Show me the salary!(blog.jobbox.io) |
Show me the salary!(blog.jobbox.io) |
So the entire premise that there is a defined salary and it's being kept secret is flat out wrong.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to better your position, but saying that there isn't a possibility of a downside is not fair.
As a farmer, this is pretty much how we sell our crops in most cases. The buyer posts how much he is willing to pay, and if I like what I see, I make the deal. If I don't, I wait and hope the price goes up to something that matches my expectations. Sometimes someone else will sell for less and that never happens.
Think of the candidate as the salesman of a car (themselves), and the employer as the buyer of the car, who wants to use it for something.
Then this actually makes perfect sense. Doesn't the seller usually list their price rather than the buyer? (who keeps their range a secret, or even has a much wider range as they have a choice of cars.)
It would be like walking into an auto showroom and the seller (get your mind around this: in the analogy the job candidate is the car/salesperson, but selling themselves rather than a car) asking the shopper to state how much the shopper is willing to pay (shopper = employer in this case, since employer is the one paying, and has a choice of 'cars'). Or at least state a range. Shopper (=employer) don't have to do it - you can ask what the cars are going for first.
Who is at more fault: if a car salesperson refuses to tell you what the cars are going for (job candidate doesn't say how much he or she will work for) or if a buyer refuses to tell you what they have budgeted (the shopper doesn't say how much they're willing to pay, and just wants to see some cars.)
Like all ISO99 car analogies, it's quite a good one, in this case because in fact the buyer and seller both do have a range, i.e. the buyer can consider different prices, and the seller can often be flexible within a single car.
Also there is another reason not to list salary ranges: absurdity. We can conceive of a buyer of a car, given certain circumstances such as a new well-paid job they must drive to or near, but being broke after a period of unemployment, considering everything from $500 to $50,000. It's conceivable, depending on the terms involved, for this particular purchase ("hire"). But that is a range of two orders of magnitude.
Sound absurd? A one-person startup might hire someone from an intern salary all the way through six figures, even doing similar things (if not much has been built), depending on age, experience, whether any of the salary can be deferred, who they can find, etc..
You don't need much imagination to realize that a cofounder salary range is: $0-$100K salary, 0%-50% equity.
With a little imagination, that range actually widens considerably, but I don't want to make your brains explode. (With negative salaries or much higher than 50% effective equity, etc.)
It's all on the table.
If you don't want to interview for positions outside of your salary range, here's a thought: 1) call up whoever posted the advertisement and tell them you don't want to apply if it's far outside of your salary range. tell them what it is - you don't even have to identity yourself. if it's outside their range they'll tell you. 2) (I don't really recommend this.) Send your CV (your car or house brochure) with a price range.
It's somewhat rude, sure, but I guarantee it's better than not letting 100 employers see your resume/CV at all, because you've filtered them out based on a lack of listed salary and refuse to take even 5 seconds to drop an email with an attachment.
The line "Expected salary: ___" is guaranteed to filter out anyone whose budget is less. On the other hand, you might filter out people whose budgets are more or people who consider this very rude, and forward.
I was just describing the point of view common in some other countries, in which case the employee is expected to come up with their requirement and state it. Neither one is correct or incorrect. (And both have real-world analogies - for example, auctions, which can also be an analogy for the job market in that there's only 1 of specifically you, where bidders have to offer an amount rather than the seller saying how much something costs.)
I work at an IB, doing Python/Quant development. We are presented with two candidates to interview.
Candidate 1 is ok, has a year or two of Python but otherwise mostly Java background. Did so-so in the algo and numerical discussions, was ok in the problem solving categories. He was currently earning 75k and was asking for a 5k bump. HR were fine with this.
Candidate 2 was unbelievable, has authored and contributed to many open source Python libraries, was well known in the community, did very well in the questions, would have been an absolute asset to the team and business. He is currently earning 50k at a Django shop. HR rejected his application as hge asked for 70k, on the grounds that the jump was too big. Even though it was less than the overall pay for candidate 1.
