Since I'm hiring for engineering positions, I evaluate candidates based on their engineering skills and ability to work on a team, not their BS or sales skills.
Therefore I would not "dock a grade" for someone telling me their salary when requested because it's a reasonable request.
If they got angry at the request, the interview is probably effectively over and any following interviews are probably cancelled. If that simple request yields an angry response, I shudder to think of what would happen in a code review where a reviewer pointed out that their code was inefficient, hard to maintain, or behaved unexpectedly in some corner case which the design failed to mention explicitly ("Nowhere did the spec say that if a web user entered a general Unicode character into the input box that the server could not crash so my code is fine and you should shut the fuck up and if you question my code again we're going to resolve the issue in the parking lot after work.")
If they politely declined to reveal salary information and didn't play games in that refusal, the interview process won't be terminated for that reason, but it would be noted in my brain as an issue to be resolved. Though if they refuse to offer that information eventually and don't have a good explanation (like, "I owned the company and sometimes I lost money, sometimes I made money so I don't have any meaningful salary history"), probably an offer won't be made. I think teams work best when people don't play games and are as transparent as feasible and being intentionally opaque (or not trusting me to not abuse the information) about this simple matter is likely to portend problems in the future.
BTW, I've don't think I've ever had someone refuse to answer that question before an offer was extended -- although sometimes the answer, which is acceptable, includes an explanation such as "There was a serious illness in my family for three years and I requested flexibility in exchange for pay raises for three years. That situation no longer exists and, as you will note, my salary three years ago was competitive so I expect a new competitive salary" (if I can, I might try to verify the story though).
I actually don't care if employees share salary information - those that want to share are, as far as I'm concerned, free to do so. Generally, I think the best compensated employees will be the least likely to share because they realize less productive employees may be jealous of them. Generally the least skilled workers seem to think they are much better than they are.
I certainly would have no interest in participating in "collective bargaining" for my job. Nor do I think hardly any of my coworkers that I've respected would be interested in doing so. However, I have no problem with others participating in collective bargaining. If a group of employees got together and wanted to bargain collectively and I made policy, I would urge them to try to unionize. But if they didn't want to, or couldn't get enough of their coworkers to vote to unionize, I think I would generally be happy to evaluate each employee in the group, determine what raise I thought each deserved, then distribute that raise pool equally (as a percentage) among the group. I would share with any employee that requested what their contribution to the common raise pool was (obviously I could not give that information to other employees though). Of course, no employees have ever requested collective bargaining in my organizations or in any around me so I've never had to actually face this question.
If you conducted a anonymous survey among all the employees in your statistically significantly sized group (perhaps Department, perhaps below) and asked "Do you believe, among employees in this group who perform similar jobs, that you perform ABOVE or BELOW or RIGHT AT the median?", do you think the number of people who respond "BELOW" would be statistically the same as those who respond "ABOVE"? I strongly suspect that more will select ABOVE than BELOW.
Generally in the US work environment, I've found that low performers are much more likely to overestimate their skills and contributions while high performers are more likely to underestimate or accurately estimate theirs.
the least competent performers inflate their abilities the most; that the reason for the overinflation seems to be ignorance, not arrogance; and that chronic self-beliefs, however inaccurate, underlie both people's over and underestimations of how well they're doing.
An example of this I recall outside my direct field was an acquaintance who was a lab tech who seriously believed that she did the same work as the engineers but wasn't paid as much. This was completely ignorance on her part -- she had no idea what the engineers did outside the lab because she didn't delve into what engineers were doing the other 95% of the time when they weren't in the lab.
As far as the risk I will never get a quality employee who feels like they have been pushing themselves too hard etc... I don't see why requesting salary information would affect that significantly. I would want an explanation of why they were interested in taking a pay cut to work in my organization. Reasons like "more interesting work", or "bored with doing the same old work" might be very legitimate if they were clearly overpaid in their past job (which sometimes happens because someone has become the critical expert or has a critical skill that the employer is so terrified of losing that they effectively "bribe" the person to stay but the person isn't happy and, likely, isn't even doing their best work due to poor morale).
However, in most groups I've managed I probably would not accept the "pushing myself too hard" unless the person was also dropping to a job with less critical responsibility. Outside of a couple employees I've had that were techs rather than engineers, everyone in my group has been on salary so working "less for less salary" is too difficult to manage. As well, most organizations I've been in/manag
No, I don't think that you would jump at a $10K increase over your current position -- reread my note. If you would do so, I don't want you. I will explain the job to you as well as I can and my interview discussion will give you some additional guidance. However, I can't accurately predict what you will be doing in six months in the future -- that depends on your initiative and skill and what needs to get done. Sure, I want people who work hard -- as I do. But I want them to do it because they enjoy the work, not because they feel they "need" to or just because I gave them a higher salary.
