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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

If these were extremely specific job postings (e.g. "We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer II with 2-3 years of experience") then it would make more sense.

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.

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I'm hiring for a very small startup, and this is 100% correct for us. The exact position isn't even super defined. If I had to add salary, I just wouldn't do it, because I know that saying something like 80k to 150k depending on experience/ability would invite criticism from people who would immediately assume that I'm trying to dodge the requirement with a big range, and I don't want to deal with that.

You're worried about hiring a junior developer and offering them $80k and them getting mad because they just spent 4 years coding in college and are now experts that should be starting at $150k?

FYI: $150K salaries for new grads are extremely rare. Only a select few companies offer that range and they're highly selective for a very small number of graduates.

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+

Is 5% "extremely rare"? I bet at least 5% of new grads are making that kind of money, given that the companies that pay that kind of money employ 8-10% of the engineers in the country, and I suspect hire a disproportionately large % of new grads relative to the industry as a whole. (So that number could be as high as 10-15%.)

Tiny geographic bubbles, maybe, but I would hazard to guess a whole lot more software jobs exist in those bubbles compared to the landmass they occupy.

For Silicon Valley, New York, and Seattle, at least, $150k yearly is below average market value for new grads. (I may even be missing some development centers.) "Salary" may be lower than that, but not total compensation including cash and stock bonuses.

I was trying to say that a junior developer may not have a realistic idea of how much experience they actually have. They don't know what they don't know.

So, I'm going to be more pragmatic than most to say there are differences in pay based on a huge number of factors, but I'm going to use my example based where I live, my history in IT (clinical research, energy sectors), cost-of-living, and technical schools in my area and how it all plays out on pay in my general area vs. the large metro in NY -> New York City.

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.

Maybe post a position when it's defined? As more jurisdictions require salary information with postings, employers will inevitably have to do so. California, NYC, Colorado, and Washington state are leaders in this, it'll only be a matter of time before more population heavy states follow (Illinois next, and eventually Texas and Florida).

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...

I doubt Texas and Florida follow, I see no reason Republicans would support a law that so blatantly reduces negotiating power for business owners.

Well, they may not be Governed by Republicans forever.

Plus the defining characteristics of Democrats and Republicans is changing and in many ways both parties are quite similar. Republicans are showing less reluctance to restrict people for national purposes (eg epidemic) while this has traditionally been the domain of individual freedom minded liberals/democrats like hippies for example.

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.

Might not reduce the power. I read that austria or so has such a rule, but this only lead to that everybody posting the lowest possible salary for that position with the implicit assumption that the real salary will be different.

That just means Austria has a huge supply of labor relative to demand. A low number for minimum pay indicates that employers are not having to compete to attract candidates, which is a sign to sellers of labor to sell a different type of labor. If a whole country is like that, then they have bigger problems to solve.

What I read was that everybody just knew the posted numbers were not what will be paid later.

It could also be framed as Texas and Florida aren't in a rush to restrict the freedoms of employers.

I would frame it as <insert entities who want to obfuscate prices> are not in a rush to enable the market to allocate resources more efficiently per supply and demand. Because the more efficient a market gets, the less profit (the inefficiency) there is to be had.

In an early stage startup, there are relatively few "defined" positions.

Wanted: Smart people who will figure out what to do. Pay commensurate with added value.

Early stage startups are a very small slice of all employers (and the returns flow predominately to founders and VCs), probably best not to optimize labor law for their specific needs. And real talk, the pay is very unlikely to be commensurate with added value [1] [2].

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/

Early stage startups are prevalent on HN, which is the subject at hand.

Also, half of Americans work for small businesses. It is probably best not to optimize labor law for megacorps either.

We're a non-profit. Any "VCs" are donating with no expectation of return, and the founders are the ones that bound their hands with the non-profit status in the first place.

> 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.

Why would smart people want to apply to a job with ambiguous compensation ranges? In what ways are being ambiguous better than being direct in a job listing?

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.

> Why would smart people want to apply to a job with ambiguous compensation ranges?

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.

It’s great that you found a non-profit, and that its mission motivates you.

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.

As a candidate, I don’t mind opaqueness with regards to salary. My time outside of work is pretty much worthless. I don’t mind talking to someone for an hour or however long if it’s a job I might like doing. If the price is right, great, if not, well whatever. The benefit to me is that if they get invested in hiring me, I can push them on salary if I choose to do that.

So you don’t want that, assume you are smart, and that all smart people are like you?

How pleasant your life must be.

I never said any of those things, and I wasn’t trying to be inflammatory.

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.

Ambiguous compensation allows more room for negotiation - that's why.

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.

But you didn’t know their budget. What if $150k was reasonable for their budget? You don’t really know. For all you know $120k was low for them.

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.

You may not have specific positions in mind, but if you don't have a rough idea "here are the kinds of things my startup will need to do in the near-to-medium term" and "this is roughly the amount I can afford to spend annually on positions I haven't yet hired for, in aggregate", then that doesn't sound like a company that's got a good future to me.

