stories/economic-growth/norway-can-s... and their society and economy seems fine, except they it's extremely easy for new grade to know what they can ask for.
The "complications" are basically employer and manager propaganda because the information asymmetry suits them better than people realising they are undervalued and leaving
Salaries being a public record does come with some downsides for employees.
For the low-paid, it can make it even harder to get credit, or a place to rent, and it can be used for other kinds of discrimination. For the highly-paid, service providers and sales people can use the information to increase the prices you pay and make negotiation harder.
More transparency in a society is for the better. This shouldn't stop at salaries. Why aren't service providers required to disclose what they charge others? Why aren't dentists, lawyers, surgeons etc... required to report their stats? All of those would break information asymmetry and make for better decisions all around and less scams.
your bank already knows your salary, and if they don't they are going to ask for it as a condition to give you credit. in some countries landlords ask for proof of income too. the less regulated these areas, the more likely that is going to happen.
Even better, grocery stores might make various discounts and promotions eligible based on whether you belong to a certain bottom percentile of income. That’s the holy grail of price discrimination („milk them for all they have”), which is now attempted to achieve only through imperfect means such as premium brands, up-sells etc.
Ranges are still somewhat useful. If they low-ball the upper bound, anyone expecting close or above the upper bound is unlikely to apply. So there is incentive to be honest about that end at least. But as an applicant (or current employee), knowing the upper bound the company is willing to pay for this position is useful information for salary negotiations (and to enable you to spend your limited time and resources in applying to well-paid jobs)
Obviously it's not perfect. But as you say, it's a difficult problem. And salary ranges are at least something
In my experience, they will offer a bit above the advertised minimum of the range. So if I wasn't happy with £60,000, I wouldn't consider that job, and I definitely wouldn't apply on the basis that maybe they'll offer £90,000.
That's fine though - As long as they're publishing the actual range that they like realistically pay someone, there's literally nothing wrong with that.
Would that actually be a good thing? When a company publishes the salary range, that means the job seeker agrees to that range, including maybe getting the lower part of the range. Companies know that, and now they have the advantage to put lower ranges.
if i don't agree to the range then i don't need to bother applying. saves me lot's of time.
if i apply despite not liking the range i can still say no and ask for more, but not knowing the range in advance is unlikely to raise the chance of that happening.
How is that going to work if you interview Bob for X task at Y pay, but discover Bob would be much better suited for A task that is worth more salary? What if Bob didn't meet the requirements for X, but would be a perfect fit for B task that is not worth as much salary?
The requirement is to publish either minimal salary or salary range for the position from the advertisement. If company has several positions available then specific minimal salaries should be given for each.
Sometimes companies create a specific position for an interviewee after getting to know the candidate. For example, a candidate might have an unexpected unusual skill.
What does that have to do with providing a salary range for a particular job posting? That specific position created should also have a range - publish that. Normally you have to interview other candidates for this position too.
Unless you’re some VP/Director/Distinguished Eng/C-level etc, this doesn’t happen in practice. Those jobs don’t follow normal job posting rules anyway, they’re usually sought out.
99.99% of the time, I doubt the job is ever adapted for the person. They come in with that skillset and are usually expected to grow and meet the needs of the other job areas.
And in any normal court they will lose since its a different position and they agreed (paper trail) for that switch. Or they could be just let go if company is too careful. Not that such situation happens often in real world, I never even heard about even one.
If they would sue it would also burn their professional creds permanently, nobody sane would ever want to hire such a problematic person.
Then you tell Bob about how he would be much better suited for job A or B, explain how the pay is less, and if he's cool with it, directly put his CV into the pile for that job. If he's not cool with it, shake his hand and wish him a good day
Cancel the job posting - advertise again for A task, Bob already passed some of the stages, maybe see a few more candidates for A task and boom you are in business.
Presumably the law will be written to account for advertised role != assigned role, but it can't account for gaming the system by never hiring exactly the advertised position.
Labour's approach to problems is to tax employers into oblivion and then say "the reason salaries are so low is because we didn't ban them from posting adverts without salary disclosure".
To be clear, I mean employment is already taxed extremely highly.
Burnham put cost of living as his highest priority, then this is the kind of measures he comes out with. If you think more red tape and bureaucracy is going to help then I've got nothing.
This isn’t red tape or bureaucracy though. Many things are, but not this. Infact it actually reduces waste for both comapnies and citizens because they won’t have people applying who will turn down due to the salary.
Mandatory Gender Pay Gap Reporting (Conservative Party 2017)
Pay Transparency Pilot (Conservative Party 2022) - (Participating employers only) list salary ranges on all job adverts and stop asking applicants for their salary history during recruitment
For some reason cultists get all excited that one particular person is single handedly destroying everything that is great and true - by doing the same thing their lord and saviour does.
I will repost a comment I made here a while ago on a similar discussion. Salary non-disclosure is a dealbreaker for me since being through the situation described below:
A few years back I wanted to get out of the work situation I was in. I looked around, had some interviews, had some offers. None of the postings had salary ranges, as is common where I live.
My eyes, however, were set on a specific small company because I liked their product. The process was long and involved multiple meetings, a take-home problem, and stretched over 2 or so months. I was upfront about what my salary expectations were (wasn't looking for a raise, just a lateral move). They said we discuss salary when you meet the founders, i.e. the last step before getting hired, but they also didn't tell me that my range was way off.
Turns out I had played this 9 week game and turned down other offers just to be severely low-balled by them. Maybe they saw that I really wanted the position and thought they could get away with a low offer.
Obviously, I rejected their offer on the spot. I also promised myself to never, _ever_, be fooled like that again. We talk money before I invest any significant amount of time or I walk.
EDIT: fixed wording.
I've done worse than that. I've taken the job on a lower salary, being told I'd get a promotion and pay rise in 6 months. That didn't happen. And then when it didn't happen at 18 months they dangled the carrot of a promotion up two levels. After a few weeks of not hearing about it I popped a resignation letter in the post one morning, went into the office and had an email to say the promotion had "gone away".
Then they went legal trying to prevent me working for a competitor.
I actually got what I needed from the role anyway, but it was a lesson to heed the red flags. I've not heeded that lesson a couple of times recently, just because the market seems to be toast, but it's not been worth it.
A friend that works as a manager told me that companies stretch the interview process on purpose so that at the end you will accept a lower offer that you normally would because you are exhausted by the process.
> A friend that works as a manager told me that companies stretch the interview process on purpose so that at the end you will accept a lower offer that you normally would because you are exhausted by the process.
1. It depends on how desperate the applicant is: if they're searching while still employed then they can walk (like GP did).
2. Even if they are desperate, they may take the offer… for now… so they can start getting a salary again, but that won't prevent them from continue to look. In which case you're paying for them to learn a job which they'll leave and you'll have to pay someone (else) a second time to learn as well.
False economy IMHO.
bingo. hiring is expensive, onboarding is expensive, offboarding is annoying and has non-trivial-risk, and dragging it out means work isn't get done in that position.
unless you're looking at VP and up level roles where there may be a significant delta in risk, cost, and pay it's probably not worth it.
And if you’re hiring a VP who isn’t able to see through the tactic… do you even want that?
I've mentored a lot of young engineers and something I often point out is that there is practically zero risk in accepting an offer. Many companies also do not even present the full paperwork to sign until your first day or two.
You don't have to show up on the start date, though you do have to be mindful of the bridge you may be burning. But it is totally reasonable to show up to a few days of work, and declare "you know what, I don't think this is a good fit" and no one will be offended. They don't have to know that you already accepted another offer.
Exploding offers, low-ball offers, all bullshit. But you don't have to play their games.
This is certainly valid in "right to work" states like Pennsylvania. If there is no notice period, then there is no penalty from accepting multiple jobs. Having accepted a job, there are also various ways to push the start date forward.
Some corporations will exploit whatever advantages they perceive. I overheard one hiring manager refer to their process as "the hunger games".
Another benefit: if people start doing this often, companies might start using actual notice periods that apply to both sides.
Usually the manager doesn't care about this though - a p-number is a p-number, it doesn't matter if they are paying them $200k or $100k (assuming the salary range for the position was that large).
If anything the manager would prefer a higher offer that the candidate is likely to expect than a low-ball which they reject and then the hiring process has to continue.
Yup. I never had any incentive to haggle over the Salary. If I got them to agree to a lowball, no one ever rewarded me, or cared.
That can only really work if you are unemployed or they know your salary is is still way below.
It's just the good old boring sunk cost fallacy.
it also just gets to the scammer end of the "who is stupid enough to keep doing this to the end". The point of a lot of scammer's poor grammar, huge red flags, etc, is _they_ dont want to waste _their_ time with someone other than the biggest marks in the world.
I just thought it should be clearer how many of these businesses likely operate to filter out.
Maybe I misunderstood but are you saying that companies have these lengthy interview procedures to filter out smart/capable/non-desperate candidates?
Sounds a bit counterproductive
Depends on your goals.
A lot of places are looking for unambitious, mediocre, status-quo following bodies to fill seats and follow arcane bureaucratic processes. Too much critical thinking is bad. Ability to deal with long drawn out bullshit is good.
whelp I guess that makes sense.
I love working in tech because it’s so cushy and chill but it’s the most stupid (and delusional) industry i ever worked in.
I'm saying business managers tend to follow patterns that gets them to the numbers on their paper. What you, or a single employee, sees as counter productive is often just a means to an end.
They'll spend 5x your ask for a raise finding someone to fill your position because denying you keeps the rest of their payroll in line. And if you consider these people communicate across their industries, they will make informal cartels that depress all employee wages.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there was just a natural way to filter our employees who would be to demanding by making them jump through more hoops.
> companies stretch the interview process on purpose so that at the end you will accept a lower offer
That doesn't pass the smell test. That would mean those companies do not care about filling a role of hiring competent workers. If your guy is willing to wait two whole months for your offer, you are either Google or you are trying to hire a dude who no company on earth wants.
If your salary depends on how many underlings you have you want them to do as little useful work as possible. Hiring becomes is a very time consuming delicate process, you need 3 full time employees to find those 5 perfect sheep men.
This is what car dealerships in the US do too. Waste a ton of time and keep you there for hours to fatigue you into accepting whatever bullshit they throw at you in the "close".
I always assumed that kind of tactic was a way of hiding other decisions, e.g. protected class discrimination or some such.
I’ve similarly had 6-round interviews where at the end I either receive a lowball offer or am rejected because of something disclosed up-front.
> small company
> Stretched over two months
These companies aren't Google. There is no valid reason why it should take so long to decide on candidates for a position. It is not necessary to have more than two interview sessions. I bail on any company that subjects people to this garbage.
I think it should be the other way around.
Google is a very large company. They have capital on hand and an established, well-worn process for onboarding. It costs them comparatively little to hire.
For a small company, an engineering hire is a big investment. They don't do it as often, so it costs them more in terms of both direct costs and indirect costs - like the time it takes their existing team to go through the process and bring the new hire up to speed.
I recently had a small company take a month and had after the final two 'interviews' with the CEO and CTO were scheduled a week apart, realized this is almost certainly a stalling tactic to have a couple more candidates in the pipeline so they can pick the best.
Agreed, when I was recruiting for a small company (where we could be easily outbid), the only tool I really had was that the process was 1 interview and I made a decision. This was before remote absolutely exploded but I was able to successfully recruit some really bright young developers and, I hope, kickstarted some incredible careers for them. Granted, I’m not confident I could do it now, as the gap between what the company could afford and what you can make working remote is much too large now!
Similar experience, multiple tech rounds all completed with excellent feedback from a company which approached me. Mentioned my ask and no indication of the range being a problem (but no firm approval either).
Based on that, assumption was the budget would be adequate. Final response was that they would not even mention the salary because it was too far away.
Following week they posted the job advert for same staff engineer role but at under average eu minimum wage.
It's risky if no salary is listed but do not ever proceed if they don't openly accept your ask without any doubt.
>staff engineer
>under average eu minimum wage
Wth ? How does this work
yep - never interview - if salary range is not disclosed by the hiring manager or recruiter. if hiring manager can't discuss salary - the hiring manager is a lame duck and won't push anything but just take orders.
with regards to uk tech companies - they have salary ranges like 60k-75k - where someone might have spent time in a role at 63k e.g if the average tenure within a certain position is 3 years, 63k - then when you join they will say new joiners start at 60k.
Just to add a little bit of perspective here. When I was a manager, if a candidate reached an interview with me, they had already had an interview with the recrui-I mean, "talent acquisition expert", with whom the compensation had already been previously discussed. I often had no idea what was the salary offered and I could not negotiate on it.
That was the other guy's job, and it as a prerequisite - they would not reach me if the compensation was not to their satisfaction. My job was to determine whether the candidate could perform at the offered post. If I needed to discuss compensation then someone before me would have screwed up.
I always get a range up front from the recruiter (and later confirm with the hiring manager).
This is very common with small software shops (which don't have the budget) and startups (which are running on private equity fumes).
Perchance you mean: "non disclosure of salary is a dealbreaker"?