"Perks", in the conventional usage, are part of compensation to some extent -- they all increase the cost of opening a new position (or retaining an existing position). I, personally, prefer fewer perks and higher salary but I also recognize that others differ on this (companies like perks as they pay wholesale for them and, if times are tight, they can cut them -- if they start cutting salaries, employees will start quitting en-mass).
I've NEVER worked for a company that capped individual annual raises at any particular value -- I'd leave such a company the moment I knew they were doing that. However, it's a reality that the raise pool and the promotion pool is set at any company of any significant size - management has to have some idea what expenses will be in the upcoming year and match it to revenue in some rational way -- if every manager could just give out whatever raises they want, planning is not possible. In normal cases if the combined pool isn't substantially more than inflation, I'd also leave. However, most "real" (inflation adjusted) raises effectively come from promotions - strong performers move quickly up the ranks early in their career. They move into more responsible positions where they are not yet proven -- coming out of the top fifty (or higher) percentile of their prior position and ending up in the lower perhaps thirty percentile of their new grade. When they perform well, they get good raises (combination of their performance and their salary percentile is within the new grade). At some point it becomes obvious a promotion is appropriate.
It's true that I don't place a lot of value on past salary -- it's just part of a much more complex investigation.
However, I think we can agree on one thing -- I probably wouldn't want you on my team and you probably wouldn't want to be on my team. I try to avoid hiring prima donnas who insult others just because they don't agree with them because they damage team morale and I have to go through the hassle of firing them if they don't take the hint (because I vett carefully, I think I've only had to let a couple people go over the decades because of such problems). I prefer to be on/leading teams where people get along and behave like adults.
But how do you know what your friends had for breakfast or see the latest picture of their cat and comment "Ohh... Soo... Cute"? Do you mail postcards back and forth to keep up to date?
I don't underpay. I don't know where you got that idea. I also don't overpay. There are rarely significant material negotiations around financial issues and most of my offers are accepted.
And, you're talking about contracting -- I rarely hire contractors. I have little idea what an employee will be doing six months later or what the duration of that project will be so I am looking for more abstract skills. On the rare occasions where I've hired contractors, I do sometimes try to cut costs (they are being hired for a specific task that requires little training and I can validate the quality of their work and if they are not meeting requirements the contract is terminated and everyone goes their own way) in part because I'm not as interested in establishing a long term successful relationship.
And, if your primary goal is "to get as much out of me" as you can, you're probably not someone I want to hire. I want people who are interested in the job, mesh well into the team, have a passion for the work and/or product/project, etc and place value on such things. If I've offered you a generous $180K and your primary reason for taking another job is that they offered you $190K, I'm very happy that you took the other job as obviously you don't perceive my job as being sufficiently interesting and likely we will both be happier with your decision.
Unlike you, I don't approach the hiring and negotiating process from either side of the table like I do when buying a new car -- there I'm looking for the absolute lowest cost for the exact car I want and I don't care how the salesperson feels about it and I'll play any ethical card I can to get a lower price.
I will share the salary range for the "grade" if asked after I've made an offer. That is relevant information to the candidate -- I think they should know if they are at the top, or bottom, of the grade range if they care (if they are at the top, they can reasonably expect smaller annual wage increases than if they are at the bottom for the same performance level).
I don't share other employee's salary information with anyone outside the "need to know" (HR, my management chain, payroll etc). If I worked at a company that had "open salary" information (such as Buffer), then I would share at least some form of that information with candidates who made it to the offer level if policy allowed it.
I actually almost never work with more candidates in the tail end of the pipeline than I have openings.
Only a tiny fraction of those in the earliest stages of the pipeline make it to the end so of course I have to work with multiple candidates concurrently at the earliest stages -- just as I expect that I'm not the only person looking at a candidate's resume that just appeared in my inbox. On the rare occasions where I've had two candidates who I wanted to hire and who ended up at the end of the pipeline but only had one opening, I've been able to wrangle a new req (sometimes an existing open req assigned to another area or sometimes a brand new req) to make both offers - smart companies don't let a great candidate walk just because they didn't have an "opening". The vast majority of the offers I make are accepted (often after some negotiations) so that colors my technique a bit.
And you wouldn't get to work at most of the companies that I've worked at -- none filled with "deadwood or desperate candidates" because in the rare case where such a candidate got hired, they didn't survive in core engineering very long.
