Job descriptions should show a salary or salary range
sifted.eu
sifted.eu
> The Guidance makes clear that employers must disclose compensation and employee benefits information in each job posting for (i) positions that are to be performed in Colorado, or (ii) remote positions that could be performed in Colorado.
My employer posts salary for all positions and for me its been net negative. I was always aware that my odds of getting more money are low, but now seeing how much (and little) others are compensated makes me feel worse about my job. It will be very nice when applying for jobs, but has created a lot of frustration for me.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/colorado-releases-guidance...
You need software engineers to make software, we are the necessary commodity of the future economy, nee grads arent getting in person experience, bootcamps arent doing as great at teaching during the pandemic, the visa program was also reduced. Are we sreing a supply side squeeze and a demand side rush on devs?
Some companies will simply pay people whatever it takes to convince them to join the company, which results in compensation that’s all over the place.
Some companies have surprisingly uniform compensation, some to the extreme that all developers are paid the same compensation in lock-step. This is usually an attempt to make things fair, but it creates a lot of animosity when people feel they deserve more than their coworkers.
And some times, it really does make sense to hire less experienced people into high-paying roles of their career trajectory looks promising. Hiring isn’t just about selecting for the height of experience on a bar chart. It’s also about looking at the slope. Less experienced employees who are growing very fast are best hired at high salaries, otherwise they’re just going to leave in a year when they grow even more. Conversely, if they fail to grow into the role they might need to be let go to make room for someone more appropriate for the position.
One of the tricky things about teams sharing compensation is that there is almost never a specific ordering of salaries that everyone on the team would agree is appropriate. It’s one of those situations where 80% of people on a team might see themselves as being in the top 20%.
As always, it helps to collect competing offers elsewhere. It helps even more to be prepared to take those offers if they pay more and higher salary is your highest priority.
How many places fire people because they thought they might be a star performer but turn out to be only average? I thought Netflix was newsworthy for being "ruthless" in that way, that it was rare and that few companies have followed their example.
Couple rotations through the ranking process and if you're not jumping you're on the way out. Smart devs will read the room and find a new gig before then.
Netflix also offers amazing, most-cash, compensation, and demands results up front. Throw 300k cash at me and I'll play those games for a while, too.
If you have virtually unlimited budget then keeping an over-leveled person in an overpaid position can slide if they’re still adding some value. However, it’s still better to demote them (difficult) or remove them to prevent animosity from brewing in their peers.
If you only have the budget to hire a few people, then having an overpaid and underperforming person taking up a valuable slot in your limited budget is a pressing issue. You need to get them off the team to free that budget up for someone who can earn it appropriately.
Plenty of engineers effectively have 1 year of experience 12 times.
Do you mean they've been doing the same things year after year? I.e. without growing their skills in breadth or depth?
Experience alone doesn’t mean much.
Your existing one will bump your salary by like 5-10%. A new one won't have that baseline, making it easy to go above that. My salary increased by like 45% in the last year. I've seen posts of people claiming they've doubled their salary with this one simple trick.
At least here in Montreal software engineers are almost as high in demand as doctors.
As attrition rates are surging throughout society. People are quitting faster. More and more people are on temp contracts. I find it kinda nuts that the sign that it is time to leave a company for a raise is hitting a productive stride. It is common knowledge that the best way to get a raise is to switch employers.
Yet absolutely nothing is being done with this information by employers. It isn't secret. So they seemingly have determined that preventing attrition isn't worth it.
Upper management doesn't have the visibility or the introspection to know one single individual contributor is truly worth 30% more to their business.
I coach my reports to sell themselves. Tell the directors how they individually are adding value to the company. They are completely allowed to speak with higher ups, and usually they're more than willing to take 15 minutes and listen to ICs on virtually any topic they wish to speak about. Then, the directors will remember you when it comes time to making pay decisions. Most engineers are modest, but nobody gets penalized for communicating and highlighting the great work they do.
Some companies are smaller than yours, or have better visibility, or give managers more budgetary latitude. Speaking as if this is The One Way It Always Works is unhelpful.
I know it feels like nitpicking, but I never felt that any of the developers were actually hard to replace: it takes some money, time spent on recruiting, interviewing, then training, but in the end, the new people catch up in a matter of months and the resources needed to invest in a replacement can be relatively easily estimated.
I usually don't see that with very good business and product people. When they left the company, the team became demotivated, the lack of company and product vision caused frustration, the company couldn't find a replacement at all, caused turnover. In my experience, good business people leaving is the early sign of the company going south.
The causation can go in both directions, though: 1. product and business people are the first to see if a product/business model isn't working out, so they leave. 2 they leave, then they can't be replaced, replacement is only half as good, people quit because of lack of vision, things go even worse, more people quit, company has to shut down.
In your example if the product manager sees the plan is not working out so they leave. Is it their business model? If so they are running away from a mess they created. If the model comes from above than senior leadership is lacking.
Not being able to replace would point to a problem with either HR or senior leadership .
[Citation needed]
I'm sure there are senior leaders who are amazing, and would be extremely difficult to replace. My experience of "senior leadership", however, has been, almost universally, that they're in that position because they were born into money, their organizational skills are crap, and they think "vision" means "sticking with the status quo (with maybe one oddball quirk) and "leadership" means "yelling at people until they do what you want."
That kind of "senior leadership" isn't hard to replace at all.
In fact there might be a slightly counterintuitive relation here: assuming good intent on all sides, transition from a leader with good organizational skills would be less disruptive.
What's needed, IMO, is a cultural shift away from the idea that we need a singular, extremely powerful CEO/president/chairman, and toward more group-oriented decision-making processes and devolution of both responsibility and power.
We abandoned absolute monarchies for a lot of very good reasons, and one of them is that having one guy who can just walk into any room in the kingdom/company and exercise the power of (in this case, financial, but that often becomes very literal) life and death over anyone else in there is a bad thing.
You can save a lot of budget by not giving competitive raises.
If company X isn't looking for external experience (because they figure they already have that experience in their senior management, other team members, etc), then they'll be happy to let the person leave for company Y and hire some new entry level / fresh grad / minimally qualified person for the position and start over.
Taxes are high in Canada but are the highest in the QC. By a lot. You get good stuff, like free or subsidized daycare, but you lose a lot of $$$ out of that paycheck.
COL in Montreal is low, but it's a cold place. Like, why go to Canada when I could go to Austin or the NC Research Triangle? Low COL means lower salaries. "Easier to be a human but harder to be a consumer" is what I've heard about COL and taxes in QC.