For many “positions” in tech, job descriptions are merely useful fictions. Except my first job, I didn’t stick with the elements of my job description beyond a month or two. This is especially true for my current FAANG job.

This is even more true with early startups. You need pseudo-founders that are willing and capable to do whatever.

> and I don't want to deal with that.

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.

conveniently left out of your quote, I was talking about criticism (from people on the internet who know nothing about us or our situation yet want to jump to conclusions and assumptions based on little to no information). You've perfectly proven my point.

Sorry, I did not intend to come off as criticizing you. I was simply conveying that people who have options will select to apply to employers that are offering a range with a minimum at or above what they are willing to accept. If the labor you are interested in purchasing is in sufficient demand, then you may be forced to state at least a minimum price to get the applicants you want.

no problem, sorry I'm a bit defensive and I no doubt read more into your message than is actually there.

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.

Couldn't you say something like we're hiring one person and we're open to many experience levels but here's the grades:

New Grad (Software Developer I):X-Y

Sr. (Software Developer II): Y-Z

10+ Yrs Experience or whatever (Software Developer III): Z-ZZ

Yes kind of, but it's a matrix of variables and level is only one column. Breadth and depth of technology is also a factor. For example, a hastily written description:

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.

It is clear to me a lot of folks posting haven’t tried to hire a developer lately.

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.

Yes, exactly my feeling as well.

That seems reasonable, but at the same time it does sound like there would just be a disproportionate difference between the bottom and top levels. I can see how gray area mixes would require more careful calibration.

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.

I kinda think it is good that you would be discouraged. Think about it a lot more before you post. Are you willing to pay 150k or not? Do you really need two hires? Who will be the new hire's boss?

You aren't ready to hire somebody yet.

Well is the person we hire a new grad, a junior, a senior, a principal? Do they have Kubernetes and Terraform experience and can help with devops work or is their experience breadth limited to app dev? Do they have experience in security, particularly OWASP rules and the like? Do they know linux or only macos?

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.

Like I said, you aren't ready to hire. You don't even know if you need a new grad, a junior, a senior, or a principal. You don't know if they need Kubernetes and/or Terraform experience.

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.

Yep we tried that. The high number attracted a mountain of unqualified applicants that we had to sort through, none of whom were actually qualified. Also if this is one person todo all, they're gonna need a lot more than just k8s, terraform, security, and linux. this person will need to at least familiar with typescript, react, cloud infrastructure, and be a good shell scripter.

Do you have experience in a hiring role? or is your advice purely theoretical?

Think about all the work involved in talking to prospective applicants and figuring out it's not a match based on compensation. If you had the process in place to post salary ranges it would be totally worth it for everybody involved.

Even a small company - or especially one - will certainly have a ballpark range in mind for what's possible. Even if a wide one, they could offer quick guidance with something like: Looking for help! CTO / VP ($100-$150k), Developers / PMs ($80-120k).

Bam, everyone gets a range, and the small company can cast a wide net. It doesn't have to be so complicated.

> Even a small company - or especially one - will certainly have a ballpark range in mind for what's possible. Even if a wide one, they could offer quick guidance with something like: Looking for help! CTO / VP ($100-$150k), Developers / PMs ($80-120k).

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.

Not in favour of any mandatory salary labels. But:

> 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.

> 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.

The hard feelings only come if there was already a veil of equal pay. No one in finance or sales balks at coworkers earning much more than others, because the expectation is that individuals have different market prices.

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.

> Agatha was a star performer wasting her time at an office park in Boise

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)

Probably Agatha is being paid less at the new job because she was paid a comparatively low salary at her previous one. To a degree, companies have to consider the candidate's salary history when they make an offer -- say their target for a position is a $175K salary, and someone they really want to hire is already making that at their current company. They have to decide whether or not they can offer more and, if so, whether to. The flip side of that, though, is that if someone in a much, much lower-salary market than Silicon Valley (e.g., virtually all of them) is making $80K, you could offer the the $175K you'd offer someone locally, but you could just offer $120K. Look! It's a 50% salary increase! Fantastic...?

> 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.

> To a degree, companies have to consider the candidate's salary history when they make an offer

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".

Sounds lovely -- if you want to exclude every medium to high performing IC from considering your posting. I don't know any IC's at my company that make less than 120k. (In fact I believe the starting salary for college grads is right around 120k)

> But most of the "Who is hiring" posts aren't job postings

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.

It's not impossible to say "Positions vary from $20k to $600k, DOE." for these cases, if you really are hiring your new CTO and also a janitor. 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. And there are balanced incentives to go either direction. If you post low, you miss out on talent, and if you post high you have to convince every noob that might be useful they aren't worth $1M/yr. But having to decide that balance is useful.

> It's not impossible to say "Positions vary from $20k to $600k, DOE."