Employers suck hard sometimes!
You are doing these guys a favour, but it is also very beneficial to the company in the long run. If they are good and aren't treated well then they will leave. It is as simple as that.
I'm also guessing that since you're getting them so cheaply to begin with then they're likely still under market rate with a ~75% bump in pay.
Best bet is to join one, if you have to, from a contractor route. Then you have an advantage, as they know you are most likely on a higher rate and are not willing to muck around with the usual HR demands.
The flip side of this is that it's easy to bump your market rate - just get counteroffers. This provides the basis firms are looking for. Some people are more ruthless about than others, of course - it can lead to the sorts of disparity you're seeing.
In an ideal world we would have more uniform salary numbers with transparency around them, but until we get to that world, it's contingent on individuals to put in the work to set themselves up for success.
[0] I founded http://OfferLetter.io - we provide negotiation advice and career services
[1] PS - you should check out the Offer Drive (http://offerletter.io/drive.html) - "Confidentially submit your offers. Learn if you're paid fairly." as the tagline goes.
Brit here, wanted to take part but wasn't sure if my submission would be meaningful.
this has nothing to do with which party is stating the price.
- I don't apply to jobs that don't list a salary range. This is a red flag that tells me that the employer doesn't have the budget to pay market rates and that applying and interviewing could be a colossal waste of time for both of us. I get that the employer may not be willing to pay what I want based on my experience, etc, but the salary range tells me if getting what I want is even possible.
- I also don't apply for jobs that don't list an annual salary. I get the vibe, rightly or wrongly, that when you only list a monthly salary you don't expect to keep your new hire around very long.
- Jobs that are listed as "xx months with possibility of extension" are also right out. A job, for me anyway, represents a huge commitment and if the employer isn't willing to make that same commitment then I'm not interested.
> Yes, you have quantity, but what about quality? How much time will you spend sorting the wheat from the chaff? How much application spam will you have to review and dispose of? And of the relevant ones, how many under- and over-qualified candidates do you need to sift through because they lacked the vital piece of information that is a salary range?
It's easy: filter the incoming candidates based on who you want to hire. Send your favorite candidates a simple email saying what you want to pay for that position, and ask if they're still interested. Interview the ones that are. (This way, you're not posting the salary number to the public, but you're still filtering candidates quickly and respecting their time.)
If none of your favorite candidates are interested at your targeted price, there's your answer. Either lower your standards and take one of the other applicants, or ask all of your favorite candidates what number it would take to get them interested. (No interviewing - you don't have the right to take up their time until you can come up with the money - you're just asking for the salary number they would need to even step into an interview.) When the numbers come back, that's what it would take to hire your favorite candidates.
See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940820
So: the only people who will apply for jobs with no salary listed are the ones desperate for any job.
Are they the people you want to hire?
Supplying expected compensation up front is one of the best ways to market your business to developers. If I, a developer, am making $100K and you make it known that you are willing to pay $200K, I'm going to get excited and get in touch with you. If I am left to assume that you are also only offering $100K, because you "pay market rates" or haven't said otherwise, I'm not even going to waste my time getting in touch with you.
It seems like a lot of businesses feel like they are in a buyer's market, which comes with completely different rules, and then cannot figure out why it isn't working for them.
And people who hire complain about the bad standard of applicants!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao%27s_Millionaires%27_Probl...
The candidate puts in the minimum they're willing to take into one side of the solution, and the employer puts in the maximum. Both then securely find out if the minimum is less than the maximum, without revealing the two numbers to each other.
The socialist millionaire solution is used in OTR, but this solution seems to have not caught on yet.
Maybe that's unfair, but I don't think we've ever chosen not to hire someone because of the salary level they wanted.
Think of airlines. In the handful of times, I've asked how much people have paid for their seat. I've gotten ranges of a couple hundred dollars in both directions for a cross-country flight. Some of it was when the ticket was bought. And I thought I was getting a deal on Priceline...
There are always disparities in salary. The most glaring and entrenched - being that of males and females of near equivalency being paid different amounts.
