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Comment by SMAAART | Hacker News Reader

What prevents employers to game the rules with broad ranges like "30K-300K DOE"?

Does anything need to? Imagine you are looking at two job postings that are identical except for the salary range. One says 30K-300K DOE and the other says 150K-180K DOE. Are you going to trust the first one? I sure wouldn't.

And if you are right and that becomes a problem, well, shit. Back to the drawing board I guess.

If I wouldn't consider moving for anything less than $250K/yr, I’d consider the first one and not the second one.

I'm not sure I'd trust a company who thought that software engineer value creation only varied by a maximum of 20% either. Tight ranges cut against companies differently than broad ranges.

> I'm not sure I'd trust a company who thought that software engineer value creation only varied by a maximum of 20% either.

But hiring is not evaluating a software engineer in general, rather it's to find a person for a specific role and a specific set of work to be done, a tighter range could mean better estimation.

I don't seriously believe that you want to apply for a job, knowing you set the bar at 250K/yr, when the posting set the bar at 30k/yr.

Just a couple guesses, could be wrong:

1. If someone has 10 years of experience and gets offered $150K, they know they're at half the earning potential. That's not a good way to come into the job.

2. Employees may monitor the job postings of their own company, then ask for a raise closer to the $300K ceiling, especially if they know they're valuable contributors.

Human reactions to being lowballed prevent that. Putting that bottom on a role that pays up to 300K will sour your candidates and is INCREDIBLY costly to hire for as a result.

The fun part is when you get to the offer stage, and the offer isn't for 300k..

"Hey you said this job paid 300k, what gives?"

This already happens, for a while jobs on LinkedIn for Nordstrom (Denver) said exactly that.

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