Comment by rboyd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rboyd | Hacker News Reader

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I think the guy was just priced out.

Companies ought to be more upfront about their salary bands. It's pretty unreasonable to have candidates jump through a phone screen, complete a homework assignment, then travel to come meet in person for the whiteboard pain session before they know if a company can even afford them. I see more companies getting this right lately but we have a way to go.

Otherwise, it can be a huge waste of everyone's time. In this case it sounds like whoever negotiated didn't even have authority to make a deal, which is a pretty big flub on Canonical's part.

The other possibility is that one of the interviewers didn't get feedback in before the negotiation. That would still be a process fail.

A good developer/SRE should basically be able to justify her expense and essentially write her own check, splitting the value capture with the host company. Things are way off and asymmetric in the current hiring practice.

Thanks for posting. It's understandable to be upset here. More companies with bad interview processes should be outed so that they can improve and the rest of us don't have to discover them on our own.

Thanks BTW for understanding - that's my intention here, which is to call out bad companies for doing egregious sorts of things (along with me being pretty frustrated in general, which could've been in poor form but whatever)

They should have mentioned this earlier though. It seems pretty unprofessionally handled, and return he's being about as professional.

It's better to rise above things, but sometimes it's more evening to give what you get.

>"I think the guy was just priced out."

Indeed and I think this happens all the time. Recruiters play lots of games. They will reach out to candidates and get them into the interview pipeline in order to demonstrate to the company that are actually doing something meaningful.

I think that often times the recruiters are not forthcoming with others about the candidates salary expectations. I believe this results in lots of late stage rejections after many rounds of successful interviews. This costs recruiters nothing but candidates lots of time.

The article mentions salary negotiations and immediate interview feedback. It sounds like the executives decided not to hire for whatever reason (maybe salary).

>"A good developer/SRE should basically be able to justify her expense and essentially write her own check, splitting the value capture with the host company. Things are way off and asymmetric in the current hiring practice."

I was curious what you meant by "splitting the value capture with the host company." Similarly I would be interested in where you see asymmetry in the hiring process.

Not OP, but they likely meant that a developer or SRE can be a force multiplier that delivers value far in excess of salary and costs.

For example, if I produce value to the company of 400k/year, whther that's in new development, or optimising/supporting existing systems, and they incur costs of 50k/year in hiring me, then the 350k is up for discussion in terms of the distribution between salary/bonus and remaining with the company to reflect risk and capital etc.

That said, this calculation applies to most value-generating employees in most industries - techies, and HN in particular, are just more explicit in discussing it.

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