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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people decide to work and you can't expect someone to know if they want to work for you without giving them that data.

The numerical salary shouldn't be the deciding factor. I want to know if you're interested in the work that you'll be doing and the team you'll be working with. I don't want you to think, "man I wasn't going to go there but they offered a huge salary!".

Of course the salary is relevant, but I want to know that we're just negotiating on the number, and not number+job.

Are you interested in the work that we'll be doing? Yes? Good, is this number high enough to make it worth your while? No? Ok, well that was the highest I could go, so thanks for your time.

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I exclusively work for whoever is willing to pay me the most, at the least inconvenience to my current living situation. I would feel pretty comfortable wagering that I'm in the large majority there.

I may be off base here so apologies if so, but reading between the lines a bit I'm assuming that you are an early hire or possibly a founder of some startup. Very few people, probably nobody, will be as invested in your business as you are (unless you give them a non negligible amount of equity, and they believe there's a good chance that will actually be worth something). It's understandable that that's a difficult/frustrating fact to accept, but it shouldn't be hard to understand. Acknowledging it will lead you to a more effective hiring process.

I'd rather work at somewhere with a 0.9x salary with a healthy culture and work life balance and a product I'm excited about than a place with none of those that pays 1.1x salary.

I don't think I'm in the minority of that either. That's not to say salary doesn't matter -- it's very important because given two places I'm equally interested in, I'll pretty much exclusively choose based on compensation.

That seems reasonable, but the compensation ranges I've been seeing aren't 0.9-1.1 x a reference salary, they seem to range from 0.3x (crappy consulting) -3x (HFT) the compensation of a mid-range FAANG position. With that kind of variation, it's very possible that compensation differences could overwhelm a normal sized difference in culture quality.

"I'll work for whoever is willing to pay me the most" is valid from your point of view. But I as a founder don't want people who're in it just for the money, so eliminating such people is exactly why I think I'll henceforth separate out the "Are you interested in this job?" part from the pay part.

Perhaps without realising it, you made an argument for the opposite side :)

> The numerical salary shouldn't be the deciding factor.

I don't think people that didn't grow up poor can appreciate how stupid that statement sounds to us.

You're assuming I didn't grow up poor. You'd be correct in that assumption, but that doesn't mean I can't empathize. I didn't grow up poor, but when it came time to get my first job, I didn't have any money nor any help from my parents, or any fall back options. I had to get a job to afford food and shelter.

I still cared about the work that I'd be doing.

> You're assuming I didn't grow up poor.

True, but given the evidence, I considered it highly unlikely that you did.

> I didn't grow up poor, but when it came time to get my first job, I didn't have any money nor any help from my parents, or any fall back options. I had to get a job to afford food and shelter.

It's not about that. It's about how you look at the world and how you view finances because of the way a person grows up. You don't have the same scars that we have.

> I still cared about the work that I'd be doing.

For us, that would be pretty low on the list of things that mattered.

Even from this post its clear you just don’t understand.

Why shouldn't people optimize for the number? At the end of the day, people change, and being optimistic or excited about the job today doesn't mean they'll feel that way 4 years from now. Money on the other hand, is quantifiable and can be saved up, its a much more flexible resource to optimize for than immediate happiness.

these are just things people say to get people to take accept lower salaries. a narrative that serves to suppress wages.

quite frankly i’d like our industry to evolve past mission narratives.

Not at all (at least not in my case). I already know how much I can afford to pay for someone doing that work I'm hoping to hire you to do. I want to make sure you're interested in that work before I tell you that number, only because I don't want that number to be what pushes you over.

Sure, maybe you'll lie and say yes to get the number from me. That's a risk I have to take. But if you say no, at least we didn't bother having you come on board just to be unhappy.

> I want to make sure you're interested in that work

Is the work something so unique that it's not roughly the same as work in multiple other companies?

Is the work going to be such that it's going to continue to be interesting even after the newness/novelty of such work has worn off?

If I get paid enough, I can always take acting/improv lessons and just feign the enthusiasm, treating it like a side-hustle on top of the regular work.

If you tell them you really want to work there, they can use that asymmetry of information to their advantage in order to give a lower offer. What you’re doing is asking someone to take a highly disadvantaged negotiating position.

man, you want the body coming to work, the brain doing the work, and also you want the soul. The soul does cost a significant extra and it seems you're trying to get it on the cheap by catching and exploiting the enthusiasm of those people who feel it for your jobs.

Expectations can be very far apart. In Kuala Lumpur, the average salary for 5-10 years of experience is about $15,000 annual.

That's... way too low for me. 80% of interviewers will offer this range, but it takes several days of interviewing before they'll mention numbers. I really don't want to waste anyone's time on an offer I can't take, so it's good to filter that early on.

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