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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

It really still isn't the norm anywhere to list compensation and I suspect that Y Combinator has the same problems of disparate compensation based on when people joined as any other company. Heck, we are all switching jobs constantly because the new guy got more than we did, despite being the same level and having more experience at the company.

Plenty of companies decided to stop hiring from Colorado rather than post compensation in the job postings.

If I had to guess, I suspect it provides no competitive advantage to list compensation except if you pay top tier.

As an anecdote from a friend, the wage differences can be substantial. The friend just recently got a new job and the senior who mentored him in onboarding also got promoted a level too. That senior was talking about how they finally reached six figures (Canada has much lower pay than the USA, so this isn't crazy). My friend made six figures starting, with 3-5 fewer years of experience and just about two years overall.

There are a lot of absurdly underpaid people out there.

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> Plenty of companies decided to stop hiring from Colorado rather than post compensation in the job postings.

Do you know if there's any data supporting this?

Here, I found 5 so far.

https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=9e046a56c76ba933&tk=1fo21m...

https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=d87c517c32a680d3&fccid=2b2d...

https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=0e1dbdaee064b39b&fccid=c953...

https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=b1ed6d586890504b&fccid=afbf...

https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=cd34c725a1fc5766&fccid=2c62...

The 5th link says it openly in the title of the job ad.

> Principal Software Engineer – Search (open to remote work, except in Colorado)

Just search "software engineer Colorado" on Indeed, select "Remote" and maybe 1/3 of them are a Colorado exclusion.

> https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=08cf978f51852f65&fccid=ccf1...

Of tech companies doing it, one of them is eBay.

When companies say "remote OK, except Colorado", does that mean they won't accept applicants from CO? Or does it just mean that they are officially stating that they aren't advertising to candidates from CO (but they can still apply and get hired)?

A lot of them prohibit any of the work from being conducted in Colorado in the job description.

It is anecdotal from constantly seeing remote job postings saying things like

"this role can be performed from any US state except Colorado." Sometimes Hawaii is included.

Let me try and dig up a few of these.

I wish California would pass this law. It would be really hard to avoid tech workers in California.

California, IIRC, mandates that they provide you the pay range if you ask for it.

They updated the law: you have to go through at least one interview before they are forced to share it.

What kind of waste of time is that?

Prevent people from 'scraping' job postings by manually asking for salary range.

That seems like a good middle ground. Generally it's one of my opening questions for contracts. I'm honest and say that I don't want to waste anyone's time and get an upfront range and give them some wiggle room.

Yeah after the first interview. But that's way different than with the job posting.

"We're so glad you asked. Our possible range, depending on the candidate, is from minimum wage to $1M/year."

If a company answers this way, it is likely that you would succeed on a claim under the California Equal Pay Act. This kind of hair splitting doesn't generally go over well.

>The California Equal Pay Act

Does this account for the vastly different levels of output from employees? I would have to imagine nobody believes quality of work and productivity are actually equal amongst coworkers.

Pay is more a measure of what the worker is willing to accept than a measure of quality or productivity.

If you're paying someone 3x someone else, they're probably doing different jobs, which should have different pay ranges. A range of 20%, or even 50% is probably acceptable for salary (also of note the CA and CO laws only require salary disclosure, performance based bonuses or equity award ranges don't need to be shared) based on performance in a role. A difference of 3x or 10x (or 50x as is the case above) in salary means that the expectations are different.

Using athletics as an example, it's quite common to see the best players making $30+ million/year while their peers doing the same job (albeit not nearly as well) are getting paid half a million.

The peer pay differences are less pronounced in other fields, but why would we assume people are "essentially the same" at their output? I have definitely seen full stack developers that are "doing the same job" 3x-5x better than some of their peers in many cases, when you compound quality and efficiency. Not every company has enough people for tiered job rating buckets like Google, Amazon etc.

My previous company posted several openings for our team. All specifically excluded Colorado.

https://www.coloradoexcluded.com/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/remote-...

> really still isn't the norm anywhere to list compensation

Jobs posted on remote job forums like weworkremote.com and remoteok.com routinely list salary ranges.

Heads up for anyone else that reads this comment and tries the site in their job searches, first one is a typo for weworkremotely.com :)

I think most people are naive (even on HN) regarding compensation and negotiations.

