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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

<i>I would strongly recommend against doing this, for the simple reason that they will need to know your last salary so they can calculate your tax. In the UK this is the P45 form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P45_%28tax%29 If you have lied to them, they can terminate you immediately.</i>

There's no equivalent in the US. There's never any reason a future employer ever needs to know what you earned in the past.

If you work for a government entity, they might be able to find that out, as it may be public information easily obtained, but barring that, there's no way they can find out (legally).

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<quote>there's no way they can find out (legally)</quote> Really? Is that really true? What about all the forms one signs, allowing for background information check (education, employment information, etc)?

Due to the way the legal system in the US works, there is a lot of posturing. Plenty of the forms you sign are not enforceable at all and only there to make people ignorant of the relevant laws afraid to exercise rights they actually have.

Interesting.... Could anyone be more specific? Plenty of "serious" firms ask about last salary earned (in fact, if you were to fill out an application on line, you may not proceed, as these fields tend to be mandatory). Is your advice to simply fill out $0? I've always thought "current salary" was irrelevant and just a nasty tactic.

I always refuse to answer about previous salary. As I've said in other places in this thread, previous salary is irrelevant. They have the right to ask and I have the right to refuse to answer. It's part of the negotiation. If me not telling them is enough for them not to want to hire me then I would have been underpaid and unhappy anyway.

>Plenty of "serious" firms ask about last salary earned (in fact, if you were to fill out an application on line

Are you saying that a "serious" firm would have you fill out an application (online or otherwise)? I thought any career level job would expect a resume/CV.

With online applications you can just place 0 (if required), and make a note "unwilling to disclose" or "will discuss compensation within an interview" or "upon offer" etc.

Big finance firms (EG, top 3 in the world) require tax documentation and will rescind offers if your comp was exaggerated.

Mike Kimsal. I recognize that name. I once took on some contract work to modernize a web app for a manufacturing ocompany.

It was PHP work. And they had it built on a framework I'd never heard of called logicrate iirc. It was kinda a steaming pile man :) I mean, it just didn't age well, I'm sure. Over the last decade some awesome PHP frameworks were written that didn't exist, i'm guessing, when you wrote that.

It was started in 2000. I wouldn't say it was a 'steaming pile', but obviously I'm a bit biased. MVC structure, user mgt, automatic login/registration, database abstraction, a rudimentary ORM (very rudimentary), user groups, permissioning from a control panel that was able to be hooked in to from administrative modules. The closest thing around with any degree of flexibility at the time was phpnuke when lc was started.

It hasn't been worked on since 2003 - one of the original people behind it started cognifty.com several years ago.

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