The CAD is weaker than the USD by around 20-30%, which makes it less cool for US-based devs. You can work around that by upping that CAD number, but remember the taxes are much higher and you'll be paying comparatively more, %-wise, at 210k CAD than you would at 150k USD.
Most jobs expect some degree of French, ranging from "learning but can get by" to "full-fluency in English and French". The city as a whole is kind of like that.
So yeah, of course there are jobs. They pay mediocre rates, need a second language, and mean you'll get taxed a lot. And if you're not in Canada, moving north presents logistical issues on top of months of snow.
For Montreal, the French thing is largely true, meaning you would generally have to at least pretend to be learning French. I find that the requirement gets ignored regularly however when yours is the only decent CV in the pile.
Or perhaps they’ll just find a way around it by using other forms of compensation that skirt transparency laws in spirit.
There is risk to switching companies, but a signing bonus helps compensate for that risk.
But if nothing comes of it, I end up just frustrated knowing I'm either under-payed or more likely just under-employed.
But, abstractly, maybe four of them are getting cheated. Shouldn't they be told?
In a more general sense, more information makes for better decisions.
Person B should be (and is) free to tell person A their salary iff they want. If they don’t want to share that private information with A, no else should either.
Same reason that it’s OK and informative to share how many people in your state have +COVID or +STD tests, but not how many in your household do.
On the one hand I do very much support privacy in many areas. Facebook is a cancer that seeks to spy on me every second of the day and needs to be regulated for that reason. People need privacy for a lot of very important reasons.
On the other, I'm not sure how I feel about privacy in financial matters. Do people's salaries need to be secret? Yes, having other people's financial information is an advantage in negotiations, but wouldn't that even out if you both knew more about each other's finances? And make lots of other negotiations easier too.
Edit: I'm actually not sure it's a valid privacy state to conceal how many people have COVID in your household. It think that information being public has a lot of value and I don't know if I support privacy in that case. Where they were when the caught it is a dangerous thing to leak. But I don't see any reason to conceal it. Certainly, I wouldn't want COVID+ people around me, and I wouldn't want them hiding their status to sneak back to work and continue the pandemic either. "I am currently under quarantine" seems like an important message that needs to be broadcasted.
I think it's pretty clear we just have different views on privacy. I view health and financial information as being nobody else's business, except as required disclosures to the government and those disclosures should be minimal so as to serve a valid government purpose and not be disclosed to random members of the public. Sure, the IRS needs to know how much I made last year. My neighbor or my non-supervisory, non-payroll, non-HR co-worker has no business knowing it.
Likewise, if there are quarantine restrictions for people with +CV19 test results, I support the government having enough information to enforce their quarantine restrictions, but not for the local Nosy Upinmybusiness to have that information.
I'm not sure we do. I'm normally on the pro-privacy reflexive side. But the best way to test your beliefs is to have a discussion. I was hoping to take the opposite side on a few issues I'm more ambivalent about and clarify my own position.
In the case of "person X needs to be quarantined", I find myself leaning away from privacy by default because it interferes with people's ability to protect themselves. That's not suggesting I would be okay with knowing other people's cancer diagnoses or blood pressure.
Similarly, I'm not sure of the downside of your coworkers knowing what you make. It seems that openness will lead to everyone making more money. Possibly except the company, but honestly they may make more than enough extra revenue to make up for slightly higher salaries with more motivated workers.
> if there are quarantine restrictions for people with +CV19 test results, I support the government having enough information to enforce their quarantine restrictions,
Pragmatically, there just isn't sufficient government surveillance (thank goodness) for the government to enforce quarantine restrictions without the population's cooperation. That's why it's so scary to be in pockets of anti-maskers. It's also why I feel safe knowing that it's hard for the government to enforce similar measures outside of a pandemic.
Once you do, how do you share the salary information of five people such that four of them working together can’t de-anonymize the fifth? (I’m facing this exact issue at work; I do want to publish more info about salaries without risking even the slightest possibility to expose private information of any of our employees.)
1. Don't worry about that failure mode. There will always be ways for collusion among employees to gain salary information.
2. Publish the methodology by which compensation is calculated. That is, it is presumably some combination of algorithm based on location and role, performance, and discretion. Make the calculation methodology transparent (internally). This will also set a range you can publish externally.
This allows people to ask informed questions ("why is my perceived performance not being rewarded") instead of being completely baffled by numberwang. Transparency about the process and forces the company to do better, which is a good thing.
They can choose disclose it. I will not decide to do so on their behalf.
You might, for example, try asking them, and seeing how many feel that their privacy would be violated by publishing aggregate anonymous salary data. The answer will be 0.
Keep in mind if you have a reasonable belief that all but one of your employees will collaborate to unmask another's salary, they have ample support to form a union and require internal transparency in the contract. Your threat model is illegitimate.
If I publish a names-redacted list of everyone's salary and track/level/job code, or a mean & std-deviation per track/level/job code, I am almost certain to divulge private information of at least one employee. I have spoken with employees on this topic. Publishing their data, even inadvertently (as in the Netflix contest example), does not have anywhere near 100% support.
But that failure mode seems pretty similar to the failure mode where all 5 share their salary. At least in my mind.
To really answer your question, I ask wonder what your goal is? Because that determines how to set up your information publishing.
It's not a failure mode if all 5 people volunteer to share their salary information with each other. It is a failure mode if one of their salaries is exposed against their willing participation in the sharing.
I believe we are paying people fairly. (That specifically does not mean paying people equally, because the scope and value of their contributions to the company differ.)
Almost any aggregate statistics can be reversed by N-1 datapoints. Even something like Mean and Std. Deviation have a unique solution for the missing datapoint. Even just a band fails in the case that the missing person is one of the two extremes.
If that's the information you want to provide, does it matter how much the data directly reflects reality? Is there a reason to provide an actually min-max band as opposed to your budgeted min-max band (except that basing it on actual data keeps you honest and makes your employees trust the numbers more.)
If the employees don’t trust the numbers unless you give them to the penny, why would they trust anything we said? If you don’t trust any of your employer’s statements, you should probably find another employer.
Honestly, I think if you're going to do that to give me some idea of what the future holds (and it's not too much work) tell me how likely I am (individually) to move up in the band. It can be part of the annual review, or something as general as "we typically move people who are developing on track 15% of the way up the band as they progress from bottom to top". It gives a picture going forward and, if an employee doesn't advance, sends a powerful signal that they need to improve.