If all salaries were made public, you would have to equalize salaries to prevent the fomenting dissension.
This can be done at smaller organizations. For larger organizations (think Fortune 500), the higher-ups could not keep their larger salaries because a) they would not be able to justify them (as much) and b) their larger salaries may have been largely due to 'taking a larger share of the pot'.
I agree 100% and I've always found it kind of creepy - like giving candy to a kid levels of creepy.
"Here is your pay check Mr. Jones - but be sure not to tell anyone how much it is"
is very similar to
"Here is some candy Jonny, but make sure you don't tell anyone else I gave you that candy, or how much I gave you"
In both scenarios why is the "giver" trying to conceal the details of the transaction?
Because they've got something to gain by keeping it a secret.
I was once offered a position by a certain well known Las Vegas based ecommerce company while I was living in Salt Lake and working in Park City. They asked my current salary and I told them (like a chump). When my offer finally came through it was for less than my current salary (ouch). I assumed this was a really weird way of telling me "no", so I declined the offer.
I immediately got a call from their HR wondering what the problem was. When I informed them that I wasn't going to move to Las Vegas and take a pay cut they dug in their heels and argued that their offer was really more than I was currently making since Las Vegas is so much cheaper than Park City (as I mentioned above, I never actually lived in Park City but that didn't seem to dissuade them).
If I had responded to the "how much do you make?" question by telling them how much they needed to pay me then instead of wasting everyone's time they could have terminated the interview process or even better, made their offer without being confused by irrelevant salary data.
At my most current job I told the recruiter right up front what my requirements were and told her I didn't want to fly out for an in-person interview unless we agreed on ballpark numbers. She came back with an acceptable number (which I accepted when I later saw it on the offer letter) and nobody's time was wasted. I also won't be job hopping for a tiny pay bump any time soon. Win/win.
http://offerletter.io/drive.html . In short - submit your offer and equity information, get back access to a statistical pool showing where you stand.
A few notes on this subject from my perspective as the founder of http://OfferLetter.io (we provide negotiation advice and career matchmaking to developers and other techies).
Companies also oftentimes just don't know what someone is worth, and don't want to publicly publish numbers that are too high or low for fear miscalibrating expectations w.r.t. large swaths of potential candidates.
0) If a company tries to play the, "What do you make?" game, it's important to deflect, deflect, deflect and if they insist, simply state, "I expect a competitive offer to be on the order of $X"
1) Market rates are complicated. As I've written about before, the outcomes that people can see because of outsize startup exit scenarios means that their market rate can be very very high. Google doesn't publish this kind of info because they can and will match even crazy startup exit numbers, but don't broadcast this for fear of screwing up expectations.
2) At the end of the day it is contingent on the individual to define their own basis and see what places are willing to offer what compensation, and how much they are willing to budge. This is how markets work.
3) On a related note, oftentimes, companies will try and prohibit discussion of compensation by saying it's confidential, or a trade secret. Confidentiality and wage secrecy requirements in the workplace are illegal under California law. The exact statue is here: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection... As we have seen repeatedly, these kinds of requirements tend to disproportionately harm people from many kinds of non-privileged backgrounds.
And, under national labor legislation, companies cannot prohibit discussion within the workplace.
Good call on that. Resentment is the #1 factor in practically everything in internal people dynamics. Poor managers and founders just don't realize it yet.
This tends to be less bad in major cities than in small towns though. Young people, get out of the small town you're living in.
Put another way - salary is big item in job description for me - amount employer ready to pay too often correlates with problems/technologies/colleagues/innovations i am going to work with.
So naturally first question I always ask recruiter - how much. And naturally most of them shy away from answering it straight.
As a result I created job form[1] and, unless it is someone's recommendation, or i had previous relationships with recruiter, I send all of them to this form to fill it first.
"Recruiter: “Why don’t you tell me how much you think you’re worth?”"
