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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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