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Comments (269)

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  dotdi
  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.
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  aregue
  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
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  ellen364
  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.
• InsidiousWombat
  Make companies post anonymized salary lists next
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  claw-el
  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…
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  sjamaan
  > 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
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  Xenoamorphous
  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".
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  iamflimflam1
  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.
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  miki123211
  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 $250k, even though you would actually want to pay this much given that person's skills. If the candidate is allowed to negotiate upwards, ranges may gradually, over the course of years, drift downwards, with an implicit understanding that they are unrepresentative of the actual salary you are likely to earn.With an infinite number of employers and an infinite number of candidates, you would always be able to find the perfect candidate for your mix of requirements and pay them the exact salary that matches those requirements. The real world isn't like that, though, and if you, as an employer, have an offer available, you will get candidates who are under and over qualified for the specific offer you had in mind, and you might nevertheless be able to find a spot for them at some salary that both of you are willing to accept.
• nickdothutton
  Used to work in a company where every salary was disclosed for all employees. There was a constant stream of people going to their boss "why aren't I getting what [$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.
• gadders
  This is great news and an easy win. Not disclosing salary information disproportionately affects people from a lower socio-economic background.
• temp123477
  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).
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  slulu
  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.
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  Good4boothee
  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.
• tyrabound
  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.
• slantaclaus
  Hiring managers will be surprised when they set a price they’re willing to pay and qualified candidates start rolling in
• pluc
  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.
• serhack_
  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.
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  gste
  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.
• zerr
  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...
• pythonRon
  Back in the 1970's, it was common to do this in Canada... well, Nova Scotia..., well, Halifax... maybe.
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  voidUpdate
  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?
• Markoff
  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 rangeif 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)
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  feverzsj
  actual salary = min(salary range);
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  lifestyleguru
  Why do they have to disclose the obvious? The salary is GBP 25000 gross annually.
• entterprice
  [dead]
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  poisonborz
  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.
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  worldsavior
  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.
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  WalterBright
  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?
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  gste
  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".