Perhaps you are a great software developer, but you are likely limiting your horizons by refusing to accept common industry practices. I wouldn't want to hire a candidate who refused to comply with simple, reasonable, and common requests such as providing salary information on a matter of principle. They will probably refuse to do so throughout their (probably short) term of employment in other matters as well. When a customer who has spent millions on your product has a problem or desperately needs an improvement (bug fix, feature, performance improvement...), the last thing an engineering organization wants is someone who stands on some false principle (maybe "I don't do customer service, I'm an developer", or "That code shouldn't ever have shipped, I'm not going to stay up all night trying to figure it out", or "We need to redesign and rewrite all that code so the customer won't get a fix for six months - it wouldn't be 'good' design practice just to fix the SEGV") and refuses to do their job.
One case where I look at salary history closely is if the person has changed jobs three times in six years (which there's nothing necessarily wrong with).
Sometimes of course the reasons for job changes are obvious - such they worked for startups which died or which was acquired. Sometimes though the reasons are less clear even after talking to the candidate (who will rarely say "Oh, someone offered me more money so I was gone" or "I wasn't doing a very good job and my peers didn't respect me so I moved on").
One thing I'm looking for in this case is if the person has gotten big pay jumps at each of the three last jobs over the six years without increased responsibility -- this can be very concerning as it often be indicative of someone whose goal is to change jobs just to crank their salary up and I have no interest in being a pawn in that game. However, again, salary history is only part of the complex equation.
On the other hand, if that candidate had the same job for six years and had impressive salary growth, that's a hint the person might be highly valued. True, sometimes it means that they are very good at kissing the boss's ass and/or are a excellent self promoter, but frankly I'm pretty good at picking those cases out.
In reality, the range at that level often a bit wider. However, for very experienced engineers with excellent skills at strong companies, that range is reasonable in the area I'm most familiar with. A competent, but not special, engineer with 20 years applicable experience would probably be at a lower grade (where the top of the range might be $170K for example).
Yes, it may mean nothing -- but often it is quite meaningful. If the salary is out of line with what one would expect the candidate to be making (either high or low), it's something I want to explore. Titles of course mean nothing -- but salary is often a pretty good indication of the value a company who knows the employee places on that employee.
If the candidate came in through a trusted (to me) personal reference with a good track record in the past, I don't care about the candidate's salary for purposes of screening as I trust known references more than most other sources of information.
It sounds like you may want to reconsider where you work if there is little justice or logic in payscales where you've been working over the past 20+ years.
If you don't get to see a resume until HR has vetted salary, you're almost certainly losing good candidates for no reason. It's only after I'm interested in a resume that I care about salary (and, usually, after the phone screen or at the end of the phone screen if it went well -- it depends on the circumstances). When "resumes" (often just a LinkedIN link) come in through friends and acquaintances of a candidate, of course salary information is not available -- but if you wait to get salary information to do the first review of qualifications/match, the best candidates may have already been given an offer elsewhere.
The problem is, and this is from years of experience, applicants will still waste your time as a "backup" (or even "backup backup backup") option.
Also, many applicants assume that the range is "negotiable" and think that they can somehow, in the last throes of negotiation, get an offer over the top of the range. (They are wrong -- as a matter of principle I don't do that. If the headhunter kicks in $10K of their commission to beef up the "sign-on bonus", I'll do that -- and that's surprisingly common when closure is looking tenuous).
Most people, esp. those seeking high salaries, think they are better than they are (this is a common human trait - ask 100 developers if they think they are above or below the median skill level and I'll bet about 80% will assert that they are above the median). It's a waste of my time and the team's time. I've got code to write (well, usually designs to review but...) and they have code to write -- interviewing, unlike developing software, is not something we do because we enjoy it.
As a hiring manager, I want to know your last salary and perhaps some salary history for a couple reasons.
First, if I have a req for an engineer with a range of $160K-$190K, if you are making $220K I know it's unlikely that you will accept this job. If I'm really excited by you in an initial interview, I might find another position and talk with you about considering that one instead. If' I'm not really excited by you, I'll not pursue it as there's no reason to waste the team's time interviewing someone who is unlikely to take the position and/or will start out with low morale and will likely leave before your on-boarding costs have even been recovered.
Second, the person who knows you best as an employee is likely your last employer. If they were paying you an unusually low (or high salary) taking into account the company as some are known to pay high while others pay high, they likely don't think you are very valuable (or think you are very valuable). This is an interesting hint to me.
In all cases, if there's a reason that the applicant knows their last salary (and perhaps salary history) is problematic, they are free to explain early on (as in, "You may notice that my salary was very low at my last position. This is because I was working for my brother-in-law and trying to help keep his business afloat as a family favor.").
As a hiring manager, I try to bring people in as high as I can without creating disparities among the group between engineers of similar skill and productivity. This is simply logical -- when raise time comes around, I get x% to spread around and I don't want to consume it bringing people "up to grade", I'd rather spend it rewarding people. It's usually much easier to get another $15K for a new hire (esp. when the position has been open for a while and the boss really wants it filled) than it is to get another $15K a year later to give the new hire a "grade adjustment" raise.
