Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges

A competitive market would enable me to sort by salary and benefits and apply for the best job.<p>However companies don&#x27;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.<p>The market is not really free - its being manipulated by one side.<p>Similarly with healthcare you don&#x27;t know how much you will be charged upfront, so there is no competition on price.<p>With housing (in UK) there is no competition on quality because the seller doesn&#x27;t have to disclose any problems with the house. If it falls of a cliff the minute you sign on the dotted line, it&#x27;s your problem.<p>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&#x27;ve paid the house price in survey fees.

I think one reason why this is difficult for companies that are hiring software engineers, is that they can hire at multiple levels of experience. They just need good developers! A company that needs, say, a Golang developer, or Scala, or React, might be willing to hire a junior, mid-level or senior developer- they&#x27;ll take whatever experience level they can get. Remember, saying that you <i>don&#x27;t</i> want to hire someone too experienced is pushing the envelope on age discrimination laws....<p>So if they&#x27;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&#x27;t really tell anyone anything, and I&#x27;d imagine regulators can&#x27;t do much if that&#x27;s what companies put down as their range. I find that a lot of people imagine an open job &amp; 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&#x27;s point of view, that&#x27;s why we find demands for the salary range to be frustrating- lots of companies really don&#x27;t have a specific range in mind!<p>If you mandate that companies use a tight salary band, they&#x27;ll simply say OK, our Software Developer 1 pays $70-90k, Software Developer 2 pays $90-11k, etc. However- we <i>haven&#x27;t decided which level of software developer we&#x27;re going to hire you for</i>. Tough for regulators to beat that approach too

As a Coloradan another thing that&#x27;s happening is companies are listing their jobs as Remote, only advertising in CO, and just mentioning it&#x27;s a CO only job verbally. They do the thing where they sit in the gray area due to pandemic &quot;Oh, it&#x27;s remote, FOR NOW, but it&#x27;s a CO job&quot; Or listing the job as Denver and a few other cities, but it&#x27;s really just Denver&#x2F;Boulder (Twitter currently doing this).<p>Another pattern is listing the range as 40-250k so the disclosure is effectively nothing. Consulting companies Accenture, PwC, Deloitte are doing that one.<p>A few companies are completely rejecting this whole law too. I&#x27;ve spoken with a few that still won&#x27;t disclose (usually &quot;We aren&#x27;t CO based and it doesn&#x27;t apply&quot;) or they just straight up aren&#x27;t doing it with no comment. Experienced many recruiters completely flustered by it.

The law also requires that Colorado employees be informed of all promotional opportunities. A promotional opportunity is &quot;a vacancy in an existing or new position that could be considered a promotion for one or more employees in terms of compensation, benefits, status, duties, or access to further advancement.&quot;<p>If a company doesn&#x27;t already have Colorado employees, they may not be interested in having a remote employee in CO that requires special treatment.

I&#x27;m actually not a fan of this law. My first salary position was for job which advertised a range of something like 80 to 90k a year. The highest I had made previously was $10 an hour, the CEO of the company was a nice guy who brought me in for an interview anyway.<p>I took an offer at 40K or so, and within 3 years I was at 100k. With laws like this in play I&#x27;m not sure if that would still be legal. A lot of these ideas sound great on paper, but in reality you&#x27;ve completely eliminated any room to negotiate salaries downward in case an applicant isn&#x27;t all that experienced.<p>I imagine what&#x27;s going to happen is you&#x27;ll see companies become much stricter with documentable requirements. Such as a bachelor&#x27;s degree, which I also lacked back then. Saying please I need a job, I&#x27;ll take 50% less since I don&#x27;t have a bachelor&#x27;s will open up companies to lawsuits

I remember when NY&#x2F;NJ came out with law preventing employers asking your previous wages (they used to ask for W2!!!). People were saying, oh, employers just won&#x27;t hire in NY&#x2F;NJ anymore! Guess what, job market is still hot as the sun and salary range went up across all my job searches and I don&#x27;t have to deal with bullshit recruiters trying to play with comps.

So it&#x27; s basically a corporate boycott against labor laws favorable to employees?!<p>I guess this will be first time a boycott won&#x27;t be broken by a police charge and perhaps even becoming successful! &#x2F;s

Companies are using salary secrecy to benefit themselves and to lower salaries&#x2F;competition&#x2F;transparency. This is clear evidence.

Huh I didn’t realize that Colorado had passed this law. I was looking at various remote jobs the other day and kept seeing notes about the pay range for people if they worked in Colorado. The first time, I figured it must be a Colorado based company providing information on what they would normally pay for workers in the state, but I kept seeing it more and more.

I would hope this would work itself out. People (me at least) are more likely to apply to jobs that have the salary listed, so companies that try this would have a smaller pool of talent.

My favorite comment on that Reddit post is one where the guy says his company is on Digital Ocean and this news about how the company engages in antiworker practices is enough to push him into migrating to AWS.<p>I have no dog or pony in the show on either side but if I was writing a fiction story I wouldn&#x27;t be able to include something like that because no one would believe that decision making...of that caliber...actually exists out in the wild.

Insightful to see DigitalOcean as the example company here.

Most of this act seems pretty similar to what already exists in CA where employers are required to provide a salary range to applicants who ask and employers aren&#x27;t allowed to ask candidates for salary history.<p>The &quot;salary range in job posting&quot; is new but, as others have noted, ranges cam be broad and based on experience.<p>The recent &quot;no CO&quot; disclaimers feel like a short-term reaction to uncertainty and they&#x27;ll probably be phased out as companies&#x2F;recruiters&#x2F;HR providers verify their processes and policies are compliant.

