However companies don't want to compete on salary, and potentialy drive them up - they want maximum leverage. They get more leverage if process is obscure, so that you only agree salary late in the process and for the applicant, pulling out is risky.

The market is not really free - its being manipulated by one side.

Similarly with healthcare you don't know how much you will be charged upfront, so there is no competition on price.

With housing (in UK) there is no competition on quality because the seller doesn't have to disclose any problems with the house. If it falls of a cliff the minute you sign on the dotted line, it's your problem.

You have to pay for the surveyor to find out any issues the house might have, and that means you can only view a few houses before you've paid the house price in survey fees.

I'm in the UK and that's absolutely not true. If you think the owner knew about the problem and purposefully omitted telling you, then you definitely have a court case and any law firm worth their salt will win this. I bought a house recently and the documents the sellers had to fill out for the solicitors very clearly say there are are no known issues with this house, so if that's a lie then the sale can be rendered null and void.

>>You have to pay for the surveyor to find out any issues the house might have, and that means you can only view a few houses before you've paid the house price in survey fees.

I've had a few mortgages so far and I'm yet to find a bank not willing to cover the cost of a full survey, as the bank also wants to know the house they are securing the loan against is actually worth the money.

I do not understand how the mortgage helps you - you are still paying for it, and if the survey uncovers issues, you either take mortgage on a house with problems, or you are out of pocket.

If you pull out, and next house you view has issues too, you have to take it because at some poijt you run out of money

> In the US this only costs a few hundred dollars for a typical house, which is a tiny fraction of the overall transaction price.

You know what's even better than _only_ a couple of hundred dollars? The seller paying it once.

It's the same in Sweden, that the seller does and pays for a survey. Still common for the buyer to request to be allowed to get a second independent survey done. Of course the seller can refuse to allow a second survey, but that in itself is quite telling.

Also, even if the money first comes out of the sellers pocket, it’s still being paid by the buyer in the houses cost.

I wouldn’t trust an inspector chosen at random, much less an inspector chosen by the seller.

To be clear, I don’t care who is paying - as long as I pick the inspector.

Surely you do not hire an independant accountant every time you buy stocks?

I had a friend who bought a house with major termite damage (i.e., every wall had to be removed to repair the studs basically), and 2 inspectors overlooked the damage. He said in retrospect (after doing a bunch of research on termite damage), it should have been obvious to inspectors, but they missed it.

He tried to pursue legal action against either the seller or the inspectors, and basically was told: impossible to prove seller knew (as there was no repairs done), and inspectors are not held liable.

If you really don't know anything about houses (or feel as if you do not), then having someone walk you through some of the things you may have to face living in a particular house is probably a good idea.

However, even as just an enthusiastic amateur, I know more about home construction and repair than most home inspectors. When I bought my current house I skipped the home inspector, and hired an electrician, a roofer and a structural engineer. It cost me more, but I got seriously informed reports about the property, not just boilerplate fill-in-the-blank PDFs telling me that one of the windows rattled.

An auditor hired by the buyer has no such incentive.

The “regulatory capture” principle might apply here – an auditor only meets any one client once in their life, but probably meets some landlords many times, presumably develops a relationship with them, and might want to tend to not upset that relationship.

“On the hook” has different meanings when you have the enforcement power of the US federal government and criminal courts versus an individual who has to cough up tens of thousands for lawyers in civil court.

Of course not, I let the short sellers do it for me.

Also, making decisions around catching Tesla or GME at the right timing in the market… that’s not a great starting point for investment strategy.

I thought the same thing for years, and just avoided the market except for a 401k and stock granted by companies I worked at. Then I got into trading because I thought I could make money trading volatile stocks and I've never looked back (I've already made enough to retire). So far I've only lost money on my value stocks.

To each his own.

The best advice I can give is pretty generic - follow the data. First of all actually find the data. Don't trust some finance news rag to tell you anything meaningful, some of them actually have a direct incentive to lie to you. Now that you have the data, what does it say? This sounds simple, but everyone told me I was an idiot to invest in GME in January. They said the same thing in March. So far my investment in GME has more than a 10x ROI. I'm just using GME as an example because it's topical - people tell me I'm in a cult while I'm actively making money betting against them.

"Buy the rumor, sell the news" is pretty easy to understand, just find a stock you know well (I would guess something in tech, like Alphabet or Amazon but whatever) and look at dates for stock movements, rumors, and announcements. You can do this retroactively to find a pattern then try to apply it moving forward. "Never invest in something you don't understand" is general advice outside of stocks, but just an extension of what I said initially - do your own research until it makes sense to you.

I think a huge amount of inertia is just people afraid to try it because they've been conditioned their entire lives to believe they can't make money doing it. I'm quickly realizing how much of this is bullshit (I realize I'm lucky and I understand I'm likely in a local maxima, but I am still extremely confident a lot of the things I've been told are just wrong). So take a small amount of money and invest it and see how it goes. Learn. Iterate. Improve. The goal is to start making money before you lose it. I actually started with just $10k and once I started to figure it out put in more money as I wanted to increase my profit.

At the end of the day it's your money and you should do what you want with it. So long as you understand you will definitely lose money sometimes and are willing to learn from it, give it a go with whatever money you're willing to lose.

If there's anything remotely questionable, they'll punt and tell the buyer to hire an actual engineer (or plumber or electrician), so even more money out of pocket.

