I can't comment on those posts, so I wasn't able to do any type of callout. I thought I remember being able to comment on them, but I think that functionality was removed ...
Why is this acceptable?
I'm firmly on the side of salary transparency, even if a company technically doesn't have to because of its size - but I suspect many of the YC companies in question here are small enough to not be affected by some of these laws.
* Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads.
* If you don't give the job board a salary range, they will use tools like salary.com or their own tools to show an "estimated salary range" on your job so they pick up more clicks when they syndicate your job to other sources (i.e. email alerts and other job boards).
* If you are uncompetitve on wages, fix it. Even though there's a lot of doom and gloom out there, the truth is that unemployment did not go up in November.
* If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.
My experience with being hired at non-FAANG places over a career of more than two decades is that I'm usually through a process and hired within a week. Often, like three days, from first contact to offer. I think my single longest job search was maybe a month, total. Companies that have these weeks- or months-long processes but don't pay FAANG-tier wages to make it worth the wait, I have no idea how the hell they manage to hire anyone at all. You've got to move or I'll already be looking at two other offers before you set the date for your second round or WTF ever.
For me a clear understanding of the process steps and how long it will take start to finish is more important than absolute speed. Example: "These are the N phases, we aim to be completed in X days/weeks and you will always know what's next and when it will occur." My last employeer was really good at communicating promptly with those that were not progressing, which is also very important.
I think we should all agree that limbo/ghosting is totally unacceptable and these companies (or people) should be called out by name.
That takes about one or two hours.
Then you think about it, and if you want to hire them send them an offer the next day.
First 3 months of the contract is trial period (you can fire them without severance in the trial period if it doesn't work out).
Not sure why you need weeks to evaluate a candidate, either they are a fit or not.
All the delays are materially the fault of glitches in the hiring organization.
Edit: even an intense 6-interview loop including a "sell" dinner can be done in a day if scheduled properly. The multiple weeks thing is entirely poor scheduling on the part of the company.
Yes, a filter should happen first. A 30/60 minute phone screen to determine who to bring in for the full interview set. Then, what companies did back in the 90s was to take a day (say Friday) and blitz through interviews that day. (Do companies still do this?) You will pull people from their normal work to do this, but conversely you don't lose applicants because your process leaves them hanging too long.
Fast forward to this past February, and I'm being let go for "performance reasons", but it's a lot clearer in retrospect that I should've been failed out of their interview process if it was any good, and that seeking to hire someone within a week is now sort of a yellow flag for me.
I want to move fast, but I also want my counter-party to do proper due diligence.
I was let go two weeks after they acquired a competitor. They claimed it was my performance that was the reason I was being let go, but when you have zero "negative performance" conversations with your manager despite having regular weekly/semi-weekly 1-1s, it's clear to me "performance" was not the driving issue.
Hmm? you just perform 1-2h interview and decide?
>These are the N phases, we aim to be completed in X days/weeks and you will always know what's next and when it will occur."
Why would you need N technical interviews to decide whether somebody is worth their money?
There is little evidence that longer interview cycles produce better results.
"Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship."
- https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...
Given the state of tech interviews, and what can be objectively determined _at all_, what makes you think more time would give you any more accurate assessment?
* Define what a hireable candidate is so you aren't paralyzed in deciding who to give offers to and can be confident in screening.
* Front-load objective screening. Don't wait until after the interview to do a code test. Hiring managers should know what they've got, and focus on
* Make sure hiring managers understand their role in the process and are not running a different hiring process than the recruiting team so expectations can be met.
I thought this was great - I felt like I really understood who I'd be working for and what I was getting into. And now that I've joined I understand that he was simply doing the same thing: getting to know me; making sure I wasn't someone good at technical interviews but with misaligned values. Hiring the wrong person can be very expensive.
I wish the whole process had taken 2 weeks rather than 6, but I'd view an offer in 24h as a huge red flag.
Perhaps what happened after the first two meetings, the manager sat down and analyzed his list of reasons he's excited about the candidate as well as any potential concerns that he saw.
The subsequent rounds may have in part been structured to dig into the areas of concerns to assure themselves they aren't real issues or can be lived with.
This wouldn't scale at a FAANG but for a smaller shop it's probably close to optimal.
I didn't marry my wife after our first date :)
This is a very detached view from the reality. The only reason for the company to spend that much time on the interview process is to reduce the rate of "false positives" as it's deemed very expensive at the big tech. Avoiding individual accountability is not the reason
Not OP, I do not mean that there is an evil confabulation for this to happen, but if you have a hiring committee, this is happening. Even if it would reduce the amount of bad candidates (which is not a given at all), both effects can happen simultaneously.
