I often read the “Who is hiring?” posts but I have no idea if the jobs are even remotely within my range. I think it would save everybody a lot of time if a range was posted.
But most of the "Who is hiring" posts aren't job postings. They're literally answering the question "Who is hiring" and inviting a wide range of people to apply.
Requiring salary ranges would significantly elevate the amount of work that goes into answering the "Who is hiring" question and therefore would reduce the number of postings significantly.
The smallest companies and startups would be the most negatively impacted. Big companies could probably kick it over to HR and legal and have them spend a week drafting up a post that complies with all of the various requirements in different states, but the average poster in that thread isn't going to want to touch a salary requirement posting for something that isn't a specific job ad.
Sure, it's useful to go fishing as a hiring org, but the market is moving against such an approach.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/states-and-cities-where-empl...
Wanted: Smart people who will figure out what to do. Pay commensurate with added value.
In a statement like that they have an idea of what is valuable and what they would be willing to pay for it. Seems like a perfect opportunity to give a salary range.
I'm going to remind everyone of this important idiom: As a business owner, nobody is as invested in your company as you. Even if your employees have a lot of passion for your business, even if they have a little "what-if" equity, they're never, ever going to have the same level of dedication to your role as you, the founder/owner/creator of that business.
All of this is also to say: it is not a buyers market for skilled tech labor right now. If you're an early-stage, my advice is to start competing with the open market.
People are motivated by many things, not just money. I took a major paycut to do something I believe strongly in. We're not a for-profit startup trying to make our founders rich. We're a non-profit trying to help people. To some people the feel-goods of that is worth a smaller paycheck.
> In what ways are being ambiguous better than being direct in a job listing?
Well, if the salary range is very broad then at best it's no helpful, at worst it's misleading. If we found a truly incredible person, we could potentially try to raise funding to meet a higher salary, particularly if hiring this person meant we didn't have to hire another person. In addition, if it's going to be really useful it takes precious time/effort away from engineering work (building the product and putting out fires) to try and create a matrix of salary ranges depending on all the factors. Some of the factors we probably don't even know yet.
I realize that different motivators exist for different people, but I still don’t understand how not knowing the pay range upfront benefits anyone but the employer.
The Chan Zuckerberg foundation is a non-profit. The NFL is a non-profit. Non-profits aren’t excluded from labor market conditions. Non-profits aren’t even obligated to be all that charitable in most cases.
My employer could give me a massage every day but I’d still want to know the pay range.
One job I had had no defined plan for compensation so I asked for a number and they gave it because they had no idea anyway. I also pushed other benefits and got those because
I went from a job that paid ~$80K in 1995 to this new job at ~$120K thanks to the ambiguity. This was Hewlett-Packard as a lateral transfer from a defined job role to a brand new job role that didn't even have a "pay curve" at HR.
As it turns out I'm pretty good at reading situations and thinking outside of the box so it was "easy". Not everyone has that skill so they want things "safe" and "defined". That's not me and never will be.
Maybe it was high for you, and that’s fine. But “negotiation” is a facade for the vast majority of jobs. Companies know exactly how much money each role in the field commands. They pay research firms and do their own google searches to gauge local salary expectations.
They’ll also happily take advantage of candidates who accidentally give them a low ball salary expectation out of pure naivety or inexperience. That’s why ever recruiter under the sun asks for your desired salary first.
I’d argue that negotiation has nothing do to with whether the pay range was stated. Either the company has the money or they don’t. Might as well just say it up front.
How pleasant your life must be.
My questions are serious. In what situation is a stated pay range a detriment to the job posting? It’s my belief that just about every company who is competitive with compensation benefit from stating it up front, while all the companies that are sub-standard benefit from hiding compensation.
In other words, anyone unwilling to state their salary range is afraid or aware that they don’t pay competitively.
EDIT: @stickfigure: I don't disagree. My comments are for the benefit of employees, not early startup owners/founders/investors. Sell the dream, I'm pointing out reality.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25488751 (cherry picked subthread, but the whole thread is very helpful on this topic)
[2] https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ | https://danluu.com/startup-options/
Also, half of Americans work for small businesses. It is probably best not to optimize labor law for megacorps either.
This is even more true with early startups. You need pseudo-founders that are willing and capable to do whatever.
Furthermore, in most significant ways, Republicans and Democrats are unified especially when it comes to engaging in war, surveillance, and mucking with elections and politics of other nations.
In short, not sure it matters very much which one is the governing party.
And applicants with options will not want to deal with figuring out if the minimum you are offering is worth it for them to bother applying.
what you say is perfectly reasonable, and I think you make a good point. No doubt there are people who might be interested and qualified who won't bother without salary info.