When I have bought a house, in order to get a proper survey with the property boundaries marked by stakes I had to pay for that myself.

Does anybody do this?

Back in the early 90s — on a recommendation from a realtor who was a close friend of my brother's — I hired an inspector who was close to retirement. He worked with his wife who served as his assistant tasked with, in essence, taking dictation of her husband's near constant commentary as he conducted an incredibly thorough inspection. Every outlet tested for proper ground, every nook and cranny looked at, wood moisture content, HVAC pitot readings, masonry, roof … just a super-duper detailed inspection that took about 6 hours to complete.

At the end of the inspection, he summed up by saying the house was good and that he had no qualms recommending the house.

Two days later, he stopped by with a three-ring binder that contained his inspection report. It first contained a summary that concisely covered the positive and few negative aspects of the house. Then there was a section about the history of the house: the year built, the name of the builder, changes in the neighborhood since it had been built, earthquakes it had gone through, flood events in the area, and so on. It also included the manufacturer names of things such as the windows, door hardware, etc.

The third section was lengthy, covering the precise state of the electrical, plumbing, structural, envelope, etc, and included all the notes his wife had taken during the course of the inspection. It included a sub-section with warnings about certain materials that likely contained asbestos and would need to be dealt with if we ever did remodeling.

Finally, the largest section was what he called a "maintenance work order" arranged as a schedule for the ongoing, recurring upkeep of the house but beginning with things he thought needed to be done immediately, replacement of the circuit breaker box, splash blocks under each outdoor faucet, tuck-pointing some of the chimney's brickwork, etc. And then his estimates as to when he thought systems might need to be replaced, the water heater, furnace, roofing, etc. As I discovered when the water heater burst, his estimates were pretty much spot-on. Over time, I added notes as we upgraded things, added low-voltage wiring, and remodeled the basement.

Nine years later, when I sold the house, the buyer was elated to have this owner's manual and I am fairly certain that the book was key to a very fast sale of the house which we did without a realtor.

As I look back on it now, I realize that inspection was perhaps the best $350 I have ever spent.

When we bought our next house, the inspection took about an hour and produced a few page report, most of it boilerplate.

This was fascinating to read!

How did you find a buyer without a realtor? Are you able get into the listing databases without using a realtor? Any special tips for selling without a realtor?

The first time I mentioned to a co-worker that I was thinking about selling my (first) house. He said that he thought he could be interested. He came and saw the house and agreed on the spot to buy it. That was that. We established the price by asking the realtor who had sold us the house what the price should be and then reducing the price by an amount that was 50% of what the standard sales commission would have been. In essence, we split what would have been the commission with the buyer.

We also split the cost for a real-estate attorney — a few hundred dollars, total — and got it done in just a few days.

The second time was a little more planned. I carefully photographed the house and painstakingly built a website for it with tons of description. Whether or not we hired a realtor, I thought a website would help us sell. This was early 2001, a web presence for a house for sale was still fairly rare.

We contacted the same realtor who had sold us our first home and asked her for a market value for the house. I offered to pay her a fee for her expertise and she declined saying that she knew we'd end up hiring her anyway, and that, "You may have sold your first house on your own but you'll never be able to do it twice."

A few days after the website had gone up, I decided to put a small "for sale" sign in the yard and, no joke, as I was pounding the sign into the ground, a passing car stopped and, longer story short, within a few hours she and her husband agreed to buy the house. The husband was a building contractor and he was especially impressed by the aforementioned inspection report.

As we had done with our first house, we set the price at market minus half the commission so it was well-priced.

We hired the same real-estate attorney who put the sale together. It was super easy and done around the buyer's kitchen table in a single two-hour meeting, followed a few days later by an official closing at an escrow company.

Now that the market in our area is smoking red hot, I am pretty sure we could sell our present home on our own too. We might miss out on bidding war wins but, I think, in the end, we'd come out okay.

One of the issues that keeps there from being a neutral third party holding the inspection results is the vast difference in quality in home inspections. Since home inspectors are not liable for anything they miss in the inspections, there are some really poor quality inspectors out there. The third party hiring the inspectors isn't going to be aligned with your interest in hiring the best inspector. Most likely they're going to go with whoever is the cheapest so they can keep as most of the fee you and other buyers are paying them.

In states that license and regulate home inspectors, perhaps part of the requirements could be that every home inspection report has to be part of the public record for the property. If there are multiple inspections, each of them becomes part of the record. A sneaky seller might pose as a buyer and payoff an inspector to give them a good report that becomes part of the record so it would still be in the buyer's interest to hire their own inspector if there is only one inspection report. At some point though, there will be enough inspection reports that your risk of only seeing faulty reports becomes low.

This probably is because many buyers go with the inspector recommendation of their realtor and realtors aren’t going to recommend someone that is too through to the point of risking the deal.

A decent inspector can and will find things, but true it may be difficult to find one.

I think the solution is going to be an unpopular take--learn about the world and be able to do a lot of this stuff yourself.

I bought my house without a realtor and without an inspection. My house needed work for sure, but I got a great deal and learning experience in both the buying and repair/maintenance. I spend my evenings working on the house instead of watching tv and eating garbage. Three years later I have a few 100k in equity.

I do wish the world was full of trustworthy people and life was easy, but no number of bureaucratic requirements are going to make these problems go away. If you live in a world you don't understand, you will be taken advantage of.