The first thing I do at the start of every interview conversation is ask comp. I then tell them my total comp and ask for X% over. If equity is discussed, I always require my same base pay or slightly higher.

The reality is that ensures a continued trajectory upward. I also always request 2-4x any equity I’m offered. If they want to keep me, they need to make it worth my while at a higher risk profile (equity isn’t cash on hand).

Equity is always a gamble, for the company and the employee. I personally demand higher because plenty of my work is open source and I offer more references as well. That mitigates the company risk and in return I demand more equity (as I’m reducing said companies risk).

The best thing for most people is to delay talking about comp as long as possible into the interview, and not to tell them your current salary or total comp because it isn't relevant or helpful for you. If they have more time invested they are more likely to pay on the higher end of their salary range.

But you should ask the recruiter about the salary range and do research on the company before hand to find out what the range is.

This entirely depends on what you're after. If you have a predetermined number that you want to meet, lettergram's approach is better and will save time. If you instead want to get the company to pay you the most they can, delaying may be better.

If you're generally aware of what companies in the market are paying, quickly filtering out those that pay below what you want (for example, by saying "I'm looking for a total compensation above $500,000, and I know that there are companies in the market that will compensate at this level") is likely to save you time.

To put it into perspective, I’m in that later category. I know what the high end of the market is and I basically just ask for that plus X%.

I’ve been burned too many times waiting. Not worth it to get to the end only to be 50% over what they can pay.

Hiding your current compensation is a good strategy if you know you'll accept say 30% over your current salary, but the company might offer you more if they have to guess your number. This way, you might get pleasantly surprised.

I am no expert, but it sounds like you are naive when it comes to negotiation as well.

Please explain why for the rest of the class. A few sentences for those of us who know we are naive would be helpful.

> You can’t win if you guess at their salaries.

> If you underestimate what they’re willing to pay, you’re leaving money on the table. If the real answer is that they would compensate someone like you up to $75,000 dollars, and you guess they would pay a salary of only $65,000, you very literally may have just cost yourself $10,000. [0]

[0] https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/salary-expectations-in...

And a video from the creator of that site (Josh Doody) on this specific issue (disclosing current salary):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N7mOR9yv2U

Can recommend. I followed Josh Doody's advice last time I switched jobs and I did really well in negotiations. Even though in the beginning of my job search I had given a recruiter my preferred salary range (my mistake) and of course the company's offer was at the bottom of that range, I was still able to negotiate and recover quite nicely in the end. Though, having multiple offers on hand helped a lot.

I avoided saying much because, like I said, I'm not expert and don't want to mislead people. But I'm pretty sure laying your cards on the table is the wrong answer.

The goal of every negotiation isn’t to extract the theoretical maximum from the counterparty.

The goal can be to reach a mutually agreeable solution as quickly as possible. In this case, saying “this is what I’ll agree to” up front works towards that goal even if it does leave some meat on the bone.

some hint on naivety. Salary negociation remains an unspoken art and is often taboo. It takes experience and good understanding of the many dynamics in place to stop being misguided/fooled by what's going on and what we are told. The message most companies spread is that it's a meritocracy, that the wellbeing of all employees and fairness are taken very seriously. and the claims are that we roughly work in a meritocracy. Being naive is believing it is true to some extent. Reality, and people who have lengthy experience and no reason to censor themselves in my circle all agree with this: It is an adversarial exchange of information, each party pushing as far as they can get away with in order to serve their own interest.

with that in mind, and the following rule is a basic negociation principle: Information gives an edge.

So if you put down your expectation, or worse provide your current compensation, you are giving away critical information to let the other side know pretty much all you know, which one can roughly derive what you would accept or reject. and the other side will either not give an offer at all (if your expectations are way off higher than budget) or will offer the minimum to get away with.

tldr: trusting potential opponents by telling them what they kindly ask is naive.

Do you feel that salary negotiations are adversarial?

For context: I realize that one-off negotiations (buying a car at a dealership) are strictly adversarial, but negotiations in ongoing relationships (employment) benefit more from sharing information on what you want and why.

For example, you tell the other side that you need 10K extra for planned babysitting expenses and they offer you less, but add paid time off to care for your own child.

