California's pay transparency law came into effect this week revealing some Big Tech salaries including $253K-$327K for a software engineering director at Meta
just what it “reasonably expects,” which is a little vague. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/ ... https://twitter.com/... @susannavogel1 : another day, another very useful salary range. this one from @netflix https://twitter.com/... Jordan Novet / @jordannovet : the new required salary ranges for job postings in California don't include stock, so total compensation isn't clear, but they're more transparent and up to date than what was available before https://www.cnbc.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When California became the latest state to mandate salary ranges in job postings back in September 2022, Meta, Alphabet, Disney and other large employers were given until January 2023 to comply — and this week that deadline hit, surfacing concrete numbers like Meta's $253K–$327K range for a software engineering director.
The immediate follow-on coverage shows both the value and the loophole in the disclosure: Jordan Novet notes the required ranges exclude stock, so total compensation stays opaque, while within days companies were already exploiting vague statutory language — one Netflix posting stretched from $90K to $900K. The episode lands amid rising tech pay benchmarks, from Amazon's earlier $350K base-salary ceiling to AI researcher packages climbing well past it.
First-order effects
- Big Tech recruiters in California — Meta, Alphabet, Disney among them per the September coverage — must now publish base-salary bands in every posting, giving California candidates their first look at what director- and staff-level roles actually pay at named companies.
Second-order effects
- Employers are gaming the requirement's 'reasonable expectation' wording with absurdly wide ranges like Netflix's $90K–$900K, which pushes regulators toward tightening definitions and pressures rivals to either match the vagueness or compete on genuine clarity.
Third-order effects
- Public posting ranges create an external benchmark that collides with internal secrecy — as seen when Netflix moved to restrict some staff's ability to see colleagues' salaries — suggesting transparency laws will force companies to reconcile published bands with internal pay structures, and potentially extend disclosure to stock if base-only ranges keep understating total compensation.
The trend: State-mandated pay transparency is converting tech salaries from private benchmarks into public ones, with employers' workarounds shaping how far disclosure regulation goes next.