In most states, home inspectors are licensed and insured professionals so they can be held liable for obvious omissions from their reports. But there are a lot of holes in the system, and there's no clear guide for inexperienced home buyers to vet inspectors.

The benefit of a good inspector is that they aren't the buyer and thus have no temptation to overlook things the buyer might miss. A good inspector is thorough and will take several hours to perform an inspection of even a small home.

If you can find a very reputable inspector, it's generally a good idea to use them both when selling or purchasing homes. Inspecting your home before sale can identify issues you can quickly address and it gives comfort to buyers to see an inspection report on the counter when they do a walk through.

I got burned with a home purchase early on in my life because I used my realtor's inspector who wasn't licensed in my state. When we later discovered a foundation issue we had no recourse because the inspection report had a disclosure on it.

A general problem in the US is that it's mostly ok to be misleading as long as you have a disclaimer, and that disclaimer doesn't necessarily have to be upfront or obvious. As a result of have a lot of "Administrations", "Bureaus", and "Authorities" that superficially appear to be governmental or reputable but turn out to be scams.

We had asked for various fixes to be made but the seller only did a sewer repair and I think that is/was required for the house to be in sellable condition.

With everybody looking for houses now, a big thing is to put in a bid without requiring an inspection. I'm sure it works out almost all of the time but I'd hate to do it.

People love security theater where some professional swoops in and assures them everything is fine. In some cases you have to rely on an expert but in many cases, I've found that for anything significant, I can't outsource risk assessment because it's not worth it most of the time. No one doing the assessments have enough liability or incentive to do a deep assessment, it often simply costs too much relative to what you're assessing.

Now if you're completely naive or ignorant about something or the total risk is known and is relatively low, then it doesn't hurt to pay a small fee for the quick risk assessment passover made by an expert who will be more likely to spot things than you. Also, if someone really has significant liability for their assessment, they tend to be very direct to the point of pointing out low risks they normally would brush over.

I recently purchased a home and it was hooked up to a private well. The seller said it was fine, the inspector said everything looked fine based on old test data, and a private well inspector said it looked fine. Not a single one of them thought it was worth testing the water quality beyond the bare minimum, only concerned about quantity. It turns out, I spent a part of 4-6 years developing water quality monitoring infrastructure and performing water quality analyses and had it not been for the knowledge I had and always skeptical attitude, I wouldn't have batted an eye. I told them to all stuff it and perform a water quality test or I was rejecting on other terms. Good thing I was difficult because there were all sorts of issues (bacteria, organic and inorganic issues) and I may have even gotten sick or a guest could have gotten sick.

Years ago I had a health scare and saw three independent doctors that thought it was nothing, even after describing my symptoms but there were too many red flags for me to ignore accept their opinions. I suggested a specific condition to each of them and they brushed it off like I was crazy. They didn't have the same level of risk or incentive for their time in their assessments to push forward and didn't want to acknowledge that even a low level of uncertainty could be true. Sure enough, I found a fourth doctor to check, they listened, and did appropriate diagnostics eventually confirming via lab and in person diagnostics I was correct. This isn't something that frequently occurs, not a hypochondriac.

Professional risk assessment can be useful but you should always be skeptical of it given the lack of liability and incentives many have. They want to get paid and move to their next transaction. Such is our highly transactional society where people really don't care about other people or can't afford to care about other people in the name of efficiency.

In the US if a buyer does provide an inspection report to the seller and backs out, then the seller does at least have to disclose any issues found.

UK excluding Scotland.

In the US we have home inspectors, and we have surveyors. A home inspector is generally responsible for auditing the structure and mechanicals of the home for issues. A surveyor is only responsible for identifying property boundaries.

A home inspection is under $1000, usually $250-500. I don't know what a survey costs as I've never been involved in a property boundary dispute as US homes are generally on large enough plots that encroachment issues aren't that common.

They aren't, OP makes it sound like it costs an arm and a leg. The costs are around £300-400, about £500 if you want to pull out all the environmental reports as well, which while not insignificant in itself, is not really a big deal when buying a house for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Fair enough, I don't know anyone who bought a house this way though. For me personally it was always 1) find a house 2) ask the bank to do the survey 3) based on the survey either carry on with the mortgage or retract my offer. Yes I probably couldn't do 5 houses at once, but I have done 3 houses consecutively this way before, no issues whatsoever with the banks.

I am always surprised to see comments that make it sound like jobs (or, employees) are fungible commodities that can be bought and sold purely on price.

One simple example - two jobs may have the same title (Senior Developer, or whatever) but have totally different expectations of communication skills, leadership skills, ability to handle pressure, etc and would pay very differently. So you (and everyone else) would be tempted to apply for the top-paying job but potentially not be qualified.

Or the situation where a company is very flexible on who they hire and thus would pay a lot more or a lot less depending on what the individual brings to the table.

In a way, I think there's a bit of "you don't know what you don't know" principle at play here. If someone has limited perspective on how career development, seniority, and hiring work, they may really believe that the big problem is "I can't sort my opportunities by salary." Someone with more experience and understanding may recognize how non-fungible people and roles can be in a way that a simple "sort by price" cannot capture.

To use your real-estate analogy, would you ever buy a house that came up first in a price-sort? No, you'd both want to really understand the nuances of the house (location, condition, etc.) and how it compares to your needs and your ability to pay. IE, you'd often take "not the best price" because either there's something wrong with the property or it's just not suitable to your needs." Hiring is much the same.