I think employment benefits negociations are less adversarial than at the car dealers. Because as you said one off vs to establish a long term relationship obviously leads to different optimal outcome from both sides. It is adversarial non the less and has the same patterns: information disymetry, personal gains and complex dynamics involving other stakeholders with constraints on both sides.

I think basing what should you get basing on your needs, rather than on your worth is a basic mistake.

>I think most people are naive (even on HN) regarding compensation and negotiations.

I think most people on HN are naïve as to how most companies outside of tech startups actually work. They have concrete pay scales, you get the bare minimum of that pay scale when you hire in, anything above that is from your annual merit based increase which is often at or below inflation. You can look at your co-workers and have a very good idea of what they make to the percent based on how long they've been in their role.

"The first thing I do at the start of every interview conversation is ask comp. I then tell them my total comp and ask for X% over."

First, no good team will hire someone that does this, second, this is not a good negotiation tactic at all.

On the former: definitely it's prudent for both sides to be 'in range' or else it's all pointless, but that should be sorted out before the interview process - just the range.

Anyone wanting to talk about salaries up front is not going to make it past that part of the conversation for any decent group. It's the last part, not the first part, for so many reasons not the least of which is trying to put a number on something wherein fit, value etc. has not been established, and more obviously a concern over motivations etc..

As for the later, i.e. 'why it's a bad negotiating tactic' ... because it's not just about Supply, it's about Demand as well.

You may be overstating or understating your position by quite a lot thereby rending moot a real opportunity for exchange of value.

You may have some kind of special skills they really need, and some advanced insight. They might also be in a very profitable position. They might be happy to pay you much more. Alternatively, you may have little to offer, they might be cash constrained etc..

For equity again, they might be offering you a sweet deal, above industry norms, in which case asking for 2-4x just seems aggressive or uninformed.

But really, both of those things combined are bad: anyone wanting to talk comp details before demonstrating value, commitment, professionalism and the incidentals like curiosity/intelligence ... as an employee that's 'really bad signal'. If you're hiring someone you know to be a competent contractor, the scope of the job is established - fine - but that's rarely the case.

YC doesn't publish comp because it's probably not very helpful, the range would have to be wide, and they probably want people who want to be there, the comp distracts a bit from that. That said, I wonder if there were a sea change on that custom if would all be better off.

As someone who’s wasted probably 80+ hours in the last 2 years getting through to the offer stage only to find that none will match my current comp (all of whom were coy at the outset about comp), fuck this opinion. I’ve now learned to check Levels.fyi and, if the company/role are not posted there, will explicitly ask at the outset to ensure I’m not wasting any more of my time (surprise surprise, most of them can’t match it either-asking has literally never cost me a role I wanted but it’s saved me numerous interviews by this point). I’m not taking a pay cut for your company, great as you think it is, so if my skills aren’t worth the premium to you, it’s best we find that out beforehand.

Levels seems to be restricted to a few well known names though.

This is why I'm happy to go through third party recruiters. It's in their own interest to not waste time with people who either can't be placed or need a certain pay range, so you can ask them in the first minute of conversation what the job pays and they'll tell you. Plus they'll know the salary of many many people, as their own compensation depends on it.

>There are a lot of absurdly underpaid people out there.

In my observation, this is literally the backbone of capitalism

Not really. It is simply a consequence of a market lacking price transparency.

We have the internet. We have laws protecting employees discussing their pay. There is nothing in capitalism stopping anyone from disclosing their pay and creating a transparent market.

And it is happening, albeit slowly (see levels.fyi and glassdoor). CO’s transparency laws also help, and anything to help transparency will assist. The main resistance I sense is actually from people themselves, for various social and emotional reasons.

Well, if you are on the higher end, you probably don't want to share with those on the lower end, simply because 1 of 3 things will happen.

1. They ask for a raise and don’t get it. You lose a team member when they leave.

2. You can’t get a raise because your boss is forced to give your colleague a raise and doesn’t want to have to hand out raises.

3. Your colleague stews and resents you. People say it won’t happen, but I have heard a ton of complaining about how X earns so much and they don’t deserve it from co-workers.

> 1. They ask for a raise and don’t get it. You lose a team member when they leave.

Yes and that should be a lesson to pay the whole team more.