New Grad (Software Developer I):X-Y
Sr. (Software Developer II): Y-Z
10+ Yrs Experience or whatever (Software Developer III): Z-ZZ
Looking for smart, motivated people of varying skill levels and expertise who want to make an actual difference in the world using technology to improve lives. Technologies particularly desired are typescript, react, php, laravel, elixir, kubernetes app dev, kubernetes infra (especially linkerd, logging, monitoring), terraform, cloud infra, ansible, web app security, infra security, experience with SOC2 requirements. Prefer senior candidates but open to less experienced but motivated people.
If we get a seasoned pro with experience in many of those, it could mean we only have to hire one or two people and the budget can go to salary. If we have to hire 4 to 5 new grads and train them, there's a whole lot less available for salary.
The tack you’re taking is the only one I’ve found that works for small orgs: be flexible about experience and try to build a team around whom you can find.
One way to do this would be to look at your best and worst (group) cases and set the ranges according to those numbers. Having a fixed budget makes planning a lot easier. Probably more difficult if the budget is more fuzzy.
You aren't ready to hire somebody yet.
Every one of those combinations is gonna get a different offer. We have a set budget that is limited by donations and we need to cover all of those skillsets. It would be awesome and worth a lot more to us to find one jack-of-all-trades, but probably that wont' happen. It definitely won't happen if I post 4 different job descriptions as though it's set in stone that we hire 4 separate people.
Here, let me help. You need a principal with Kubernetes, Terraform, security (particularly OWASP) experience on linux and macos. Salary: $500K.
If you want one person, advertise for one person.
Do you have experience in a hiring role? or is your advice purely theoretical?
The median salary for all software engineers in the United States is quite a bit less than $150K. Only within a tiny bubble are new grads paid $150K+
1. Location - location dictates above all else, what you can earn. The local economy, and what it produces and how much income / wealth the area can support is what I see is the biggest factor. With remote work being a BIG COVID outgrowth driving up homes in rural towns with great internet connectivity, being the exception in recent memory (housing process are blowing up in crazy areas, because tech workers are moving out of big cities - real deal, ya'll). If an economy can support a tech force and pay them well, then that's a huge reason why pay can be unusually high in some areas. I call this this cyclone catalyst, because diversified industries of skilled knowledge workers make it rich with talent. Think Charlotte is a good example of this. Keeping it short, and sweet because we have more ground to cover.
2. I have 20+ years in tech, and not seeking management I am often yearly compensated accordingly, so my prospects for 150k+ are promising. Now, Junior engineers / developers in my general region will make between 60-100K depending on experience (in a stack), degree (industrial players in the area) and who you know (small town politics). But my economy in Buffalo doesn't attract the proper amount of talent it should despite being diversified in industrial and start-ups (but that's changing with 43N in the last 5 years), because of the taxes business have to pay in a pro-employee environment like our state [not a bad thing, but staying out of the politics naturally]. We are healthy though, because of #3.
3. Cost-of-Living - it's still very cheap to live in Buffalo. Much like any of the Rust Belt (aka any manufacturing city in the Great Lakes region from the 1900-2000s that lost industry to China, etc), we have seen revitalization by necessity and since attracting big industry players w/o billion-dollar tax breaks for what seems forever (think Riverbend project for Tesla/Panasonic) we are a multi-industry city, but we have an ever expanding older population and top-notch medical / healthcare industry that is slaying it between Cleveland and Buffalo (not to mention Toronto's influence). However, much like the rest of the country its starting to become unbearable to buy a house, with recent outbids in my own experience on our 2nd house by 30-50K (houses such as $300K can easily fetch $375K in a bidding war - VERY OFTEN!). I can't see this being sustainable, however. COVID really did a number on our housing market, but its gotta crater at some point.
Lastly ...
4. Technical degree programs in the area are just insanely high for the Rochester / Syracuse / Buffalo area and with deep ethnical roots with family, I find a lot of people really yearn to return to the area. As 43N and other industries like banking and clinical research, and in a smaller part energy (hydro, solar, geothermal, and the like) keep putting deeper stakes in the ground (almost doubling down), we'll continue to retain more and more of our never ending supply of computer science grads from University at Buffalo in particular.
Bottom like, there are like 100 factors, but for me, these 4 seem to drive pay around here. We can't support the $150-200K jobs in tech, no matter how you spin it. However, we have more than our share of 80-100K jobs to go around. I think Buffalo's play is quantity over scarcity because of the 4 major factors in our area.
