But in which way? If you don’t want to pay a lot, maybe you should choose the equally qualified candidate with the lowest salary, because he or she won’t bug your for a raise.
I’ve hired lots of people over the last 30 years, and I’ve never had two identical candidates. If you have them you are not digging deep enough in your interview, or you are not asking enough of them.
I have seen resume that looked wonderful but the man did not know a box wrench from a open end wrench. Or the best one I heard was from one of my old chiefs. On the walk through the applicant was asked what he knew about that (pointing to a chiller)> His was that it was a fire tube boiler with NOXs controls. But he had a great resume explaining about all his training and his schooling. And the engineer degree, it is just a piece of paper indicating that you have some theory, but no indication if you can apply it. And with only 6 exceptions that I know colleges do not give you any experience. The 6 exceptions are the state Maritime Academies.
I have worked on crews where the chief hired someone with a good resume and indicated experience but were coming from a low paying job. Not one of them lasted a year.
It’s illegal to make you keep your salary secret from your fellow employees (because it has collective bargaining implications). It’s not illegal to make you keep it confidential from some other company.
The first thing I do when someone claims they have experience is to test that experience. No question about that - that is what an interview is all about (not asking where you see yourself in five years and other garbage.)
But one of the worst things a college can do is to concentrate on giving you experience, at the expense of a good theoretical underpinning.
Some CIOs complain about colleges not teaching the latest software package they use. But that is because they want to hire someone who needs no training, and then toss them out for a new crop when they change the software they use. And then the CIOs have the nerve to complain about a shortage of talent.
How many colleges are going to be able to afford to have the boiler you use, not to mention the boilers that other people use? In my field colleges will never be able to get state of the art circuit designs we use, because they are proprietary and because they are too big. They also can’t afford million dollar design tools, though top universities might get copies. You don’t pick up these things and use them in the time you have for a class.
What we do, and it has worked, is look for smart students with a good grasp of the fundamentals, and train them. And it has worked very well. And I have no problem hiring great students who have worked out very well.
And I think we are starting to get seriously out of GQ territory, so my apologies.
If you have the diary as a PDF, post a link. No jpegs for me, though.
ETA: if that was rhetorical, never mind, my bad.
Now you are shifting your goalposts from salary history demonstrating competence to asserting only hands-on experience being valuable. There is no way you can discern someone’s practical experience from a salary history, and in fact, in my experience at least a salary history is almost useless for determining competence. Some of the least technically competent people I have ever worked with have managed to regularly improve their salary by dint of speaking real good and hopping from position to position before any of their mistakes could catch up with them. (I worked at one major company which had a rotation program known as the “Future Technical Leaders” intended to expose those identified for rapid promotion into the ranks of executive management. The program, typically referenced by the acronym “FTL” was widely known by working scientists and engineers as “Failed to Learn” or “Failure to Launch” because participants rarely had enough depth in any technical area to complete any useful work or even understand the applications of a new technology program.)
As for the notion that only the MARADs provide practical experience or applied skills, this both false and to a certain degree, missing the point of collegiate versus vocational training. Many engineering programs offer cooperative training programs in industry and hands-on research opportunities for students who are sufficiently motivated to learn applied skills like welding, machining, composite fabrication, practical control system debugging, et cetera. Not all students are required to participate in these (which I consider a deficiency of applying the general four year education scheme to engineering) but it is quite easy to evaluate the fundamental skill level of a candidate by asking a few basic questions about how to torque a bolt, isolate a leak or FOD in a hydraulic or pneumatic system, et cetera.
And while this practical vocational experience is certainly useful in designing new systems for usability and maintainability by end users, the purpose of a collegiate-level education is to instill in engineers an understanding of discipline fundamentals such as thermodynamics, structural mechanics, electrical and control system design, signals processing, and so forth which is beyond the experience of technicians so that they can perform higher level conceptual design and evaluate the viability of systems before hardware has been built. I’ve worked with many people who had good practical “wrench-turning” experience, but despite having an engineering degree couldn’t read a steam table or perform vector analysis, and that deficiency was just as much of a hindrance when dealing with a theoretical calculation of performance or simulation of behavior as having an analyst out on a shop floor trying to explain how a multi-pass weld should have perfectly controlled bead geometry for his analysis to an expert welder with decades of experience.
A well-educated engineer should have both enough fundamental knowledge to learn any system in his or her discipline area, and also the skills to explain and document it for others versus just being able to operate a specific engine or know a certain software application. “Engineers” who are exposed to and only work with one type of application or system are not truly engineers; they’re overly educated technicians, and unless they have knowledge specific to my narrow area of application, they’re probably useless to me.
Stranger
I never claimed we were good or even competent at hiring people. 
In retrospect we probably weren’t. In my own personal defense I wasn’t present at any of the interviews, I was literally given some paperwork and asked to give my opinion on who seemed the best fit. Based on that it was a tough choice.
I want to see the pay history in the resume. And if it is sub pay then I am going to see if there is a valid reason. This will happen before the interview. If the resume indicates the candidate may be a good candidate then an interview can be used to test his experience. Why would anyone bring a sub par candidate?