How do you know you are a good negotiator if everything is hidden? Is there a correlation between self proclaimed 1-x devs and self proclaimed great negotiators?
That's something of a loophole, though it often ends in an awkward standoff where the company has to explain why it offered you something other than the top of the range.
Do you see any benefits in being able to compare your own salary and work output with those of your colleagues?
This will be interesting. So if a company doesn't explicitly exclude Colorado from their remote job description this applies to them.
> This is a remote/office based position which may be performed anywhere in the United States except for within the state of Colorado.
A lack of transparency really only aids the employer (after all, the employer knows what everyone makes, and with salary comparison services they know exactly how competitive their salaries are).
It's at least somewhat coincidence that communists have typically gone for high state involvement - Russia was, before it was communist, basically an entirely non-free market, and most industry happened at the behest of the Tsarist bureacracy, which was massive. So the USSR was big on state planning kind of as a continuation of that.
Is it, and does it apply here? The employee is the seller who would declare the price. Employers are purchasing workers and I don't blame them for not trying to apply prices to products too much.
Flipping those roles is like telling customers to name their price when they enter a store. Customers would pay as little as possible, such businesses would fail to keep losses at bay, and other businesses that don't behave this way would survive.
The burden is on the employee to name their value, and the business can decide whether or not they want to buy. When employees don't name their value upfront, they're the ones acting like a shady business that wants customers to guess the price, since an unknowledgeable patron is likely to overpay.
Yes, price movements are how buyers and sellers in the market know the supply and demand curves are moving.
> The employee is the seller who would declare the price.
Both buyers and sellers can declare the price they are willing to buy and sell at. But that’s not important, only the price the transaction clears at is important for others to know.
> Flipping those roles is like telling customers to name their price when they enter a store.
Price transparency has nothing to do with whom puts out the first price in the negotiation. It’s only about knowing what other transactions cleared at so you have an accurate idea of supply and demand. Also, people looking for long term employment is not analogous to purchasing a low cost item in a store.
> Customers would pay as little as possible, such businesses would fail to keep losses at bay, and other businesses that don't behave this way would survive.
This is not true. Depending on supply and demand, buyers or sellers can have the upper hand in a transaction and who is naming the price first has nothing to do with which price is accepted by both parties, and certainly does not predict what business survives and not.
> When employees don't name their value upfront, they're the ones acting like a shady business that wants customers to guess the price, since an unknowledgeable patron is likely to overpay.
Bartering on price is not shady business. People do it all the time with large purchases, such as cars, real estate, wages and in poorer countries, even clothing and food. When employees don’t name their value, they’re simply might be doing so because they don’t have the clear upper hand in the negotiation, and are not willing to upset the other party. Or they want to let the other party name their price, and go from there. There’s nothing wrong with various negotiating strategies.
What is clear, is that 90% of people have very little information of supply and demand for the labor market compared to employers, so they obviously are at a disadvantage. The solution is websites like levels.fyi, that even the playing field so employees know how the supply and demand curves are actually moving.
About salaries you can get a good idea by talking to people and with sites like glassdoor. The ballpark range of salaries isn't such a secret.
And, to elaborate on my previous comment, if a business were to advertise salaries, it'd be easy for a competitor to outbid them for employees they really want. So that system just wouldn't ever become the norm.
I’m not sure what the relevance of this question is, but I presume there might be countries where real estate sale prices are not public record. I think this is the case even in the US state of Texas.
> About salaries you can get a good idea by talking to people and with sites like glassdoor. The ballpark range of salaries isn't such a secret.
The internet is helping a little, but forums and sites like levels.FYI are much better than Glassdoor I think, which sells to employers so I would not trust it.
> And, to elaborate on my previous comment, if a business were to advertise salaries, it'd be easy for a competitor to outbid them for employees they really want. So that system just wouldn't ever become the norm.
If every business had to do it, then everyone is similarly advantaged/disadvantaged. The internet is already helping. For example, I would welcome a Swedish style system.
For issue 1) you have a selection bias, and for issue 2) you have no way of knowing if that salary is for a hotshot with a great resume, 6+ years old and out of date, or anything else has changed within the company or field. And in a lot of cases the ranges are crazy large, almost uselessly so.
With a number in the actual job ad you know exactly where you're at: "SWE 2 @ 120k + 20% bonus + misc."
If you don't want that, go to a union, work for a government, or do something with an hourly wage.
This assumes that employees are a fungible commodity whose price should be set by some efficient market rate, but that's not true at all.
Under the current regime, the setup helps top performers be compensated more highly, without torpedoing morale.
You can fantasize about a world in which the salaries are transparent and everyone has frank conversations like "Yes Jill makes 50% more than you even though you're nominally at the same level. Her compensation reflects her superior contributions to the company." But that's just not how it is.
Still, do you think that compensation and merit are correlated? I do.
Also, FWIW, Joel Spolsky pretty famously detailed his company's transparent compensation plan, which took into account both experience and unique skill set.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/30/fog-creek-compensa...
If anything, I think the taboo nature of people’s economic worth and the games played to around it are what’s toxic to society.
How do you sell conspicuous consumption / Veblen goods to people if you can know, for sure, that they're really broke af?
On the other hand if you took Sweden as it currently exists, and put up a real time scoreboard on every office wall with the name and total comp of all employees (or all employees of that particular department, or whatever), you'd have pandemonium--except in workplaces with homogenized, formulaic compensation.
I don't mean to minimize your struggles, but perhaps this is a case where the exception should not be the rule? Do the benefits to the people positively impacted outweigh the loss to the people negatively impacted?
It already exists and is called Austria. The effect is that every job advertisement since 2011 says:
"The minimum salary amounts to xxxx € according to law/ordinance/collective labour agreement. According to candidate's skill set a recompense higher than that is possible."
The first sentence is mandatory. The second is not, but has become a stable trope.
Question for HN readers: do you think this is useful? Why/why not?
The system is basically an automatically fully unionized labour market.
I think it's valuable. Very much so actually. Not necessarily for software engineering jobs at the moment, because companies will have to pay above that to get someone anyway. In general though I think this helps people be paid more fairly overall. It might not result SV salaries anytime soon.
I'd say it helps newcomers to the job market a lot (both career start wise as well as moving to Austria from somewhere else. Again don't just think SWE here.
This kind of system also goes with other social stability benefits that might be strange to North Americans. Overall it should result in better care for everyone (health care, pensions etc) while it also equalizes the top towards the bottom more.
