This whole thing is pretty silly, right? The penalties for noncompliance with NYC's law apply to the listing company, not to the board they posted on. If you really think YC companies are deliberately skirting the law, report them to NYC.
NYC does a one-time 90-day notice-and-cure, so you can "effect positive change" with listing YC companies without subjecting them to fines, if that's really what you're worried about.
Exactly, and - assuming a mistake rather than maliciousness should have been the first take. There are 100's if not thousands of rules and regulations companies need to conform to and you should normally at a minimum give them a chance to fix this rather than to right away start yelling about them 'breaking the law', because no CEO that I'm aware of does so willingly (assuming they intend to stay in business and take their responsibilities somewhat seriously). This seems more like an exercise in grandstanding than actual concern.
It's also just so weird to suggest that HN should be policing this. They're fixated on NYC's law, but NYC is more lenient, at least statutorily, than Colorado, which has had this rule for over a year. But NYC and Colorado have different disclosure requirements, as will California and Washington. That's not just down to who needs to disclose (if you have fewer than 5 NYC employees, for instance, you're apparently not obligated to report) but also what you have to disclose.
It's not reasonable to suggest that HN should also run an HR practice. Again: totally fair to be irritated at a YC company who lists a noncompliant job. Go report them!
I would be highly surprised if in any given startup in the first 24 months they were not at least in breach of several laws, especially in the HR domain. Usually this gets fixed during the first fundraising (during legal DD and for a regulated industry compliance review) but your average 3 people in a room start-up trying to get a product out the door will inevitably make mistakes like these - and worse. The GDPR is an easy one to mess up on, local employment law, employment contracts, especially when hiring people remote can be super tricky and if you are in a regulated industry my advice would be to hire a part time compliance officer (and probably an HR professional as well) as soon as you can afford it, it will save a whole raft of problems later on.
Regulators are usually more than willing to work with such young companies to get them to become compliant, rather than to throw the book at them at the first opportunity.
Given the state of the companies advertising on YC my assumption would be that they are too busy to get to either an MVP or to break even to be acutely aware of all of these compliance issues. One thing YC does is to help the companies with legal support, they probably could give some assistance with making sure that public job ads are compliant either by serving as a clearing house or to offer a set of written guidelines to ensure basic compliance, thus minimizing the risk of accidentally running afoul of the law.
I mean, no, local regulators are not generally friendly to startups (I've experienced drama both in SFBA and in Chicagoland) --- but nobody is really being fined for these salary disclosure laws. :)
Companies should list their salary ranges! Like, regardless of the law!
> Companies should list their salary ranges! Like, regardless of the law!
Yes, definitely. It's to everybody's advantage. The assumption should be that if a company does not list its salary range and they're young that they don't know better and if they're older that you are about to get screwed.
NYC does a one-time 90-day notice-and-cure, so you can "effect positive change" with listing YC companies without subjecting them to fines, if that's really what you're worried about.
I don't see what this has to do with HN, at all.