Yeah I was waiting for the anecdote to reveal why OP dislikes salary disclosure.
There should be a Yelp for shitty businesses like this and half of linkedin would get listed in the hall of shame
It already exists: Glassdoor.
Which is itself a very shitty business. It's there to protect the business owners. Early days was good - then needed to monetize.
Do you still like their product or do you now understand your bias?
I would never consider a company that's making me wait that long unless I'm desperate to put food on my table and I have no other choice.
I don't mind the company that makes me wait long, and in many cases prefer it. Just I reject any take home if takes more than few hours without communication, and I reject more than 1 round of interviews done by someone junior than me.
I like giving interviews. It gives me insight into their thinking and the company.
Turns out many people are in just that position.
Probably the majority in current late stage capitalism
Had a similar experience, vowed to never do take home assignments ever again.
If i was good enough to get hired as a faang with just interviews and no take home stuff i see no reason to do that for a smaller company.
They always can low-ball you even with salary disclosure.
Yes, but then you don't need to spend weeks of work to be low-balled.
No, let's say you apply for a job with salary 100-120k in description. After ten rounds of interviews they give you an offer for 80k.
This practice should be illegal.
"Darn, that 100k-120k role was filled during our 4 rounds of interviews. Fortunately we have new role available at 80k if youre interested."
This is usually called bait and switch, but your point still stands.
I think the GP's point is that if you give the companies the opportunity to do that earlier, instead of only later, you get to save a lot of time dealing with the honest low-ballers.
There's nothing you can do about the dishonest ones.
It really should be against some kind of employment standards to do this sort of bait and switch
There are apparently some new regulations in Canada to protect job seekers from this, but it's not a clean line in the sand. It seems like companies won't likely be held accountable unless it is a pattern of hiring like this, but how do people establish a pattern when most people still won't discuss salaries?
Most companies want the new joinees to be satisfied, and if the reason is "we don't have budget" that might be acceptable. But if the reason is "we are lowballing you specifically because we can" that would just create spite in candidates mind and the company has to pay the price for the process if a candidate dropped off or joined temporarily while looking elsewhere.
Yea, it's basically a question of respect. The second somebody disrespects you you walk away, hard line. Going along with it and playing their games, as described above, just prolongs the inevitable.
Don't want to act like an adult and tell me how much money I'll make? I'm out, good luck.
I have always felt that job ads should include salary information. The main reason is not to waste anyone's time. Often a narrow salary range or a clear link between requirements and salary are much more informative than a job description. I have experienced to apply to a job opening and go through one or more interviews only to find out that the company is actually hiring for a more junior position than the ad copy implied.
A second reason is to avoid discrimination. Applicants that feel disadvantaged, even if they are actually qualified, may hesitate to negotiate for a higher salary in the same way that a other applicants would. The consequence is that they start with a lower salary. This applies specially to women. Plenty of research shows that they are less likely to negotiate their salary.
Research[1] suggests that pay transparency leads to lower average salaries because employers avoid paying higher wages to any one employee to avoid costly negotiations with others. The effect is small, around 2%, and it disappears with increasing degree of unionization. In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w28903
When hiring I don't have a narrow range in mind, it can be 50% or more. I look at the individual and make a judgment call on their impact to the business. For software we don't have a widget factory where employees are easily substitutable.
I've tried the opposite, paid everyone the same. But there were clear differences in ability and more importantly outside options. It became a problem when it came to retention and the business didn't have the ability to overpay everyone to keep the top performers.
You're describing levels. If your range is so wide the top of the range is double the bottom of the range, you're hiring at multiple levels, and you should just say that. You should also have more detailed descriptions that help you and candidates differentiate what those levels are.
More broadly than that -- it's not that you need to pay everyone the same, it's that you need clear structure around how your pay works.
An example that became a problem with one previous employer was that they kept saying "performance" was their only determining factor for pay, after it had come out that exactly one person on our team had been offered bonuses as a performance incentive.
It's not actually performance-based if you have different and better reward structures, or if you can't/won't explain why gaps exist.
It's mainly specialties, not just levels. Are you a graphic designer that can also build your designs for the web? Were you previously consulting for our largest customer? Do you speak Welsh for our important client in Pembroke? Did you previously work in tech stack X and want to get back to it, and could lead our effort into that market? I'll pay more for these even if they come in at the same grade. Pay is very subjective, it is a prediction about the value an employee can or does bring balanced against their next best option.
Many of those things you can still just say, in a job description, as details that make you stand out. Many of those specific details do have tangible value (though I'd still say if you include words like "lead" you're describing levels), and you're not necessarily just describing vibes, but what you also aren't describing is a reason why you wouldn't have some idea of what you would pay someone in normal circumstances.
Say that no one you interview has those particulars, and you hire someone who's just -- by your regular, baseline standards -- qualified for the job. Do you have a cutoff for what you would pay those people? Then you should probably post that, and then just act like companies that comply with this stuff already and include some kind of disclaimer, that extraordinary candidates may still fall somewhere outside that range.
Because I could write 5 pages filled with these potential factors and it would be confusing to most candidates. Why specify Welsh when less than 1% of staff or candidates speak it?
> Because I could write 5 pages filled with these potential factors and it would be confusing to most candidates. Why specify Welsh when less than 1% of staff or candidates speak it?
You want to set laws that hurt 99% of employees for a theoretical benefit to a 1% case for the employer?
what's the point of a pay grade if the pay is wildly different in the same grade?
it's just multiple grades at that point masquerading behind a broken HR system
"level" can be an internal designation to communicate to others about the problems you can take on. Says nothing about pay. Many ways for a company to operate.
People seem very attached - emotionally, almost morally - to a model of hiring that looks like this:
* The company decides to open a specific position, which it will fill no matter what.
* The position will pay the same amount no matter who fills it.
* There exists a binary condition called "qualified" which people metaphysically are or aren't.
* The job must not go to an unqualified person, but could go to any qualified applicant.
* Society may instruct you to use certain non-merit-based criteria to prefer some qualified applicants over others, but hiring managers and teams must not use their own subjective feelings or relationships to do so.
I can understand how a civil service or other massive bureaucracy full of principal-agent problems arrives at these rules, but they are obviously not the only valid way to assemble a high-performing team or the best one in all circumstances.
Then you should have more defined roles, even if organisationally they're the same, i.e. there's very clear expectations of differences in salaries (and business impact) between junior, mid and senior developers.
This is about job ads, not their internal designation. I don't put out 8 different job ads when 2 are sufficient.
The point is you should be putting out different job postings when you are looking for different personas.
I'm not answering a pitch that says "$100K-$350K salary, final decision based on vibes" but I will if it says "$250K-$270K salary, needs 10 years of experience leading X kinds of projects and proficiency in Y, Z".
This is an ideal state, for sure, but it's also where corporate bureaucracy gets in the way. It's FAR easier to have a catch-all, pretty generic posting for a category of role than to get approval for discrete postings for each conceivable instantiation of that role category within a hiring org. This is also why many [tech] companies will include leveling information in the posting in addition to a salary range, so candidates will know that they could be considered whether they slot in as, for example, an IC4 or IC5.
Posting a job ad isn't the onerous part of the process though to be fair.
It does make me wonder what would happen if you put out 100 different job adverts split apart by £1,000 increments. I'm sorry you aren't suitable for the 100k job you applied for but would you consider our 97k role instead?
It makes sense for multiple job ads if there are completely different roles applied by completely different people. But, for the sake of hiring, it doesn't make sense to invent new titles just to justify differently negotiated salaries. For example, I was once hired as a "Senior Software Developer" who essentially got paid twice what the least senior Senior got; they were to some extent mislabelled: They were senior in another capacity than software, and had transitioned inside the company but kept their titel because people are vain. Our responsibilities were vastly different: He was a frontend tokenmaxxer, and I migrated strategic customers to on-prem Kubernetes by negotiating contracts, bootstrapping clusters, and adapting applications to run without autoscaling. They could have given either of us a different title, but for the sake of the value we added, the salary made sense.
A title like "Senior Software Developer" can range from 5 years of general-purpose web development experience to 20 years of highly specialized experience. Those "Principal" and "Staff" titles don't necessarily make sense outside of larger corporations.
Most recently I've seen salary ranges up to 30% of the upper bound. Completely reasonable.
Maybe you should, one for each expected level, with a description of the expected qualifications of each and how much you’ll pay for those qualifications? Sort of an “if X, then Y, but if also Z, then W” thing? Like a company should?
So then put up multiple job listings with different salaries. State what the skill expectations and senority requirements for each are.
That's impractical most of the time. It's much more efficient to handle leveling during the interview process, and to coach the technical recruiter to use screening questions that give a decent indication of where a viable candidate might slot.
It's also easiest for candidates. If you are faced with 2 job postings about the same org at a company you may not have any experience with, how will you decide whether to apply for the lower or higher level role? It's not always clear.
How does the seniority requirements work? I've seen 1 year junior better than 8 years senior; 5 year senior with no difference to a typical 2 years junior and everything in between.
i make a similar judgement call when i look at hiring manager and the workplace
This sounds like you don't know what the fuck your hiring for.
If you want juniors to fill out your team, why are you getting a bunch of seniors?
100% wrong.
If I'm building a team, I don't need everyone at the exact same level. I want a mix. I want some juniors, some seniors and a tech lead. The job description is the same, I'm not writing 3 or 4.
Job descriptions for junior positions and tech leads are not the same.
Agreed, maybe a bad example.
But a team of SWEs at different experience levels for the same role won't be different job descriptions.
I'm in this situation right now, I have a minimum requirement, it could be MET with someone with 1-2 years of experience or 20 years.
But that is the MINIMUM, if I find someone that meets that minimum but I get a lot more, I will pay more. But I'm still not making multiple job descriptions with different ranges.
You could just put multiple ranges and add additional details for what seniors/leads look like. You would have minimums for what those things are too, and those qualities would actually overlap a lot with a previous level's nice-to-have items.
There's valid conversation around the nuances of "what if this need isn't specific to a level?" but those don't excuse keeping people in the dark about what the job offers or requires.
> But a team of SWEs at different experience levels for the same role won't be different job descriptions.
Why would you put people with different experience levels in the same role? You'll have three classes of people, only one of them "happy", for the others it'll be too much or too little. You cannot put a junior in the same position as a person who wants to be tech lead?
I think maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because having one job description for those three roles don't make much sense as I understand it currently.
I'm probably not explaining myself well, but besides from FAANGs that use levels, this is how every company i've worked at does thing.
We need a team of X people, we have minimum requirements. We are open to anyone as long as they are close to the requirements (100% match is never possible).
We evaluate the comp based on interview feedback... then as the team gets filled what we look for starts to narrow to "fill out the bench" so to speak.
But we won't ever go back and update the description or pay-band, no need.
Operational flexibility is a thing. A small company could be looking for competent and motivated people in general and adapt their internal processes to match the hire's experience level.
Couldn't you have a single job advert with a wide range and in the description say that you're looking for juniors, mid, and seniors and that you'll tell people early on where you think they'd slot in?
I can take multiple types of people, I'm casting a wide net to find value.
then you should expect to waste a bunch of time. yours and others'.
No, work with a recruiter who understands your business and is similarly aligned to spotting value at a good price. By the time I have an initial phone screen with a candidate I know their CV and their salary expectation and I have agreed to be in range of their expectations. Direct inbounds go through a 10-minute screen with a recruiter to collect additional details.
"Wanted: employees."
No, it sounds like there are clear differences in abilities.
If you think every junior/senior/staff has the same ability, you're delusional. Two people can broadly fall into the same bucket but be very different in terms of output.
Yes there are clear differences in skills. So if I'm hiring to fill a certain need, why would I consider someone who isn't skilled in that area?
I often look at a CV and notice specific skills that can benefit the business even if they aren't part of a normal job description. Imagine a software developer who used to be a graphic designer. I can save handoff time and have this person take on additional tasks, but it won't be in the job ad because the hit rate is too low. I can afford to pay that person more than others with comparable programming skills.
Or, I find value in areas that get overlooked in the market. Career transition people for example might not have many other options and I can take a gamble on how fast they ramp up.
> When hiring I don't have a narrow range in mind, it can be 50% or more.
As an occasional hiring manager, having this sort of flexibility sounds really nice!
Unfortunately I have to define my requirements and justify a fairly narrow range when I want to add to my team, so it's not something I get to enjoy. There have definitely been candidates who stand out from the crowd and have higher expectations, that I have not been able to offer to.
I've always asked, and then get the generic "for the ideal candidate we are prepared to go very high", which I tactfully point out as the BS it is - there is no role that has ever been advertised without a manager or director-level sign-off on the range.
I usually reply to the brush-off with "I only ask because the seniority level is reflected in the salary, not the role or the advertisement."
I say that because it is, in fact, true: the seniority/skill required for the role and duties/responsibilities dictates the pay, the bullet points in the advertisement and the role description is often completely divorced from the level of seniority or skill required in the actual role.
