If you are looking for a new job, you often do not know what the pay will be beforehand. In the US, companies are now being forced to disclose the salary range in job advertisements.
In the US state of California, progressive salary transparency legislation went into effect on January 1, 2023. Private companies with more than 15 employees – including tech giants such as Google, Apple and Activision Blizzard – must now disclose their salaries to job seekers in advance.
Tech companies must disclose salaries
The law aims to reduce the pay gap based on gender and ethnicity. It also allows existing employees to request a salary range from their company for their current job. This allows them to compare their own salary with the information provided by their employer. Companies that do not provide a salary range for a job posting can face penalties ranging from $100 to $10,000. Similar laws will also come into effect in the US states of Washington and Rhode Island from 2023. More are to follow in the course of the year.
Big tech companies like Google, Meta, Twitter and Apple will therefore indicate a salary range in their job advertisements in the future. A senior software engineer at Twitter earns between 162,000 and 226,000 USD. at Google brings a similar management position between $218,000 and $326,000. Apple offers a hardware architect between $150,000 and $269,000.
Game studios are looking for loopholes
According to a now-defunct tweet from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, some companies are now trying to find loopholes in the new law. Accordingly, Activision Blizzard, based in Santa Monica, states such a large salary range that the actual payment can hardly be determined from it. Specifically, it is about two job postings that are valued at $134,000 to $247,900 and $80,800 to $149,400. That’s a difference of USD 113,900 and USD 68,600 between the lowest and highest values, respectively – almost double in both cases.
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Electronic Arts and Riot Games also use the same practice. EA, for example, has two positions that range from $129,500 to $204,600 and $157,450 to $245,500. The difference between the lowest and highest values, while smaller than Activision Blizzard, is still enough not to give job seekers a clear picture of the actual salary.
However, the discrepancy is particularly large when it comes to the tender for a game director at Netflix. The position is valued at at least USD 150,000 – but the range goes up to USD 500,000. That’s more than three times the bottom line, so it’s not much of a help in determining the typical salary for a game director.