A website tracking California's new pay transparency law found something curious about just how broad the range for some jobs can be.
A senior software engineer at Netflix Inc. in Los Gatos can earn anywhere from $90,000 to $900,000 a year. That engineer could earn between $83,000 and $418,000 annually at Tesla Inc.'s Fremont or Palo Alto locations. At Snowflake Inc.'s San Mateo offices, that person could make between $214,000 and $328,000.
Those are some of the pay spreads that the new site, Comprehensive.io, has tracked. The pay disclosure site launched on Thursday and comes from Comprehensive Inc., a San Francisco startup which launched last year and offers software designed to help businesses make pay decisions.
The company is run by co-founder and CEO Roger Lee. "I'm a big believer in pay transparency and pay equity," Lee told Bay Area Inno. He says the website is part of a suite of products that his company is building around compensation. The company raised a $6 million seed round of funding in October and employs 10 people.
Separate from Comprehensive, Lee also produces the Layoffs.fyi website, which has tracked tech job cuts since early in the pandemic.
"As the founder of Layoffs.fyi I am keenly aware of the hundreds of thousands of tech employees who lost jobs over the past year," he said. "I hope this will help level the playing field as they look for new jobs by showing which companies are hiring and what they are paying."
Comprehensive's site only covers tech pay disclosures required by new laws in California and New York City for now. Lee said he plans to gradually expand that to other sectors.
Comprehensive's site shows that only 39% of tech job postings in California now comply with the law that went into effect this week. New York City's law took effect in November, and the site shows 63.4% of tech job postings there are in compliance.
One reason for the low compliance rate may be that companies are struggling to determine what to post as a salary range, Lee said. They don't want to alienate current employees by posting high pay numbers nor do they want to discourage potential job candidates by posting rates that too low at the other end of the range, he said.
"But I think a lot of companies are just waiting to see how this develops," Lee said.
There has been very little enforcement of the New York City law, according to Ben Zweig, CEO of a workforce data analysis startup that's based there called Revelio Labs Inc. It plans to release a report next week on compliance in California and Washington state, which also has a new transparency law.
"We know what the consequences of not complying are stated to be but we haven't seen them enforced yet," he said.
Penalties for violating the law in New York start out mild but can go up to $250,000. In California, first-time violators face no penalties if they add the information. But job-seekers can sue or file a complaint with the state Labor Commissioner's Office, which can issue a penalty of $100 to $10,000 per violation.
Despite the wide pay ranges on some job postings, Zweig believes the new laws are useful.
"We were actually surprised by how narrow the ranges have been on most postings," he said. "More information about pay ranges helps to empower workers in dealings with employers."