IOW "We're hiring a Senior dev" might have me respond "That's a Junior pay-bracket".
I’m not sure of a way around this. I’ve done it.
I need someone to do a specific set of tasks, but there’s also a wider group of tasks which I’d like someone to do, but it isn’t urgent.
The posting goes out for the task we NEED. If someone more senior applies, and they can do more than the role needs, we pay them more.
This is a non-problem: if a candidate approaches you for Role A, and you decide they'd be a great fit for Role A+B, then create Role A+B, and perform the perfunctory interview, then hire them at the new role.
There is no (and I feel comfortable with this absolute) scenario where you need to keep the salary range hidden, or where a published salary range prevents you from hiring a candidate for an expanded role. None.
The only thing transparent pricing does is result in an informed participant in the market, which is pricing signals and thus something Capitalism.
Once you go down the route of asking for special exemption to make your business work in an open market, you're not doing Capitalism anymore.
It's a bureaucratic problem. Getting a headcount approved for a specific role is a non-issue. Getting HC approved for something brand new might be impressively complicated. Especially at large companies, listed postings persist for many months sometimes and stagnate because functions, dynamics or org alignment shifts before anyone is hired. It's much easier to write a generic-ish job posting and just coach the recruiter/screener on updated specifics than it is to retract a posting, rewrite it, and repost it. This happened to me frequently when I was a hiring manager at Google, for example.
This works for some orgs but not for ones where roles require significant negotiation and sign-off. That can take weeks or months and by that point an attractive candidate has moved on.
To be honest, the places I’ve worked for that could do this were not the best jobs I’ve had. That flexibility can sometimes point to other organizational issues.
Freakonomics have a good episode including one of the authors of that paper - https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-pave-the-road-to-hel...
It's very hard for people to accept that this might even be the case, many people just assume that transparency is better for workers.
Love Freakonomics :)
That said I think Jury is still out on pay transparency mostly because there isn't that much practical data. The EU has been navigating it for a few years but research is still ongoing.
One paper (which is more focused on pay gap reporting, which is longer implemented and seems to have limited impact) suggests salary disclosure in job ads actually increases wages.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pay-transparency-in-pro...
It's definitely obvious that internal salary transparency will a) act to normalise salaries over the long term and b) generally depress salaries. But disclosure at the job as stage is less clear.
We've had decades of salary suppression already, supported by a culture of "Don't tell your coworkers what you earn." I'm not seeing how making full disclosure mandatory would generally depress salaries.
The people whose job it is to measure this have explained it and it's linked above - because it changes employers' incentive to negotiate and makes them more reluctant to give any raises because those raises would be visible and trigger more raises being requested. This can reduce inequality but bring the averages down (some might argue that's an acceptable tradeoff).
There's a difference between coworkers talking to each other and the system being set up in a transparent way where everyone can see everyone else's salaries, these two aren't the same thing.
that is what bonuses are for, and can be tied to individual performance
Generally that's basically how socialism works: if you make things more equal, they tend to be smaller on average. Sometimes that's a reasonable trade, but it's worth acknowledging.
2% lower on average, and in exchange you save a lot of time avoiding pointless interviews. I wouldn't say it's worse for workers .
Price transparency is better for society, as price movements are the signal to buyers and sellers for which way supply and demand curves are moving, and hence resources can be allocated more efficiently.
A more real time view of the change in people’s pay to quality of life at work ratio can help people decide what to train in and how much to invest in the training.
People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
We will invent narratives to protect our ego and will happily keep other people down (including ourselves) instead of confronting this.
"He just got promoted because he's more outgoing, he's not more talented than me!"
Ok let's assume thats true. But if your job involves spending 40 hours a week with someone (more than your family), it turns out humans value being around charming, outgoing people. Is this wrong or is it the market accurately assessing relative value in the context of the actual work (collaborating with other humans)?
>People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
Mediocre and average employees like the idea of reducing inequality, because the mediocre employees stand to financially benefit and the average employees can expect little to no change in compensation while reaping emotional rewards.
For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.
> For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.
Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality.
Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others. If you want to pay someone outside of band, give them a different title.
If someone performs unexpectedly well, give them a bonus/promotion etc.
It's deeply sad (but unsurprising) that so many people can only focus on their particular benefit (especially when the vast majority of that benefit is context dependent).
Like, if you hired John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard and just told them to take tickets, they'd probably be an average performer at best. If you told them never to take initiative, they'd perform badly. So lots of performance is dependent on context, there are very few "good" employees in a vacuum.
> it's unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others
No its not. This is a skill that is useful when exchanging value with other entities (the basis of the economy). You're being compensated for having that skill.
Would you hire a salesperson or head of procurement or media buyer with bad negotiation skills? How about a developer who can't properly negotiate with teams demanding their time to properly allocate themselves where needed?
>Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality. Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others.
Then give your money to people who don't negotiate as well. In practice, you don't: your revealed preference speaks louder than your stated preference does.
Wanting to live in a better society should not preclude me from doing better in this one.
And the transaction costs on such an approach would be too large, as I'm sure that you know.
M I note that you don't address the notion of context dependent high performance.
Just because someone is 'good' at negotiating higher comp in the interview process, doesn't mean that will have an high impact on the business.
As an EM, a person's current salary is an anchor. If someone is paid at the bottom of the band, but then later the company learns about their high impact, they aren't given a raise, they are told to push harder and get promoted.
And then when they are promoted, they are probably at the bottom of the next band.
if a person threatens to leave, the EM (rarely) can magically wave a wand to increase the salary, but they can promise to put them up for promotion next cycle.
If they're truly high impact and high competence they should be able to signal that value in high impact high competence ways.
The reality is that in most industries competence and impact has very little to do with compensation. Compensation is the result of political status games, not demonstrable ability.
> People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
It goes other way round too. It might just be that the your higher salary is not rational, you got lucky or got unfair advantage.
Like, in the bottom of your comment, you made up situation that might just not apply. Or might just not counteract anything
Or, might be directly damaging - agreeing with everyone makes you popular, but causes a lot of damage in the long term. Lying about important stuff makes you popular, but causes damage to company and everyone else.
People go out of their way to rationalize and defend unfair or damaging systems.
My point was that the "you got lucky or got unfair advantage" narrative that people use to explain why other people are successful and they are not is motivated reasoning.
So it's far more likely these comments are over-indexing on the "its all luck/unfairness" explanation than the "it's all rational" explanation given there's 100X more people who will have their egos protected by the former positioning (the ratio of executives to worker bees is like 1:100).
Nah I think that almost everything is luck based.
It’s more that the “i work hard and hustle everyday” narrative from successful people is to protect their little egos from the realisation that 90% of their success is pure luck / chance / chaos.
You didn't confront my core assertion.
Yes, both parties use motivated reasoning to protect their ego.
But there's 100X more of the worker bees than there is of the uber-successful.
Therefore any discussion like this one will over-index on the luck explanation.
We're obviously not at risk of assigning too much agency to successful people here on HN, an internet forum filled with frustrated leftist upper middle class last men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
And my point was that "no he was not lucky, it was entirely fair with no luck or advantage (and no fraud, lies etc)" narrative is frequently motivated reasoning too.
> the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
I'd like the boss to do his work and write down the rationalization. Then, when we have an objective measure of the rationalization of the wage, I can work towards getting a higher wage myself.
The biggest opponents of wage transparency (and many other things) are incompetent managers refusing to do their work.
Signed, a high earner.
About 30% of modern economics is dubious studies that demonstrate that things which hammer profits are Bad For The Little Guy.
See also: hiking the minimum wage (possibly the most obvious example of academic corruption), rent controls, taxing the rich, etc.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary ones are 1) economists also respond to incentives and those think tank jobs pay really well and 2) prestige in the industry is also a commodity - a commodity which can be bought and sold. The level to which money talks in this industry is reflected by the wages - always higher than all other humanities.
As an example the freakonomics guys popularity are to popular economics what k pop is to music: a slick, highly refined, marketed product from a superbly well oiled marketing machine.
You're disagreement with the outcomes of studies, does not mean there is widespread corruption. Rent controls, are just obviously awful things, and the data supports this. You create a lottery system, and disincentivize capital creating more supply causing a supply constraint raising prices in the long term. Minimum Wage being set to $X means prices must raise to allow that increased cost, or they will cut the position. A job a business would be willing to pay $5 an hour for gets cut when the minimum wage is $15 an hour, and just have 1 person do the work of 3. Many grocery store jobs that people used to be able to get at 13 or 14 have disappeared with the higher minimum wage for example. Taxing the rich lowers the velocity of money, disincentivizes capital to search for more profit seeking enterprises.
>Minimum Wage being set to $X means prices must raise to allow that increased cost, or they will cut the position. A job a business would be willing to pay $5 an hour for gets cut when the minimum wage is $15 an hour, and just have 1 person do the work of 3. Many grocery store jobs that people used to be able to get at 13 or 14 have disappeared with the higher minimum wage for example
What actually happens is that profit margins get hammered (notice how you forgot about those? you were supposed to) and those businesses that rely upon minimum waged labor complain bitterly.
Very low margin businesses do raise prices but in the study I saw that looked at profit margins ans prices only two examples of price raising from a survey of about 50 were, like, nail salons and catering.
In the well designed studies where they measure job losses they found essentially negligible job losses. These studies caused a lot of drama in the economics community - a lot of them acted like they'd been told that their god didn't exist. It was replicated though.
Some other studies say "look! restaurants go out of business when the minimum wage is hiked! job losses!" but neglect to mention that when restaurant A goes out of business and is replaced with restaurant B (which is what often happens), servers and cooks just switch jobs.
The whinging manifests as money piled into lobbying and public outreach to prevent this type of thing from happening again and the result of that public outreach is how you formulated your opinion about what happens and why you forgot that, for example, profits can also decrease when price goes up.
My point is that we should be able to distinguish between the studies that are dubious and the studies that are solid but go against out assumptions. And if our assumptions are that that economists are just protecting corporations, we'll end up rejecting claims that might be true, and end up with policies that sound like they protect the little guy but are actually harmful.
It's not that simple. Every study takes assumptions, simplifies things and is limited by the range of real life conditions the authors know about. It's also influenced by the economic doctrines everyone learns in college and most never question after, because they're often presented as laws of nature.
I think the most common "mistake" is that most economists are used to thinking about money in absolute terms, but in real life it's a lot more useful to treat prices as a percentage of your income. That means the utility of money is not linear, so redistribution is good by itself unless it hurts growth so much that average incomes start going down in real terms.
The other one is way deeper and harder to fix but I don't think a lot of people actually believe it, they just use it implicitly in their research. It's that the goal of economics is to maximize efficiency (measured by ROI = profits), not to deliver the best outcomes for the greatest amount of people.
From this point of view a platform like Doordash is efficient because they underpay workers and overcharge customers, and so are surveillance data brokers. That's clearly not a perspective that gets us into a better society. But measuring quality of life is much harder than taking two numbers every company is legally required to count.
> measuring quality of life is much harder
I always found the question “what is a good life?” to be one of the most interesting and consequential philosophical questions. People have found very different answers for this over the millennia.
Sure, ideally you should dig deep. I did that on a lot of the minimum wage papers and discovered just how deceptive and misleading they were trying to be - mostly using carefully crafted data and assumptions which were patently unrealistic. Sometimes they would smother those wrong assumptions with incredibly elaborate math.
Not everyone has the time, energy or patience to do that though. Journalists certainly don't and the general public is more inclined to be drawn in by a nice clickbaity story that makes them feel smarter than their friends (which is the market segment freakonomics services).
Point being if you were to make an assumption, "pop economist says that popular thing thing that is bad for profits is bad for you too is probably bullshit" is actually a fairly safe one.
Economics is a noisy subject where you would expect some studies to get plain incorrect results, and lots of them to be incapable of measuring their object. Even by no fault of economists at all.
That said, your 3 examples are very well studied, and rent controls are completely different from taxing the rich and hiking the minimum wage.
Can you share your research, because a lot of what you say goes against common sense and empirical data we have available. You seem to be very adamant that you are right, but with nothing but your word for it.
Let's hike the minimum wage to one million USD an hour, then!
The first thousand USD/mo a person earns has a different meaning to them than the second thousand, and the third thousand, and so on with diminishing returns. The point of minimum wage should be that no one is constantly fighting for their life, because a person in that situation is usually a harm to everyone.
The point of minimum wage should be that people can only be exploited to a certain level by their circumstances and requirement for food and shelter.
There is of course still a black market
In the gastro industry it’s extremely common (at least in my country) to be employed illegally (as in cash in hand directly).
Most restaurants you go to to eat would have to close if they needed to employ their workers legally. Same thing applies to bars and similar venues.
Source: worked in that industry 10+ years
Compensation for work comes in the forms of money, working environment, flexibility, etc.
A minimum wage is a ban on certain baskets of compensation for work.
It doesn't prevent 'exploitation', whatever that means. Companies fiercely competing for labour is what you want here.
>A minimum wage is a ban on certain baskets of compensation for work
No, it's not.