The school needs only to have one ore two boilers to give you the training. Nothing brings it home like a lab class run by a good instructor. The theory gives you a base to work with. Experience makes it real. Lighting off a boiler by hand has to be experienced. Getting the flair back and not pulling away and at the same time keeping your face out of the way gets driven home by doing not reading.
An experience I had at San Jose State. I was working on the throttling flat of the thermo lab when a group of engineering students came. The lab had a steam turbine connected to a pump. The lab experiment was to run the turbine measure steam flow to determine work input measure pump water output to measure work output. The students just opened the throttle and brought the turbine up to speed. They did not open any drain and spin the turbine to bring it up to temperature. Scared me. And when I tried to explain the dangers of what they were doing all I got was a blank face, it did not even register. They all had read the test on how to measure work input and output without any of the particle application.
No I am not saying that salary history means knowledge. I am saying lack of a proper salary history indicates a lack of practical knowledge. That is one of my 1st steps on evaluating a candidate. If they pass that test then read the resume and see how much practical experience is there.
You appear to have an extremely narrow view of what constitutes sufficient experience for an engineer position. I’ve designed and operated 100 ton plus mining equipment, cutting/severing/penetrating devices for emergency rescue, hung off of a launch vehile gantry in near gale force winds, and tested high pressure composite overwrapped pressure vessels (among various other hands on applications) in addition to performing finite element analysis, structural dynamics evaluation, system requirements studies, et cetera (and notwithstanding research work done in cloud physics, ordnance testing, and a spot of energetic organic chemistry) but I’ve never operated a coal, gas, or fission fired boiler of any kind. So I guess I’m shit as an engineer in your estimation, right?
Stranger
Not necessarily, though, and if you’re weeding out candidates merely because their previous employer paid shit, you’ll lose good candidates.
For example, I spent a chunk of my career working for government agencies. The government doesn’t pay market salaries. Period, end of discussion. You work for the government for the benefits, or the stability, or the satisfaction, or the experience, but you don’t work for White-Haired Uncle or his state/local counterparts for the money, not in the technical fields with which I’m familiar.
Some of the my counterparts at these agencies have fantastic experience and they’re really really good at what they do. Depending on the agency, they may actually have a far broader and deeper range of experience than people who work in private industry at significantly higher salaries. (I’d put a career lawyer from the Federal Public Defender’s Office against most criminal defense attorneys in private practice, for example, even though GS-whatever isn’t remotely comparable to what they could make outside.)
If you discard that application because “oh, she was only making $X so she can’t possibly be any good,” you’re making a huge mistake.
Similarly, people in non-government positions may have their own motivations for accepting below-market rates–at a nonprofit, because they believe in the cause; at an employer in a particular location, because they really needed to be in that locale, e.g. for family; because at a particular stage in their life they needed the flexibility, etc.
I know a lady, for example, who stayed at a ridiculously underpaid position for a number of years solely because she had a seriously-ill spouse and GREAT insurance. She could have gotten herself an easy 25% raise merely by walking across the hallway, but that would have meant possibly starting over with different doctors and a different health plan; the pay raise could not offset the aggravation and upset involved, and her employer knew it. They shamelessly took advantage of her, but she let them because hubby’s health was more important than money. Maybe you would not have made the same decision, but deciding whether to even review her resume based solely on a number would not be a good decision on your part.
If I was hiring you to be a boiler engineer you would get a pass from me. The same as you would probably pass me over for a mining engineers job.
Thanks to careful resume reading and a good phone screen, I make offers to a very high percentage of candidates I bring in. Without asking for salary history. If we luck into a person who is really good, and paid more than the open position, we can often bump up the position to match.
But why would anyone want to put his or her salary history on a resume which goes out to who knows where?
If you’ve ever done salary administration you’ll know that there can be a gap between salary and value for a number of reasons.
Lab courses are essential, sure, but I wouldn’t mistake one for the real world.
Those of you who consider this essential information, how do you deal with immigrants? Very often their pre-immigration salary history is from a country where salaries are very different from those in the US, or have gone through several years of being underpaid/underemployed as part of immigrating.
In my case, I was paid at level 7 for a job that was supposed to be levels 9-12 due to a bad application of company promotion policies (the scale back home had 12 tiers, the scale in the US had 16; my former position had only one possible tier at home, 3 in the US…); later when I went back home my boss felt bad that my new salary was “so much lower!” when in terms of where it put me in the local economy it was actually higher than the US one. Those things are very difficult to evaluate.
Living in California what you are saying not only applies to immigrants but someone moving from out of state. My so a locksmith in Kansas City is making about 1/2 of what he was making in the Bay Area. But his money goes twice as far. His house cost him around $125,000 one like it in the San Jose area would be in the range of $800,000 to $1.2 M. He can afford to have and board 2 horses. If he lived here he would be renting and any horse would be out of the question. Resume also should have the area where the applicant is from.
Which has not one thing to do with my salary history. Stop shifting goalposts.
Stranger
I am not shifting goal post. My goal post is to find a qualified person. One of the markers that I would use is salary history. one of the markers not the only one.
How do you know that without seeing his salary history? :smack:
It seems to me that salary history, not that its any of your damn business anyway, has more potential to mislead than to find you a qualified candidate.
He stated some his qualifications and they did not fit. You read the whole resume. My experience when looking for a job was that most prospective employers don’t read the resume sent them.