[qurren]

I'm just tired of regulators realizing the right things to regulate but not implementing them correctly.

Job postings must include a salary range? Who the fuck thought of that? Did they even ask a mathematician whether providing the min() and max() would be useful rather than mean(), median(), and std(), which is what the law really should require?

[sokoloff]

How many people who are considering hiring their first few employees have an idea of what the minimum they’d likely pay and the maximum they’d likely pay for those new positions? Almost all.

Now how many could even tell you the rough definition of standard deviation, let alone be able to give a value for it? Almost none.

As an applicant for a single opening, it’s not obvious that standard deviation is helpful either.

For normal people, I think that min and max are the two most practical and understandable measures.

[qurren]

> As an applicant for a single opening

You're nitpicking at details. I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how to write it so that this isn't an issue, but it seems you're more interested in "taking the other side" rather than thinking together about how to increase job compensation transparency.

Here's the problem with minimums: Companies posting ranges of $100K-$900K. Yes, I've seen them.

Here's a hint for everyone else: For small companies and single openings they can just aggregate mean/median/std by job level (E5 average, M1 average), or aggregate horizontally by team (HR average, ops average), whatever. Anything to increase transparency. If you're criticizing the math instead of building on the math, you're clearly against job transparency.

[sokoloff]

I’m in favor of transparency (and consistently argue for that and act accordingly inside my own company). I’m against adding information that will confuse far more people than it will help.

A company listing $100k-$900k per year for a role that’s not commissioned sales is exhibiting malicious compliance and should be dealt with directly as such rather than adding an additional nearly useless measure to somehow help smoke that out or avoid it.

[runako]

> Companies posting ranges of $100K-$900K.

Yes, this is extremely Netflix. The "fix" for this is to mandate that they can no longer post an ad for engineers, but rather they have to post separate ads for each engineering role. Maybe this is better, maybe not. If a person applies to L4, are they allowed to be hired at L3 pay? Will that confuse people?

> For small companies and single openings

levels.fyi chooses not to publish some comp datapoints because there's too little data, which means publishing the data is tantamount to publishing an individual's compensation.

I hear you on the goal, but the details are tough.

[master-lincoln]

we need less normal people

[sgerenser]

For many tech jobs, that still wouldn’t help much. Salary alone is often half or less of total compensation. They’d also need to include stock grants and bonuses for the comparison to be meaningful.

[qurren]

Good point. Absolutely include mean, mean, std of stock grants, bonuses, and sign-on bonuses by law as well.

[runako]

Caveat: I am pro more transparency in compensation data. But it's hard to do right.

> mean(), median(), and std()

play this out a bit, and you'll quickly realize that there are infinite ways to game this. Something like levels.fyi only works because levels are a thing, and they are consistent across a relative handful of companies (most tech workers do not work at those companies).

And even levels.fyi won't publish salary data until there are enough data points at a company to prevent such publication from inadvertently publishing how much an individual person makes. This makes it less useful for (say) a senior looking for a job at a non-tech or small firm.