That's literally how a minimum wage works legally: you can have the nicest work environment and biggest flexibility and awesome training (or not), but if the money part of the job is below some minimum, the job is banned.
Granted. But that means that there are negative effects to at least some hikes of the minimum wage. So now the discussion can be had about what the effects are and when which effects kick in and how much.
we could just gradually keep hiking it until it starts impacting employment and then stop.
stage 1 is it hammers profit margins <-- for 95% of businesses we are here.
Stage 2 is then it increases prices <-- only affects very low margin businesses which are a small minority.
Stage 3 is it triggers job losses <-- to my knowledge it's never been raised high enough to make this happen. maybe $50 / hour would be the threshold.
> we could just gradually keep hiking it until it starts impacting employment and then stop.
Why are people so focussed on employment? Employment is only one area that minimum wage affects, and as you say, with moderate minimum wages and an otherwise functioning economy, employment effects are relatively minor.
> stage 1 is it hammers profit margins <-- for 95% of businesses we are here.
Businesses adapt, raise prices and do more automation to keep their margins, which have been remarkable stable if you look back. The losers are consumers and workers, because everything costs more and salaries don't rise as fast.
> Stage 2 is then it increases prices <-- only affects very low margin businesses which are a small minority.
Every mom and pop shop is a low margin business. Most business are low margin, only a few have a really high margins, the ones we all know and talk about.
>Stage 3 is it triggers job losses <-- to my knowledge it's never been raised high enough to make this happen. maybe $50 / hour would be the threshold.
I can only recommend you expanding your knowledge. It's like saying why do we need car seats for babies, because when we were younger we didn't have them and did just fine. Of course those that didn't make it aren't here to tell their story.
Taxing the rich seems like an example where you’re obviously correct.
I’m more skeptical of the minimum wage one, I think the details there matter a lot, and raising the minimum wage too much too fast can indeed be worse for just about everyone.
But rent control? Really?
It’s also interesting to me how a certain segment of the political persuasion simply cannot resist the allure of price controls, and no amount of data or historical experience seems to convince them that it’s generally a bad idea.
> Taxing the rich seems like an example where you’re obviously correct.
Really, can you at least provide some napkin calculations to see the cons and pros? Some countries have tried it, notably France. It backfired as expected and they had to revert.
Agreed.
My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.
From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.
Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.
> My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?"
The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.
So now in my initial intro call with any recruiter I just tell them my minimum, fully knowing that becomes the maximum offer. If they're ok with that we can keep talking, if not, that's cool, we both avoided wasting time.
That's why it's important to ask the recruiter, rather than wait to be asked.
That way you can respond to their range with something along the lines of "that sounds roughly what I was expecting", "okay, I'd probably be looking for the top end of that", "that's perhaps a little lower than I was expecting - is there enough room for flexibility for us to be able to continue talking?" or whatever. It's too early in the conversation to be doing a full salary negotiation, you're just making sure the role's at the right level.
There's a big problem with employers writing a senior-sounding job ad for a junior role - the salary range is a much more accurate indicator than a job description.
> The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.
Disagree, I've had "my range is X-Y", and the recruiter told me "for this role the range starts at Y+20%, are you ok with that".
It depends on the recruiter and how they work - someone asking for $X-Y when the role is $1.2Y could indicate that there's a role mismatch or a duty mismatch.
“Oh no I'd like to earn less money, sorry bye”
Heck, my experience lately has been that recruiters (or independent headhunters) are completely up front with the salary range explicitly because they don't want to waste anyone's time... and because there -- in tech especially -- can be enormous ranges of compensation for similar responsibilities.
That matches my experience - and I'd treat a failure to give a straightforward answer as a strongly negative signal, and would immediately concentrate my efforts on other opportunities.
I suspect we're pretty lucky in tech, though. Anecdotally, I've heard that in fields such as sales and marketing it's much more the norm to treat potential new hires in a much more adversarial manner.
After a bitter experience early in my career I _never_ “negotiate” the salary. When that conversation comes up I ask for the range they have for the position. If they are not willing to give that, it’s a huge red flag for me. It means that either the company _doesn’t have a range_, or they’re hellbent on hiring the cheapest person for the job. In both cases I don’t want to work there anyway.
I agree that Jobs should disclose pay upfront before anyone wastes any time. However, quite often pay does not hit the level necessary for me to move from my current role. It is then up to the employer to decide if they want to make the offer better to have me move.
I hold no opinion on whether this is fair is not. Another applicant who is single, low mortgage may end up with more disposable income for less pay and subjectively be "better off" and effectively undercut me and my dependents that I support.
No system is fair. My only personal opinion is that any employee should be able to have representation in employment negotiations. That does not mean just unions, although they work for some, rather they could be a family member or a paid agent.
At my last 2 jobs (Yelp and Grab), employers gave same level the ~same~ pay, but vastly modified the bonus reward structure so the top 10% (that quarter/half) is rewarded.
This always enabled the company to shift around who is the top 10% (whereas salary is locked in).
If these companies are just measuring salary and not considering RSU grants and bonuses, then you may see an overall reduction on salary, but (potentially) a collective increase on total compensation.
In general, a free market only works (even in theory, let's not even get started on the practice of it...) when _there is no assymetry of information_. Otherwise it's just fraud, one party mispricing things because the other party knows something they don't.
It's why we require public companies to disclose their finances. How could a person, even in theory, know whether to invest otherwise? It's why we require sellers of houses to deliver an independent inspection report. Etc etc.
The converse is also why HFT companies make more money than croesus.
> This applies specially to women.
At least the young women in UK are outearning (and outeducating) young men.
Yes on outeducating, but ONS data still shows young men outearn young women.
More critically; historical data shows pay gap for women increases through their 20s and jumps significantly in their 30s
Shocking, shocking I tell you!
idk the paper seems very suspect to me.
At the very end you can see what states they’re talking about and it’s basically just New York and California (no other state enacted a law 3 years before 2019).
California’s median income increased 17% from 2016 to 2019 (the 3 years following the law).
New york income increased 17% too.
Federally it increased 5%.
I think using some random spreadsheet as your data source just isn’t a great idea. NBER should be aware the IRS will let people have access to income data for research purposes.
This should not even be a band. It should be exact number and that's it. So that anyone applying knows what they are getting into and whether at that price point it makes sense for them at all.
Salary is a range because experience and skills are a range.
Employers are willing to pay more for someone who can hit the ground running and contribute meaningfully to the team's output in week 2 vs someone who has the basic skills and a couple years experience but will need months to come up to speed on industry-specific knowledge.
But "week 2" people are hard to find, so they often settle for "months" people just to keep work moving along.
In purely theoretical terms I agree, but I don't think that's practical given that you be open to someone more or less experienced, and slightly change the role based on who's available. Experience-based salary ranges are everywhere, even in highly-regulated roles like the NHS in the UK. The key here is the low figure, which will let you know whether they might try to lowball you (presuming there's enforcement if a role is advertised at £X to £Y and they then offer you £X - N).
>In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
That theory rests on the assumption that your salary is based on how good you are at your job. But if that were the case then corporate life wouldn't be full of people complaining "my boss is an idiot and yet (s)he makes ten times what I do".
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
> perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
> The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales
Maybe I've been lucky to work for moderately reasonable companies, but I've never seen that.
For example in my current company, yearly raises are directly tied to performance rating. And while there is subjectivity in the rating, it is basically impossible to squeeze in a high performer rating for someone who doesn't do anything even if I wanted to (which I don't). It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
The correlation will never be a perfect 1.0, but it is closer to 1 than to 0. Low performers end up getting low to nothing in raises, and the high performers get a multiplier that increases their raises.
> It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
I work at a smaller company now, with a lot of very good people, so I've been happy enough with my rating and bumps.
When I was at "bigcorp", I was still as good at my job, but I didn't play the game very well. I presume I was not visible enough to be rated highly by my peers (peers aren't those in your team, but outside your team) and so I didn't see the rate of progression I think I merited, and eventually left.
That was a very good decision.
> so I didn't see the rate of progression I think I merited
Well yes, that's common. But I was responding to the idea that there is literally 0 correlation between performance and raises.
I'm pro salary transparency, but both things are true and OP should not be downvoted:
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments, underwater social entitlement systems and mass riots. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
The second is solved ... its called a bonus.
Now you've permanently handed power to employers to claim every year is "a tough year" and pay people less, while tricking people into uprooting their lives and taking jobs under the pretense of "the salary is low but you usually get a crazy big bonus!"
Let me guess, your next rebuttal:
> "But then we'll create more policy to try to stop the downsides of the first policy we created!"
Now you have a patchwork of 48,000 regulations all collectively harming the efficiency of the economy and creating all sorts of weird un-intended consequences and loopholes for low-trust people to game instead of rewarding honest people for doing the right thing like you intended.
The only policy that's needed is unions everywhere with industry wide bargaining like they do in Denmark. Or even better employee ownership.
The thing about employee ownership is that, almost by definition, employees don't have much capital (that's why they live by selling their labour) and businesses need capital to survive. That capital has a cost, either interest on loans or profits going to outside shareholders.
> Let me guess, your next rebuttal
My actual response "But then we will have to deal with biases, discretion and management collecting their 10mil bonus by giving the juniors a pittance"
The flip side of course is people who actually work in bonus heavy revenue generating roles - where the impact is easy to measure - tend to leave if they are not valued and take their clients with them.
Things work a lot better in a healthy economy with competition and low friction for people to move around - exploitation blossoms when people are trapped by economic circumstances
This is the lump of labour fallacy, right? Companies don't actually have to have fixed labour budgets; indeed ideally firms should be always willing to hire/retain a worker at a salary less than that workers marginal revenue product, as this is profit maximising.
Apart from the general difficulty of organising like this and actually evaluating the marginal revenue from an additional employee (it's hard enough to attribute to your existing employees!), this marginal revenue is likely to have diminishing returns as the company grows and from a risk management point of view you will want to have some margin so that you don't flip into losing money as soon as business slows a little.
Companies have bureaucracies and bureaucracies are very much budget-constrained.
Companies can decide to do it however they want. They don't have to conform to a platonic ideal of a bureaucracy. A company expecting to grow its market share will give it's managers more leeway than one that's under financial difficulties.
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
I can imagine that this is the dynamic which for actual x10 developers makes flexible YC-style startups more appealing than rigid FAANG-level companies.
How well correlated are the highest paid employees to the best employees, though? My guess would be that salary correlates strongly with self-belief, charisma, and negotiation skills
Yeah, its all about sales at the top level. How can I sell myself or anything else as the best.
It may mean paying less to the best negotiators, but not the best performers.
These very much tend to strongly correlate. You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill as your leverage.
That’s not at all the case. Five of us recently moved internally via a remapping and they gave us pay rises. I negotiated 15% more than the initial offer, everyone else took the initial offer. Roughly same ability.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
"Tend to correlate" is a strictly probabilistic statement, I'm not talking about guarantees here.
And you have studies to back your claims up?
It's just sound reasoning. You're confident if you have less reasons to be desperate.
So no evidence, just claims that fly in the face of real experience.
> You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill
Not if high performers underrate their skill, and under-performers overestimate their skill, both of which studies suggest is true.
I would speculate that 10x devs' underestimation primarily concerns their percentile ranking relative to peers, not necessarily their absolute skill. Comparing yourself to the likes of Carmack and Wozniak is what pushes you to become cracked in the first place.
What matters is how they rate their skills relative to their colleagues, and how well they rate their value to the company.
people who claim to be 10x devs tend to be 0.5x devs with fancier keyboards
Just because you may have leverage does not mean that you're wise enough in negotiation skills to use that leverage effectively.
> A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages
Absolutely not. It has a maximum, sure, and a minimum it can get away with, but there's always a range in between them.
> Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees
Bold assumption that the best are paid the most.
Imagining this problem is just a sign that your company can't do pay grades or job titles properly. Or work out the concept called a "bonus".
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
> A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages.
When they hire and amazing 100x employee they have higher sales, revenues and profits with which to pay employees.
Cautiously pleased about this. Some companies in UK pay senior devs £30-35k. And some companies won't discuss that until v late in the process, while importing US-style multiround interviews. It's pretty silly when people get 3 rounds in, take time off work for the interviews, then find out their expectations are so far apart.
It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
It is your fault if you allow the recruiting process to get to the third interview without at least knowing if the salary range is acceptable.
If you lack confidence in talking money, here is what you say:
"I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer."
You might add:
"$120K is my minimum but I am really hoping to find a role at the higher end - $130K is what I'm aiming for, depending on the job."
If, after saying all this, you get lowballed, then you have good reason to be very annoyed, and express calmly but clearly that you have had your minimum salary on the table since the first phone call." At that point you withdraw from the process and go look for a job with a professional company.
This sounds great in theory. I've had a ranges that was very healthy on application, gone through a lengthy process including showing work examples and meeting the team to be offered below the bottom of the original offer - "We feel like this is a good starting sallary, we will review it in 6 months" - "The company has changed its investment direction so this is a revised number" - "We've created a new role that better fits your needs" etc etc...