Well... what I'm worth to a company depends a whole hell of a lot on how good they are operationally. Company A may be able to extract $500k of value per year from my skills. Company B may only be able to extract $80k of value from my skills. What am I "worth"? It's largely dependent on the environment I'm operating in, and how good they are at organizing everyone's skills to produce/extract value.
As for the article, I think the author lists a lot of real concerns that exist at companies - and then sort of dismisses them as if they are invalid because they aren't ideal. I'm sorry - but companies aren't ideal.
Let's also look at the function of job postings - from my point of view, the goal is to get as many candidates into the pipeline as possible and then get them qualified. I want to minimize the number of filters whenever possible.
Finally, he doesn't provide a lot of benefit from doing these actions aside from perhaps not having to wade through a lot of resumes - but as I mentioned above, I don't think that turns out to be the case.
One of the points in the post is that not posting salary information is also a filter. Some would argue that the absence of even a salary range filters out the top end of candidates, leaving you with a pipeline of mediocrity.
To the interesting job spam I usually reply with the question of the salary range, and 95% of the time there's no reply back.
have you tried giving them a call and verbally stating that you find it interesting, state why you're a match, but say that you don't want to apply if it's outside your range. then ask if (number) is within what they would consider? since you've pre-qualified yourself they must answer, and will be looking forward to your application if you match.
This is the status quo for many American companies unfortunately. It's an unfortunate consequence of dealing with a highly individualistic society. You as a person are an asset and you always have to be selling yourself. Your previous salary is seen as leverage when it comes to finding a new job. Once you find one, you'll most likely find that salary discussion is a very sore thumb with everyone in the workplace. I see it as competitive collaboration that's gone cancerous.
My point is just that I don't think it only benefits the employers.
If you thought they were underpaid, you were kind of doing them a disservice by keeping quiet. Knowledge of a pay disparity within a group of similar employees tends to help the negotiating power of those who are making less, but does not tend to hurt those who are making more.
Do you tell them early to avoid wasting your time?
For myself I'll just say that I've done well since I realized that I should negotiate for EVERY offer I'm given no matter how high. There are no more exploding offers after you've had a couple jobs - we're not in kindergarten and our parents aren't going to take things away because we're acting selfishly.
If I'm applying for a job it's because what's there sounds interesting, if the salary backs it up then brilliant. If the salary is poor then maybe I didn't want to work there after all and that's very much their loss.
I don't do the "lets re-negotiate my salary" bit, it's up to my employer to keep me at or above market rate for my skills, I shouldn't have to ask for it.
And given the fact that this market rate is not a clearly defined value (also thanks to employers' reluctance), don't you think it is necessary to at least negotiate with your current employer if you believe you're being paid below par?
Compare with "What happens if engineer Bob finds out that his company has finally conceded to the current market rates, if only for new hires, but expects to continue under-paying their established employees?"
In most cases, businesses are reasonable. They aren't going to volunteer to pay you more out of the goodness of their heart, but (most) of the time it doesn't hurt to ask. Just don't go threatening to leave if they don't.
However I've found I get the best results by stating my salary requirements up front.
KitnaDetiHai.in (coincidentally means the same as show me the money in Hindi)
The site has gone viral in top bschools in India.
The idea was born out of the thought, just for a simple mobile purchase or for a meal, we compare prices and reviews to get the best deal. Whereas for one year of blood and sweat, when HR says this is the best in the industry they are no accurate sites to refer to ask for a fairer deal.
How do I trust the HR words, when one of her prime KPI is also how much money she could save for the company while rolling an offer out.
I would be happy to hear feedback from you folks!
p.s. In Glassdoor I can post as CEO of Apple, there is no authentication and why the data is so inaccurate, whereas in KitnaDetiHai after initial search its a compulsory LinkedIn Login to search more and even after that Machine Learning Algorithm's are used to identify outliers. If found so the user's access is removed and he cannot be a part of community at all.
Another Incentive here for users to enter right salaries is, we will suggest jobs which 1. Match hiked up no's from current salary. 2. Also fairly matching skills of the job against skills listed/endorsed on LinkedIn.