I highly doubt that the parent comment meant that he would literally apply to the job with the biggest number with no other consideration.

I read it as the far more modest claim that, if even _seeing_ the number requires a significant investment of time and effort on your side, the efficiency of the market is highly restricted. Especially since, once you do see the number, you usually need to take it or leave it within a short time frame; you can't "open up" a lot of job offers and then pick the best.

To use the real-estate analogy again, how would the housing market be affected if buyers had to put down a deposit to even _see_ the listed price? And if the sellers had the ability to get a complete profile of the buyer before revealing their price? It seems pretty clear to me that the average house price would significantly increase, despite the supply and demand both staying the same.

Price-sort is a very crude version of an even more powerful tool, which is: "Show me everything about every product, without trying to manipulate me, and let me organize the data by criteria that I choose, not that you choose." This is why Excel pivot tables are so popular in business.

Anything that makes the job search function less psychological has to be beneficial. Nothing prevents me from taking a pay cut for a particular job that I absolutely love, in a favored location, etc.

Oddly enough, product marketing and hiring share a common feature, which is that both fields have endless amounts of verbiage about how psychological manipulation is actually beneficial to the person being manipulated. If so, it should be an opt-in feature, perhaps even one that people are willing to pay for.

Also, I most certainly do sort by price when I'm looking for real estate: I have a budget, after all. Same thing with employment: most people have needs that salary requirements can meet, and it's pointless to look for jobs outside the range one can accept. Therefore it's almost certainly the best and most useful first thing to sort by.

Others have more freedom. For example, thanks to a recent IPO I can literally work for no salary and be fine. I have far more freedom to consider other details about a job than 99% of the population.

This is going to be very meta and not about salary so feel free to skip :)

When I disagree with someone, I try to find where we are disconnected. It's usually one of two things: we reach divergent conclusions either because we are aware of different facts, or because we're interpreting those facts through different values lens.

A good quick heuristic of a fact missing if when someone talks about either one side of the equation or even worse, makes both sides line up to their conclusion.

For example: "we should use Python - it's the best dev experience, we are only using C++ cuz our lead engineer is stupid" versus "We use C++ because of performance attributes, but I argue we can be fast-enough in Python and get better dev-experience"

The 2nd statement shows awareness of both sides of the argument and then proposes a solution that accounts for them. The 1st side is missing the context for why someone would do something other than what they want to do - suggesting they don't have perspective on that and making it likely that their solution doesn't account for it (or if it does, only by accident.)

In the discussion at hand, the original poster clearly prefers salary ranges and his model for why companies don't publish them is that they are evil. To me that suggests that they are lacking perspectives on the cases where salary ranges are either impossible to share or end up working in the employee's favor. Having had this conversation many times before, I attribute this lack of perspective on not having the senior hiring experience either from candidate or company side where one would have picked up the perspective.

To sum it all up, yet there's a bit of presumption in my suggestion but at the same time - you have to be able to assert things or else you'd never be able to make any points.

You're making it sound like the companies are being forced to pay the same salary for the same role - they are not, and this is a straw man argument. The companies should publish the salary range - they are free to adjust the offers within the range depending on skills & experience of the successful candidate. If the range is $20k - $180k to cater for the "rockstar" who brings a lot - then they ought to publish that range and be prepared to explain to a candidate why the company thinks a candidate deserves $20k/yr and see how that goes.

An equivalent scenario to what's happening on the job market outside Colorado would be houses being sold without displaying the asking prices - all potential buyers would be expected to jump through all the hoops and be asked to "make an offer" without being able to make comparisons on how much other similar houses on the market are going for. Instead, they'd be asked "How much did you pay for the last house you bought?" or "How much are you currently paying in rent?"

I think this is an example of flexibility that people bring up. Not that they shouldn't publish the range, but my friend had no idea the other range was open to him.

TO be clear, i agree that they should have to explain "why" if they chose the part of the range, like you say, but i think it misses some edge cases that are not uncommon.

This asymmetric information is the intention of the employer, but sadly, in most cases it goes the other way: person gets hired as an SDE 2, but earns less than some/all SDE 1's because they are terrible at negotiating, or their salary history was always below market rate and they do not know it. I'm all for companies paying commensurate salaries and having the flexibility to do so - publishing salaries ranges when posting jobs is orthogonal to that.

> i think it misses some edge cases that are not uncommon.

In your friends case, I hope/wish the law covers that scenario whereby the employer is forced to disclose the range for the upgraded when asked - so that all your friend needed to do was ask.

If someone shows up for interview with leadrship skills so amazing they can run the whole company and you want to pay them 4x, then it's probably a different job, maybe a TeamLead.

Publish several jobs and just fill one of them, cancell others.

But the argument is bordering on "we are so flexible we have no structure at all and we have no clue what we are doing" and is difficult to taje seriously.

What do you think makes this a problem here? You apply, you interview, the company either gives you the position or not. I don't think anyone would use the salary range as the one and only factor to decide where to apply. It can help to decide where to make more effort or what the comp potential is if I improve my skills.

No, but if they also weren't giving me an asking price, that's a huge red flag.

You're right that price is but one attribute of a job, but it is an important attribute. Its not the only thing i am evaluating, but it is one of the things, even one of the more important things.

So yes, i would like to know what the salary range is at the get-go.