Germany isn't Austria but close. I know there for example, state pension and health care were top notch. You didn't have to have a 401k or an RRSP or an expensive extra health insurance/a good employer. The state took care of it (you paid higher taxes overall though). Then the system broke and they told people in their 50s: oh btw the pension system is broken and broke. You have to start saving up for yourself. Oh and we will also tax your pensions now! (which they didn't before). Oh and btw this and this and this will no longer be covered by your health insurance. You better get extra insurance. Screwed a good many people over that believed they were taken care of. Never mind the people that just can't start saving for themselves or buy the extra insurance. But there's also no 401k/RRSP system. The "Riester Rente" and the current 401k/RRSP "equivalent" basically just funnels your money into insurance companies. No way to invest yourself while being tax sheltered.
Most of the time they give a range.
Even if I wasn't looking, I'd have picked up valuable market insight.
I mean, it depends what market you're in. If you're desperate for the job, maybe you should reveal your salary (and bump it a bit?)
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/04/04/06/1629219/analysis-of-spam-and-a-proposed-solutionBoth were about 20% below all of my other offers, if I livdd in the usa. Worse still, I expect make a San Francisco salary working remotely from other countries. They were both shocked when I laughed out loud when their offers were based on the country where I live rather than USA where I pay my taxes.
I’m all for equality, but, fuck you, pay me. I work in tech for the money, nothing else. Cash rules everything around me.
I don't even making a San Francisco salary working not remotely in the US. It should be illegal to pay people different wages based on where they live, but it's not. Companies pay the market value of labor in a given region.
It’s just business.
There are many things about employment that should be illegal (at-will employment, enforceable non competes, ownership over IP, etc) but taking away the ability of either company or candidate to determine their compensation is a terrible idea that makes outcomes worse. It's as bad as banded salaries or any other kind of standardized pay scales.
Sure, you can watch Zoom recordings, but when folks have to connect, it'll be a 24-hour turn around to get questions answered, and those lags could materially impact business outcomes.
Before this job I was an individual contributor getting 3-5 hours of overlap at a company distributed all over the USA.
This afforded me more than enough overlap, extra on-call coverage hours and a solid 4 hours of uninterrupted project time. It is actually a huhe benefit that I get that much uninterrupted project time.
Again, if a company sees value in my skillset and multiple decades of experience then they will have to pay me the salary I want. If not, another one will.
It has been at least a decade sincr I have spent more than 2 weeks per year in-office or worked in a team that wasn’t distributed over 4-10 time zones.
Another perspective is that your skills are worth X to the company, and when they felt constrained to hire in the SF market, they found they had to increase pay by Y. So your resulting salary of X+Y might be artificial.
Also, moving to a different timezone/non-local presence might actually diminish your value to the company. It might even cost them money, though usually a small amount. So your new rate might reasonably be X-Z.
Regardless, when you turn yourself into a different product, your value to the buyer changes, and is reevaluated in the context of competing products. Relocating is just a qualifying event for triggering that reevaluation.
Sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it
I’m an American with American expenses and my terms are that I only work for an American wage. If a company wants to pay me based on the payscale of how much people make in the country where I live, yet they don’t have a presence here, it tels me they’re low balling shuysters and I laugh them off.
The primary restriction limit is I cannot work for companies which have a presence in the country where I live, or then I would pay taxes in that country and would require a work permit. I also cannot work this way frok countries which do not allow for “digital nomad” arrangements.
Some people can have their cake and eat it too. Most people can’t, but everyone like to think they can. The former won’t complain about having to accept lower wages, because they will have options at higher wages and will not have to accept lower wages.
But at least it’s out in the open, saves people time if they are expecting more then that.
Monster.com doesn’t have a filter for years of experience, but says 70k at the low end
Dice.com says 62k-84k
> There’s no excuse for not publishing a salary or salary range
There is nuance around what is competitive comp for different departments (eg. engineering vs customer support), and how current employees in the lower paid departments will perceive the difference in comp across departments. I am all for publishing salary ranges, but it doesn’t come for free, you will wind up with more ill feelings among team members in lower paid departments, even if you pay everyone market compensation. It’s probably still worth publishing salary ranges though, for all the reasons cited in the article, and that it saves everyone time.
Because, trust me, as someone who's worked at multiple B2C companies with large customer service departments, everyone absolutely knows, which is why us in the engineering department were always happy to buy the rounds at cross-company happy hours.
If departments know what they get paid — and what other departments get paid — before accepting a job, then they either accept that there are differences for a reason, or reject the offer due to the reasons.
If the reasons are fair/reasonable, then there’s nothing to worry about. If they’re not and can’t hire anyone, they’ll figure that out and adjust the salaries for those departments.
1) A candidate's expectation for salary might be lower than the advertised range, but if they see the range, they'll expect more money.
2) The company might be able to convince a good candidate to accept a salary below their expectations if they can sell the company and culture. These candidates won't apply if they see a range below their expectations.
3) It makes the company's salary ranges public, which little startups will use to create comparison websites, driving even more candidates away from smaller companies to the tech giants and monopolies who can afford to pay above market in order to kill their competition.
Overall, I'ld say it would be convenient at first, but a horrible idea in the long run if it's made mandatory. It should be up to individual businesses.
Is there any point in applying for a job without a good idea that they can match your salary expectations?
A client expected price for a product might be higher than the advertised price, but if they see the price, they'll pay less.
I do not say this is a good idea, but I do not think it is obvious that this particular issue is a reason for it to fail. This is how selling products work so, why wouldn't it work for the job market?
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/California_Equal_Pay_Act.htm
“Pursuant to Labor Code section 432.3, upon reasonable request, an employer shall provide the pay scale for a position to an applicant applying for employment. Recent amendments define a reasonable request as one made after an applicant has completed an initial interview with the employer.”
You start off saying it will never happen because unless it's mandatory. And you're probably right about that. That's why it should be mandatory.
Point 1 sounds like a great issue. People getting paid more sounds good.
Point 3 just means small companies will have to have some explicit additions to salary (profit sharing for established companies, more equity for smaller ones).
I don't know how to respond to your second point. What does "sell the company and culture" even mean? It's doing a mission you would accept a paycut to be at? Great, that's not hurt at all. It's a company with a lot of future growth? Great, spell out how (via equity or other ways) I participate in that growth. It's a fun place to work?
I do agree we would want some more compensation information than just a dollar sign. You offer free laundry and hanggliding on your lunch break?
