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Coming soon to a job near you: Knowing what it pays:
You wouldn't rent an apartment or even buy a pair of jeans online without knowing the price. Soon, many Americans won't search for a job without knowing what it pays, either.
A series of local and state laws, both newly adopted and soon to be in effect, will force companies to divulge what a job pays when posting an open position. Besides being common sense, the intent of these laws is to shrink the persistent wage gap that divides white men from women and people of color. Lowering the pay gap would be an important step forward for equality in the US, affecting everything from Americans' quality of life to how they see themselves. But while pay transparency is a much-needed improvement, a lot more is needed to truly create balance for all Americans.
In the US, women and people of color get paid less than white men, regardless of job or experience. Pay gaps often begin at the start of careers, then compound over a lifetime as women and people of color are less likely to get raises. A variety of other factors contribute to the gap as well, like the motherhood penalty, wherein women who take time off paid work to care for kids are paid nearly 40 percent less than those who don't. There's occupational segregation, in which jobs that are filled predominantly by women or people of color, like home health aides or food service workers, are paid less. (The pay and prestige of computer science, for example, rose only as more men entered the field.) Women and people of color are also seriously underrepresented in leadership positions, which are paid the most. In sum, that means the median hourly wage for women is 86 cents per hour for every dollar a man makes. Black women make 68 cents. There's been little progress on closing the pay gap in the last three decades.
[...] "Transparency is one of the leading tools we've identified for closing the wage gap," Andrea Johnson, director of state policy at the National Women's Law Center, told Recode. "It is absolutely crucial for both increasing worker power and employer accountability."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday October 24 2022, @09:29PM (4 children)
Around '90 or '91 I took a job for Scientific Atlanta writing software for the Seawolf Submarine towed arrays. Besides being one of the worst places I've ever worked (got a Halloween memo that said anyone who dressed up would be fired on the spot) they had a rule that said anyone discussing their salary would be fired. But they had memos on the wall specifying job titles with pay ranges, with the range being maybe $5k. Anyone who knew my job title was foo knew I was making, say, $40-$45k, if my title was senior foo it was $42-$48k, and if it was bar $45-52k.
After 40 years in the industry a good 50% of my horror stories were from the 12 months I spent there (I was young and naive, felt like I had to stay at a job for a year to not look bad. I bailed on the 366th day).
Ahh, stories:
1) ADA. At the time DOD was all "We spent money on this, you'all gonna use this", didn't allow direct memory access, nor bit twiddling like AND, NOR, XOR. I write device drivers that require direct memory access and bit twiddling.
2) Cadre. "You'll love this editor, you'll master it in 30 minutes". Yes we did. Because it sucked, we were an Emacs and Vi shop and Cadre editing sucked ass.
3) Pseudo code reviews, where East Coast folks escaping winter outnumbered us (San Diego) 2-1. For 2 weeks.
3a) and argued document paragraph # 3.1.2 should be 3.1.1.5 ad naseum. As in, wording nor design doesn't change, numbering does
3a1) The East coast folks were in San Diego during the winter on my company's dime
4) Not allowed to test provided hardware. Found out a year later provided hardware didn't provide a major promised feature ("gee, nobody has used that yet"). I'd left a few month previous and heard about it from a former co-worker who's pants I was still trying to get into (never did, but her cat liked me). (The board was Sky Warrior DSP, the feature was chaining).
4a) Without promised feature system requirements couldn't be met
5) The naming standard of the day. Seemed like monthly we went from Foobar to FooBar to Foo_Bar, to fooBar to strFoo.
5a) This story is where I get my most mileage and I need to figure out how to monetize it. Hint: I bypassed Cadre and, had the DOD found out, would have cost Scientific Atlanta a ton of cash. Then again, I changed a 1 week task to a 1 hour task while management still thought it was a 1 week task. The 4 of us got to really like when management mandated a new standard, we just shot the shit for 39 hours, "fixed" it, and went home on time for the weekend.
In the comments tell me how I can monetize this story, cuz it needs to be told (hint, I've already told it if your google fu is good) and I could use the prescription drug money.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Snotnose on Monday October 24 2022, @09:34PM
Dang, forgot the most important part. Interviewing for the job I figured it to be 6 months from design, code, debug, done. I was there for 12 months and never wrote a single line of code, and never got to do anything but look at the package of the DSP card I was writing code for.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday October 25 2022, @12:01AM
There was a reason for it. See, a byte might've had first bit attached to send the nuke while the second to cancel. Too smart kids tend to optimize the code by setting the byte to all ones first.
That's how my former boss wrote ADA compiler and DOD have been fearful ever since.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday October 25 2022, @01:00AM
ADA? Ada is a computer language. In the United States, ADA is most often understood to stand for "Americans with Disabilities Act."
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 26 2022, @02:23PM
Thanks.
I was about to post something like:
How about making it illegal for companies to forbid or punish employees for discussing how much they get paid and other compensation and who they had to sleep with.
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.