Also this is true for pretty much everything - when buying a car, you dont generally go with the cheapest option, there's lots of attributes to evaluate, but if someone refused to tell you the price you wouldn't go with them either.

This!!

- At every company and institution I've worked for, I've never really been in a situation where two people, even if they have the same job title, are line-replacable for one another (unless they are very junior). Everyone has extremely distinct skills, experiences, capabilities whose value is extremely contingent on the needs of the moment.

- Making rules to make things for fair or transparent has the opposite effect. A major institution I worked for came up with an impossible-to-game, no-human-in-the-loop formula for bias-free and discrimination-free compensation. The result? People with equal responsibilities ended up getting paid _vastly_ different amounts. Similarly, people with equal salaries had vastly different levels of responsibility. I don't think a uniform compensation scheme simply works, other than just negotiating 1-on-1 with staff until agreements are reached, and when it no longer works out they ask Mr. Market.

- A company not disclosing salary already gives you enough information. Unless they are a flagship megacorp with well known salary bands and staff levels, and they are not disclosing the salary, then you know it's not competitive salary.

> Unless they are a flagship megacorp with well known salary bands and staff levels, and they are not disclosing the salary, then you know it's not competitive salary.

Frankly that's not been my experience. I find that especially on the senior level, the variance is so high for what a person could make in a role that publishing the range would just be meaningless. Thus, I take the "lack of range" as a non-signal.

That's because software engineering suffers from tittle inflation (same way grade inflation works really).

Internally there are several "levels" of Senior Engineers at most companies. But what the levels map to is completely arbitrary. I've seen places where senior really means 20 years of industry experience and others where it's more like 5.

The real problem, as you point out, is there is no consistency. In reviewing resumes basically ignore titles from any company I'm not very familiar with, and rely on their description of what they have done.

As an aside, many engineers, especially less experienced ones, are terrible at this. As a piece of advice, think about what your resume says about your work if the titles are blacked out.

That's the correct approach. Same holds for job descriptions: what have others at this level band shipped and what were their contributions.

I don't do this, and I feel like most reasonable people wouldn't do this either.

Let's say you manage to actually get a job that you're not qualified for. There's a strong possibility that you'll be fired, maybe within the 90 day probationary period. At a some large companies, you might get some cover and get passed around from department to department for years. But I've definitely seen a fair number of people fired for non-performance in my career; it's not exactly rare.

Sure there are about a billion other factors to look at but if the salary is a non starter then why waste the time to interview even if everything else was perfect?

Having to write a cover letter, customize a resume and sit through multiple interviews just to find out if I can literally afford to work for you is not acceptable and the only reason companies get away with it is because all the other companies do it. This trend needs to die and it needs to die a decade ago.

That's like, your opinion. Millions of people go on job interviews everyday without first knowing the salary offered and in fact in most meetings the salary is the last thing discussed.

What job seekers are begging for is a salary range being included with the job posting. Not doing so just wastes everyone's time when the company low-balls after the 3rd interview and the interviewee walks out the door.

If you want a junior worker for a junior's salary, that's fine, there are plenty of juniors looking to get their foot in the door, but include a junior's salary range so you don't waste everyone's time interviewing someone who's never going to accept your junior offer.

If you want a senior for a junior's salary and think you'll get one by leaving the salary range blank, go pound sand.

No one thinks they are getting away with anything but you. I don't get why you are so mad most people don't consider not knowing the salary beforehand a reason not to go on an interview. Not posting the salary on the job ad has never been the reason a position has been left unfilled.

The market is free, it just isn't a healthy market. Those are different concepts. Participants in a totally free market are free to use their size/power/leverage as they wish. A free market is one where the little guy, the job applicant, will be hammered by the big guy. A 'healthy' market is one that is regulated in such a way that the little guy has at least a hope in the negotiation process. This then fosters competition, innovation, yielding a free-but-healthy market. Regulation needed to do those things that the "free" market cannot.

If you call that 'free market', then its like communism - a concept that never works in the real world

Note that that's an issue on England (and presumably Wales too?). It's not the case in Scotland. Not sure about NI.

How much are you paying for surveys? Even a full structural survey -- which would be considered over the top for most purchases -- should only cost £1,500 or so.

And you're not going to get any sort of survey for most of the houses you view. You only usually bother with one once you've made an offer and the vendor's accepted it: if the survey reveals anything significant, you either pull out or try to renegotiate the price.

That prevents people from negotiating higher pay than is advertised publicly, so employers would have to tell everyone what their maximum salary could be. Employers would have an incentive to post high maximums rather than miss out on quality candidates.

What has taken place is that the mass of people who were "consumers" have become "users", and are replaceable and disposable; while the employees have been downgraded to associates.

It's not just the feeling of outrage you get when you're trying to establish, with a person, where $1000 someone sent you disappeared to for a month. It's the anti-human system underpinning the idea that we should build an algorithm to keep people on hold longer, the more pissed off they sound about an unwarranted charge.

There are a lot of points at which business logic taken to its fullest fruition turns out not to be good business. We tend to hope the market will rebel against the excesses of companies that treat users as interchangeable parts. But the reality is we (coders) are contributing to the de-humanization of the majority of humanity, in many of these small interactions and small-change money collecting circumstances. That's our job. But at some point we should be able to see the circle closing around us; we're exempt because we can hack our way through the thicket of junk it takes to get our identity back if it's stolen, a new job if our startup shuts down; we are constantly re-inventing ourselves and innovating.