2) Oh these poor poor companies who won't be able to screw their employees out of their fair compensation.
3) Do you mean the startups that get crazy stupid valuations? Or those startups who pay peanuts and have little benefits? People already know the risk they're taking with the latter, and the former can afford to pay competitive salaries or sell the other benefits harder.
No, it should not be up to individual businesses. You are clearly comfortable with exploiting people for the benefit of the business.
If your business can't afford to pay for top talent, then perhaps it's ok if it doesn't get the top talent. Businesses should purchase what they can pay for, just like we do when we go to the store.
You can list benefits alongside salary to try and make up for anything you want, but mandatory salary postings won't change anything except waste fewer people's time on interviews for offers they won't accept and make people working for too little money aware of the fact.
First off, the bigger tech companies are already known for having much higher salaries/compensation, hence the whole FAANG goal that many applicants aim for.
Generally, people have an incentive to pick a startup vs a big tech company for several reasons, such as preferring the startup work environment, the fact that their equity has the potential to grow in value much faster than equity at an established tech company, etc.
On top of all that, even with big tech paying the biggest salaries and attracting talent, they still have a finite number of positions. All the applicants who aren't FAANG level will go to work for those other companies that don't pay as high.
Adding transparency to job posting salaries is a net benefit.
Even if a company would happily hire me & pay more than I'd expect, I haven't even gone into their funnel at all.
This may not always be the case. If startup funding sources know that salaries are more transparent and there's more competition, they know they need to offer more to the companies to be able to hire the talent to actually ship. I personally have no qualms about increasing funding amounts that go directly into developers' pockets.
Sites like Hired let people bid for you with salaries first.
Places like Glassdoor post salary ranges.
And all the companies I've worked for have had internal salary ranges for a position which cannot be negotiated around. Just because they aren't public, doesn't mean they don't exist. I had a job offer that was lower than my current salary but they wouldn't match my current salary since it was out of their range. And I'm a straight, white male.
I will say that studies have demonstrated that starting out is often harder for minorities, and therefore it is harder for them every step of the way (because if you are always moving one rung up at the same pace, but you started one rung back...)
But ultimately, that issue seems far easier to study if we had open salary data.
I work for the University of California, so my salary is a matter of public record, along with all state employees. So be it. The sky hasn't fallen.
One big problem with making salary info public is that if it is one sided (some firms do this and others don't), it can place the firms that do make it public at a disadvantage. There are also some issues with the government forcing private firms to disclose this information.
At the very least, I'd say that any firm using the H1-B visa should be required to make all salaries public, not just salaries for H1-B hires. If you're going to claim that you can't hire (or retain) staff and need a special visa for this, let's see those numbers. I'm not saying I don't believe it, just that it's hard to take this seriously when they are very secretive about their own information but want the power to decide who is going to be permitted to live and work in the US and at what salary.
If you want to keep it private, that's fine, you just don't get the power to bestow temporary residency for the purposes of working for your firm.
There's a similar game theoretical game for the employee. You don't want to ask immediately because you'll seem greedy. But you also don't want to waste a bunch of time doing interviews and homework, only to find a booby prize at the end. So as long as there's enough firms that do publish a range, you're going to apply to them.
And it's not really honest either to just put the blame on the company. "I’m unlikely to bring up the topic of salary with a potential boss." Well, then change that. Before demanding something from a company that you would like to work for, start demanding something from yourself. It's basically the attitude "I have a problem, I could directly contribute to the solution, but I prefer ranting about that somebody else is not doing that for me."
you can not expect a person to speak up about something when they have to fear negative consequences. we first need to ensure that there are no negative consequences, and then assure those affected that this change happened. a way to do that in this case is by stating salaries up-front.
I have a hard time believing that this is actually the case, at least more than for men.
True, the candidate does not know initially when they first see the job posting (or are contacted by a recruiter) but most of the time/effort/hardwork is after getting someone to acknowlege your resume is a good fit.
To make sure expectations are in ballpark, use a confidential salary survey.
https://payscope.io (I made this)
Why Employers Should Use Confidential Salary Surveys: https://payscope.io/blog/employers
However in the era of “more people than jobs” that has drifted away.
If you don’t value my time now then why is it going to be any different if I work for you?
Lack of salary and clarity on the role is an instant “not wasting my time with that” signal for me.
Obviously there is some (long term) unemployment so in some sense the answer is yes. But that sense is also not relevant to job seekers: if I’m looking for a job then I would only be concerned if that were the case for the sort of jobs I’d be applying to (eg computer programming). And I think in that area there are generally more jobs than people.
Could someone enlighten me here?
Discrimination against women makes sense. Discrimination against non-whites makes sense. But how specifically is the interviewer supposed to find out the sexual orientation? Maybe indirectly, by asking about marital status (in countries without gay marriage), but is that even legal? Also, many straight while males are not married, especially the young ones.
It's a lever to get the bourgeoisie to make changes.
If you question it, then you're some sort of -ist, e.g. racist, sexist, etc. Woe be to thee who is on the wrong side of wokeness.
But it takes a while to learn how to evaluate your skills against a particular company's needs, market at large and learn to negotiate. I know few people who were 'brought up [...] to stir the pot'. Talking to people, putting yourself out there, doing research and then finding a workable deal is not something that just comes as a given. But yes, privilege exists.
Having said that, in a competitive market a salary range simply makes a potential employer more trustworthy, and avoids wasting time for both parties.
Albeit the salary data on levels.fyi is far less authoritative than an official salary range in a job description.
Edit: Also for the larger tech companies, you can trivially see how much they pay their H1B visa holders in salaries, differentiated by company, title, location, and date. This site is unofficial, but it's a lot easier to use than the massive Excel files that the official data is provided as: https://h1bdata.info
But companies soon found out that providing a range like "between $1 and infinity" is technically legal, so these days half of job advertisements contain some form of that. :(
> As a woman... I’m unlikely to bring up the topic of salary with a potential boss.
If you have that attitude you are going to make less money than someone who negotiates. Period. Companies will try to pay anyone, no matter their race, gender, or religion, less. There is also no reason to feel bad about discussing salary - it is a part of the process, just like submitting your resume and interviewing.
Would publishing a salary in a job description make things more equitable? I don't think so. The keyword in job market is MARKET. It is not as simple as publishing a salary. Every role I've interviewed candidates for had a range we were willing to pay. The best candidate will get the maximum of the range, and a candidate that we are less excited about will get the low end. The candidates are always being judged against other candidates, and how much we think they will cost. What we are willing to pay fluctuates and depends on how we feel about the candidate after the interview, how badly we need someone, and how many other candidates there are at a given time.