This law will force them to actaully stick to a number.
>> This law will force them to actaully stick to a number.
No it won't - such a thing would never be pursued by anyone or enforced it's not worth the effort.
As I said, if you get lowballed after making it clear at the start then just withdraw and move on, find a company that is professional.
> such a thing would never be pursued by anyone or enforced it's not worth the effort.
How are you so sure about that? Seems to me that without enforcement this law is useless.
If the law is worth its money, than you can start working in this position, wait for the trial period to end (or until they let you go) and then sue for the compensation stated in the job ad (well, in a country with some level of work place protection you could).
Or play their game, sign the contract, keep your original job, not show up and later tell them why they did waste their time themselves. If they then threaten you, you can point at the law.
Some recruiters get paid on commission, meaning after 6 months of you being in the role they get paid. Other internal recruiters don’t work that way so they have no incentive to get you in the door for a minimum term.
The law will make it visible how much a company values someone with those skills. Companies won’t advertise the salary though, they will advertise the range.
I have never applied to a job in the UK (or in USA), and wonder why you are being voted down. Is that not an appropriate question? Or will the employers and hiring managers not give answers?
They more than likely will not answer or will dodge the question entirely. This is so ubiquitous that if you decided to only go through processes that do answer this question, you might not get anything at all. In many cases when they do answer, it is a bold lie; and if challenged "who told you that range?", "well if you hit certain performance parameters by year three your total package may be x...", "that's for the senior position, we are offering you the standard position".
Do your due diligence and research companies that behave in this manner via platforms like Glassdoor. AI makes this process much easier. And always publicly call out companies that do this instead of sucking up.
If they don't answer, then you call off the interview.
You will basically have to be willing to walk away to get an answer other than "tell me what you're looking for and we'll let you know if you're in our range", which basically loses the negotiation. Most people are not comfortable doing that.
Also, large parts of the UK culturally have difficulty talking about money. (Exceptions are Yorkshire, which is proud of it's difference here, and (parts of?) Scotland). That's not going to change overnight, so making disclosure a legal requirement is a fair solution.
I'm in the UK and always ask about salary range and if the role is remote before I agree to do an initial interview. It saves everyone involved from having their time wasted. The first contact is usually a recruiter though, I don't mention pay and benefits in interviews.
It isn't uncommon to be given an acceptable figure, go through several rounds of interviews and end up with job offer but with a lower salary than initially agreed because the recruiter padded the numbers.
> You will basically have to be willing to walk away to get an answer other than "tell me what you're looking for and we'll let you know if you're in our range", which basically loses the negotiation.
No, it doesn't lose the negotiation. What makes you think so? Setting anchors and controlling the document is very powerful.
But yes, you need to know what you can get, and you need to be able and willing to walk away.
They're already anchored, because they know what everyone else is making. You won't kick them loose unless they are teeny tiny. The advice in this thread is basically straight from the patio11 blog post.
Yeah, that part of the blog post ain't that great.
> They're already anchored, because they know what everyone else is making.
Different people make different amounts of money.
The suggestion that it's OP's/the candidate's fault jarred me a little. In my experience this is such a common situation in the UK that you could be jobless for much longer if you insist on early salary disclosure.
Yeah, weird, I’d say? Even in Japan salary range talks come up during the first call. Or in intro emails.
because you ask for their range, but you don't tell them your range.
From GP:
> I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer.
yes, never tell them what you are looking for until you know what they are offering and are ready to reject the offer.
Why not?
If you tell them what you are looking for, if they are honest, can say no or short-change you.
Or they can just lie and say yeah we cover that.
If you ask for their range, if they are honest, provide their range.
If dishonest, now they have to provide a range which is within the range you are looking for, and is probably more difficult to gauge.
I find it easier to lie on a yes or no question, than a question of quantity.
But in the end, if you provide a quote, they may save themselves money if you value yourself below market.
> But in the end, if you provide a quote, they may save themselves money if you value yourself below market.
There's no single market value for workers, because there's no one archetypical worker, especially not for the kind of knowledge work many people here do where you have salary negotiations at all.
So it's your responsibility as a candidate to portrait yourself as the highest and most valuable kind of worker and ask for compensation that's commensurate with that. That number is also part of the signalling.
> Or they can just lie and say yeah we cover that.
Well, you'll detect that lie at the latest when it comes to signing the contract. If you do, that's a big red flag and you will save yourself a lot of hassle by walking away.
> I find it easier to lie on a yes or no question, than a question of quantity.
I'm not sure that makes much of a difference. But let's grant it for the sake of argument: in that case, you giving them a number also has bigger signalling effect.
Why not?
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
For me, being fresh out of university, I didn't really think to press on salary too much and was just happy to land a job. In my first job, I recall not knowing the salary until I got the contract and offer (luckily, it was surprisingly above average pay).
When I moved into the software industry, I started to realise my worth a bit more and job-hopped for 10-50% pay bumps on an annual basis for the first few years and just started chasing higher salaries and turning down interviews unless they were in my desired range.
I know many other engineers who never changed this behaviour (or were never taught to be more ruthless and know their worth) and were just happy to receive any increase in salary - and as a result had 10+ years in the industry and had utterly pitiful salaries due to their employer simply taking advantage - you'll never receive the same increase in pay by remaining loyal to a company versus job hopping. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing in the UK or what but this is the type of advice that should be given in schools more IMO.
Yeah, this is my experience too, trading up every couple of years (though sometimes I've taken a sideways or slight downwards step to broaden my experience or work for somewhere that I thought was interesting or worthwhile). I've had a couple of longish spells at companies, 7 or 8 years, and in both those cases I left because my pay wasn't keeping pace with the market or my growing responsibilities and management wouldn't budge. The irony being that at those places i was at my most valuable because of my institutional and political knowledge. I think companies greatly undervalue the benefits of long term employees.
Same here. You don't even know what you're worth if you keep working at the same company. And even then, if you don't know what you could ask, you will never know how much you're really worth.
Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.
Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.
Just taking what you're offered is understandable when you're young and don't know any better. I think a lot if not most people had that experience with their first job(s). But there's no excuse for not taking agency over your own life when you're a bit older and more experienced. These people have to grow up and stop acting like kids, or accept that people will take advantage of them.
From the article, this self disclosure of range is part of the problem. People who have been given lower salaries in the past for discriminatory reasons may well low ball themselves if they offer up the range.
It's also within your power to negotiate price of emergency treatment. If they want too much, just turn and walk away. Look for a professional clinic. Firmly stand your ground.
Consider that a lot of people don't have the luxury of just not working until proper work appears. Because they have to pay for housing and food and if they don't have work, they would not be able to.
In software or other high paying jobs where you have experience in the industry this is true.
There are plenty of jobs where that is not true. I think the article using a picture of a jobscentre as a stock photo should give you a clue as to who it is there to help.
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
Sure, but the first phone call happens after you have already spent potentially hours putting together a tailored resume, cover letter, and 3 creative writing prompts about how you resolved a conflict with a coworker.
This way you reveal your salary expectations first, which gives the other side the upper hand, in case they were prepared to pay more than you expect.
And it was in their power to refuse. Now it won't be.
It baffles me completely that anyone provides a CV without knowing a pay range
Would you agree to buy a house before you knew what it costs?
Literally insane behaviour
There are a lot of people hunting for very few jobs, it's an employers market at the moment.
That's a pretty bad comparison. You aren't agreeing to work without knowing your pay. It's more like looking at a house before you know it's price.
Depending on your circumstances, that might be reasonable. If most people aren't quoting pay ranges and you need a job, not applying because of that isn't very smart.
I would make sure I knew the pay range before going through all the interview rounds, but not sending your CV in sounds too limiting to me.
To disqualify you before you had the chance to explain why you're a fitting match? Tell me, why do you make such stupid statements?
Advice for anyone in future.
Recruiters at big companies will be told to advertise the role within the payband (the min to max pay for that role at that pay band)
So if you see a top end number and think you’ll get that, you probably won’t it will be around the middle of the range.
At that point you go back to the recruiter and state that you would expect the top end of the range. They may agree with you but then keep in mind that may also impact your salary increase at the end of the year, meaning a smaller increase for you compared to your peers which over several years would even out and out you back in the middle of the payband like your peers. This is why the common idea is to jump roles every few years.
In my experience companies in the UK have a habit of labelling devs and engineers as senior extremely early in their career
> Some companies in UK pay senior devs £30-35k.
That is only about 50% more than full time minimum wage!
Agreed. I don't know what niche of software dev that is but we pay our graduates more than that
It's the reality when everybody uses AI to slop out a JD (which is only marginally better than before — where the poor sucker just human-slopped out something instead)
There are job ads in Canada for "senior" devs at non-tech shops for $70-$90k. There are signs you'd be the only dev at the shop (or one of very few)
Huh, I thought I was paid on the lower end for my field. Well, I suppose I still am (working for a NGO), but £30-35k is absurd. That's not reasonable for any skilled role, really. Why do people accept it? Are salaries for software in the UK generally very low? Even lower than Canada? I find it hard to believe, but then, I have no data to go off of.
There are pros and cons of working with external recruiters, but that they will know (and be willing to disclose) the salary range is absolutely one of them, as they don't want their time wasted either.
Besides ‘salary disclosure’, one other law that really helps improve salary is to ban potential employers from asking candidates’ current/previous salary. This avoids potential employers from offering just marginally better than candidates previous roles…
I got this once. I was equivocating, and then the guy was like, well, you're gonna give us your P60 when you join anyway, so you might as well tell me.
I was like, okay, fair enough.
I played it completely wrong though. I should have just reframed it and said, well, I paid this, but you're not competing against my current employer, you're competing against Meta, who I'm also interviewing with this week.
This is very dodgy on their part. Personal tax details should not leak out from the finance department.
In small companies this does mean people have to operate with internal Chinese walls in their heads.
for others like me
"A Chinese wall or ethical wall is an information barrier protocol within an organization designed to prevent exchange of information or communication that could lead to conflicts of interest. For example, a Chinese wall may be established to separate people who make investments from those who are privy to confidential information that could improperly influence the investment decisions. Firms are generally required by law to safeguard insider information and ensure that improper trading does not occur."
"Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage states that the metaphor title "derives of course from the Great Wall of China",[2] although an alternative explanation links the idea to the screen walls of Chinese internal architecture.[3]
The term was popularized in the United States following the stock market crash of 1929, when the U.S. government legislated information separation between investment bankers and brokerage firms, in order to limit the conflict of interest between objective company analysis and the desire for successful initial public offerings.[4] Rather than prohibiting one company from engaging in both businesses, the government permitted the implementation of Chinese-wall procedures."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall
though I still don't get the China reference, Great wall of China never really helped against any attacks or exchange of information, so I still don't get the etymology
I have never visited but I imagine two people one on either side cannot hear each other even if they shouted, and of course cannot see each other. The etymology need not be based on history or practical use.
I've lived in China and visited multiple times and you could certainly shout and hear someone from the other side (if you are not in touristy noisy section), it's really not that huge while you are right under the wall. I mean if you can shout in mountain and someone can hear you hundreds of meters away, they can certainly hear you over some 2-3 floors tall building.
Yep, the advice I always give people for this question is to respond:
"My current salary is xyz, but I'm currently interviewing with several companies, so my salary expectations are tied to what I'm worth in the market, not my current pay. My specific ask will change as interviews progress"
You don’t _have_ to give them a P60 though, right?
You do have to give them a P45 and they can work out your pay from your tax code.
You don't have to give a P45. It might mean that your first salary is on the wrong tax band, but that sorts itself out fairly quickly. See https://www.gov.uk/guidance/starter-checklist-for-paye
They also don't know if your tax band is due to salary, loans, deduction, pensions, second incomes etc.
HMRC seem to be able to provide a new employee's correct tax code almost instantly these days (part of the Making Tax Digital programme, maybe?).
I changed job last year and wasn't asked for a P45 by my new employer. Despite starting near month end, my first month's payslip already had the right tax code.
The days of being stuck paying emergency tax for months finally seem to be at an end!
i don't know what a P60 is, but you are unlikely required to give them anything except background checks and proof of qualifications until the salary is decided and the contract is signed.
Its usual to give your new employer the your P45 because they need that to calculate your tax.
after you negotiate the salary though. the point is that no information is disclosed until the salary is negotiated.
Candidates can just lie in Europe. There is no equivalent to The Work Number, for good reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_Number
Wow, I didn't know there is a whole service to share employees' data with corporations! As an European, I find the idea that I can't keep my salary private repulsive.
Which European? Norway, Sweden, and Finland let the public look up everyone else's salary!
i'd also like to ban asking for a salary expectation. it puts you in a very weak bargaining position. also my expectation depends very much on the type of work i'll be doing. i'll accept a lower salary for a good job and work environment, but i won't know that until after some interviews.
A candidate can just make up whatever number they want to respond though. Most candidates I interview usually say what they want to get, not the real number.