This is different for different people, but I think its fairly accurate for our town.
Bam, everyone gets a range, and the small company can cast a wide net. It doesn't have to be so complicated.
In the tech startups I've worked for, we did not actually have fixed, pre-approved salary ranges like that. Startups tend to gather a wide range of talent from recent grads through ex-FAANG employees and you need to be prepared to rise to whatever level is necessary to hire whoever comes through your application process.
But the real problem is that requiring specific positions and specific job postings changes the thread from something where anyone can invite people to apply to something that is essentially an extension of their company's HR department.
> Even if a wide one, they could offer quick guidance with something like: Looking for help! CTO / VP ($100-$150k), Developers / PMs ($80-120k).
You may think those ranges are wide, but they don't even come close to the variation we got at startups. When you're hiring developers straight out of college and also straight out of FAANG companies your compensation range from low to high can extend to a 5X difference or more.
I wonder whether that kind of variation in compensation is really good, presuming we're talking about hiring into comparable roles. I'm familiar with the whole "10x performer" trope, and I get that there's value in flexibility rather than sticking to a rigid "Someone with this title and this many years of service in the company gets paid this much with 5% variance" formula. But it seems like "Agatha, George, and Bob are all 'Software Engineer II' but George makes 2x what Agatha does and Bob makes 2x what George does, because we hired Bob away from Google, George has no experience but he just graduated from Stanford, and Agatha was a star performer wasting her time at an office park in Boise" is a setup for some pretty hard feelings -- or worse -- if the pay disparity becomes known.
If Agatha and George are unhappy they are earning less than others, then they are free to go find another job. When, and if they cannot, they will quickly learn to be happy with the maximum they can get, even if someone else is earning more. Just like they already are happy with sports and movie stars earning more.
Why is Agatha being paid less here? Just because she has not FAANG experience? Also, lumping them all under SWE II is dishonest (to hide the disparity)
> Also, lumping them all under SWE II is dishonest (to hide the disparity)
While I picked SWE II arbitrarily, the notion that there was such a wide range of salaries offered for essentially the same position seem to be the point of the comment I was replying to. If it's a startup they'll probably have squishier titles, like just "Developer" or "Engineer", but the point is that if you can have two people on the same team ostensibly at the same level where one is making three times what the other does, it's…curious.
This BS practice is why these transparency laws are being enacted, and I fully support laws that make requesting/searching for past salary illegal. The only number potential employers should be concern themselves with is the one the candidate will accept.
Companies get away with this due to information asymmetry: it's not that they want the flexibility to pay people "what they deserve" on a case-by-case basis, its that they want to avoid paying market rates by low-balling candidates who don't know better. "Free market for me, but not for thee".
> But the real problem is that requiring specific positions and specific job postings changes the thread from something where anyone can invite people to apply to something that is essentially an extension of their company's HR department.
If you have managers inviting people to apply, but without any approval by HR, you're setting yourself - and particularly your candidates - up for some hideous experiences.
Of course if you're so small you don't have any HR then fine, you're a classic startup, do whatever works.
What the hell are they then?
They better be job postings, because that's what 'hiring' implies - a job.
Regarding various requirements - what requirements? Cry me a river - nobody is getting sued over posting a salary range and if someone does sue for that, we should have a 'Who is a giant piece of shit suing people for providing salary ranges' to solve that problem.
When you don't post a salary range - you waste everyone's time. It's why it's so hard to hire competent people - because only the desperate are willing to jump through the bullshit hoops of talking to employers playing games. The competent ones will jump through the bullshit FAANG hoops once and never again.
What value would that bring to the thread?
> The nice thing about having to put _some_ kind of range is that there is some the poster will have to choose whether or not to reveal they _might_ pay well.
Yes, and the least scrupulous companies will put a $500K upper limit when they don't plan on paying anyone more than $120K/year.
With no salary range, there's nothing to call then out on.
So like ... 30 seconds more of work?
If you know you want/need to hire someone, but you haven't so much as glanced at your numbers to see how much you might need to pay such a person, and you're also legally an adult, it seems to me like you need to have your head examined.
This is dumb, just post a salary range. It's HN, it's just a web forum.
There’s a hunger for talent right now. While some businesses try to cut every corners, others are simply raising more money and hiring talent to innovate faster.
Remember: you are an asset to the company only worth what you're willing to fight to be paid for. A company will pay you the least amount of money they can to keep you.
If the job is not remote or has on-site duties the argument becomes moot.
Companies with 4 employees have an HR department. I guess these days everyone wants to call themselves a founder without having to work like a founder?