Just like in any market that is this small, there is negotiation involved. Employers want to pay less, employees want to make more. The way you arrive at a price is making offers until both sides agree.
That is simply the way it works. It is a barter system. I don't buy the idea that women / bipoc can't navigate this system. It is something you have to learn. White men aren't born being able to navigate it - it took me about 5 years to be fully comfortable with the process. Before that I was underpaid.
A normal part of an interview process is discussing salary, and if they won't give an answer then you know they are not trying to be competitive and it's not worth continuing the process.
This is making the market more efficient.
Edit: Also, when a company does not disclose the salary range for the position it actually provides a very useful data point., You can pretty much be sure it's at most average -- but probably less-than-competetive -- market rates. The major and popular tech companies don't need to do this because they have a reputation, but the smaller companies can either show they too are competitive (by publishing above-market rates) or show they do not offer competitive salary (by not publishing their salary target).
But it's not really arguable at this point that women and people of color (especially black & indigenous) are treated less well, assumed to do a poorer job, and generally at a disadvantage when negotiating salaries.
(This all completely aside from the fact that "good negotiation skills" should not be the reason Employee A gets a better salary than Employee B, unless the job itself is significantly about negotiation.)
The first is that better candidates will get the maximum salary out of a company, and less qualified candidates will get less. This seems to indicate that people who are qualified for a given job will also be excellent at negotiating for it. I don't think these two skills are in any way related.
The second assumption I see in this is that candidates should "women/bipoc can't navigate this system." I think what you're missing (and the article states this) is that minority candidates will be looked at differently when asking for money. There's also the difficulty of determining one's worth, especially when companies don't post average salaries. It can be a difficult guessing game to even ballpark what your value is (even with companies like Glassdoor posting salaries), and if you made less money in your previous job, you're likely to ask for less again. This naturally disadvantages minority and female candidates that have made less historically.
Yes, white men aren't born being able to navigate it. But this ignores the fact that our society is set up to encourage confidence in straight white men and discourage it in many other groups.
In addition, posting a salary range has many positive downstream effects as mentioned in the article. My brother recently benefited from this, as his company posted a job listing for a similar position to his with a starting salary of 20,000 dollars more. He was able to use this to advocate for higher pay.
Bottom line, posting a salary range just adds transparency to the process and evens the playing field a bit. Needing negotiation skills to even get in the ballpark of your true value is crazy; even car companies give you a price point to start from.
I agree. I'm just not sure if I agree that it particularly benefits underprivileged groups. I don't see a compelling argument being made by the author that the system of negotiation specifically is biased. Whether a salary range is posted or not everyone has to negotiate and engage the market. There is no way to get around this and if you aren't willing to do it you are going to be taken advantage of.
A salary range posted by the company who is trying to hire you is not going to tell you how much you should be making there. They are going to try to pay you less. It seems like what people really want is for employers to magically pay everyone exactly what they should be making without negotiating, which is simply not possible, because nobody knows what they should be making until the market sets a price.
> The first is that better candidates will get the maximum salary out of a company, and less qualified candidates will get less.
I'm not assuming this. In my experience whether someone negotiates more or not at all has more to do with their experience around the process in general. More junior candidates or candidates who haven't switched jobs more than once or twice are more likely to be underpaid. I personally screwed this up about 4 times before learning my lesson.
> minority candidates will be looked at differently when asking for money
I don't disagree with this. I don't see how posting a salary range changes this. If the company / market is willing to pay less to an underprivileged group, that is going to be reflected in compensation regardless of whether a salary range is posted or not.
> There's also the difficulty of determining one's worth
The way you determine what the market is willing to pay is to find out what the market is willing to pay. There is no other way to do it. For someone looking for a job you should try to get multiple offers, negotiate them, and see how much you end up with. That number is as close to your market value as you are going to get.
> this ignores the fact that our society is set up to encourage confidence in straight white men and discourage it in many other group
I guess I really just don't buy this argument as it pertains to this topic. Negotiating compensation shouldn't be a matter of confidence after a certain point in your career. After you have done it a few times it is not very intimidating. It is a fact of life and something everybody needs to learn to be comfortable doing. If you can't become comfortable doing this, you are going to make less.
A salary range effectively puts a floor on how much you can underpay someone. Does that fix every problem? No, but it's certainly better than the current system.
> The way you determine what the market is willing to pay is to find out what the market is willing to pay.
I don't see how posting salary ranges is any different from negotiation. If a company posts a salary range and gets no qualified candidates, they now know that the offer was too low. Instead of putting the onus on the prospective employee, why not put it on the corporations? I think it probably makes more sense to have companies competing against each other in a transparent and open market, instead of requiring employees to do that work for themselves.
> Negotiating compensation shouldn't be a matter of confidence after a certain point in your career. After you have done it a few times it is not very intimidating. It is a fact of life and something everybody needs to learn to be comfortable doing.
Why does this have to be a prerequisite for getting your full worth? Negotiation skill has nothing to do with the actual ability to do most jobs. If you go to the link related to the Howard and Heidi case study [1], you'd see that there is at least anecdotal evidence that women are seen as less likable and selfish if doing the same thing as men. It's not just about a matter of confidence, but how that confidence is perceived. Combine those two issues together and you can see how negotiation can negatively impact some groups.
This is the crux of the argument, and it is something that needs stronger evidence from the author. The Howard and Heidi case study is not related at all to how someone will be perceived negotiating a salary. It is a very weak piece of evidence.
It also doesn't make any sense to me, and doesn't match up with my experience hiring or being part of the process. Women and bipoc have the same leverage in negotiations that white men have. If the employer wants to hire them, they will pay what they are willing to pay them. If someone wants to work for a company, they will take the amount they are willing to be paid.
> A salary range effectively puts a floor on how much you can underpay someone. Does that fix every problem? No, but it's certainly better than the current system.
Maybe salary ranges do help people that are being absolutely fleeced by their employers. Again, I do not buy that has anything to do with gender or race. This happens when people are simply not doing basic things like applying to multiple companies or negotiating at all, or staying at the same company for years without a raise. It is true that many, many people do this and end up being underpaid. There is no barrier for someone in an underprivileged group from learning that they need to negotiate and shop around.
As you said, a salary range might help a small amount for people who are being taken advantage of but they will still be underpaid. The only way to actually get what you are worth is to navigate the market. It is a very simple process.