But we are not our users. We wouldn't even want our users to be us.

The point as I take it, of this, is that screwing your employees is treating them as users; and treating users the way we have, for a long time, is also self-defeating and bad for society.

Every snowflake is special and unique too, but nobody cares when they are shovelling their driveways. Stop spreading incredulous fantasies, companies that hire 3000 JS-React mashing "agile' dev have salary ranges, HR has them, and you can find out about them once you are hired. They just don't want to publish them upfront.

Maybe if we are talking top leadership positions this argument has credence, but for most of us they aren't bending over backwards and putting together unique compensation packages.

Asymmetry of information is what got you to the top. You know more than your competition, more on a productive process, on consumer behavior, on business partners, on leveraging financial avenues, on political "contributions", on questionable use of insider information, etc.

And Information is what keeps you at the top: knowing who to "lobby" to create convenient regulation that hurts your competition the most, is the most effective way monopolies use to stay that way.

Monopolies are not monopolies in the abstract, they have to fight everyday to keep being a monopoly and they do that by leveraging information asymmetry.

> Or maybe a company is on top because of their execution.

I already explained that part.

That is what I wrote, yes. AT&T knew who to "lobby". That is information asymmetry.

That is why, even if you know who to lobby you can't get a meeting, but they meet everyday. You don't know who to bribe to get a meeting. And on and on.

I live in france and all big enough companies are mandated to have union, doesn't mean that they help with salaries.

Those normally negotiate the banding and the COL increases and also know what the rates are.

Unions in the entertainment industries do :-) underpay or stiff workers and you get put on the "call first list" this is the PC name for another type of list.

So if they're willing to hire someone with 2-20 years of experience, the salary range may be so broad as to be meaningless. $80-180k doesn't really tell anyone anything, and I'd imagine regulators can't do much if that's what companies put down as their range. I find that a lot of people imagine an open job & job description to be Very Rigid Categories, whereas in practice companies hiring in high-demand fields have to be flexible to find people. From the employer's point of view, that's why we find demands for the salary range to be frustrating- lots of companies really don't have a specific range in mind!

If you mandate that companies use a tight salary band, they'll simply say OK, our Software Developer 1 pays $70-90k, Software Developer 2 pays $90-11k, etc. However- we haven't decided which level of software developer we're going to hire you for. Tough for regulators to beat that approach too

Not meaningless at all. The company is at least saying they are willing to pay senior level salaries. I think the companies really pushing back are those who want 2-20 years experience with a range of $50-$80k. The other group of companies pushing back are those who let their current employees get too far out of the current range, and can only keep them happy through hoping they don't find out.

Both are signs of companies I want to avoid.

Is it perfect for employees? No, but it's much better than no information. Also, keep in mind they will not just throw some crazy high number on their either because then they have to explain it to existing employees.

So many people are uncomfortable talking about money, and companies push that it's taboo. This law does a tiny bit to push the information asymmetry back to the employee.

EDIT I've always been a pretty aggressive (not in a bad way) negotiator. So for me, asking why not the max would be question one and probing the answer would be the next set of questions. Maybe this wasn't obvious to those less apt to negotiate?

Companies usually just post multiple ads if they are hiring for junior or senior roles.

I don't think a job posting for both junior and senior developers would be appealing to a senior developer.

I think the market in Austria is different. If your job ad isn't compelling enough, you won't get any applications.

I have seen some companies do this in a sense. They will post their salary "grades" A1, A2, A3, B1, etc. But there isn't really any correlation to say a Software Developer 1 will be a grade A3 or B1 or whatever.

The difference being I know the salary ranges of the bands before I apply and talk to HR

The idea is they have 3 ranges for 3 experience levels for 1 position, not a 80-200k range

You also create the impression of massive growth (or team turnover) when actually you only want the one engineer.

What would society gain by obfuscated pricing? Assuming the goal is to benefit all of society, and not certain individuals who happen to be able to take advantage of arbitrage scenarios.

A single job posting shouldn't aim for all levels of devs. There should be separate postings for each level with specific requirements/expectations and a salary range to go with it.

Bigger companies do/should know how many devs they need for each level. Smaller companies would benefit from being more organized too.

I'd also be ok with a minimum rather than a band, which means that they wouldn't be scaring away a best of the best type candidate by setting the ceiling too low.

Given the stage of my company, our hiring plan, and the fact we hire remote across the US, we absolutely could have a role with a salary range of $80k or more.

You know who definitely has preset salary ranges for years of experience and isn't paying based on individual ability? The government & heavily unionized jobs. Seniority Trumps Everything there. I dunno, is that the world we want? I thought tech was philosophically opposed to that kind of mediocrity?

Another pattern is listing the range as 40-250k so the disclosure is effectively nothing. Consulting companies Accenture, PwC, Deloitte are doing that one.

A few companies are completely rejecting this whole law too. I've spoken with a few that still won't disclose (usually "We aren't CO based and it doesn't apply") or they just straight up aren't doing it with no comment. Experienced many recruiters completely flustered by it.

This feels like a losing strategy as other employers will be posting tighter ranges which will get more applications. Especially if the lower bounds is too low. Hopefully this sorts itself out.

A lower floor encourages more people to accept mid-range offers because nobody likes getting an offer in the middle of the range.

If someone gets an $80K offer for a job with a $40K-$250K range, they are happy to be paid twice as much as what they assume entry-level employees get, and they’re happy because they think they can grow into the $250K range if they work hard enough.