> 2. You can’t get a raise because your boss is forced to give your colleague a raise and doesn’t want to have to hand out raises.

Your colleague wasn't paid well, asked to get paid better, and got it.

Now you're said because you can't continue to get paid more relative to your colleague? Lose your greed and grow some empathy in its place.

> 3. Your colleague stews and resents you. People say it won’t happen, but I have heard a ton of complaining about how X earns so much and they don’t deserve it from co-workers.

Then work with them to explain how and why you deserve more than your colleagues. Otherwise, they might be right about you not deserving it. You getting what you don't deserve means, by your own logic, that they're not getting what they do deserve.

> Otherwise, they might be right about you not deserving it.

#3 results from a fundamental confusion people have that pay is based on people "deserving" something. Like it's an expression of virtue or your worth as a person or a reward for doing something good.

It's not. You're paid based on supply and demand and your negotiating skills, nothing more. It's not a golden star from your teacher that you're a nice boy. It's whatever you were able to convince the company the monetary value of your contribution is worth. That's all. Get over whether someone deserves this or that. I'll solve this once and for all: nobody deserves anything. You're responsible for figuring out how to provide value and capture it.

> You're paid based on supply and demand and your negotiating skills

Your ability to negotiate your own salary is pretty orthogonal to your ability to do most jobs. Some jobs definitely require the ability to negotiate in the form of compromise, but rarer are the positions where the brinksman-style of salary negotiation (where you credibly would scuttle the entire deal) would be useful. It should be pretty easy to figure out within a year how a new hire compares to the existing employees and were they _should_ be on the salary totem and set them on the proper trajectory from there.

There would certainly be other knock-on effects from true salary transparency, but bias towards salary negotiating skill is much closer to bias towards people-who-look-like-me than it is to bias towards people-who-generate-value-for-the-business.

You make it sound like your salary is just meaningless points, but of course the reason coworkers might resent a seemingly overpaid person is that they’re actually very meaningful points that are fungible across everyone’s salaries. And it’s totally compatible with what you’re saying if it turns out that salary transparency itself affects the supposed “negotiating skills” of the highest earners.

I do believe in getting paid what's deserved and what's deserved changes as the market changes.

What's unfortunate is that people aren't willing to see the change go downward ever and then also argue that others can't go upward because... well then you yourself "can't" go upward.

What's deserved is for people to be compensated fairly. If the company is compensating someone unfairly and can't compensate someone fairly because of then, then that is a definite and clear problem.

Whatever your definition of fair is, whether that's "deserving" or "market forces", it's still the same argument.

"fair" and "deserving" have the same problems. It's just adding unnecessary moral dimensions. What's fair is whatever both parties mutually agreed to. If you agreed to be paid $X and employer pays you $X, then that's fair. Whether they might have possibly agreed to pay you $X + %10 or $X + 20% or whatever is irrelevant. What they're paying other people is also irrelevant. You saw the number, you said "ok" and that's that.

If you were theoretically willing to pay $5 for a gallon of milk and you walked into a store and they were selling it for $2, I'm sure you wouldn't insist they take the extra money. It's the store's job to figure out how much to charge for milk. It's your job to figure out how much you're willing to charge for your labor.

"What's fair is whatever both parties mutually agreed to"

You could argue there's an important caveat of symmetric information around this interaction if you want to talk about fairness. Asymmetric information is frequently considered an unfair advantage (see insider trading) but is also recognized as the source of much profit (see auction winner's fallacy), but you have to at least recognize that employers by and large have a huge information advantage in the labor market currently.

There's also asymmetric information with the milk. I don't know what it cost for the producers, or how much the store paid wholesale. Maybe it's only $0.05 a gallon on their end. Who knows? The only thing that matters is if the retail price is something I can afford and am willing to pay.

It's true that employers are privy to a lot more salary information than employees. I know I said what other people are paid is irrelevant, which I think it is in terms of fairness, but you should be (and, legally at least, in the US, are) free to take that information into account when deciding what you'll accept. It's still up to you to make that decision and hold employers to it. They aren't going to offer up higher salaries out of the kindness of their heart or some sentimentality about fairness.

> The only thing that matters is if the retail price is something I can afford and am willing to pay.