I don't think you can lie because that would be fraudulent. You can definitely refuse to answer though
It's not a clearly-defined number, though.
For instance, to compare with a contractor's day rate or an American view of "total comp", a UK employee will have to take their headline salary and add the value of all benefits, paid holiday days, employer pension contribution, Employer NICs, and potentially even the additional value from being able to take certain benefits through salary sacrifice.
Very few people who're used to being on PAYE will do all of that. They'll either just state the headline salary figure or stretch it a bit to cover some (but typically not all!) of the benefits. In other words, it's usual for many people in the UK to under-state the value of their total package even if they believe they're over-egging it.
I don't see what that has to do with my comment. Intentionally lying in the job application would be fraudulent.
In which country/jurisdiction?
I am not sure about other EU countries, but in Germany you have the right to lie in this situation since the question was very likely illegal in the first place. There are other topics which an employer is not allowed to ask about in German. For example about pregnancy or planned pregnancy. You always have the right to lie when you get one of these questions.
I've normally replied with "I'm looking for X - Y range", and if they push for my previous salary, I say "I make X all in", and include equity, benefits, etc in my number.
In the US, there's a good chance your employer voluntarily reports your salary to private groups, who then sell the data to other employers. So they will know if you're lying.
> The European Union adopted pay transparency rules the following year, giving member states until June 2026 to implement them in national law.
That's the first I've heard of it, and I've seen plenty of job postings the past year for European companies where there was no salary indication. See for example the recent HN Who's Hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50338728
Apparently, in France, the bill is not yet ready, and given the current state of legislative process, I don't think it's going to be ever voted before the next elections.
Again, member states miss European deadlines, but since it has no practical consequences, I don't see a why they would do it differently.
This is also the case in Germany, although here it has more so to do with the current government not wanting to implement this law, so they are dragging their feet and not doing it.
Same issue in Romania.
I wouldn't have been bothered if it where some exhaustive reform of the work law, but in practice it would amount to a couple of amendments. Probably could be drafted up in an afternoon.
Does the law, as implemented in their local member country, state that they have to state the salary range on that sort of post. There are a number of possible loopholes I can think of depending on how their regulations are written: it is an international posting, it is an informal/prospective posting, the information is available on their site (which they may or may not link to) etc.
Also “in the last year” means only ~50% of that time is covered by when enforcement started.
Some countries have yet to pass any legislation too, this happens quite a lot if you look into past EU declarations, so companies there might be using that as a loophole to act as if not yet be effectively covered (in theory they could be taken to court over it, but that is can be complicated, or at least expensive, when there is no local legislation yet, so in practise it is far less likely to happen). What action will be taken by the EU to push things forward, I'm not sure, presumably there is some sort of fine for extended non-compliance? The question of who you are advertising to and where from can get a bit complex if you are a company in a member state that has not yet enacted anything, especially when you operate out of more than one territory.
Most of the jobs in that HN thread do give a salary expectation (though a few with a very wide range, which might be outside the rules, but they were US anyway so not covered), I don't think I saw an EU one in my quick scan that did not (at least one UK one, but again those are not currently covered by such rules).
Yes, companies indeed break the law all the time. Most of the time, nobody with any power gives a fuck, and in the rare cases where they do, the consequences tend to be comfortably inside the “cost of doing business” range.
I haven't checked, but I believe that most member states have not yet passed the bill, despite the deadline of the european union.
So companies are not even breaking the law, just delaying the process...
The only real reason companies don’t want to put salary ranges on job adverts is that it triggers difficult conversations with staff they have been taking advantage of.
There's multiple reasons companies don't want to publish salaries, but they almost all boil down to wanting to pay people as little as they can get away with
Good companies see employees as partners, make sure incentives are aligned, and use transparency to empower their employees to make better choices with full awareness of the entire business. It's amazing how much more productive an employee can be if they believe in the missions, understand exactly how their work can benefit themselves, and have genuine trust that their employer has their back.
Do they say something about the min and max in the range being no more than X% apart? To prevent scenarios like "between £20,000 and £100,000".
No, but people will just assume the actual pay is £20k and decide whether to apply for it on that basis.
As an employer that ruins one of the classic ruses that has been going on for a while: take someone through multiple interviews and then lowball the candidate who seems the most desperate.
If you believe in free market economics I think we can expect this to be a mess for a little while and then within a year or two it gets relatively efficient at dealing with the inefficiencies it’s targeting: younger people just not wanting to play the bullshit game where employers dangle generous starting offers, and then rug pull them to 2/3rds of that number; and to fix the gender pay gap (and the smaller reaching ethnicity pay gap).
What do you think the fix to the gender pay gap is relevant to this conversation?
There is no gender pay gap in 20s, 30s with several areas now favouring women. The mean pay gap is entirely due to the percentage of women in their 40s+ taking time off work for motherhood.
Anecdotally, women in their 30s are disfavored for the “risk” of starting a family
The paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children. What percentage should have children? If you want a zero mean paygap, the answer has to be zero.
A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
The paygap is just a dial which controls the rate of motherhood.
There is no "per job" paygap. Nor could there plausibly be. For if any group could be paid less to do the same work, someone en mass would be, thus lowering the pay for that work. (Its unclear how such a rich source of free output from 50% of the population could go untapped, systematically).
Though even if that logic isnt persuasive, there is no measured per-job pay difference at an individual level. The "pay gap" describes a mean difference in pay at population level -- when you control for total hours worked, it disappears.
Even if this is true, the obvious solution in my mind is to allow sharing of parental leave.
We do already have this in the UK post partum, although there's also the ongoing matter of childcare, which judging by headcount at school pick-up time still leans heavily female today anecdotally.
Is it not possible to manage childcare around full-time jobs? Let's say dad takes the kids in at 8:45 then heads to work, while mum starts work at 7, finishes at 2:30 then goes to pick up the kids. School holidays complicate matters, but you have clubs and annual leave. And you can also both reduce working hours slightly.
A lot of people do not work in jobs where that flexibility is practical, regardless of the legal right to request flexible working in Britain.
That wouldnt "solve" the paygap, women still need to be out of the workforce for O(1yr) per child. That would be an "individual" pay gap of around 10% for a women who has two children.
> women still need to be out of the workforce
Do they? I've seen women take 6 months or even 3 months maternity leave, with their partner stepping in to support.
So you think the average human female, bearing a child for 9months, should be off work only 1.5months either side of giving birth?
For what purpose are we saying such crazy things? Why is it so important to place all members of the human species on the same rack, stretch them to the same length, and maim them till they fit?
How have we, as a civilisation, become so terrified of difference?
Nothing of the sort; just providing a counterpoint to what was an overly strong/confident assertion that "woman need to be out of the workforce for O(1yr)". Those women didn't feel forced either way - they made a plan with their partner based on what leave they each had available to them and how much they each valued their work vs parenthood.
Also, 1.5 months off prior to the due date is more than normal. Most women work until 2-4 weeks before.
allow is not enough, it would have to be required. otherwise couples are still under pressure to let men work and let women take the leave.
Why is noramlizing a population statistic, like average pay, more important to you than motherhood?
I've never met a mother who wanted to be in work full time. What exactly do zoom meetings, email threads, and spreadsheets get you in life?
I'm not one to say "captialism has gone too far", but perhaps in this case at least, isnt it mad to force average labour hours to be the same across sexes "just because" ?
women who do not want to work are not forced to. this is about women who do want to work but are forced to take the full parental leave instead of sharing it equally with the father because men are pressured to not take any parental leave lest it affects their career.
the goal is to require men to take equal parental leave in order to remove that pressure and put women and men on a more equal position when it comes to children.
today women are considered a hiring risk because they might have children and take parental leave. if fathers were required to take parental leave as well, then the risk would be more similar for both.
> if fathers were required to take parental leave as well, then the risk would be more similar for both
I wonder what the economic implications are when both parents take leave instead of just one (e.g. twice the overhead for finding temporary cover, short-term liquidity impact for employer and public benefit funds)
those are the economic implications for a society that wants to have children. the right for men to take parental leave already exists (in some countries at least). so the economic implications are already a reality. that being a problem is why men are under pressure. forcing leave makes sure that employers get to face the reality. and it puts businesses on equal footing, because now they all need to do that. as a business owner i am no longer at a disadvantage compared to other businesses if i allow men to take leave.
I got your point and I am still interested in the full picture of what I posted before
> What exactly do zoom meetings, email threads, and spreadsheets get you in life?
OK, now ask the same question of fathers.
> I've never met a mother who wanted to be in work full time.
This is as daft an argument as me saying "my wife is one so all women must be"
In the UK it essentially is, one of the two parents can take the full parental leave. It does not have to be the mother. Guess who still chooses to raise their kid instead of creating shareholder value in bullshit jobs most of the time.
You've actually disproven your claim.
> The paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children.
> A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
Your claims are disproven by your own math.
A paygap over that period would be a 3% to 8% drop due to child rearing, not 10%, if we accept your claims.
In reality, in the US women do not usually take 1 year off per child. Paid maternity leave is 12 weeks by federal law. That creates a "motherhood-caused" paygap of only 0.75% to 2%.
Demonstrably not true. One of the drivers of the legislation is to reduce the number of employment tribunals brought about for cases of pay discrimination where the overwhelming evidence is that women are paid less than men at every level of expertise and age.
We have the data on the average hours women work, it's ~1mo/yr less. We also know the pay gap, its 1mo/yr. The effect due to differential pay is a rounding error.
We can also do the simulation trivially using empirical data, women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career across male/female populations
The claim that the economy sustains a free markdown on 50% of the population's labour is mad. What force of nature is keeping a mass of businesses forming just hiring this cheap labour? Why arent there businesses booming hiring, en mass, women?
Either way, aside from that madness. The effect is, to a significant figure, entirely explained by working duration not differential pay.
And I've personally known no mothers who think the population of women is better served by reducing their part-time work, and having them work more.
> women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career.
And people wonder why professional women don't want to have children any more.
We've created a society which economically punishes people for having kids. I don't think anyone should be surprised that the fertility rate is declining.
The lifetime pay for a median UK worker @40yr @35k/yr ~= 1.4mil
The "cost" of two children, with above numbers, for "mean woman" is 20% of pay -- so she earns ~1.1m
Presented on a deathbed: would you have preferred to earn 1.4mil over your working life and have neither of your two children, or 1.1m and have both?
The question would seem an absurdity. Bearing in mind that 300k comes with a lifetime of zoom calls and emails, and not much else.
Now if you want to pay women to have children, that's a proposal I'd be open to -- it would reduce the pay gap by significant tax rises, and so on. Nevertheless, I've not met any mothers who wanted to work more nor would take the trade for 1.4 over 1.1 (this, of course, doesnt control for tax credits or welfare -- which both perform this redistribution anyway).
We don't have any real firm details yet, the pre-legislative consultation only closed last week.
However that consultation said this:
>We propose to introduce this requirement [pay transparency in recruitment] through a delegated power, enabling regulations to specify exact requirements. For example, the size of a salary range.
Right, we have these laws in my state but they are almost completely useless because of that. Most large companies will post ranges like $100,000 - $200,000, and have a secret internal "real" range that they won't share with you.
it would make more sense to just state median salary for this position in company advertising the job, unless it's completely new position/company, where the min/max would have % limits
That’s as ridiculous as some of the job postings here with a range of $100K-300K. Without bounding the range in some way like you say, this does absolutely nothing.
Example: https://www.enduranceenergy.com/careers/2af3b48c-4e20-420a-b...
https://westkite.com/careers-software-engineer
Used to work in a company where every salary was disclosed for all employees. There was a constant stream of people going to their boss "why aren't I getting what [$EMPLOYEE] is getting?". Most of them didn't like the answer, and the answer was not "[$EMPLOYEE] negotiated better". There were in fact clear milestones, competencies, responsibilities, and most significantly... for want of a better word... "campaign ribbons" that [$EMPLOYEE] had earned, that the eager junior would need to earn in order to get to that salary. Many of these decided they didn't want to acquire them.
Publishing individual salaries is a stupid way to do it. Instead publish salaries for the title/level. It's far easier to justify why one employee is "senior" and another is "associate". Even more so when there's a well defined career ladder with expectations at each level.
I totally agree.
When I’ve raised this to a CEO that was bragging that he gives competitive salaries but can’t disclose it, he said that a person that asks for the range before the interview it’s in it for the money.
he said that a person that asks for the range before the interview it’s in it for the money
any CEO who says that is also just in it for the money and wants to exploit employees.
what do you expect me to do? work for free?
Feels like a law requiring prices on shop shelves. Isn't it self interest to put the salary in the ad? So much saved time. And probably more suitable applicants. I don't apply for a job without knowing the salary. Or via recruiters that tell you upfront (they usually do).
My issue with mandated ranges is how to require the range to be narrow enough, without preventing the candidate from negotiating?