> Why does this have to be a prerequisite for getting your full worth? Negotiation skill has nothing to do with the actual ability to do most jobs.
It doesn't have anything to do with how good you are at your job. But it does have something to do with how much you get paid for doing your job. The market sets the price of your labor, and you have to engage with the market as best you can. That is just the reality of working in a market.
You've conveniently not addressed the concept of forcing companies to transparently compete by requiring a salary range. Is there a downside to requiring companies to be transparent in their salary offers? It makes companies directly compete with each other, as companies offering low salaries will receive less-qualified applicants. This also allows employees to avoid the sunk-cost fallacy, as applicants won't be required to complete the application and interview process before discovering the salary of the job.
Bottom line, most markets start with the seller providing a price. Auctions begin with a set starting price and bidders are able to tell when the reserve price has been met, car negotiations generally start from a sticker price, and most retail stores I've been to have listed prices. This doesn't stop competition; in fact, grocery store profit margins seem to hover around the 2-4% range according to Google. This is backed up by the FY 2019 results for Ahold Delhaize, which indicate that the operating margin is around 4% [1].
> Women and bipoc have the same leverage in negotiations that white men have.
The Howard and Heidi case study indicates that aggressive behavior impacts a woman's likeability more than a man's. A meta-analysis of psychological studies [1] indicate that dominant behavior can absolutely affect hireability. Does this affect salary? I can't imagine it has a positive effect. In addition, another link present in the article [3] indicates that women and minorities expect to make anywhere from 7-11% less than white men. This is relatively strong evidence that minorities and women ARE being disadvantaged in an environment where the average pay isn't specified.
> people are simply not doing basic things like applying to multiple companies or negotiating at all, or staying at the same company for years without a raise.
I think a lot of where we disagree is that you believe that shopping yourself around and asking for a raise is the proper way to obtain your full worth in a market, whereas I believe (and the author believes) that providing an average salary or salary range gives transparency to the process.
[1] https://www.aholddelhaize.com/en/media/latest/media-releases...
[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-56707-001
[3] https://hired.com/h/wage-inequality-report/#impact-expectati...
I'm not arguing this. Again, I agree that these practices are good for employees.
>I think a lot of where we disagree is that you believe that shopping yourself around and asking for a raise is the proper way to obtain your full worth in a market, whereas I believe (and the author believes) that providing an average salary or salary range gives transparency to the process.
I agree that providing an average salary or range gives transparency, I just don't buy the idea that it somehow benefits underprivileged groups more.
There is nothing stopping anybody from negotiating or trying to find a good value in the market. If being a woman means they are less likely to negotiate (which I don't believe), they need to learn to negotiate, because they don't have a choice. It is how the market sets prices, and there is no way around it. Setting a range helps, but it doesn't remove the need for negotiating.
> The Howard and Heidi case study indicates that aggressive behavior impacts a woman's likeability more than a man's
I agree with this, even if the "study" itself is laughably weak. But basically all the study is saying is "sexism exists".
Based on my experience I do not believe this has a connection with negotiating. Everyone can and should negotiate. Having been on both sides of the table many times in negotiating compensation, I have never felt that "this candidate is too aggressive or no longer likeable because they are negotiating" was a factor.
Employers understand that negotiation is necessary as it is the only way to set fair prices. I would need a lot more evidence to buy the idea that it is somehow discriminatory. The author provides none.
> This is relatively strong evidence that minorities and women ARE being disadvantaged in an environment where the average pay isn't specified.
This is correlation and not causation. The fact that women and minorities make less has been established many times. I just don't see any evidence that this is because they can't negotiate. The author needs to provide evidence that the process of negotiation itself is discriminatory, and that salary ranges will somehow alleviate this problem. Based on my fairly extensive experience I don't think it makes sense intuitively.
> I think a lot of where we disagree is that you believe that shopping yourself around and asking for a raise is the proper way to obtain your full worth in a market, whereas I believe (and the author believes) that providing an average salary or salary range gives transparency to the process.
These aren't mutually exclusive
Is it correlation when studies show that women and minorities are likely to underestimate their worth? The linked section of this article [1] indicates that women and minority are actively asking for less. I don't buy that this is primarily due to women or minorities being inherently less naturally able to negotiate, but rather societal expectations that women should earn less.
By posting an average salary, this can hopefully decrease this gap by allowing employees to avoid voluntarily short-changing themselves by asking for less. Standardizing pay ranges can absolutely prevent disadvantaged groups, as it prevents them from asking for what amounts to somewhere around 8-10% less than their white male counterparts.
> Having been on both sides of the table many times in negotiating compensation, I have never felt that "this candidate is too aggressive or no longer likeable because they are negotiating" was a factor.
The meta-analysis I linked [2] indicates that aggressive behaviors negatively impact women from both a likeability and hireability standpoint, with the effect size on hireability showing a solid relationship. I fully believe that you haven't perceived a woman as being less hireable or likable, but the evidence indicates that as a whole this type of behavior is perceived more negatively in women.
I would agree that so far, my personal experiences wouldn't lead me to feel that women are disadvantaged by this process. But, based on personal experience, I also wouldn't have assumed that women are seen as less likable if they exhibit more dominant behaviors (as that isn't something that I personally feel). But there is evidence that some behaviors can be perceived differently by gender. I can't ignore this even if it's not something that I've personally experienced.
[1] https://hired.com/h/wage-inequality-report/#impact-expectati...
You may also end up being rejected [1].
> Companies will try to pay anyone, no matter their race, gender, or religion, less
I tend to agree, but also in my experience there are some companies that try to pay people based on their experience not how well the someone negotiates.
> Would publishing a salary in a job description make things more equitable? I don't think so
Like you said before, some companies optimise towards lowest pay. By publishing salary ranges it creates a level playing field and people can still negotiate if they want. Gitlab does this pretty well: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
[1] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Shopify-Offer-Rescinded-Due-t...
Yes, we could, as you advise, teach women to navigate this system. But isn’t that what we’ve been trying, and where has that gotten us?
I think she has a unique point here pointing how companies are hypocritical - they want more diversity and transparency, yet actively take advantage of candidates by not being transparent, which overly falls harder on under represented groups.
It's also the fact that diversity isn't about what letters people have in their passports. What we want is a diversity of perspectives, opinions, and philosophies toward life and everything.
Part of why we want more women is tightly interwoven with the reasons they are less likely to negotiate hard on salary. If we hire only women who negotiate like men, we aren't getting that diversity at all.