It also often wastes everyone's time. After going through multiple rounds of communication, the salary is finally revealed: often way too low, even after hearing about the benefits.
Other recruiters will talk salary early, and those jobs are usually the ones that pay well.
I don't waste time (mine and theirs) talking to recruiters who don't share salary information (expectations or ranges). There's a major tech company that needed my expertise (systems performance), for whom I never got past the recruiters because they wouldn't talk salary. (After several months, I don't think they ever filled that role.)
This all doesn't matter much to me now, as I'm at Netflix and very happy. Netflix does talk salary expectations.
If employee talks first, the number can only go down.
If the employer talks first, the number can only go up.
It's unfortunately wide spread. I wish we lived in a world where people saw a fair offer and accepted it without automatically asking for more (employee) less (employer). If something's not fair then fine negotiate, but I think people negotiate even if an offer is fair to "win" or "its expected" or "everyone else would". So employers come in below budget and employees are hesitant to give salary numbers.
Heres a good post on it:
http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/183/does-the-fi...
If there was an objective way to determine then people and companies would be much happier not negotiating for the most part.
This does away with all the upside where you could have achieved something higher, but the only other downside is if you run into an employer whose policy requires their staff to get an initial number from a candidate and then agree on a reduced level, and you know what to tell them when you discover that is the kind of employer they are.
This one also has an evil sibling: you say something meaningless like "Salary: Competitive" and then when an applicant turns up to interview, you ask them what they're currently on. I see absolutely no reason, from the candidate's point of view, that discussing current compensation with a prospective future employer would ever work in your favour.
Worst case (edit: for not disclosing your current deal) is that the manager/HR drone stick to their guns and won't move the discussion on before you give a number, in which case you know what kind of employer you're dealing with and can decide to leave the interview early if your interest in working with them has faded.
Similarly, if they say "Good" or "Great" benefits, the benefits are probably poor or average at best. If they actually had really good benefits, they'd be specific about naming them.
I had a hiring manager push me hard for this info at one job. I ended up taking the job (maybe lower pay than I could have gotten) and he turned out to be one of the worst people to teamwork with at the company.
Do you only work for startups? Most major tech companies don't list salary ranges, and Google, Facebook, etc obviously have the money to pay what people are worth.
This is true only if you also have nothing put away from the good times to cover your essential living costs for a while and give you a safety margin.
Assuming you do -- and you need a very, very good reason not to in this business -- then taking the first offer that comes along just because you're currently unemployed is very much not the optimal strategy. You voluntarily reduce your negotiating power to nothing, and if that were really necessary, no professional contractor/freelancer would ever survive in business for long.
I look at my own current job. I was offered a full time position 6 months ago, for an amount that is pretty in line with local salaries. As a consultant, they were able to offer me a whooping 60% more, and that's after I accounted for all the benefits of the full time position.
I find it pretty screwed up, but it is the realities of the local job market, where very senior full time devs are severely underpaid unless the are consultants or telecommuting for bay area companies.
As a consultant, you're responsible for paying taxes that they would normally pay, which when combined with other benefits represents up to 50% of your total salary as a normal employee. You also lose out on a number of legal protections you gain as a regular employee.
As other people have said, you can post a range rather than a single number, and that number doesn't have to be 100% ironclad - if a range is 5-10% out for me, I'd probably still apply and try to negotiate - but I'm not going to waste my time applying for jobs only to find out they're offering £50k if I want £100k.
Check out the jobs posted here: http://oxfordknight.co.uk/jobs/
They all have salary ranges, many are quite broad, but it communicates quite clearly the level that both parties should be thinking about when entering into negotiations. So much more useful.
The tactic they use (how can anyone think this is a good idea...) is to hope by the end of the interview process the candidate will be so attached to the position (or invested at this point! see: throwing good money after bad, or the sunk cost fallacy) to refuse! Or maybe they'll just ask for 5k more, or something.