However if someone receives the same $80K offer on a listing with an $80K to $110K range, they’re going to be upset that they were given the lowest possible value and also concerned that there isn’t much room to grow.

In our case, we have a wide salary range because we hire everywhere from juniors without college degrees up through ex-FAANG employees. We don’t set out with an exact compensation or seniority in mind when we start recruiting.

Many people looking for jobs don't have the means to be choosy, and many companies aren't looking for the best of the best, they just need people.

So it genuinely could be anywhere between 40-250K.

If a company doesn't already have Colorado employees, they may not be interested in having a remote employee in CO that requires special treatment.

Generalize even further. If the company doesn't already have employees in <different regulatory jurisdiction> then they won't incur the cost of compliance in <different regulatory jurisdiction> all else being equal.

If CO had very cheap labor it would pencil out and they'd gladly jump through the hoops to comply. But CO doesn't have particularly cheap labor for the kinds of jobs in question.

Heck, my company wanted to hire a specific expert in a specific field. They were willing to pay the moon but but still almost didn't do it because of the compliance headache from having international employees. They hired a 3rd party intermediary to hire this person.

It's also in the company's interest to provide advancement opportunities internally, otherwise your employees just leave. In this case the regulations are in line with the incentives.

If remote work sticks around (I think it will), it will be interesting to see how employers handle the additional burden of having employees in dozens or even hundreds of jurisdictions. I don't think it's insurmountable, but it's certainly something many companies have not had to deal with before.

They'll outsource it to companies that look after it for them. This is the "resources" bit of "human resources".

In the meantime, maybe the actual HR people could get back to being "people and culture" managers and stop thinking of staff as "resources".

We don't necessarily want to advertise all open positions to an internal selection process, particularly more senior managers.

The record keeping requirements in CO are concerning, particularly job description records. In particular, we don't yet have a full time HR person (there is a dedicated person, but that person has other job duties).

There's 49 other states.

edit: one more reason. We had a failing exec. Not enough to merit immediate firing, but failing enough that it was clear he or she was not going to last through the next round. We needed that person to continue doing a mildly-failing job while we found a replacement, due to lack of another person who could take on those responsibilities.

Not sure how you manage something like that with an internal hiring announcement.

In a past organization a friend was HR at, there were branch office jobs and corporate jobs. Officially you could get promoted to the corporate office. Unofficially, don't bother as they optimized for different things for each hiring pool.

So they tried to keep the corporate jobs only available to the corporate people as otherwise the branch people would get excited and then end up having their dreams dashed from repeatedly applying and having their resumes chucked while an external hire filled their job.

Plenty of job postings exist merely for compliance. So all you are doing is wasting a lot of time.

I would always rather take a qualified internal candidate rather than spend months to land someone outside. So, I do shop jobs internally now, but Even without reading the CO law, I’m pretty sure I’m not fully complying with it if I had an employee in CO.

Editing This was poor word choice in the morning; I should say I can clearly see how the size or scope of a company could complicate this. I just don't have any sympathy for them; you adapt your processes to match the desired state.

Please. No more emails.

>It’s as simple as posting all open positions internally.

One of the problems that happens (today) with this is that companies decide to hire someone external for a position essentially created for them. So they may create a job posting as a formality. But it's effectively a fake posting. No one else actually has a shot at an interview, much less getting the position.

Don't try this in Northern Ireland btw. I know of US mangers getting into some serious hot water over not advertising the job in Catholic and Protestant publications.

For example, I could say that I expect "basic decency" to not kill each other. But I also support having a law making murder illegal. As part of that law, you have the possibility of people being jailed, possible for months are years, before we even get to a court case. They may be able to pay a large fee to get back to their daily life (while part of the money is sometimes returned, there are plenty exceptions to this). Then you get to the court case, where people are expected to spend days in courts and small fortunes on lawyers to prove they didn't murder someone. Lots and lots of lawyers and paperwork and record-keeping, not to mention the costs to an innocent individual wrongly accused. Good luck getting any payments to make up the debt you incurred.

Yet as a society we accept that we have to do things the legal way because just the expectation alone does nothing to stop bad people. As such the concept of "basic decency" is completely gone from the modern world, so I think it is safe to give it a new definition which includes the enforcement of a legal framework.

Before we had 'spesific regulatory framework' companies enslaved people, exploited children, commercialised rape and commited serial murder to break up unions

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

Maybe "basic decency" is a very bad phrase to describe things here, and we should just leave it out. It's probably useful as invective, and if one is already predisposed to sympathize with the point, can galvanize one to action, but it serves poorly as a tool to actually communicate.

I propose that if we avoid it, we can talk meaningfully about how the company finds it more convenient to avoid business than comply with regulatory burdens without the distraction of moralizing the matter, and draw conclusions about whether the passage of the law was wise under these particular circumstances, or what circumstances or structure might have made it better, and the like.

Perhaps your vintage-1921 blue-collar labor dispute is more of a distraction than a help, as well :)

There is also no geographic restriction so if a company has any offshore service centers, it would need to post any promotional jobs to its Colorado employees as well.

Love it.

Of course, Thai employers can still discriminate on the basis of gender, sex, religion and a bunch of other things that Colorado employers can't.

And any company operating in Thailand has a local Thai company established, which would be the actual employer for the local employees. So the Colorado law would not apply.

