Some California tech firms post wide pay ranges in wake of new law

Dive Brief:

A software engineer could earn anywhere from $90,000 to $900,000 at Netflix or $83,000 to $418,000 at Tesla, according to Comprehensive.io, a new website that tracks the salary ranges at tech companies in California and New York City. Both California and New York City have recently enacted laws requiring companies to disclose salary ranges in job postings.
“By and large, the vast majority of companies are posting salary ranges with a reasonable range,” Comprehensive.io co-founder Roger Lee told HR Dive. “Certainly, there have been exceptions, like Tesla, that are posting ridiculously wide ranges that aren’t really helpful. Those are outliers.”
As of Jan. 11, of the more than 700 companies from which the website aggregated data, 49% were in compliance with the new law in California, and 69% of the employers were in compliance in New York City.

Dive Insight:

Recent salary range laws that went into effect Jan. 1 in California and Nov. 1 in New York City are providing employees and employers alike with new market data to use in their job searches, salary negotiations and hiring processes.

1/ Our team @ComprehensiveIO just launched a new website that tracks the salary ranges of 700 top tech companies (including Google, Meta, Amazon, and Twitter). It's free and updated daily at https://t.co/nQzDR1WbXR
— Roger Lee (@roger_lee) January 9, 2023

“It’s amazing that these pay transparency laws are now revealing this valuable salary data that used to be private and is now public in all of these job posts,” said Lee, who also created Layoffs.fyi during the COVID-19 to track layoffs in the tech industry. Lee said he hopes the data helps level the playing field for workers and “make a dent in pay equity.”

The salary range across most of the 60,000 job posts Comprehensive.io has analyzed are 21% above and below a midpoint, Lee said, making him believe most companies are being honest with their numbers.

“The data source is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” Lee said. “This couldn't have been possible even two weeks ago.