I don't worry too much about overpaying under-performers though -- I tend to get rid of them fairly quickly (usually with them resigning, but occasionally via more painful routes). But, even if I am overpaying an under-performer, I still get a percentage of their inflated salary to hand out to other members of the team (and give the overpaid employee little if anything -- which also helps getting them to decide to move on elsewhere!). The logistics of this are a little trickier than described here, but that's the general scheme.
Embedded in a quote, "[sic]" actually doesn't mean that the preceding word/phrase is 'correct' or 'incorrect' from a grammar, spelling (or factual) standpoint -- just that it IS an accurate quote even though the preceding might be incorrect OR be misinterpreted as incorrect.
For example, in the following, "[sic]" is used correctly to note that the error was made by the student, not the person offering the quote
The student wrote that "the Son [sic] orbits around the Earth" and objected when the grader took points off for the student's fundamental misunderstanding of our solar system.
However, in the following "[sic]" is used correctly to note that the use of the word 'son' is correct and should not be corrected by proofreaders
The book "The Son's [sic] Trajectory Around the Earth" written by the mother of the first astronut to orbit the Earth is well worth reading.
In other words, CR was lazy and disabled the browser cache instead of developing a test representative of real life users -- their target audience. Sure, they found a bug, but not one that an ordinary user would ever encounter (is this mode even "supported"?).
I assume CR ran their tests against an in-house web server with some sort of synthetic content rather than consumer web sites (such as Facebook, Amazon, gmail etc) -- else they would be unable to have repeatable tests (perhaps Amazon would be loaded at some times and not others or Facebook would change the layout/design of their pages and invalidate all testing that CR had already done). CR should have done some real world monitoring (they could probably dig through their logs to see how their own employees access external web sites as a starting point and work from there) to determine representative patterns and built their web server and client side tests to replicate the same patterns. This pattern almost certainly would include a mix of cached and uncached accesses.
It's interesting that CR uses the "default browser" on each machine for its tests because they feel that's what the typical user would do, but then go and change obscure settings in that browser to make it behave in a non-default way. In the real world, I'll bet more Mac users in CR's audience (at least those that would rely on them for advice on a computer) use a browser other than Safari than use Safari but screw around with "hidden" settings intended for developers.
I'm not a fan of Apple, but CR really is the one with egg on their face here.
In general, I'm becoming increasingly distrusting of CR's results -- they should spend more of their resources testing products properly and less time editorializing on political topics.
See, this is why we need things like a minimum wage.
If we had a Federal Minimum Golden Parachute, I wouldn't be able to under bid you.
But we don't, so your loss... I would have done the for two million and gotten the job done much more quickly (that's why I can do it so cheaply, I'm very efficient).
It will probably take quite a bit longer than that. Given current oil prices, I don't think there's much demand for these leases anyway and the GOP has other more pressing priorities.
If he had sued for his actual damages (if there were, in fact, any) of more like $38,000, The Information, The Verge, and The/. wouldn't have run the story. He probably figured that the more plublicity, the more money he is likely to get and/or the more likely Google is to alter their policies. Doesn't seem so stupid to me.
No, I was merely pointing out that the fact that California has the largest economy in the US is only due to its population being the largest -- per capita it's not at the top or even in the top three.
To clarify where California really sits in the hierarchy, I provided some relevant numbers to augment the irrelevant statistic the original poster presented.
You seem to be reading challenged as I state NO opinion about California labor laws being good or bad or conducive or harmful to a strong economy - where you got that I have no idea. Perhaps your meds need adjusting?
Cowards who hide behind AC are hard to figure out -- in particular, I have no idea which of the ACs in the thread you are.
However, I gave you a link to the employment numbers - JUST CLICK ON IT (the URL is a.gov in the US so even if you are enough of an idiot to not have protected yourself from malicious URLs, it's a lot safer than the porn URLs you regularly click on). If you refuse to click on a reference, you're the idiot. Or, you just haven't figured out what a link IS (I assume it's the latter given the evidence that your IQ is just enough to support a sporadic heartbeat and an occasional breath - leaving only enough electrical signals to spasm on your mothers keyboard from time to time).
And, no, not disjointed -- unlike the post I responded to, I didn't cherry pick, I didn't post disingenuous claims that, while technically true, are irrelevant. Intelligent people take relevant facts when presented and tie them together in obvious ways without a thousand page "See Dick Run, See Spot Poop" guidemap -- unfortunately, you appear not to be one of those intelligent people.
Anyone reading this thread long ago figured out who the idiot is -- and it's not the person posting as AC!
Slashdot Mirror
Since I'm hiring for engineering positions, I evaluate candidates based on their engineering skills and ability to work on a team, not their BS or sales skills.
