That range probably doesn't satisfy the requirements of the new law:

The range must: "extend from the lowest to the highest salary the employer in good faith believes at the time of the posting it would pay for the advertised job, promotion or transfer opportunity."

> That range probably doesn't satisfy the requirements of the new law:

It's amazing how some people lazily assume they're so much cleverer than everyone else.

A good heuristic is to assume you're just plain wrong if you think you've discovered a way to weasel out of a law with only five seconds worth of thought.

Right, the first thing a compliance officer will ask is: "what are your <employees of this category> actually paid right now?"

When your given range and that range don't roughly coincide, they'll ask why—and then fine you for your bullshit "are you a mind reader?" response.

> Right, the first thing a compliance officer will ask is: "what are your <employees of this category> actually paid right now?"

And then you can point out to entry level software developers and much more senior ones and demonstrate that such a wide range is not only feasible, but already exists between employees.

> the employer in good faith believes

So unless you can read minds, it'd be hard to prove that the employer doesn't believe this is the salary range.

And besides, 10K to 1M is a pedantically large range to illustrate this dynamic. Realistically a lot of companies could provide a range from $60K to $300K for software developers - both of these are salaries I can attest to firsthand. This isn't as stark as a 100:1 range, but a range of 5:1 is still a wide enough range such that expected salaries are still effectively unknown.

> unless you can read minds, it'd be hard to prove

That's not how it works.

There is going to be an evidentiary standard (such as "preponderance of the evidence" -- it won't be "beyond a reasonable doubt") applied by an administrative law judge.

The judge can very well decide he CAN read minds -- unless YOU can read minds, or he decides to tell you, you won't know.

It'd still be easy to meet that evidentiary standard: point to an entry level software developer making ~$60k and point to a much more experienced one making north of a quarter million. Such a spread is not hard to find

The job ads for their positions will have different experience and education requirements.

Even judges understand there is a difference between "entry level" and "senior."

Can't the company be compelled to provide salary data for the role? I assume there is some kind of enforcement mechanism. So then it's a matter of explaining why your lowest paid senior engineer makes 150k, the median makes 200k and you've listed a floor of 10k? The judge/jury don't have to accept a smarmy response about how the hypothetical candidate might conceivably make 10k.

And on the subject of the window, most places have much narrower bands than that for a role. It might be that wide for all engineers, but not for senior engineers for example.

An 60k is easily an entry level salary. And 300k is easily a principal engineer's salary. Put the two under the same job title and then you can say to the jury, "it's not just credible that this salary range could exist, this range actually already exist right now."

Good luck convincing your principal engineers to take the same job title as the entry level engineers.

They do at my company. Everyone is just "Software Developer". I don't see anything wrong with it, I find that titles are largely meaningless anyways. At some companies "principal engineer" is handed out after 3-4 years of experience, and at others principal engineer is the highest title with only 1-2% of devs holding it.

For software engineering compensation, wide salary range isn't the biggest issue. It's that much of the compensation (often 25% to 60%) isn't salary: it's stock and discretionary bonus.

I haven't read the background for this law, but I guess it's meant to help people earning less than $100k, and people with less power to negotiate an initial offer.

It's meant to help people applying for jobs, the vast majority of whom don't get the job, so it's not really about the people who get hired.

Not sure I follow. The min and max would be based all the real job in the company. Otherwise it's useless.