They are not wasting your time. You are wasting theirs. The candidate cannot reasonably determine how well your company is able to monetize their skills ahead of time. It's the employer's job to figure that out, and offer a reasonable fraction thereof to the employee. The employer should know that the position will be profitable, otherwise advertising it as permanent would be a misrepresentation. If you don't know how technical professionals will make you money (or cut your costs), and to what extent, you have no business hiring them.
That's why whenever a company starts to discuss salary before their goals for the unfilled position and my qualifications, I back away.
Sadly I rarely see this happen in practice. It would be nice to see studies about how this affects the average cost to recruit a new employee.
This sounds reasonable. But just to play devil's advocate for a second -- for any given role, is your variance really that high? Do you expect to field a dramatically variable range of candidates for the same level, title, or position? So variable, in fact, that establishing a ballpark range is an exercise in futility?
If you're fielding candidates with N years of experience, 1.5N years of experience, or 2N+ years of experience for the same role, maybe it's worth recalibrating your expectations for that role. Fine-tune them a bit. If your expectations are all over the map, then you're going to make a lot more work for yourself by taking on variance and trying to sift through it.
It's totally fine, even admirable, to take the position that each candidate is unique. But how unique, really? Unless we're talking about very high-level or rare positions, a reasonable and market-appropriate range will usually cover most of the variance. (That's not to say that you can't have some sort of discretionary, secondary range available for rockstars or competitive bidding situations. But aren't those typically the edge cases, and not the norm?)
it's very annoying to be dragged through interviews for what turns out to be a laughable offer at the end.
Explaining to people who are perfectly well qualified for the job including your own existing employees why they're at the bottom of the range is an uncomfortable conversation... much more uncomfortable than explaining why an actually-hired elite candidate whose been given additional responsibilities earns 50% more salary.
First time, they said no and we stopped talking. Second time got me my current job. YMMV.
I do agree with your policy but for different reasons. For one I haven't seen a scalable way to roll out total salary transparency with a net gain in company psychology. The problems seem to outweigh the benefits, although I think it may be possible and just not figured out yet.
#1 Make sure everybody is paid as much as they deserve as far as you can tell. #2 Roll out total salary transparency.
Not being "scalable" sounds like another way of saying "we don't want to do #1, it sounds expensive. Secrecy is cheaper.".
My response: You're the recruiter. You should know more about this company, the industry in general, the industry in this city, current skills, etc than me. It's your job to know what I'm worth.
My current company's Operating income (EBIT): $X
My current company's Labor cost: $Y
Number of employees: Z
'Hourly billing' is a perennial issue - people want to compare hourly rates on stuff, and yet I'm typically able to get stuff done far far far faster than many others (perhaps not the average HN reader, but def compared to many people I know).
"What are you worth?" is, likely, only something that can be readily answered by those in the sales arm of an organization, as it's most readily tracked and accounted for in those terms.
I also am not convinced that it's a seller's market. Most programmers (developers, software engineers, whatever) are treated like second-class citizens from the first phone screen through the "culture fit" portion of an on-site interview.
Regardless, my point wasn't about whether companies should or should not post salaries; it was that applicants to companies that don't ought not be considered "desperate for any job" because it is simply a fact that all but a very tiny percentage of jobs are advertised without said salary listed.
So declining to state current salary before receiving an offer is still very much a possibility.
That being said, if I wasn't privy to this information it wouldn't take much to find out what the other people on my team are making. I don't think I've ever worked in an environment where salaries were considered top secret information.
Sticking around for the original salary after renegotiating tells them either that you didn't care that much to begin with, or that you'll be taking a lot of calls and personal days in the next couple of months.
If I saw a range like $0-$10,000,000, I wouldn't apply since it's clear that they are not taking the hiring process seriously.
That sounds about right, though it could be even less if they're aiming at new graduates and can throw in some sort of impressive-looking benefits. An employee stock options scheme or contributory pension scheme often seems like a great addition to a new starter, because the naive candidate doesn't understand how much such things are really worth and how much of the package they'd probably get from other employers as well.