If you don't have any narrowness requirements, you can have a job where the range is $50k-500k, which is useless. If you narrow it to — let's say — 10% of the midpoint, you can say $180k-220k, but then you're not allowed to hire the perfect candidate who won't accept less than $250k, even though you would actually want to pay this much given that person's skills. If the candidate is allowed to negotiate upwards, ranges may gradually, over the course of years, drift downwards, with an implicit understanding that they are unrepresentative of the actual salary you are likely to earn.
With an infinite number of employers and an infinite number of candidates, you would always be able to find the perfect candidate for your mix of requirements and pay them the exact salary that matches those requirements. The real world isn't like that, though, and if you, as an employer, have an offer available, you will get candidates who are under and over qualified for the specific offer you had in mind, and you might nevertheless be able to find a spot for them at some salary that both of you are willing to accept.
> My issue with mandated ranges is how to require the range to be narrow enough, without preventing the candidate from negotiating?
So few candidates so rarely have the power to negotiate above what the hidden range already is, that this is a non-issue.
We really shouldn't be deciding policy based on the outliers, besides which those people (the outliers) that can dictate a number higher than the range already set aren't hired from advertisements anyway, making the whole "but we can't do this because it would affect those who don't apply respond to job ads"...
No one is saying you cannot negotiate. It's forcing them to simply make the first offer as opposed to making an offer at all.
> but then you're not allowed to hire the perfect candidate who won't accept less than $250k
You are allowed to hire whoever you want. How could you come to your conclusion? You are allowed to hire people without making job ads at all, for that matter. You are allowed to hire 10 people for a position even if you only advertised 1. And of course you are allowed to pay more than initially advertised.
> but then you're not allowed to hire the perfect candidate who won't accept less than $250k
Says who? No one is saying you aren't allowed to go over the advertised range.
This is great news and an easy win. Not disclosing salary information disproportionately affects people from a lower socio-economic background.
I understand the frustration this is born from, but find it hard to imagine a practical rule set that will actually do more good than harm.
1. To be meaningful at all, the legislation must only allow narrow ranges, e.g. 10%, so that employers can't put 30-90K in the description.
2. In addition, you would have to make the application very specific to a given position. If the employer can say "you don't qualify for L7 that you applied for, buuut... we could transfer your application to the L5 track", then we are back to where we started.
3. On the other hand, any super-rigid rule like this will hurt both employers and employees who are actually trying to fill a real position. It will hurt even more the few remaining companies that are looking for people and not just labeled cogs in the machine.
I want this to work, but it has the smell of compliance theater.
I dunno I see a lot of broad ranges in the US but it's still a lot better than nothing. And they can list multiple levels in the job ad. I can see these being pointless but I can't imagine it being harmful.
>2. In addition, you would have to make the application very specific to a given position. If the employer can say "you don't qualify for L7 that you applied for, buuut... we could transfer your application to the L5 track", then we are back to where we started.
In banking, there's various thresholds for transfers or deposits or withdrawals that require scrutiny or reporting. There's also laws that amount to "Don't fuck with us" around deliberately narrowly avoiding those thresholds.
I think that this law could have a similar "Don't fuck with us" clause, where a company can reasonably adjust what jobs they offer people that apply to their posted jobs occasionally, but if they're clearly deliberately misleading applicants, they get penalized enough to make it cost more than they benefit.
In Italy this feature has become mandatory this summer and we've been observing some good patterns (companies that do not find anyone because the salary is too low compared to responsibilities). We have also seen interesting hacks, companies reporting from 20k to 150k for an intership position.
I agree this is overall great, and will work for most companies and jobs. I'm wondering how it will work for companies where bonuses and RSUs / stock is a large part of their compensation. Or companies where their compensation legitimately has incredibly wide ranges. FAANG, big tech companies, banks, etc. can plausibly say "£100k up to [insert absurdly large number]" when talking about engineers, especially if they're hiring specialty roles like PhDs.
We have salary disclosure in our State which requires you to give a "general overview" of other compensation beyond salary. My guess is they'd mandate something similar. What I do still see are the absurd ranges. I think I had a range of something like 70% between min and max in my current role when I took it? The effect has been that the "range" becomes a mandate to post a minimum that you'll actually pay in terms of salary with the max number on the range having little basis in reality.
They need to make sure it’s total comp (equity and bonus) while they are at it. The CA postings that only show base salary are borderline useless
I am not sure this will do what I think it is designed to do. The current problem is, for example, people who are not confident enough to ask for more money being paid consistently less than others who are doing the same job. These people are likely to be female and/or from a minority group.
The problem is, if you haven't noticed yet, that it might work for a low/semi-skilled job like e.g an estate agent "£25-30K + £10K OTE bonus depending on experience". But it doesn't work for artistic or highly bespoke jobs like doctors, lawyers, some types of engineers etc. where the salary range can be much larger. Does it really help anyone to say, "Wanted: Software Engineers. Salary £25-100K depending on experience and skill"? Lots of ads already show that, people might think they are worth near the top end and get low-balled with an offer (fairly or unfairly) whereas the people who are not confident are still likely to get paid less money.
As for telling everyone what everyone is paid, that opens even more cans of worms. It is not always easy to describe that the other person gets paid £10K more than you because they have e.g. "a better attitude" (says who?), "is more productive" (based on what?) etc. and tbh, it is not usually completely objective.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss. If you are all about money, then ask for what you think you are worth and if you don't get it, move jobs. I think what other people get paid should be nothing to do with you.
> The current problem is, for example, people who are not confident enough to ask for more money being paid consistently less than others who are doing the same job.
As far as I know, women who ask for more money are received less positively than men! So the risk/reward calculus for women and minorities are different, since ambition actually hurts you more.
Awesome. Salary shouldn't be so secretive as it is right now.
That's already the case where I live, but some companies use the trick that they advertise a job with high salary, and once you apply they says "sadly this job is no longer available, but we have this similar one we haven't advertised yet", which of course comes with lower salary.
I hope this will a real law, not the phony one passed here. They should literally exile from country the person responsible for that mockery. It goes something like this: The salary range has to be included in job add or provided to job seeker at the latest upon signing the contract.
That entire sentence could be stricken out and nothing would change.
What?? That’s ridiculous, in which country do you live? Oss there ever a situation where they wouldn’t provide the salary even on the contract?
>literally exile from country
What? And sort your grammar out, I got a headache reading it.
> I got a headache reading it.
You should probably speak to a neurologist about that, their grammar was hardly egregious
In UK, in my experience, companies always do release this (at least in tech). They might give a range, but it si there.
European companies on the other hand, have made me jump thru hoops and the nlow ball me
>The government will soon introduce legislation to parliament making salary disclosures mandatory, Burnham's office said, although it did not provide a timeline.
won't happen
Make companies post anonymized salary lists next
Can we also make it mandatory to reply to a job application, even just an automated "sorry, your application has been rejected", so you know whether to keep considering that job?
If you do t hear back in a week, they’re just not that into you. Silence is an answer.
As a small employer, I don't mind to provide a number. I'll always provide a number if I have one in mind.
But anything intellectual, me providing a number is not as useful as you think. Often, I just don't know. Especially hiring outside my expertise.
I assume every applicant is worth $0 and it's up to them to convince me otherwise. I'm willing to go as high as you can convince me. .
The number you write isn't what the person is worth but what the position you are hiring for is worth.
For a small business, that's often pretty hard to define. How much is your first marketing hire worth? Depends on how much business they bring in and how much they can get done before you need the second one. You can't identify in advance what marketing work is to be done and how important it will be - that's what you need the marketing hire for!
I'm not saying it's impossible to comply with salary disclosure, but it's harder than people think to make the disclosure "real".
I mean you've got to pay them something while you wait to find out how much business they'll end up bringing in, so you can start with that...?
Unless you're paying on contingency, in which case you can absolutely just advertise that you're paying directly on contingency and provide the formula. That seems fine to me.
Could they potentially just choose to pay more than the disclosure?
This is the only market where people think this is a reasonable thing to do, mostly because it's the only market in which most people are sellers not buyers.
Imagine if the government passed a law saying that when you got to a restaurant (or car wash, or bookstore, etc) you had to declare to the business what you're willing to pay before we see the menu so that the business could adjust their prices accordingly.
Because it's not about who's the seller or who's the buyer, it's about who has a whole institutional structure set up for doing the thing and who is doing it casually. When you walk into a pawn shop or one of those tacky-looking high street gold buyer places, you may sell them your valuables or buy someone else's valuables, but either way the shop is the shop and you are the customer. You don't become the shop when the shop is buying from you.
Pro tip. When a recruiter contacts you with a position, the literal first message you send should be a request for salary range. In my experience they will tell you ~80% of the time and then you proceed normally. This saves untold hours on both ends.
Ha in the European Union, the workarounds are vast and came fast, now it doesn't have to be in the job listing but upon first real interaction or something along the lines, and then I've seen job ads saying 1-5000 euro per month.
Ghost jobs and such practices should demand mandatory time in the slammer and business foreclosure
The worst is when you apply and they ask for a range which you give.. then you get rejected because you demanded too much. Bitch, negotiate.
I suspect the devil will be in the details here. How will it be enforced? Can companies get away with silly wide ranges?
I saw that almost all Netflix dev jobs, regardless of level, advertise as something like $120,000-$720,000. Which… okay, that’s a range but it’s not a useful one.
Maybe one of the hiring managers lurking here can make an exception and admit their true rationale.
For now, I suspect the main issue is: you don't want the fallout of advertising the job at current market rate of £60k when all your existing employees are on £40k for the same position.
Whilst we're at it can we also have job adverts that say upfront what the employer does rather than just providing a generic job description please?
actual salary = min(salary range);
Not the reality in sectors that already do this, like the civil service, but it will cap the upper limit that people can negotiate to.
Even if the minimum does apply everywhere, it fixes the inequalities gap that is causing so much economic drag in the UK: white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies. If everyone gets the bottom of the band, at least everyone gets the same, and that’s been an important goal for multiple UK governments of different political stripes over many decades for reasons to complex to go into here (and no, it’s not “political correctness”, it’s far more complex than that).
I also don’t think it likely means average salaries come down, I just think it means the distributions narrow.
> white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies
I think this would be illegal under the Equality Act (which does not of course mean it doesn't happen), can you offer some examples or further reading?
I assume one day the racism and sexism in the commenter you're replying to will be addressed.
Until then, you are quite correct. The pay gap is not a feature of individual jobs, but a population effect due to women in their 40s+ not being in the labour force.
It is illegal in the UK to pay differently, and there are many high profile cases of this being enforced even to the point of absurdity (such as forcing councils to pay bin-men/trash-collectors the same as female office admin workers).
Likewise as the mean pay for women is ~1month/yr lower, the mean hours men work, as a population is ~1month/yr longer. Thus there is no pay gap once you control for hours worked.
Incidentally, the only way there could be no mean pay gap across both populations would be if no women had children. So a non-trivial paygap merely an indirect measure of the birth rate.
Your posts are REALLY focused on "proving" women aren't actually discriminated against in pay. Almost like a vendetta.
My concern is that the pay gap is a population effect. There are "discriminatory" population effects, depending on how you define the issue. I've no stake in that. I am irritated by the claim that its an individual effect, because it isn't and it is such an implausible claim given here in this thread by a racist and a sexist.
> white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies
Is there any evidence that’s the case?
Yes.
There are two elements to women being paid less. Both exist, but they are deliberately conflated for reasons.
One is that women do get paid less for the same job on average.
The second is that jobs which women tend to do get paid less than jobs which men tend to do, either through different industries or through different opportunities.
It’s not as clear as “yes” though, and there is little evidence boiling down to the “same job” disparity.
You're being misleading.
“Chinese and Indian employees had higher earnings compared with White British employees, while Bangladeshi and Pakistani employees earned less compared with White British employees.”
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
This is more noteworthy than weaker studies which attempt, often poorly, to assess pay differentials between employees in the exact same role at the exact same company.
No. This claim relies on deceptive definitions of "exact same role".
Employment tribunals in the UK now regularly conclude that jobs which are clearly different are actually the same, essentially as a bung to women. For example, stating that working in a warehouse lifting boxes all day is the same job as working on a checkout till sitting on a seat, or that being a librarian has the same value as a guy collecting garbage. Being a bin man is much higher paid because it's a dangerous, dirty and low status job that people don't want to do, so the incentives have to be correspondingly higher to attract workers, but delusional left wing tribunals declare by fiat that they're the same as highly feminized jobs that are clean and safe.
This is causing chaos in Britain, for example in Birmingham where trash just doesn't get collected because the bin men went on strike:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Birmingham_b...
> The council also says that the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role does not exist at other councils, and that retaining the role opens it up to equal pay claims, since it is performed mainly by men.[2] In March 2025, the council declared a major incident after 17,000 tonnes of rubbish were left uncollected on the streets.
You’re cherry picking.
Look at the wider picture of unfair pay employment tribunals that are driving HMG to introduce this legislation and you’ll see the problem is real, systemic and decades old.
