Individual states’ pay transparency laws are already applying upwards pressure on salaries across the country.

My company has multiple groups in different states including Colorado, and in anticipation of needing to post salary ranges for our open positions in Colorado, my group (with no positions in Colorado) preemptively bumped up everyone’s salaries to the midpoint of their pay bands to avoid anyone becoming frustrated if they learned they were in the bottom half. Despite the preemptive adjustments, a colleague of mine became angry and quit when they found out their salary wasn’t at the very top of their position’s pay range.

So pay transparency laws are having a big impact—not only in the obvious cases of candidates negotiating salaries in the states that passed the pay transparency laws, but also for average employees in other states who didn’t even need to do anything except learn how much their labor was worth.

> Microsoft said it would disclose salary ranges in all internal and external U.S. job postings no later than January 2023. That date is when Washington state, where Microsoft’s headquarters are located, will start requiring employers with at least 15 employees to disclose salary ranges for each position.

In other news, Microsoft to comply with a new law.

It's incredible in these comments that so many of you who work in the industry on the employee side are arguing against having more transparency for the employee, and for having more leverage in the negotiating process for the employer instead. I want all the advantage as an employee that I can get. Any secret withheld from me is not to my advantage.

Given that most big tech companies' base salary tends to plateau and total comp begins to be dominated by stock grants and performance bonuses, just how much real transparency is actually going to be provided?

This is the way. We need more of this.

I'm at a point where if a recruiter messages me "about an exciting opportunity" without any salary information, he/she will not get a response.

While there are some jobs that maybe I would consider a pay cut for, I generally want to make more money because that allows me to invest more so I can be free one day.

There are a ton of people here who probably make 6 figures complaining about pay ranges in job postings.

I am not sure I fully see how this is a problem, any minimum wage job says pay range (or a specific rate), any job for dish washers or line cooks say $18 a hour or what not, a tech job with a six figure salary should at least say a range, since it varies based on skill and department.

I haven't read a single response that I agree with as to why this is a negative? Can someone provide some insight in to why people seem to be against this? Also the silly comments about well $5 to $5 million is a range are just silly. They are going to provide a range like $42k to $55k. Because it is based on skill to some degree (7 years in the industry should pay more you more than 2).

This is going do to absolutely nothing. Most of this legislation does nothing to really address the potential for folks to just advertise incredibly wide potential salary ranges, to say nothing of alternative ways that they can change total compensation "for the right candidate," if you catch my drift. I would suspect that the biggest effect of this is to actually lead to overall greater distrusts, as folks will make all sorts of assumptions based on the ranges they see for jobs at their companies, based on their own biases. True transparency which would require something like disclosure of average/median total compensation at the company for that role, for instance, would be incredibly meaningful, but it will never come.

Job posts with a pay rate get about 28% more applications than those without. Some job boards that syndicate jobs from other job boards will insert an "estimated salary" or "industry salary" just to get more clicks if you don't include a salary.

Source: my company does recruitment advertising for many other companies, and including salary is something we coach our customers to do.

Just to play Devil's Advocate: being explicit about salaries is the kind of practice that sounds amazingly good on the surface, but might have some unintended real-world consequences.

For instance, whereas before when salaries weren't explicit, a weaker candidate with some good qualities who was on the bubble for consideration might be able to get a job if the salary was more favorable than the company was initially planning. With explicit salary ranges, if the candidate isn't deemed good enough to warrant hitting that predefined range, they might be unemployable in that field and not gain the experience needed to progress. In the past, a weaker candidate might have been able to go for a lesser salary range, get the job and gain more experience, and maybe make it up down the line. Maybe that's no longer a path forward for a lot of people on the bubble.

And stronger candidates who are perfect fits and world-class performers might be lost for a lot of companies because the company has the excuse of a pre-defined salary range. So maybe firms miss out on some genius, perfect fits, because the bean counters can't be bothered to assess everybody's merits individually.

What's the actual problem that including salaries tries to solve? IMO if used strictly, it could only limit the talent pool (consider if someone more skilled than expected applies, but won't accept at or below the stated upper salary bound; the company won't be able to pivot and hire them).