Therefore I would not "dock a grade" for someone telling me their salary when requested because it's a reasonable request.
If they got angry at the request, the interview is probably effectively over and any following interviews are probably cancelled. If that simple request yields an angry response, I shudder to think of what would happen in a code review where a reviewer pointed out that their code was inefficient, hard to maintain, or behaved unexpectedly in some corner case which the design failed to mention explicitly ("Nowhere did the spec say that if a web user entered a general Unicode character into the input box that the server could not crash so my code is fine and you should shut the fuck up and if you question my code again we're going to resolve the issue in the parking lot after work.")
If they politely declined to reveal salary information and didn't play games in that refusal, the interview process won't be terminated for that reason, but it would be noted in my brain as an issue to be resolved. Though if they refuse to offer that information eventually and don't have a good explanation (like, "I owned the company and sometimes I lost money, sometimes I made money so I don't have any meaningful salary history"), probably an offer won't be made. I think teams work best when people don't play games and are as transparent as feasible and being intentionally opaque (or not trusting me to not abuse the information) about this simple matter is likely to portend problems in the future.
BTW, I've don't think I've ever had someone refuse to answer that question before an offer was extended -- although sometimes the answer, which is acceptable, includes an explanation such as "There was a serious illness in my family for three years and I requested flexibility in exchange for pay raises for three years. That situation no longer exists and, as you will note, my salary three years ago was competitive so I expect a new competitive salary" (if I can, I might try to verify the story though).
I actually don't care if employees share salary information - those that want to share are, as far as I'm concerned, free to do so. Generally, I think the best compensated employees will be the least likely to share because they realize less productive employees may be jealous of them. Generally the least skilled workers seem to think they are much better than they are.
I certainly would have no interest in participating in "collective bargaining" for my job. Nor do I think hardly any of my coworkers that I've respected would be interested in doing so. However, I have no problem with others participating in collective bargaining. If a group of employees got together and wanted to bargain collectively and I made policy, I would urge them to try to unionize. But if they didn't want to, or couldn't get enough of their coworkers to vote to unionize, I think I would generally be happy to evaluate each employee in the group, determine what raise I thought each deserved, then distribute that raise pool equally (as a percentage) among the group. I would share with any employee that requested what their contribution to the common raise pool was (obviously I could not give that information to other employees though). Of course, no employees have ever requested collective bargaining in my organizations or in any around me so I've never had to actually face this question.
If you conducted a anonymous survey among all the employees in your statistically significantly sized group (perhaps Department, perhaps below) and asked "Do you believe, among employees in this group who perform similar jobs, that you perform ABOVE or BELOW or RIGHT AT the median?", do you think the number of people who respond "BELOW" would be statistically the same as those who respond "ABOVE"? I strongly suspect that more will select ABOVE than BELOW.
Generally in the US work environment, I've found that low performers are much more likely to overestimate their skills and contributions while high performers are more likely to underestimate or accurately estimate theirs.
Interestingly, some studies have suggested that
An example of this I recall outside my direct field was an acquaintance who was a lab tech who seriously believed that she did the same work as the engineers but wasn't paid as much. This was completely ignorance on her part -- she had no idea what the engineers did outside the lab because she didn't delve into what engineers were doing the other 95% of the time when they weren't in the lab.
As far as the risk I will never get a quality employee who feels like they have been pushing themselves too hard etc... I don't see why requesting salary information would affect that significantly. I would want an explanation of why they were interested in taking a pay cut to work in my organization. Reasons like "more interesting work", or "bored with doing the same old work" might be very legitimate if they were clearly overpaid in their past job (which sometimes happens because someone has become the critical expert or has a critical skill that the employer is so terrified of losing that they effectively "bribe" the person to stay but the person isn't happy and, likely, isn't even doing their best work due to poor morale).
However, in most groups I've managed I probably would not accept the "pushing myself too hard" unless the person was also dropping to a job with less critical responsibility. Outside of a couple employees I've had that were techs rather than engineers, everyone in my group has been on salary so working "less for less salary" is too difficult to manage. As well, most organizations I've been in/manag
No, I don't think that you would jump at a $10K increase over your current position -- reread my note. If you would do so, I don't want you. I will explain the job to you as well as I can and my interview discussion will give you some additional guidance. However, I can't accurately predict what you will be doing in six months in the future -- that depends on your initiative and skill and what needs to get done. Sure, I want people who work hard -- as I do. But I want them to do it because they enjoy the work, not because they feel they "need" to or just because I gave them a higher salary.
"Perks", in the conventional usage, are part of compensation to some extent -- they all increase the cost of opening a new position (or retaining an existing position). I, personally, prefer fewer perks and higher salary but I also recognize that others differ on this (companies like perks as they pay wholesale for them and, if times are tight, they can cut them -- if they start cutting salaries, employees will start quitting en-mass).