Obviously I speak in stereotypes now, but I think the general point still stands; we can't keep hiring with the exact same criteria and expect to magically get different hires. We want diversity in terms of who the person is, not what their biological sex or social gender is.
If only...
My personal experience is that the folks who are most vocal about “diversity” (i.e., the letters in the passport you refer to) tend to be the least supportive of different perspectives, opinions, philosophies of life, etc.
“Agree with the way I think, or you are part of the problem” sadly is a common rallying cry.
I'm a "white" man, I find it hard to navigate the very idea of salary negotiation, and I would very much appreciate salary ranges being required in job advertisements. I might very well be underpaid, and I'm sure that many individual women and people of other ethnicities find it much easier than me, be it because of experience, personality, or conscious effort to overcompensate. Others might find it harder than me. Regardless, it doesn't matter.
What does matter is that opaque salary ranges on job advertisements are detrimental to the income of certain individuals, and the result of this is:
- People with a personality more suited to negotiate their salary are paid better than those without, and (with a few exceptions) it is not correlated with the skill or abilities relevant to the job.
- Other people may decide to learn and become fully comfortable with the process, with more or less success, by expending time and effort.
- Businesses financially profit at the cost of less assertive workers, thanks to the information asymmetry [0] of salaries in the job market.
None of these features generate any kind of value to society or to the economy at large, and there would be no downside to introducing a requirement to publish salary ranges in every job advertisement. Would it make salary negotiation obsolete? Absolutely not! Would it eliminate putative salary gaps between identity groups? I don't know. But would it make salary better correlate with skill at ones job, and improve the income of workers? I think so, yes.
> As a woman, society brought me up to be polite — not to ‘stir the pot’— and certainly not to talk about money. I’m unlikely to bring up the topic of salary with a potential boss. If I look too money-driven, I’ll likely be seen as cold and ruthless where a man might be seen as ambitious and straight-shooting (if you don’t believe me, read the ‘Howard vs Heidi’ study).
While it is easy to tell people to negotiate, some people are not equipped to negotiate in that particular context since they have not been brought up to negotiate in that context. It also turns out that it is very difficult to control this upbringing. I have had conversations with mothers who want their daughters to be strong and self-reliant, yet express frustration with teachers and child care workers conveying the exact opposite message. If they have difficulty in contexts where they can express their concerns directly to the people involved, their battle is utterly hopeless when it comes to society as a whole.
The "cold and ruthless" comment also illustrates that the attitudes of the party being negotiated also plays a role here. If you are walking into a negotiation where your asks are perceived as ambition, you are more likely to be seen in a positive light. If you're walking into a negotiation where your gender automatically implies that the same asks are going to be seen as ruthless, you are more likely to be seen in a negative light. Unfortunately, social expectations mean that gender will play a role in how a candidate is perceived even if they are asking for the same thing in the same way.
It can also be a bad starting point for a hire who takes a job for pay at the very low end, that their value has been pegged at the bare minimum. The new hire may be fine with it when the position is clearly an advancement for them but for others they may resent the assessment of their worth even though it's more likely based on market realities and/or the organization's finances.
A possible downside for a potential employee is they could be a very qualified candidate who passes on applying for a position because the high end of the range isn't high enough but they didn't sufficiently factor in the other benefits. Salary is only one part of the value of taking a particular job, there are other monetary (lower out-of-pocket heath coverage, profit participation) and non-monetary (better work-life balance, more interesting work, better workplace relationships, etc.) factors.
I work for a university and the job application system requires people to provide a desired salary range (I think it's a dropdown list of ranges, each $20,000 wide). I wish applicants could pick the top and bottom of the ranges themselves but it does weed out some people with unrealistic expectations (usually they're overestimating their worth but even if they're not, there are hard limits on what a department can pay).
The university also publishes salary ranges but they can create problems because they are very much not hiring ranges; the hiring ranges are mostly in the bottom third, the upper limit of the salary range represents what someone might make after a long career in such a position. When I was a hiring manager, I would explain the difference in salary range and hiring range in interviews without being too specific about what the actual hiring range might be in their case (I also wasn't responsible for what a candidate was offered).
EDIT: I don't see a downside for an employee. If they don't like the advertised range, they can try to negotiate regardless.
Probably would forget it two weeks after the interview.
Also, if the employer is a company, the person who made the hiring decision may be different from the employee's direct boss.
The author even said she’s likely to undervalue her own worth. This proposal is a business straight up telling them their worth. Opposite of empowering. She wants prices listed like a McDonalds drive thru. She wants it easy.
Real empowerment would be teaching women how to properly negotiate a salary.
It’s not empowering to stay in t-ball.
I also think that helping women negotiate is more complicated than just teaching them techniques, because people will not necessarily react the same way to the same behavior from men as from women.
Then it’s not realistic. How can companies afford to raise their highest expense?
This will put a cap on skilled negotiators since it creates a fixed range.
Call it a “benefit”. I could see how it “benefits” more workers, but I wouldn’t call it “empowering”.
It does make good negotiators more powerless.
So what?
So we’re back to my original point then.
I used to be like this myself until I saw with my own eyes the cronyism at play in hiring and compensation.
The day I stopped believing that SV is or could be a meritocracy was a sad one indeed.
Having a good dollar amount listed on your job listings draws eyes. This is especially valuable if people don't know what your company is because you're smaller or just lesser known. Which is honestly most companies.
Some people simply underestimate their market value, and companies are happy to keep them in dark, sometimes for years. Other people don't have unlimited time to do job interviews, so if they find something that seems okay and the provided salary is maybe 90% of what they originally wanted, they may choose to take it anyway. If they don't, the interview was a wasted time -- both for them and for the company, but because the company had the option to choose otherwise and decided not to, it's probably a net win for the company.
I have no idea about specific numbers, but if the company spends 2× as much time interviewing in return to saving 10% of salary costs, it may be worth it. If the employee wants to spend 2× much time interviewing in return to getting 10% higher salary, they will probably quickly run out of vacation days. The process is usually asymmetrical; the company spends 1 hour interviewing the candidate, the candidate spends some time preparing for the interview, traveling there and back... also, if the interview is in the middle of working time (it usually is), for the company that's 1 hour lost, for the candidate it is 1/2 day off.
If they need high quality employees (or any employees at all depending on their industry and location), they need to post their salaries to even get people to consider applying.
If they need low quality employees, are in an industry that has high demand, and in a good location: maybe it hurts them.
If they need money, why are they hiring?