Don&#x27;t all companies have to share it for H1B listings anyway, as federal law, which legally are supposed to be commensurate with non-H1Bs (not that they necessarily are in practice)?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;h1bdata.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;h1bdata.info&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m making PredictSalary (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;predictsalary.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;predictsalary.com</a>). It&#x27;s a tool to predict the salary ranges from job opportunities. I collect job opportunities with salaries and create a Deep Learning model. Right now, it only supports three job opportunities websites.<p>Soon I will create a tool to share the salaries. I&#x27;m inspired by the story below.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.axios.com&#x2F;salaries-game-developers-break-silence-8f03c4aa-216e-4043-80dc-0376c606b926.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.axios.com&#x2F;salaries-game-developers-break-silence...</a>

What is the likelihood someone in Colorado sues for discrimination? I think 100% at some point in the next 5 years.

I used to think keeping salaries secret was a racket. And maybe it is.<p>But I also think there might be people you work with who try hard, do decent work slowly, and are compensated accordingly. (Fairly) And who are delighted with their job and salary.<p>How would it benefit that person to be confronted with the fact that someone else makes double or triple what they do?

Interesting since this coincides with a different issue I am facing. I had an employee move to California (we are a single-site business on the east coast) and everything was fine during covid. Now I&#x27;m being told that there are concerns about California&#x27;s employment laws since they are out of sync with the laws in our state and might require HR to do some additional work and the organization to incur added expenses. Currently, we are awaiting a decision from HR. Our mitigation plan centers around moving this person from employee to contractor. It might be the only option for us - the employee has plenty of other opportunities.

Would this have the effect of revitalizing local Colorado businesses as Colorado employees would no longer have the option of outsourcing their own talent out of state?

Although not exactly the same thing, California already requires employers to give pay scales for jobs when requested by an applicant and bars asking about their salary history: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB168" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;billTextClient.xhtm...</a>

Hmm...looks like a good way to filter out companies not worth applying to.<p>That&#x27;s easy for me to say, though. I am not looking for work; especially not with corporations that want to begin our relationship on a platform of dishonesty. I&#x27;m fairly big on that whole &quot;Integrity&quot; thing. I know it&#x27;s not in fashion, these days, but I&#x27;m a bit &quot;old-skool.&quot;

I also would prefer to know salaries (while not minding letting other know mine) but I certainly don&#x27;t think this should be mandated. And, unless regulations force all my competitors to disclose this information (even those outside of these regulations jurisdictios) I don&#x27;t see the point of these regulations at all.

If you&#x27;d like some talking points to help you start this conversation with your HR team, here&#x27;s an article I wrote:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dtrejo.com&#x2F;why-share-salary" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dtrejo.com&#x2F;why-share-salary</a>

Those companies should be named and shamed.<p>I say this as an employer BTW.

It’s all about maintaining a monopsony-like advantage in bargaining position by maintaining information asymmetry with (current and potential) employees.

How is this expected to work in the real world?<p>When I&#x27;m hiring, which I always am for software engineering roles, I am looking for talent at levels between college intern and multi-decade veteran.<p>I don&#x27;t necessarily have a roster of specific positions I need to fill; I have an idea of what kind of skills and experience mix I would like to see over time, but there&#x27;s always going to be turnover at every level.<p>Talent acquisition is multi-modal through campus programs, referrals, recruiters (both for targeted skill needs and passive candidates), and I guess probably some advertised positions.

Couldn’t you could hack it and put a ridiculously large range of salaries? For example: $1 to $10M just to comply.

Curious how wide the salary ranges can be. Are there ways companies can just provide a wide range and get away?

It looks like DigitalOcean changed their policies, I can’t find the same messaging on the linked job post.

I get why companies are increasingly focusing on referral hiring. it lets you sidestep so much compliance.

&gt;&gt; Some companies however have decided that excluding all Colorado residents for a remote job that can be filled by someone in any of the other 49 US states is better than sharing how much they&#x27;re willing to pay.<p>Well, yes obviously that is better. If 2% of all poker games required you to hold your cards the other way around, would it be better to just avoid those games? Yes, it would.

“Man plans, God laughs”.<p>Centrally planned well meaning ideas seem to invariably fail.

We should build a blacklist of companies that do this.

My sympathy is with the employers. Colorado did this to itself with such an anticompetitive law. Beyond this effect, it also encourages sending the work offshore altogether.

While that’s employee friendly..

This is why you need to organize and self report salaries. Like the game devs from a few days back or leverage sites like levels.fyi

Reminds me of the outrage™ when US newspapers blocked connections from Europe over the GDPR.<p>Regulations have consequences. Not all those consequences are the consequences you want. Sometimes exiting a small market looks like a better option than compliance.<p>Sometimes HN downvotes posts for challenging a political crusade by pointing out what it did to those who promoted it. ;)

Reminder: people respond to (dis)incentives.<p>You should really think about the rational response to a disincentive whenever you make a law. But we have politicians who neither care to, nor have the intellectual capacity to bother researching how these “feel good” laws will actually be reacted to in real life.<p>I have a friend who calls SF “the city of unintended consequences” for this exact reason, and now Colorado is importing their attitude.

I understand the public reasoning why the law was passed. I am not sure it is the right solution.<p>As a business I would be very concerned that the cost&#x2F;compensation for those few individuals with the qualification in Colorado will become very expensive as my competitors outbid each other to the sky (CO pop. 5.759mm US Census 2019). I remember the pre-dot com boom. IT was &quot;rolling in money&quot;...<p>As an employee, I am now concerned that I will be targeted because of the job I have. The criminal elements can now pretend to be &quot;Robin Hood&quot;.<p>As an employee, how will this &quot;race to the top&quot; salary battle backfire? Will I be stuck in Colorado? Are there loopholes (and there always are) where CO companies can hire outsiders cheaper?<p>And, so on...