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.

Less scrupulous companies doing that might but be all bad because they can be called out.

With no salary range, there's nothing to call then out on.

Maybe make separate postings for the door greeter and CEO?

> 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.

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.

Most of the who's hiring posts offer remote work. The issue with posting a salary range is that the salary is very depending on the location of the person applying.

Which is dumb. If you're hiring remotely and a small company, pay for the role not the candidates address. Want to save money? Then offer a lower salary but still get insane talent from Asia. Want to get some of the most insane candidates from Europe? Offer Bay Area rates and get top-tier PhDs with 20 years industry experience applying for your $130k role.

Why should salary be dependent on where I live if it’s in the US?

Because they feel they can get away with paying you less if you live in an area with a "lower cost of living". It's a way for the company to extract more value from the employee without having to pay the employee what they're actually worth.

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.

Is that really the case? Everyone seems to be talking about geopay but from what I heard it magically doesn’t apply to core contributors.

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.

I never liked this argument, does your company charge differently based on the location to the people who is using its products? No. So why does it pay differently based on location?

Yes its not an uncommon practice to price products depending on the users location. https://www.steamregionalprices.com/ https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/countries-netfl...

you know that in some examples the company sells more expensive the products in the regions where they pay less salary. In that example the games are more expensive in euros than in dollars, but the companies from states probably will offer less salary to someone from Europe. So it is even worse with your example.

I think you are implying that goods should cost less if you get paid less but that is not the case and is not what I was suggesting.

Actually the justification to pay you less in some places is because cost of life is lower. Which is true because food and rent is less expensive, but some products are the same or more expensive (like technology). So quality of life is worse.

Then be honest about it.

A response to "Who's hiring" that is so vague as to not indicate whether it is hiring a Graphic Artist or a cafeteria Dish Washer is a waster of everyone's time, anyway. Hundreds of developers polish up their two-page resume and send it in because a company couldn't have their HR staff write up a proper one paragraph response?

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?

First example I’ve seen of why not to do this, that I have considered a legitimate point. Thanks!

Thanks. It's a difficult topic to broach on HN because most commenters here are coming from an IC perspective, not a hiring manager or even startup perspective.

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.

Violating the law is not a concern. You can simply put $50k/year to $1B/year and you comply with the law.

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.

> Violating the law is not a concern. You can simply put $50k/year to $1B/year and you comply with the law.

Right! Which is completely useless and would just clutter the thread.

No, it is not useless. The lower bound is most of the information that sellers of labors are interested in, and that buyers of labor want to hide.

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.

> The proof is employers excluding Colorado residents from their job listings.

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.

That is true, it would unnecessarily open one up to legal costs from CO, and is a good reason to exclude CO residents from job listings.

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.

I don't think you should use the same brush to paint giant 100,000+ employee companies and 4 person startups.

Every for profit company wants to decrease the cost of goods and labor and increase profit - or at least sucker enough money out of investors by giving the illusion of profitability whether they are a four person startup or a 100,000 person company.

No Colorado has explicitly called out this practice as illegal. You have to be actually willing to hire someone for that role at that salary.

True, I did not notice that CO required a "good faith" range for the job. Ideally, the law would be that the employer simply has to state a range and then let the market forces dictate the ranges employers advertise. In competitive labor markets, the bottom of the range will naturally rise, and if they do not, then sellers of labor know that it is not a business worth going into.

How do they prove "willingness"? Like if you put $100K-$700K, but you just don't have any employees that are good enough for $700K, how would you prove you're nevertheless willing to hire someone (the right person) at that salary?

Also, what about the converse - what if the range is actually wider? Does anything prevent them from putting something narrower?

I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. Knowing how much money my labor is worth to you is the primary filter.

As a hiring manager, I wouldn’t want to waste my time interviewing a candidate when our salary expectations are completely misaligned.

> Personally, I'd be most afraid of making it complicated enough that HR has to get involved.

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.

I feel like you're making it more difficult than it has to be.

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.

If a company doesn't have clear the positions they are offering, and so, they are more less know how much should they pay. I don't want to apply. I have applied to so many companies which didn't know very well what they wanted to hire that it was a completely waste of time. I you know how much value the position is going to add to your company you have a clear defined role and a range to spend in that role. So yes, it will be more difficult for startups, but it will clear some undefined roles that wont be translated into jobs in the future.

So because you don’t want to “elevate the amount of work” to add salary ranges, i as a candidate should waste time going through the interview process just to find out whether I am interested?

I find that salary data is pretty well known anyways. Everyone talks about it around the Bay. Not hard to reach out to people inside and really figure out what's going on.

Yeah, that's a terrible justification: that just means that people who are connected and friends get better pay, and those who are outsiders and less connected get worse pay: because they don't know what to ask for they'll likely be wrong, but it's only in one direction: if they go too high they'll get told no, if they go too low they won't know it.

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