Big companies posting official job listings can make sure they comply with all of the relevant laws simply because they have HR and legal teams to do all of the legwork.
If you're a startup who really just wants a wide range of enthusiastic candidates to apply, you either:
1) Don't participate at all, lest you accidentally violate the rules or, worse, the law.
2) Post a huge range of salaries (This position pays $80K to $500K) so you don't exclude any candidates, but then your risk angering the readers.
3) Break every listing into multiple positions with different salary bands (Software Engineer I: $100K - $150K, Software Engineer II: $150K - $200K, Software Engineer III: $200K - $300K and so on). This barely provides any more signal to the reader, but it complies with the rules and laws.
Personally, I'd be most afraid of making it complicated enough that HR has to get involved. I'd rather allow engineers to post up generic invitations to apply to a company, not change the rules to require highly specific job postings or nothing.
Hiring managers / business owners simply do not want sellers of labor to know the minimum they are willing to pay. Naming the minimum is a loss of negotiating position for the purchaser of labor, and that is why employers do not like the idea.
Employers also do not like the idea of having to increase their current employees' pay if market prices are rising. I know, because I have benefited greatly from paying different people different amounts simply because they do not know what I am willing to offer other employees.
Also, what about the converse - what if the range is actually wider? Does anything prevent them from putting something narrower?
Right! Which is completely useless and would just clutter the thread.
The proof is employers excluding Colorado residents from their job listings.
If buyers of labor were not going to lose anything by putting $50k/year to $1B/year, then they would be doing just that. But they correctly calculate that they would lose big time if existing employees are easily able to find out what the real time minimum market prices for labor are.
FYI this happens because they don't want to risk legal action in a remote state that contains less than 1% of the workforce anyone.
Excluding CO from the job listing is the quick and easy way to ensure you don't violate Colorado law.
It really doesn't make sense to add another state's entire legal requirements to your startup unless you have to. It may seem simple, but it's actually a pain to bring in yet another legal code you have to understand and check just to do anything.
It would have been better if the CO pay disclosure laws were simpler and only came into play if applicants are bamboozled, i.e. if they apply for a job and then are offered lower than the minimum advertised.
If your company is hiring a software engineer, but doesn't know:
A) what salary you can afford B) what skills level you need (SE I, SE II, SE III)
I would be worried about your company. If you feel you could pay up to $300,000 for someone with the right qualifications the problem is easily solved:
> Software Engineer - Salary range: $100,000 - $300,000 dependent upon skills and work experience.
BOOM! Super simple!
If for some reason you have a posting for a position with the salary range moving between $80k - $500k, I would think you don't know what it is you're looking for in a candidate or what type of position you're trying to fill. That would really lead me to question the leadership of a company and wonder about the longevity of it as well.
That doesn't sound like a little company that doesn't have an HR and legal department. That sounds like a bureaucratic headache of a big company. You seem to want to have your cake and eat it, too.
Why do you try so hard to make it sound so complicated? If you can't explain the job responsibilities in one paragraph with a salary range, you are broken. Admit that you are broken. You aren't afraid of HR. You are afraid of looking like you don't know what you are doing because you don't know what you are doing.
As a hiring manager, I wouldn’t want to waste my time interviewing a candidate when our salary expectations are completely misaligned.
For companies, remember you're not just wasting a candidates time. You're also wasting company time paying people to interview a candidate that won't accept a lowball salary.
I also think if companies are allowing remote except for those particular states the job posting should be removed, but that's more of a personal opinion.
If you want to do business there (and make no mistake, HN is a part of YC's business), you have to follow their rules.
Nor there are any checkboxes stating that you agree to the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy or anything of the sort.
Besides, cookie notices have to be explicit anyway. It can't be a thing buried deep within ToS or Privacy Policy.
It's a matter of fairness. Not everyone is good at negotiating salary, and they shouldn't have to be just to get a fair paycheck. There is tons of data showing that women and minorities get paid less for the same work in part because they are afraid to do so.
Posting the salary up front goes a long way towards pay equity for people who are traditionally underpaid.
One thing I do personally to help the situation is go through the Who's hiring threads and upvote any post with a salary listed. I encourage everyone to do the same.
On the other hand, if you know the person is not the right fit, why would you waste your time, just out of respect to other people's life
What do you do that makes you "expensive?"
The downside is for the employer, who if they already employ comparable people earning $120k, and now they are advertising a new person earning $150k, then the person earning $120k needs to be raised to $150k because the market price is now easily visible.
