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Comment by fukupayme2 | Hacker News Reader

A big problem here in London is the willingness of big firms, especially financial ones to pay market rate in all conditions. An example:

I work at an IB, doing Python/Quant development. We are presented with two candidates to interview.

Candidate 1 is ok, has a year or two of Python but otherwise mostly Java background. Did so-so in the algo and numerical discussions, was ok in the problem solving categories. He was currently earning 75k and was asking for a 5k bump. HR were fine with this.

Candidate 2 was unbelievable, has authored and contributed to many open source Python libraries, was well known in the community, did very well in the questions, would have been an absolute asset to the team and business. He is currently earning 50k at a Django shop. HR rejected his application as hge asked for 70k, on the grounds that the jump was too big. Even though it was less than the overall pay for candidate 1.

Employers suck hard sometimes!

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As a technical manager, I regularly have a similar problem. I often hire folks [in Mexico and Brazil] with minimal experience, either fresh from school or coming off their first 1-2yr job(s) out of school. As such, we pay them pretty low. If they prove their value and become key contributors, I naturally want to give them a 50-100% raise after a year or so. This always results in painful discussions with HR/Comp about why our typical "20% max salary increase" rule is stupid and inapplicable. I usually, but not always, triumph. Last year one guy got a 98.5% raise. :D Doing things like that always makes me feel really good.

This is awesome. Kudos to you.

You are doing these guys a favour, but it is also very beneficial to the company in the long run. If they are good and aren't treated well then they will leave. It is as simple as that.

I'm also guessing that since you're getting them so cheaply to begin with then they're likely still under market rate with a ~75% bump in pay.

I've worked in one company which gave a spontaneous raise after ~1 year, and another that declined to give any raise after years. I know which one has more motivated employees.

That's pretty ridiculous. I guess I don't feel bad about being less than honest when asked by a potential employer about my current salary. It's really none of their business.

It can get worse - I know of people who have been asked by the IB to prove their current salary/bonus levels, to avoid inflation or overstated earnings. They do also verify via the P45 as well.

Best bet is to join one, if you have to, from a contractor route. Then you have an advantage, as they know you are most likely on a higher rate and are not willing to muck around with the usual HR demands.

So a potential employer can verify your current salary through the government? That's terrible. I don't think employers have that ability here in the states, but I could be wrong.

It's a small downside to the massive upside that in the UK most people don't have to do their own taxes, their employers and the government do it all for them.

Hence the employers need to know how much you've earnt and how much PAYE tax you've paid so far this tax year (via a form called a P45).

I guess you could get round it by claiming you had unpaid leave, or you'd recently been given a pay rise, or you'd been offered the figure by your previous company to stay.

So a potential employer can verify your current salary through the government?

That's not strictly true, but in the UK employers are normally required to deduct the main income taxes before paying the employee's salary and they are responsible for remitting those taxes to the government. To do this, they need to know how much total salary a new starter has earned so far in the current tax year, in order to make the correct determinations about tax rates and therefore deduct the correct withholdings before paying salary.

So, when you leave an employment mid-year you get an official record of how much you've been paid so far that year in that employment, along with how much was deducted for taxes etc. A new employer will normally want to see these records for any previous employment within the same tax year.

That doesn't mean they can actually see your previous salary. If you started on 6 April (edit: This is the first day of the new tax year in the UK) and therefore hadn't had any previous employment in the same tax year, or if you had previously worked multiple jobs, or had a pay rise, or anything else irregular, then they can't do the arithmetic to reverse engineer the salary from what they've been told for tax calculation purposes. But if you've had one regular job since the start of the year and no significant changes in salary or bonuses, this does mean a quick division will tell them exactly what you were on before.

Don't you get the P45 after you left your old company? Which means they can only look at it after you were hired.

Also, why is it the employee's responsibility to not drive inflation? If the company is fine with paying someone X for a job, why does it matter what the person earned before?

Well, that would be a great first impression if the very first thing the company found out about you was that you've lied in the interview about how much you've earned before.

thats absolutely batshit. just agog at other comments claiming this is a feature. no way it's worth tiny amount of time and effort saved.

This is why you shouldn't lie about your salary. They'll find out your current salary. If they can prove you lied at interview, you could be fired at any time.

Market rates are complicated, and it's not unusual for employers to do this. For high-value people, the big guys (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) can and will match crazy high counteroffer numbers a lot of the time. It sucks, and this leads to the exact scenario you're describing. The justification these places use is that, "We don't ever want to lose good people simply because of money."

The flip side of this is that it's easy to bump your market rate - just get counteroffers. This provides the basis firms are looking for. Some people are more ruthless about than others, of course - it can lead to the sorts of disparity you're seeing.

In an ideal world we would have more uniform salary numbers with transparency around them, but until we get to that world, it's contingent on individuals to put in the work to set themselves up for success.

[0] I founded http://OfferLetter.io - we provide negotiation advice and career services

[1] PS - you should check out the Offer Drive (http://offerletter.io/drive.html) - "Confidentially submit your offers. Learn if you're paid fairly." as the tagline goes.

For financial IT in London specifically, I would always advise people to state you have multiple interviews and roles on the go, and do so, so that if you are made an offer, get it in writing, even though then pretend it is an time limited offer, and then get at least one or two rounds of counter offer. And don't feel bad about doing it. They will squeal a bit, but it is just business at the end of the day. And yes, do job hop from time to time or else your pay will stagnate. A good rule of thumb is to interview every three to six months to establish your market potential and look at the difference on your current role.

Offer Drive looks interesting. You should either internationalise it (right now the salary field only accepts numbers and doesn't specify what currency, and there's no "country" field) or clarify that it's only for your country (presumably the USA, but there's actually no clue about that on your site).

Brit here, wanted to take part but wasn't sure if my submission would be meaningful.

Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately TypeForm (which we're using right now) is a little difficult on the internationalization front, but you're welcome to input the specific unit of currency alongside the value.

Nope, you can only input numbers.

MathWorks tried to pull similar shit with me. When we started discussing salary while setting up an on-site the recruiter balked at the salary delta I was asking for, not the absolute number. It was one of a few reasons I ultimately declined the on-site.

This is why you shouldn't tell prospective employers your current salary.

if you're flipping something you wouldn't tell the buyer what you bought it for.

this has nothing to do with which party is stating the price.

How HR knew about their current salary? Did they tell it themselves? Cause it's clearly not beneficial.

In UK your employer can see what you've earned before. As explained elsewhere, it's because unless you run your own company you don't have to do your own taxes. Government does it for you, even if you have multiple jobs they will figure out exactly how much you need to pay without you bothering with it. But the downside is that yes, you have to disclose how much you've earned before(there are situations when you can make the figure appear slightly larger or smaller,but it's not very easy).

Might be worth mentioning that the P45 form with previous salary only comes into play once a company has hired you and are doing salary tax paperwork.

So declining to state current salary before receiving an offer is still very much a possibility.

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