One of my co-workers did this but his asthma could not stand the humidity and he had to come back.

There is also an internal jobs portal where you can search whatever you want

A Company could 100% already being doing everything to be in compliance with a regulation and still oppose the regulation, and take actions to ensure they are bound by that regulation

A) Companies oppose regulation because of filing and compliance costs, despite already doing the required behavior

B) Companies oppose regulation because they don't want to have a requirement to do and maintain the behavior

It feels like really we're talking about (B) as a primary motivator, and (A) is a smoke screen for PR palatability.

Big companies will have no problem with these regulations. However small and medium sized companies need a bunch more busy work that needs to be done and so will avoid it.

This last is hard to measure - regulations have a cost in this form but it is hard to figure out what would have been done but isn't.

IMHO, the US should have much more "larger than X" laws (and clauses that enfold organized subcontractors working for larger corporations).

1. Companies do weird divisions to keep under the limits

2. Companies are artificially restricted in their growth as they need to add employees but are unable to, for example if the cut of was 50 employees, adding the 49th employee is easy, adding the 50th employee is $$$$$ thus it will not happen, this would mean few companies grow to 50, rather you would see several 50+ employee companies merge as the cost burden for the new 100 employee company would spread over all 100 employees, vs the regulatory cost being hit with the single employee add

I am not sure why you think anyone or any company would DESIRE to have external actors imposes requirements on their actions or why it would be unpalatable to say you do not want to have regulatory burdens imposes on you

As a culture have we so lost the respect for freedom and liberty that is now bad if you want to have said freedom?

Of course they desire to have external actors impose requirements on their own actions and other people's actions and other companies' actions. Just so long as they think those requirements benefit their bottom lines.

Ever hear of the business lobby opposing union-busting laws on the basis that they create regulatory burden?

In a choice between maximizing efficiency for good actors, and curtailing behavior by bad actors, I tend to weight the latter.

I took an offer at 40K or so, and within 3 years I was at 100k. With laws like this in play I'm not sure if that would still be legal. A lot of these ideas sound great on paper, but in reality you've completely eliminated any room to negotiate salaries downward in case an applicant isn't all that experienced.

I imagine what's going to happen is you'll see companies become much stricter with documentable requirements. Such as a bachelor's degree, which I also lacked back then. Saying please I need a job, I'll take 50% less since I don't have a bachelor's will open up companies to lawsuits

- A seniority system;

- A merit system;

- A system that measures earnings by quantity or quality of production;

- The geographic location where the work is performed;

- Education, training, or experience to the extent that they are reasonably related to the work in question; or

- Travel, if the travel is a regular and necessary condition of the work performed.

The things you listed, like taking the job for less because you lack the relevant education are actual exceptions written into the law.

These are not the same jobs. You took a junior position and in 3 years were promoted once, or maybe twice, into more senior position(s).

Nope, I switched to a new company. You can't really expect a company to take care of you

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Especially in your situation it would make sense to have a separate title at the start.

Every jurisdiction has laws and compliance regulations specific to that jurisdiction. These requirements seem in no way onerous or out of line to me.

I think the companies that will avoid CO applicants for jobs will be doing so because they want to avoid the wage transparency more than they want to avoid the regulatory burden.

Do they actually check that the data is real?

That was my question too.

I guess this will be first time a boycott won't be broken by a police charge and perhaps even becoming successful! /s

Is it really though? Complete transparency in salary ranges also means that every other employer can see exactly what their competition is offering. I can't help but worry that this will lead to a sort of "price fixing" that will actually drive wages _down_.

Competition is good, not bad.

Companies already buy salary information from brokers. So they already know what the competition is paying and generally try to keep in line with that. And that's pretty much a type of collusion. If everyone seeks to pay "market rates" based on these salary reports, then everyone will aim to pay about the same amount.

It's not a good rhetorical tactic to cede the concept of fairness; better to argue "that thing being done in the name of fairness, is actually unfair".

Hence the previous comment's tautology that fairness will not be an objective good for most people, because (a) most people prefer their own self interest, (b) the status quo provides majorities advantages that minorities do not share, and (c) objective fairness will thus come at the expense of the majority (who are by definition more numerous than the minority).

It's interesting most people are interpreting my comment as a preference, vs an observation.

Fairness is better than tyranny, don't you think?

I personally, despite also being in a number of majority classes, prefer to avoid being an asshole because of an accident of birth.

That seems a shaky foundation to build policy on.

There are companies that survey employees for salary information, collect all that knowledge, and then sell it to corporations.

Medium and large businesses already have a very good understanding of the job market and what a competitive salary range is.

Companies might not advertise salary ranges at a few big tech companies, but the vast majority of recruiters tell you the salary range as soon as you talk to them (or you name your price and they say "that will work"). I already totally ignore the bottom 75% of salaries.

The problem tech companies have is that many of them can be disrupted by a few motivated individuals, and there are always new opportunities for them. If you pay enough, you benefit from them. If you don't, somebody else does, or worse, they become new competition.

I'm convinced a primary motivation for hiring in mega-tech companies is to keep people from making startups to dethrone them. You can't legally compete with Google, etc if you've signed a non-compete.

A founder of a now-popular startup worked for Google eight years ago, so what? Let's say Google remembers and decides to pursue action. They'd spend another 3-4 years suing a person who has a mountain of plausible deniability to hide behind. And for what? There's no real gain to Google for this.