The person making the hiring/firing decisions probably isn't responsible for the bottom line. They'll be working within defined constraints on what they are authorised to do and how much they are authorised to spend on doing it. If they want to go outside those constraints, they probably have to follow a standard procedure to request authorisation to do so, which may well involve legal as well as accounting approval, explicit approval from management at increasing levels of seniority depending on the request, etc.
If senior management haven't kept a careful eye on how their policies are actually being implemented, this can easily create perverse incentives where doing something is favourable to the person making the decision even though it is less favourable for the overall success of the organisation. The current example, hiring expensive contractors for very long term gigs instead of salaried staff, is not unusual.
Other similar results of potential interest to geeks would be things like renting SaaS rather than buying (often more expensive in the long run, but done because the relatively low recurring opex is preferred to relatively high up-front capex) and buying commercial software from a preferred supplier rather than using something Open Source for free (because preferred suppliers have been pre-vetted and approved so their product can be bought immediately, while using someone's FOSS might need legal to review the licence if it's one they haven't seen before, which can involve all kinds of "business justification" paperwork and extensive delays).
Edited to add: Of course, there may be other factors as well. Contractors might be more expensive per day but often don't come with the long-term legal obligations of hiring an employee (a big deal in places with relatively strong employment rights laws, such as most of Europe). For software purchases there may be issues of ongoing support contracts or (re)training and migration costs that dominate the total cost of ownership, making rent/buy or COTS/FOSS decisions a relatively minor factor. Sometimes the incentives set up by senior management who are looking at the big picture aren't as perverse as they look from below.
Hence the employers need to know how much you've earnt and how much PAYE tax you've paid so far this tax year (via a form called a P45).
I guess you could get round it by claiming you had unpaid leave, or you'd recently been given a pay rise, or you'd been offered the figure by your previous company to stay.
That's not strictly true, but in the UK employers are normally required to deduct the main income taxes before paying the employee's salary and they are responsible for remitting those taxes to the government. To do this, they need to know how much total salary a new starter has earned so far in the current tax year, in order to make the correct determinations about tax rates and therefore deduct the correct withholdings before paying salary.
So, when you leave an employment mid-year you get an official record of how much you've been paid so far that year in that employment, along with how much was deducted for taxes etc. A new employer will normally want to see these records for any previous employment within the same tax year.
That doesn't mean they can actually see your previous salary. If you started on 6 April (edit: This is the first day of the new tax year in the UK) and therefore hadn't had any previous employment in the same tax year, or if you had previously worked multiple jobs, or had a pay rise, or anything else irregular, then they can't do the arithmetic to reverse engineer the salary from what they've been told for tax calculation purposes. But if you've had one regular job since the start of the year and no significant changes in salary or bonuses, this does mean a quick division will tell them exactly what you were on before.
Also, why is it the employee's responsibility to not drive inflation? If the company is fine with paying someone X for a job, why does it matter what the person earned before?
About being paid unfairly - I don't think I agree with this as a basic concept, at least in the context of software development. They were getting paid what they agreed to when they signed on the dotted line.
And I disagree with your assertion that signing on the dotted line instantly makes everything fair. For one, employers have far more data on what they're paying for the position already than any candidate. If both sides don't have the same information, it is not possible for any agreement to be fair.
Jealousy is real, it will impact your day to day relationships with people.
I really don't understand why companies are so nonchalant about employee retention.
You do not have to tell your salary, but lying - is bad for carma.
Telling your salary target is a good idea that saves time for everyone involved, but it should be clearly outlined as a target, not as your current salary.
But... just never bother telling your current salary. It doesn't help you in dealing with recruiters at all.
"$x is what will make me consider a new position" is all you need to say.
You don't say what the minimum you will work for is, you tell them what your other offers are, then you have an auction and they have to bid up.
I'm sorry for the situation you found yourself in, but that isn't remotely true. I've been working independently for a while, and I've sometimes discussed how much is worth putting somewhere safe in the current economic climate with friends in broadly similar positions. The idea that anyone wouldn't do that was universally regarded as crazy.
