Say that no one you interview has those particulars, and you hire someone who's just -- by your regular, baseline standards -- qualified for the job. Do you have a cutoff for what you would pay those people? Then you should probably post that, and then just act like companies that comply with this stuff already and include some kind of disclaimer, that extraordinary candidates may still fall somewhere outside that range.

it's just multiple grades at that point masquerading behind a broken HR system

I'm not answering a pitch that says "$100K-$350K salary, final decision based on vibes" but I will if it says "$250K-$270K salary, needs 10 years of experience leading X kinds of projects and proficiency in Y, Z".

It does make me wonder what would happen if you put out 100 different job adverts split apart by £1,000 increments. I'm sorry you aren't suitable for the 100k job you applied for but would you consider our 97k role instead?

There's a difference between coworkers talking to each other and the system being set up in a transparent way where everyone can see everyone else's salaries, these two aren't the same thing.

Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality.

Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others. If you want to pay someone outside of band, give them a different title.

If someone performs unexpectedly well, give them a bonus/promotion etc.

It's deeply sad (but unsurprising) that so many people can only focus on their particular benefit (especially when the vast majority of that benefit is context dependent).

Like, if you hired John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard and just told them to take tickets, they'd probably be an average performer at best. If you told them never to take initiative, they'd perform badly. So lots of performance is dependent on context, there are very few "good" employees in a vacuum.

As an EM, a person's current salary is an anchor. If someone is paid at the bottom of the band, but then later the company learns about their high impact, they aren't given a raise, they are told to push harder and get promoted.

And then when they are promoted, they are probably at the bottom of the next band.

if a person threatens to leave, the EM (rarely) can magically wave a wand to increase the salary, but they can promise to put them up for promotion next cycle.

The reality is that in most industries competence and impact has very little to do with compensation. Compensation is the result of political status games, not demonstrable ability.

So it's far more likely these comments are over-indexing on the "its all luck/unfairness" explanation than the "it's all rational" explanation given there's 100X more people who will have their egos protected by the former positioning (the ratio of executives to worker bees is like 1:100).

So I live in a country with no rent controls with very high rents and housing costs. The capital is disincentivized from creating more supply by the fact that creating more supply devalues existing supply.

Rent controls would 1. lower the rent (obviously), 2. lower the price of existing apartments since the profit you make on them is lower, 3. like a sibling comment points out, hammer the profits of capital.

> Taxing the rich lowers the velocity of money, disincentivizes capital to search for more profit seeking enterprises.

Wow... Taxing the rich means less taxes for the poor means more people with money/time to start their own companies.

What actually happens is that profit margins get hammered (notice how you forgot about those? you were supposed to) and those businesses that rely upon minimum waged labor complain bitterly.

Very low margin businesses do raise prices but in the study I saw that looked at profit margins ans prices only two examples of price raising from a survey of about 50 were, like, nail salons and catering.

In the well designed studies where they measure job losses they found essentially negligible job losses. These studies caused a lot of drama in the economics community - a lot of them acted like they'd been told that their god didn't exist. It was replicated though.

Some other studies say "look! restaurants go out of business when the minimum wage is hiked! job losses!" but neglect to mention that when restaurant A goes out of business and is replaced with restaurant B (which is what often happens), servers and cooks just switch jobs.

The whinging manifests as money piled into lobbying and public outreach to prevent this type of thing from happening again and the result of that public outreach is how you formulated your opinion about what happens and why you forgot that, for example, profits can also decrease when price goes up.

I think the most common "mistake" is that most economists are used to thinking about money in absolute terms, but in real life it's a lot more useful to treat prices as a percentage of your income. That means the utility of money is not linear, so redistribution is good by itself unless it hurts growth so much that average incomes start going down in real terms.

The other one is way deeper and harder to fix but I don't think a lot of people actually believe it, they just use it implicitly in their research. It's that the goal of economics is to maximize efficiency (measured by ROI = profits), not to deliver the best outcomes for the greatest amount of people.

From this point of view a platform like Doordash is efficient because they underpay workers and overcharge customers, and so are surveillance data brokers. That's clearly not a perspective that gets us into a better society. But measuring quality of life is much harder than taking two numbers every company is legally required to count.

Not everyone has the time, energy or patience to do that though. Journalists certainly don't and the general public is more inclined to be drawn in by a nice clickbaity story that makes them feel smarter than their friends (which is the market segment freakonomics services).

Point being if you were to make an assumption, "pop economist says that popular thing thing that is bad for profits is bad for you too is probably bullshit" is actually a fairly safe one.

stage 1 is it hammers profit margins <-- for 95% of businesses we are here.

Stage 2 is then it increases prices <-- only affects very low margin businesses which are a small minority.

Stage 3 is it triggers job losses <-- to my knowledge it's never been raised high enough to make this happen. maybe $50 / hour would be the threshold.

Really, can you at least provide some napkin calculations to see the cons and pros? Some countries have tried it, notably France. It backfired as expected and they had to revert.

To be honest, the places I’ve worked for that could do this were not the best jobs I’ve had. That flexibility can sometimes point to other organizational issues.

Maybe I've been lucky to work for moderately reasonable companies, but I've never seen that.

For example in my current company, yearly raises are directly tied to performance rating. And while there is subjectivity in the rating, it is basically impossible to squeeze in a high performer rating for someone who doesn't do anything even if I wanted to (which I don't). It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.

The correlation will never be a perfect 1.0, but it is closer to 1 than to 0. Low performers end up getting low to nothing in raises, and the high performers get a multiplier that increases their raises.

What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.

Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.

Not if high performers underrate their skill, and under-performers overestimate their skill, both of which studies suggest is true.