I have personally had to advise boards that their discussion of compensation adjustments to women of child bearing age are illegal, it is a rife and widespread practice and absurd.
white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies
Quick reminder of the classic takedown of that misleading nonsense:
Cathy Newman interviewing Jordan Peterson on the gender pay gap etc
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xg2psply4no
Original:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54
I've seen that. Cathy Newman being a terrible interviewer doesn't mean the thing they're talking about is actually false. But if we are doing ad hominem against Cathy, I think we should also consider it fair against Jordan: a while after this interview, he went to Russia for medical treatment banned in America and Canada, ended up with a severe addiction to benzodiazapenes and disappeared entirely from public life. He is not somebody I would rely upon for accurate information even though he was good at public speaking.
Given the government is introducing the legislation to stop the cycle of unfair pay employment tribunals (that are often successful), I think you’re not looking at the same data set they are.
I think you are looking at it through identity-tinted glasses.
You didn't need to bring colour and gender into it.
I wouldn’t if the data from tribunals suggested employers didn’t. Unfortunately they do, so here we are.
Well, the video explains the misunderstanding. Its not about gender or race in the way you present it, but a wide variety of factors.
You're citing Jordan Peterson as evidence of something?
Who's next, Alex Jones?
Hiring managers will be surprised when they set a price they’re willing to pay and qualified candidates start rolling in
The pay range for this position will be between £20,000 and £400,000 per year based on the candidate’s experience
Back in the 1970's, it was common to do this in Canada... well, Nova Scotia..., well, Halifax... maybe.
People will make out hiding salaries is some grand conspiracy, but if you've ever been on the other side of hiring, people just don't know.
Would you like to have to pin your salary on your CV? Probably you are hopeful you can get as much as possible. And employers look for a deal. It works both ways.
I agree that personally I'd prefer to see the salary on the job advert. But state meddling generally leads to unexpected outcomes.
>but if you've ever been on the other side of hiring, people just don't know.
I've spent my entire career on the other side of hiring and I've yet to encounter a single valid excuse for not knowing, and subsequently not advertising, a salary range. Before you hire, you need to know if you can afford to hire. If you know you can afford to hire, you know what you can afford to pay. It really is that simple.
Affordability is different to declaring your position at the outset.
For example, when I buy a used car or a house, I know what my budget is. But I'm not telling the seller that upfront. Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget. I'd rather pay below my budget if I can.
The only excuse for forcing employers to do declare is that you want to hold them to a higher ethical standard. Not because there's no reason to do otherwise strategically.
>Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget.
Yeah I get the whole "if we advertise a range, everyone will demand the top of the range" argument. Unfortunately, that assumption has never held true.
I'm on the other side also. There really is no minimum, only a maximum. But most often, I'd get cold feet before paying anywhere near the maximum.
Few jobs won't have a market salary. I think for exec jobs there could be an exception here. You may want to pay one person double the other and even define different role for them. But for a welder or junior dev it should be easy to define and figure out.
> People will make out hiding salaries is some grand conspiracy
In the US, the National Labor Relations Act covers this situation. The NLRB says that discussing wages/salaries is a covered "labor organizing activity" and it is a violation of the NLRA to prevent employees from discussing wages.
> If you are an employee covered by the Act, you may discuss wages in face-to-face conversations, over the phone, and in written messages. Policies that specifically prohibit the discussion of wages are unlawful as are policies that chill employees from discussing their wages. When using electronic communications, like social media, keep in mind that your employer may have policies against using their equipment for unauthorized use, though it is possible such policies could be unlawful.
> You may have discussions about wages when not at work, when you are on break, and even during work if employees are permitted to have other non-work conversations. You have these rights whether or not you are represented by a union.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
29 USC 151-169 is the NLRA:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/chapter-7/subchap...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act_o...
NLRB:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board
I know what salary range I would tell employers if we both had to give a range, but they don't so I don't.
Cool, more free market dynamics.
Everything everywhere should have its price advertised, jobs, healthcare stuff (not just insurance, but procedures, prescriptions, etc), services, etc
I just ignore entirely any job that doesn’t have a range listed in the job description, because unfortunately they try to make it a business deal rather than a compensation for someone’s experience or knowledge at the end.
Even better than salary disclosure is collective bargaining. Then its doesn't matter if they disclose anything, you'll get the industry agreed salary matching your seniority - and then you can negotiate from there.
No! Think of the children!
How will they be motivated to finish school if they can see what the starting salaries really are ?!?!?
In America companies love to play games, maybe it’ll work in Britain though.
I firmly believe the salary should be fixed, non negotiable and public information.
Cash > equity. But in America workers have no real rights, even with proof your boss lied to you to deny your right to equal pay not many options exist.
Wage theft is the number one form of theft in the US.
as with anything, use it as a signal upon which to filter or rank opportunities. its wise to invest our time on those who demonstrate they value us the most. simply reciprocate back. why? life short, time precious.
meaningless legislation if it means, employer can just publish range somewhere between legal minimum wage and let's say double of what they will pay you, so you will gain absolutely zero knowledge what is the actual range
if the law wasn't toothless they should make it mandatory to publish median salary for this position in specific advertising company, then you would know median of your future colleagues (and so would they)
would be a red flag against that employer
There are all kinds of reforms needed in that space; like whether a position is eligible for internal hire or not, requiring that a job posting must lead to someone being hired, making it illegal for jobs to be posted on fake foreign job sites in order to claim no native job demand exists as justification to import foreign labor, requiring a 100% visa employment tax on the fully burdened rate, making all executive bonuses taxable at 100% for any company that hires Visa/foreign labor, etc.
Such laws do not really help in practice. Does a 60-90k range in EU, commonly given to engineering roles, offer any real guidance? A better system would be publishing the average salary for a similar role, but that would be a privacy problem for a low headcount team, or if the role doesn't exist yet... This is a really hard problem.
It's actually not hard at all, it's only a problem for companies if they fail to keep it secret. Norway has had their tax records public for ages https://www.weforum.org/stories/economic-growth/norway-can-s... and their society and economy seems fine, except they it's extremely easy for new grade to know what they can ask for.
The "complications" are basically employer and manager propaganda because the information asymmetry suits them better than people realising they are undervalued and leaving
Salaries being a public record does come with some downsides for employees.
For the low-paid, it can make it even harder to get credit, or a place to rent, and it can be used for other kinds of discrimination. For the highly-paid, service providers and sales people can use the information to increase the prices you pay and make negotiation harder.
More transparency in a society is for the better. This shouldn't stop at salaries. Why aren't service providers required to disclose what they charge others? Why aren't dentists, lawyers, surgeons etc... required to report their stats? All of those would break information asymmetry and make for better decisions all around and less scams.
Credit isn’t a problem - your salary is already known as you provide bank statements etc. in the uk there are maximum rent:salary ratios for example.
Parasitical private equity firms maximising their prices is a reasonable worry.
your bank already knows your salary, and if they don't they are going to ask for it as a condition to give you credit. in some countries landlords ask for proof of income too. the less regulated these areas, the more likely that is going to happen.
In Scandinavia you need to provide salary information to get any kind of credit anyway.
Even better, grocery stores might make various discounts and promotions eligible based on whether you belong to a certain bottom percentile of income. That’s the holy grail of price discrimination („milk them for all they have”), which is now attempted to achieve only through imperfect means such as premium brands, up-sells etc.
Ranges are still somewhat useful. If they low-ball the upper bound, anyone expecting close or above the upper bound is unlikely to apply. So there is incentive to be honest about that end at least. But as an applicant (or current employee), knowing the upper bound the company is willing to pay for this position is useful information for salary negotiations (and to enable you to spend your limited time and resources in applying to well-paid jobs)
Obviously it's not perfect. But as you say, it's a difficult problem. And salary ranges are at least something
In my experience, they will offer a bit above the advertised minimum of the range. So if I wasn't happy with £60,000, I wouldn't consider that job, and I definitely wouldn't apply on the basis that maybe they'll offer £90,000.
I think that it does. If you’re looking for a 120k a year job you know that you won’t have to apply.
Of course it helps. Often if a company is not advertising their salary it's because they're either trying to lowball you or the current staff
That's fine though - As long as they're publishing the actual range that they like realistically pay someone, there's literally nothing wrong with that.
Would that actually be a good thing? When a company publishes the salary range, that means the job seeker agrees to that range, including maybe getting the lower part of the range. Companies know that, and now they have the advantage to put lower ranges.
if i don't agree to the range then i don't need to bother applying. saves me lot's of time.
if i apply despite not liking the range i can still say no and ask for more, but not knowing the range in advance is unlikely to raise the chance of that happening.
How is that going to work if you interview Bob for X task at Y pay, but discover Bob would be much better suited for A task that is worth more salary? What if Bob didn't meet the requirements for X, but would be a perfect fit for B task that is not worth as much salary?
The requirement is to publish either minimal salary or salary range for the position from the advertisement. If company has several positions available then specific minimal salaries should be given for each.
Sometimes companies create a specific position for an interviewee after getting to know the candidate. For example, a candidate might have an unexpected unusual skill.
What does that have to do with providing a salary range for a particular job posting? That specific position created should also have a range - publish that. Normally you have to interview other candidates for this position too.
That would be making it difficult to adapt the job to fit the person.
Unless you’re some VP/Director/Distinguished Eng/C-level etc, this doesn’t happen in practice. Those jobs don’t follow normal job posting rules anyway, they’re usually sought out.
99.99% of the time, I doubt the job is ever adapted for the person. They come in with that skillset and are usually expected to grow and meet the needs of the other job areas.
So, you want the 1 in 10 000 (likely 1 in 1 000 000) hyperspecific job posting to affect the rules for the rest?
And nothing stops them from doing that
And then the candidate sues claiming bait and switch.
The candidate isn't going to complain if you give them _more_.
Why would you sue for that? There's no contract in place
And in any normal court they will lose since its a different position and they agreed (paper trail) for that switch. Or they could be just let go if company is too careful. Not that such situation happens often in real world, I never even heard about even one.
If they would sue it would also burn their professional creds permanently, nobody sane would ever want to hire such a problematic person.
Nothing is stopping them from paying more than they advertised or hiring them for another position.
Then you tell Bob about how he would be much better suited for job A or B, explain how the pay is less, and if he's cool with it, directly put his CV into the pile for that job. If he's not cool with it, shake his hand and wish him a good day
What if there was no job posting with a defined salary for A or B?
Sounds like lose-lose.
If you're not hiring for that job, why are you telling Bob that he'd be really well suited there?
Well then they'd be interviewing for a different job. I assume it's no different at any other company where they actually do include the salary range
Cancel the job posting - advertise again for A task, Bob already passed some of the stages, maybe see a few more candidates for A task and boom you are in business.
Presumably the law will be written to account for advertised role != assigned role, but it can't account for gaming the system by never hiring exactly the advertised position.
Sounds like a recipe for a lot of time and money wasted in court.
Ideally they reapply if it’s a lesser role and the pay is lower than the previously posted minimum.
I suspect that kind of bait and switch will become the norm.
You can always walk away if you don't like the company's offer.
If companies engage in behavior intended to deceive, they are wasting people's time, which has an economic cost >$0.
Nothing says you can't negotiate, does it?
The law seems to be about preventing negotiating.
The law is about information asymmetry. That doesn't prevent negotiation, it just changes the dynamics and power balance.
The replies are all about workarounds for the law.
So what is the point of the law, if there are all these workarounds?
Isn't it a shithole anyway? Outside London, I've seen senior engineer ads for 39K GBP per annum :) I'm pretty sure delivery chaps make much more...
Labour's approach to problems is to tax employers into oblivion and then say "the reason salaries are so low is because we didn't ban them from posting adverts without salary disclosure".
How is this taxing companies? They already have the data.
To be clear, I mean employment is already taxed extremely highly.
Burnham put cost of living as his highest priority, then this is the kind of measures he comes out with. If you think more red tape and bureaucracy is going to help then I've got nothing.
This isn’t red tape or bureaucracy though. Many things are, but not this. Infact it actually reduces waste for both comapnies and citizens because they won’t have people applying who will turn down due to the salary.
Forcing employers to declare information is bureaucracy.
The opposite to bureaucracy is allowing them to approach hiring however they see fit.
Hardly an “excessively complicated administrative procedure”
In modern Britain it's death by a thousand cuts for anyone brave enough to start a business in this regulatory environment.
Opposite to bureaucracy is cash in hand and paying no taxes - that will make the businesses boom.
Advertising salaries upfront lifts the salaries. Study a bit harder man, you will make it.
Unlike the other side (tm) ...
Mandatory Gender Pay Gap Reporting (Conservative Party 2017)
Pay Transparency Pilot (Conservative Party 2022) - (Participating employers only) list salary ranges on all job adverts and stop asking applicants for their salary history during recruitment
That's why they call it the uniparty after all.
For some reason cultists get all excited that one particular person is single handedly destroying everything that is great and true - by doing the same thing their lord and saviour does.
This political timeline is the worst.
You're really clutching at straws to spin this pro-employee move into some way to claim that Labour are bad
Why do they have to disclose the obvious? The salary is GBP 25000 gross annually.