Of course there might be exceptions. If you're starting your first business and you're bootstrapping, you might choose to accept a much higher level of risk than most normal employees ever would in order to maximise your chance of eventual success. (I know reasonable people who would disagree with even this, but there is at least a decent argument in its favour.) If you have a dependent with a serious medical problem and you need the money to fund treatment, you do what you have to do.
But if you're working in IT, in a good period, and you really are living month-to-month without either building up an emergency fund or having a clear reason to be spending everything you've got on something that is more important to you, I'd recommend consulting a good financial advisor and working out a budget so you can live within your means and better protect yourself before the next down period in the industry.
I would imagine having to explain to your employees why you're underpaying them is a difficult conversation. But the problem is that's the employee's know, the problem is that you're underpaying them.
Most employers able to pay market rate or better would rather attract candidates for a position that are substantially better than their existing employees than substantially worse, so the feasible salary range is naturally skewed upwards even if you pad it at the bottom. Most employees don't think they belong in the bottom half of the salary range for their position, even if they do. Something has to give, and its usually transparency.
Suppose you're working in software development in the UK, recently graduated and now with a little experience but still quite early in your career.
If you're outside London and living in a shared place, maybe your salary is £30k, and your monthly living costs for rent, bills, and essentials like food and travel are £1,500. Your net monthly income after taxes and student loan repayments is probably about £1,850.
So, you have a surplus of £350 per month. If you set that aside throughout your next year of employment, sticking it in an ISA (a tax-exempt savings account), then by the end of that year you have nearly three months of safety margin.
Suppose, ignoring inflation to make the maths easy, that your salary increases at about 10% that year, without any negotiation or changing jobs. Now your take-home pay is probably about £2,000 after deductions, giving you a £500 surplus each month. If you saved that away the following year, you'd have more than 6 months of safety margin set aside within 2 years of starting to save.
Of course these are just example figures, hopefully not unrealistic for someone early in a software development career in the UK today, and they ignore any one-off major expenses you might have like getting a car serviced and MOT'd once a year or taking a foreign holiday. But even if you do those things, you can surely still save something, and when it comes to having a bit in reserve in case your career hits a bump, anything is better than nothing.
Edit: After checking a few prices, it turns out that some costs of living have gone up much less than I expected since I was that young. :-) So actually £1,500 is probably a lot more than you really need to spend on essentials under the conditions I mentioned, even if you're living in a tech-focussed area, and saving a few months' worth of essentials expenses should be much quicker than I worked out above.
The hard part is that equitable salaries do not mean equal salaries. If you there are large differences based completely on merit it's very difficult to make someone feel good about being lower than the person sitting next to them, even if it's objectively fair.
You seem to be implying that voluntarily giving out pay rises to the underpaid is easy. It isn't easy.
>The hard part is that equitable salaries do not mean equal salaries. If you there are large differences based completely on merit it's very difficult to make someone feel good about being lower than the person sitting next to them, even if it's objectively fair.
This would be the hard part if American were mostly all secret communists.
For one thing, there are different but equally reasonable criteria on which to base "deserve." Maybe Bob in Engineering contributes more to company profits than Steve in janitorial, so Bob deserves to get paid more. Or maybe Steve is intensely loyal and stuck with the company through hard times and often stays late to get everything done, so Steve deserves to get paid more. Or Joe in sales hasn't been selling well this year, but his kid has cancer and he's obviously distracted and he deserves high pay because he's having such a hard time.
And of course, given a choice of criteria, people will invariably tend to choose whichever one gives them the results they like. Bob will be more likely to think the profit-based evaluation is best. Someone who's good friends with Steve will think that loyalty is more important.
Maybe it can be made to work (and it definitely can work in a smaller company), but I don't think it's as easy as you make it sound. Sometimes it's just impossible to please everybody, and if you try then you'll only succeed in displeasing everybody.
Perhaps you should look at some real examples rather than your imagination:
http://99u.com/articles/15527/the-age-of-salary-transparency