Unfortunately that's not quite true. Milk (and other foodstuffs) are a requirement to live. People are "willing" to pay more for that because they don't really have many other options. So it's ripe for abuse.

> I do believe in getting paid what's deserved and what's deserved changes as the market changes.

Well there's 2 major theories of thought about that.

One is that the holders of the capital decide how much to pay, and they make the bulk of the market. You get paid what you negotiate.

The other is that the worker will never be paid what they are worth. In other words, their surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.

And in this country, we're seeing the beginning of the second with Antiwork and the Great Resignation. Many of us Zennials are really tired.

I have witnessed number 3 in action. My first programming job introduced pay bands a few years in (it was a young company that grew from small to a few hundred at that point) and word got around about the people who were already earning above the band for their level.

The mood around those who were already above their band went from "yeah they're okay devs" to "wtf, those guys aren't nearly good enough" pretty quickly.

I'm just happy to be one of those that got a good raise to meet the bottom of my payband and not the other way around.

Yes, everyone likes to think they are top 10% (or even above average).

That is what I meant by my last sentence.

> Not really. It is simply a consequence of a market lacking price transparency.

With close to perfect information, there is little room to profit, which would put a spoke in the wheel of capitalism.

I do not think so. See retail and insurance businesses, with their consistent 2% to 6% profit margins.

Bigger potential profits merit bigger risk taking. But not all investments have the same risk profile and time horizons.

It's not a matter of thinking so or otherwise. It's a mathematical question of what value each worker added to the product. Other expenses aside, profit is the difference between the value they added and the wage they were paid. You don't get profit without underpaying relative to the value provided by a worker.

Your assumption is that each worker is solely additive or multiplicative to the process, and thus the marginal worker's input is uncorrelated to the team and the environment. Certain teams can be exponentially performant while mostly full of mediocre individuals, and certain processes can stunt the fruit of the vine.

Rather, what you're calling for is average value produced, which is substantially different. I'm not sure I accept the assertion that they are close.

I'm not talking about individuals. In aggregate, you don't profit unless you pay your workforce less than the value they produce. It's not complicated.

Value is an ill defined word to use in economics. I rarely, if ever, have seen a good reason to use it.

Obviously, employers are not going to operate a business at zero profit margin, so I am not sure what the significance of pointing out that employees do not get paid the sum total of their economic contribution to a business’s profits (which I imagine is rarely ever calculable).

The whole point of having buyers and sellers engage in numerous, transparent transactions is to figure out what portion of the business’s operations should be allocated to the purchasing of labor, since there is no objective way to measure it and have a definitive answer. It is always moving, and needs to be continuously updated. The same reason employees always need to be shopping around and seeing who will offer them the appropriate price for their labor.

The macroeconomics are built from microeconomic foundations.

That’s simply not true.

If I create value by hitting in a nail with your hammer I deserve compensation for my labor, but certainly you deserve compensation for the part your hammer played as well.

Wages are simply returns to labor, profits are returns to capital.

The hammer is an expense, as I mentioned. The hammer doesn't deserve interest payments for existing IMO.

It’s not an expense, it’s capital. The nail is expense.

Insurance is so far from perfect information though. Maybe perfect information in for an average year is possible, but it is the black swan years that knock you out.

Even then, there is no perfect information on clients.

What spoke in the wheel? In hypothetical perfect competition there is zero long run economic profit. The whole point of profit motive is that the opportunity for economic profit means there are resources being allocated inefficiently.

> There is nothing in capitalism stopping anyone from disclosing their pay and creating a transparent market.

Is that actually true? Is it possible to verifiably disclose one’s pay? Are you supposed to sign an affidavit or something?

Yes? Using records such as paystubs, W-2, or 1099.

Obviously, they can be falsified, but I presume we are not talking about that. There is also the Norway method of having the government provide it.

If the idea is for the entire labor market to change significantly due to everyone voluntarily sharing their salary, then we ought to be talking about a mechanism of ensuring honesty, just like an auction (generally) wants to design their auction in such a way that people are honest about their willingness to pay.

Ideally, but you do not need the entire labor market to participate to do it. I am guessing even shining a light on a small, representative set of real time data will be enough to get things moving.

> In my observation

You win award for understatement[1] of 2021.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

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