I've NEVER worked for a company that capped individual annual raises at any particular value -- I'd leave such a company the moment I knew they were doing that. However, it's a reality that the raise pool and the promotion pool is set at any company of any significant size - management has to have some idea what expenses will be in the upcoming year and match it to revenue in some rational way -- if every manager could just give out whatever raises they want, planning is not possible. In normal cases if the combined pool isn't substantially more than inflation, I'd also leave. However, most "real" (inflation adjusted) raises effectively come from promotions - strong performers move quickly up the ranks early in their career. They move into more responsible positions where they are not yet proven -- coming out of the top fifty (or higher) percentile of their prior position and ending up in the lower perhaps thirty percentile of their new grade. When they perform well, they get good raises (combination of their performance and their salary percentile is within the new grade). At some point it becomes obvious a promotion is appropriate.
It's true that I don't place a lot of value on past salary -- it's just part of a much more complex investigation.
However, I think we can agree on one thing -- I probably wouldn't want you on my team and you probably wouldn't want to be on my team. I try to avoid hiring prima donnas who insult others just because they don't agree with them because they damage team morale and I have to go through the hassle of firing them if they don't take the hint (because I vett carefully, I think I've only had to let a couple people go over the decades because of such problems). I prefer to be on/leading teams where people get along and behave like adults.
But how do you know what your friends had for breakfast or see the latest picture of their cat and comment "Ohh... Soo... Cute"? Do you mail postcards back and forth to keep up to date?
I don't underpay. I don't know where you got that idea. I also don't overpay. There are rarely significant material negotiations around financial issues and most of my offers are accepted.
And, you're talking about contracting -- I rarely hire contractors. I have little idea what an employee will be doing six months later or what the duration of that project will be so I am looking for more abstract skills. On the rare occasions where I've hired contractors, I do sometimes try to cut costs (they are being hired for a specific task that requires little training and I can validate the quality of their work and if they are not meeting requirements the contract is terminated and everyone goes their own way) in part because I'm not as interested in establishing a long term successful relationship.
And, if your primary goal is "to get as much out of me" as you can, you're probably not someone I want to hire. I want people who are interested in the job, mesh well into the team, have a passion for the work and/or product/project, etc and place value on such things. If I've offered you a generous $180K and your primary reason for taking another job is that they offered you $190K, I'm very happy that you took the other job as obviously you don't perceive my job as being sufficiently interesting and likely we will both be happier with your decision.
Unlike you, I don't approach the hiring and negotiating process from either side of the table like I do when buying a new car -- there I'm looking for the absolute lowest cost for the exact car I want and I don't care how the salesperson feels about it and I'll play any ethical card I can to get a lower price.
I will share the salary range for the "grade" if asked after I've made an offer. That is relevant information to the candidate -- I think they should know if they are at the top, or bottom, of the grade range if they care (if they are at the top, they can reasonably expect smaller annual wage increases than if they are at the bottom for the same performance level).
I don't share other employee's salary information with anyone outside the "need to know" (HR, my management chain, payroll etc). If I worked at a company that had "open salary" information (such as Buffer), then I would share at least some form of that information with candidates who made it to the offer level if policy allowed it.
I actually almost never work with more candidates in the tail end of the pipeline than I have openings.
Only a tiny fraction of those in the earliest stages of the pipeline make it to the end so of course I have to work with multiple candidates concurrently at the earliest stages -- just as I expect that I'm not the only person looking at a candidate's resume that just appeared in my inbox. On the rare occasions where I've had two candidates who I wanted to hire and who ended up at the end of the pipeline but only had one opening, I've been able to wrangle a new req (sometimes an existing open req assigned to another area or sometimes a brand new req) to make both offers - smart companies don't let a great candidate walk just because they didn't have an "opening". The vast majority of the offers I make are accepted (often after some negotiations) so that colors my technique a bit.
And you wouldn't get to work at most of the companies that I've worked at -- none filled with "deadwood or desperate candidates" because in the rare case where such a candidate got hired, they didn't survive in core engineering very long.
Perhaps you are a great software developer, but you are likely limiting your horizons by refusing to accept common industry practices. I wouldn't want to hire a candidate who refused to comply with simple, reasonable, and common requests such as providing salary information on a matter of principle. They will probably refuse to do so throughout their (probably short) term of employment in other matters as well. When a customer who has spent millions on your product has a problem or desperately needs an improvement (bug fix, feature, performance improvement...), the last thing an engineering organization wants is someone who stands on some false principle (maybe "I don't do customer service, I'm an developer", or "That code shouldn't ever have shipped, I'm not going to stay up all night trying to figure it out", or "We need to redesign and rewrite all that code so the customer won't get a fix for six months - it wouldn't be 'good' design practice just to fix the SEGV") and refuses to do their job.
