Some companies are taking a liberal interpretation of California's pay transparency law with wide pay ranges; one Netflix job posting has a $90K-$900K pay range
Context & Ripple Effects
California's salary-range mandate went live this month after Meta, Alphabet, and Disney were put on notice last fall that postings would have to comply by January 2023; the first week of disclosures surfaced real numbers like Meta's $253K-$327K band for an engineering director. The Bloomberg report shows the flip side of compliance: a Netflix posting spanning $90K-$900K technically lists a range while disclosing almost nothing.
The timing is awkward for Netflix specifically. Days later the company was reported to be restricting some staff from seeing colleagues' salaries, retreating from the rare internal openness it had long been known for — so the same employer is narrowing visibility inside while stretching it into meaninglessness outside.
First-order effects
- Job seekers screening Netflix roles get a tenfold range that conveys no actionable signal, and every candidate comparing offers against the January 2023 compliance deadline now has to discount wide-band postings as low-information filings.
- Netflix gets legal cover at minimal negotiating cost: the posting satisfies the statute without committing to any particular number before an offer stage where individual leverage still decides pay.
Second-order effects
- Rivals watching the $90K-$900K template have an incentive to copy it, since wide bands are cheaper than the genuine disclosure Meta-style narrow ranges represent — a race toward the least-informative compliant posting.
- If wide-range gaming spreads, pressure shifts back to regulators and legislators who wrote the mandate, forcing a choice between amending the law or accepting that posted ranges function as marketing rather than disclosure.
Third-order effects
- Pay-transparency statutes risk converging on a two-tier reality: narrow published ranges where competition for talent forces specificity, and defensive mega-ranges everywhere else — unless enforcement or amendments define what a 'good faith' range means.
- For compensation data itself, the value migrates back to private sources like the VC-accessible Option Impact database, since public postings become noisier exactly as more states adopt similar laws.
The trend: State pay-transparency mandates are spreading faster than employers' willingness to disclose, pushing compliance toward ever-wider posted ranges that preserve pre-offer secrecy.