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by geofft 3204 days ago
Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I heard, the specific organization that was pursuing the case was being defunded / split up by the current administration. It sounded like they had some interesting analysis of the data, and I don't think that's ever made it to a courtroom.

I'm pretty unsurprised that leveling is a good way for bias to sneak in. My experience as a man applying for a Google position and also talking to women applying for Google positions is that leveling is extremely opaque, more so than the salary offer, and the same candidate could easily move between L3/L4 or L4/L5 essentially at the whims of the recruiter and the interviewers, and the same role can be filled by multiple levels (e.g. there isn't headcount that's open at L4 but not L5). And this would be consistent with both Google's claims that people of the same role and level are paid consistently, and employees' claims of pay discrepancy.

Also, here's the original complaint: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4044053-Kelly-Ellis-...

2 comments

It's rare you'd have headcount open at L4 but not L5. There's a significant jump between levels, but not to the extent you're saying.

Leveling is a function of interviewer recommendations and hiring committee approving a candidate for a certain level. We usually interview people with a target range in mind (e.g., L4-L5) that's based on your experience and current role.

Base salaries don't have a huge range until you get very senior (e.g. Director). There's a LOT more variance in stock grants. I'm sure there are people two levels below me that have a higher overall comp due to huge stock grants.

Source: I work for Google, interview a lot, but don't serve on hiring committees. This isn't advice, and may not apply to all areas of the company.

> Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently?

Last I heard was the judge denying a request for more information, saying DoL was on a "fishing expedition" and didn't have anything to back their case and justify said fishing expedition.

Got a link?
WaPo article (with provisional ruling linked as well):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/07/16...

Well that's odd. Why would DoL need names and email addresses and phone numbers of employees? Didn't they already claim to have a statistical analysis of salaries based on previously-gathered data?

Is this related to the thing where Google says getting the data would be too hard (i.e., do they want to do their own analysis of competitive salaries based on scraping LinkedIn or something)?