One case where I look at salary history closely is if the person has changed jobs three times in six years (which there's nothing necessarily wrong with).
Sometimes of course the reasons for job changes are obvious - such they worked for startups which died or which was acquired. Sometimes though the reasons are less clear even after talking to the candidate (who will rarely say "Oh, someone offered me more money so I was gone" or "I wasn't doing a very good job and my peers didn't respect me so I moved on").
One thing I'm looking for in this case is if the person has gotten big pay jumps at each of the three last jobs over the six years without increased responsibility -- this can be very concerning as it often be indicative of someone whose goal is to change jobs just to crank their salary up and I have no interest in being a pawn in that game. However, again, salary history is only part of the complex equation.
On the other hand, if that candidate had the same job for six years and had impressive salary growth, that's a hint the person might be highly valued. True, sometimes it means that they are very good at kissing the boss's ass and/or are a excellent self promoter, but frankly I'm pretty good at picking those cases out.
In reality, the range at that level often a bit wider. However, for very experienced engineers with excellent skills at strong companies, that range is reasonable in the area I'm most familiar with. A competent, but not special, engineer with 20 years applicable experience would probably be at a lower grade (where the top of the range might be $170K for example).
Most of my jobs have been at smaller (usually startups or what were startups when I joined) companies.
Yes, it may mean nothing -- but often it is quite meaningful. If the salary is out of line with what one would expect the candidate to be making (either high or low), it's something I want to explore. Titles of course mean nothing -- but salary is often a pretty good indication of the value a company who knows the employee places on that employee.
If the candidate came in through a trusted (to me) personal reference with a good track record in the past, I don't care about the candidate's salary for purposes of screening as I trust known references more than most other sources of information.
It sounds like you may want to reconsider where you work if there is little justice or logic in payscales where you've been working over the past 20+ years.
If you don't get to see a resume until HR has vetted salary, you're almost certainly losing good candidates for no reason. It's only after I'm interested in a resume that I care about salary (and, usually, after the phone screen or at the end of the phone screen if it went well -- it depends on the circumstances). When "resumes" (often just a LinkedIN link) come in through friends and acquaintances of a candidate, of course salary information is not available -- but if you wait to get salary information to do the first review of qualifications/match, the best candidates may have already been given an offer elsewhere.
The problem is, and this is from years of experience, applicants will still waste your time as a "backup" (or even "backup backup backup") option.
Also, many applicants assume that the range is "negotiable" and think that they can somehow, in the last throes of negotiation, get an offer over the top of the range. (They are wrong -- as a matter of principle I don't do that. If the headhunter kicks in $10K of their commission to beef up the "sign-on bonus", I'll do that -- and that's surprisingly common when closure is looking tenuous).
Most people, esp. those seeking high salaries, think they are better than they are (this is a common human trait - ask 100 developers if they think they are above or below the median skill level and I'll bet about 80% will assert that they are above the median). It's a waste of my time and the team's time. I've got code to write (well, usually designs to review but...) and they have code to write -- interviewing, unlike developing software, is not something we do because we enjoy it.
As a hiring manager, I want to know your last salary and perhaps some salary history for a couple reasons.
First, if I have a req for an engineer with a range of $160K-$190K, if you are making $220K I know it's unlikely that you will accept this job. If I'm really excited by you in an initial interview, I might find another position and talk with you about considering that one instead. If' I'm not really excited by you, I'll not pursue it as there's no reason to waste the team's time interviewing someone who is unlikely to take the position and/or will start out with low morale and will likely leave before your on-boarding costs have even been recovered.
Second, the person who knows you best as an employee is likely your last employer. If they were paying you an unusually low (or high salary) taking into account the company as some are known to pay high while others pay high, they likely don't think you are very valuable (or think you are very valuable). This is an interesting hint to me.
In all cases, if there's a reason that the applicant knows their last salary (and perhaps salary history) is problematic, they are free to explain early on (as in, "You may notice that my salary was very low at my last position. This is because I was working for my brother-in-law and trying to help keep his business afloat as a family favor.").
As a hiring manager, I try to bring people in as high as I can without creating disparities among the group between engineers of similar skill and productivity. This is simply logical -- when raise time comes around, I get x% to spread around and I don't want to consume it bringing people "up to grade", I'd rather spend it rewarding people. It's usually much easier to get another $15K for a new hire (esp. when the position has been open for a while and the boss really wants it filled) than it is to get another $15K a year later to give the new hire a "grade adjustment" raise.