Including salary could let applicants avoid underpaying companies before they embark on a lengthy application process, which is beneficial, but don't companies already have strong incentives not to exploit people in this way since they'll only leave shortly afterward and those onboarding costs would be false economy.

If your job posting doesn't give some indication as to the possible salary range, I'm just not going to apply.

What? I'm going to go through some bullshit interview process that includes some esoteric algorithm problem that has nothing to do with the actual position in question and, even if it did, I could "npm install"/google my way out of only to find out later on that the job pays the same (or less) than what I make right now?

That's just a waste of everyone's time.

About salaries at Microsoft. I interviewed with them this year.

I did a Codility test, followed by four interviews with four US based teams.

I got an offer which is 5 to 6 times what they pay in US.

I live in a country in Eastern Europe, and prices are a bit lower. I would have expected a lower offer, but not that much lower. It was less than I already make so I had to wish them good luck in finding another person and was feeling sorry that I lost so much time in the interviewing process and also invested a lot of energy.

I see many concerns here mentioning how this may not be a useful law because the company may create very wide ranges. It sounds like there are some restrictions in the law that try to prevent that, but I wonder if we should be looking at it a different way -- provide both the salary range for the position and also the range of the salaries of the existing employees in that same position.

Can a company make an offer outside its stated range?

E.g. What if Microsoft has a job opening with a range of $110k - $170k, and the candidate they selected used to make $180k and would like $200k? Will Microsoft offer him or her the 200k they seek or offer 170k and lose their candidate?

If salary ranges can be bypassed, then they are not really useful, and if they can't, by law, companies could skirt the law by offering higher bonuses and more stock, or else lose on talent. Or the company could close the job opening, and create a new posting with an updated range for the sole purpose of being legally able to hire their candidate. Which would still invalidate the spirit of the law.

I'm not sure these salary transparency laws are good for workers or companies alike.

I wish all companies included pay ranges. When I was a junior / mid level dev I was lowballed more times than I care to admit. Nowadays if some recruiter messages me I ask for the range immediately, and I end the conversation if I don't get a straight answer.

Does anyone know if popular job platforms out there use your location to determine whether or not to show the salary information for a job posting? Or is it usually something that have to request once you can establish that you're a resident of Colorado?

How do the Washington/Colorado salary disclosure laws interact with bonus structures and stock grants? A staff engineer might make $250k/year in base salary, but their total comp could be much higher.

I wonder why only the US. If they believe pay transparency is the right way forward, they should do it globally. Surely there's no legal hurdles in posting pay ranges for any country.

But will it include stock ranges too? This is where the huge discrepancy occurs between candidates.

Salary is almost always in a tight range at Microsoft at a given level -- but external candidates can get anywhere from peanuts (a so called "tier 1" offer) to jumbo stock allocations (a so called "tier 3" offer).

Pay ranges for positions are vast and overlap to a massive degree. They also are skewed with CoL variations to make comparison difficult. They were not include discretionary add-one like cash bonuses and RSUs.

Microsoft already posts salaries for remote or potentially remote positions to comply with Colorado law - but I have not seen Meta, Netflix, etc doing the same under similar circumstances.

I wonder if this applies to contractors working at their campuses. From what I've heard, here in Fargo most of the people working at the Microsoft campus work for Archway

This will work for a while, but have a look at how this has played out in other situations: 1) college tuition cost of attendance calculators (shit goes up every year), 2) federal pay scales (completely immobile), 3) healthcare standard charges mandate. This will eventually become oppressive as the powerful learn to communicate with this new node in the network.

edit: not sure why the downvotes. Making information public increases market efficiencies, but market efficiencies don't always transfer to the workers. See: the last 30 years.

Are they going to take a look a TC? Their "highest we can go offer" was 100k below everyone else in my region (seattle)

I would have been paid less in companies I worked for under this system.

Be careful what you wish for.

Is it going to be salary or total comp?

Why only in the US? Why not everywhere?

Does this include executive roles and total compensation or just the base salary?

Awesome. I love this. This just granted +100 goodwill to MSFT.

Read this as "our initial offer"

Any tips for landing a MS interview?

$100k - $5 Million is a valid range