If you’re unwilling to tell people what you’re willing to pay, you’re willingly telling them that you’re looking to screw somebody over. Either way, we’re getting a valuable signal about your company and whether or not you’re trustworthy.
Even better, I've encountered some companies who have a "everyone at the same level has the same salary" policy and I think that's most likely a net positive. I would personally like pay to be less about your personal risk factors and negotiating leverage and more about the value you bring to the company.
Here's an incredibly common example: if I am currently employed, I know I can risk losing a job offer by asking for a higher counter-offer. If I am unemployed, I might not want to take that risk. The previously-unemployed worker doesn't bring any more or less value to the company than the one with negotiating leverage.
Companies that have pay equity policies probably have a lower risk of running into discrimination lawsuits, too, so I think it benefits the company to be transparent.
Is there any concern about the fact that posting a salary range (ie, setting the initial reference point for negotiations) weakens the candidate's bargaining power?
I personally expect (or at least hope) that these measures finally end the goldrush and bring tech salaries down to reasonable levels. What kind of lifestyle must one lead to worry if a developer job is _remotely_ within their range?
In the context of HN, the problem is that as soon as you even have to think about this question it's a non-starter for a lot of posters.
Once you have to get the go-ahead from legal and HR just to share job listings, a lot of people are going to stop. Then it's just the biggest companies and/or professional recruiters with the time and resources to push the posts through, which isn't really what I want out of that thread.
It also only applies to companies with at least one employee in Colorado.
Ultimately it's just going to end up with salary tables that are based on objective and easily defensible metrics. Which is fine too, the world will keep spinning.
If you're asking about Washington, Colorado or the EU; well, those laws will probably have specific details about that in each of their implementations and isn't the topic of this thread. There was a topic on this on HN yesterday, though.
No, more information only makes the candidates bargaining position stronger.
Years ago when I suggested lowering or raising salary based on precisely where the employee lives is a demi-scam, HN told me I was wrong.
So is it practical or useful to advertise a salary range and be okay with paying someone $80k instead of $200k because they live in Des Moines instead of San Francisco? Or even just San Jose instead of San Francisco?
On target earnings: y
Equity: yes, z
OTE is how sales gets their compensation communicated. Your base is $60k, with commission and hitting predefined goals your OTE is $200k.
I found out recently I make more than my team lead. He didn’t know any better.
In my country (Poland) it's not an unusual thing to hear after the interview that the salary from the posting is with some vague bonus which "nobody ever seen".
I don't want to waste my time (hours or sometimes even days/weeks) with some convoluted multipart interviews and offline "coding exercises" only to hear that I would get just a lower/small part of the range which nobody ever gets from the start as they're there only to encourage you to apply.
I don’t think they’re necessary or helpful for software jobs where bonuses and equity compensation can make up such a large portion of your pay, and are still highly variable but not covered under such rules. It doesn’t add a lot to require just salary info, and then a lot of companies will not post here because they don’t want to give up that info. So overall I believe it would be a net negative.
Also important that startup employees in particular understand market pay in terms of equity and salary. This tool is helpful for that: https://topstartups.io/startup-salary-equity-database/
Because of the changes in the forum over time, it has become less valuable as a recruiting channel. This would just kill "Who is hiring?", rather than affecting change.
I can give you an example from a cousin in my family. Pharmacists in the US did very, very well from 1980s to 2000s. That started changing rapidly starting in 2010 or so. The cousin spent $200k+ in the mid 2010s to obtain the necessary certifications to become a pharmacist, only to find out that pay and quality of life at work was decreasing for years due to an oversupply of pharmacists.
However, the US government's BLS website had pharmacists listed as a very promising career until 2021, with positive growth. Even though wages had been declining since 2010, easily searchable via sdnforum and reddit pharmacy forums.
So now, said cousin is depressed with their life's outlook. They likely will not have children, or purchase a home as they are still busy paying off very hefty loans. This may have been prevented if 20 year olds had access to accurate price movements for the type of labor they are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in selling.
It is not only bad for the individual making the bad investment, it is bad for the country in the long run to misallocate such precious resources, all because price movements are too opaque.
whatever criteria and mechanism used to actually determine the final comp can simply be said before hand with said ranges.
Advertising something and then ripping it out from underneath people in the final stages will build resentment- it's a horrible strategy.
why not the simple explanation: they are cheapscates ?
are we now going to enter a loop?
Can't know what you don't measure and evaluate, though; and ultra-wide salary bands for a single title is a smell worth investigating.
When I get a salary range it means the top of that range. Anybody asking for less is making an error. Sometimes I get a range and I talk to the recruiter/company and tell them I need significantly more than that. In this market, demand more.