I don't worry too much about overpaying under-performers though -- I tend to get rid of them fairly quickly (usually with them resigning, but occasionally via more painful routes). But, even if I am overpaying an under-performer, I still get a percentage of their inflated salary to hand out to other members of the team (and give the overpaid employee little if anything -- which also helps getting them to decide to move on elsewhere!). The logistics of this are a little trickier than described here, but that's the general scheme.
One example is garbage collection.
Indeed you are!
I'd like to say I was referring to the son's passion for astronomy and related fields, but that would be a lie.
I'd like to say that I left that in there for you to feast on, but that would be a lie.
The truth is much simpler -- I was too lazy to carefully proofread my comment or even notice the bright red squiggly line under the word :(
Embedded in a quote, "[sic]" actually doesn't mean that the preceding word/phrase is 'correct' or 'incorrect' from a grammar, spelling (or factual) standpoint -- just that it IS an accurate quote even though the preceding might be incorrect OR be misinterpreted as incorrect.
For example, in the following, "[sic]" is used correctly to note that the error was made by the student, not the person offering the quote
However, in the following "[sic]" is used correctly to note that the use of the word 'son' is correct and should not be corrected by proofreaders
Unfortunately, that's the half that can't be automated with "currently demonstrated technology".
Most "currently demonstrated technology" has a logical framework. Most of what goes in meetings has no logical basis. Ergo, it ain't happening soon.
In other words, CR was lazy and disabled the browser cache instead of developing a test representative of real life users -- their target audience. Sure, they found a bug, but not one that an ordinary user would ever encounter (is this mode even "supported"?).
I assume CR ran their tests against an in-house web server with some sort of synthetic content rather than consumer web sites (such as Facebook, Amazon, gmail etc) -- else they would be unable to have repeatable tests (perhaps Amazon would be loaded at some times and not others or Facebook would change the layout/design of their pages and invalidate all testing that CR had already done). CR should have done some real world monitoring (they could probably dig through their logs to see how their own employees access external web sites as a starting point and work from there) to determine representative patterns and built their web server and client side tests to replicate the same patterns. This pattern almost certainly would include a mix of cached and uncached accesses.
It's interesting that CR uses the "default browser" on each machine for its tests because they feel that's what the typical user would do, but then go and change obscure settings in that browser to make it behave in a non-default way. In the real world, I'll bet more Mac users in CR's audience (at least those that would rely on them for advice on a computer) use a browser other than Safari than use Safari but screw around with "hidden" settings intended for developers.
I'm not a fan of Apple, but CR really is the one with egg on their face here.
In general, I'm becoming increasingly distrusting of CR's results -- they should spend more of their resources testing products properly and less time editorializing on political topics.
See, this is why we need things like a minimum wage.
If we had a Federal Minimum Golden Parachute, I wouldn't be able to under bid you.
But we don't, so your loss... I would have done the for two million and gotten the job done much more quickly (that's why I can do it so cheaply, I'm very efficient).
Won't someone think of the CEOs?
It will probably take quite a bit longer than that. Given current oil prices, I don't think there's much demand for these leases anyway and the GOP has other more pressing priorities.
If he had sued for his actual damages (if there were, in fact, any) of more like $38,000, The Information, The Verge, and The /. wouldn't have run the story. He probably figured that the more plublicity, the more money he is likely to get and/or the more likely Google is to alter their policies. Doesn't seem so stupid to me.
No, I was merely pointing out that the fact that California has the largest economy in the US is only due to its population being the largest -- per capita it's not at the top or even in the top three.
To clarify where California really sits in the hierarchy, I provided some relevant numbers to augment the irrelevant statistic the original poster presented.
You seem to be reading challenged as I state NO opinion about California labor laws being good or bad or conducive or harmful to a strong economy - where you got that I have no idea. Perhaps your meds need adjusting?
Cowards who hide behind AC are hard to figure out -- in particular, I have no idea which of the ACs in the thread you are.
However, I gave you a link to the employment numbers - JUST CLICK ON IT (the URL is a .gov in the US so even if you are enough of an idiot to not have protected yourself from malicious URLs, it's a lot safer than the porn URLs you regularly click on). If you refuse to click on a reference, you're the idiot. Or, you just haven't figured out what a link IS (I assume it's the latter given the evidence that your IQ is just enough to support a sporadic heartbeat and an occasional breath - leaving only enough electrical signals to spasm on your mothers keyboard from time to time).
And, no, not disjointed -- unlike the post I responded to, I didn't cherry pick, I didn't post disingenuous claims that, while technically true, are irrelevant. Intelligent people take relevant facts when presented and tie them together in obvious ways without a thousand page "See Dick Run, See Spot Poop" guidemap -- unfortunately, you appear not to be one of those intelligent people.
Anyone reading this thread long ago figured out who the idiot is -- and it's not the person posting as AC!
Have a nice life.