Now do the math for multiple interviews per working day for someone who is decent in interviewing...
We had the same guy show up to scam interviews under different names twice! LOL
It literally went like this:
"Oh shit, didn't we interview so and so for that like 3 weeks ago? Oops! Are they still available?"
Wasn’t a bad experience at all.
We interviewed 15-20 people over the run of 3 months, finally decided on someone and got in touch with them. They'd already taken a role. Tried our second choice. Then our third. Then we just started over.
Unless the candidate is looking for you in particular, the better than candidate, the sooner they'll be off the market. The only candidates still waiting 3 months later are the ones everyone else has passed over.
(This isn't particularly recent, and wasn't in the US. It's just stuck in my mind as a particularly educational experience.)
i mean it's nice to get a response as soon as possible but this seems completely unrealistic... it seems perfectly normal to expect a wait of a few days or weeks to me
If you run recruiting like it is important, making sure recruiters and hiring managers have the tools and time to talk to candidates quickly is really easy to do. A lot of companies run recruiting like it's a surprise when they have to hire or view it as less important than other functions... and then put lines like "our people are our greatest assets" on their careers page.
Why not treat your potential staff as more important than any of your customers?
Which is harder to acquire? Customers or Staff?
Customers. By far.
Do you have a source on this that breaks out unemployment by sector? 100k tech sector layoffs could be easily overshadowed by holiday season retail hiring.
I went and found the data and it maps with what indymike is saying. Layoffs are up, but not abnormally so (in line with previous years), while hiring is down compared to last year, it remains well above pre-2020 figure.
Overall, it looks like the IT job market is the best its ever been by a 20% margin, aside from 2021, which was slightly better than this year.
It would be interesting to compare the unemployment numbers to comp.
I've noticed my interest in a job tends to drop consistently the longer it takes for a response. This isn't surprising at all. I don't think it's because we're fickle, it's more that right when you apply you can picture what it might be like to start working for the company and start to identify with that future. As the days drag on, that picture seems less and less likely to happen.
But whatever the goal of your organization, achieving that goal is going to depend on the people you hire.
It's not difficult to find companies that cut costs in order to increase profits only for it to backfire and result in less money or even bankruptcy.
Nobody in the company "makes money" (unless the company is a bank, then they literally do, by giving out loans). The people perform various functions and the money made or lost by the company is a result of a sum total of their actions.
Additionally a responsive and clearly communicating company is always a good sign that they really need to fill the role. It is always a plus if I go from hiring manager/recruiter straight upper management interviews in a matter of days.
Additionally the quicker the employer response the more likely the applicant is mentally primed for the responder and does not yet have their mental/time bandwidth taken by competitors.
As a software engineer with a long track record, I somehow only just realized this about myself within the last couple months.
With the two fresh data points I have in mind, it wasn't about perceived likelihood of an offer, but about perceived likelihood of it being a good situation if I accepted the offer.
Delays (especially after a great initial call) can be felt as signal about how much they value the role, whether they're excited about me specifically for it (both of which can make the difference between a great role and an awful one), and how well they can execute (e.g., do they have a clout deficit or a huge-corporate bureaucracy that would also be a problem getting things done there).
And if there's a recruiter, HR middleperson, or other communication barrier -- blocking the normal ability to read people and pick up on clues, from direct interaction with a hiring manager or team member -- this signal can be all we have to go on.
A friend of mine is superbly qualified for a job posted by Apple. She applied for this job expecting a reasonably quick reply. What I mean by "superbly qualified" is that she is a recognized expert in the domain, has conducted seminars attended by hundreds of engineers and business people and, back in the day, was actually invited by Steve Jobs to come to Cupertino and help Apple engineers understand issues related to this product category.
Her application, last I checked, has gone without response for somewhere around 30 to 45 days. This has caused her to have lost her interest to work for Apple. She is now considering offers from competitors.
Ghosting can happen in many forms. Why is it that tech companies don't seem to understand how important is is to treat people with respect --customers, suppliers, candidates and employees. Once someone forms an opinion about you or your company it takes a thousand times more energy and effort to change it.
Public job postings get hundreds or thousands of applications, most of which are terrible and need to be filtered out. Expecting an immediate response on one is not reasonable.
If your friend is such an industry insider, it's surprising she didn't have a network that could short circuit this process for her.
In general, my experience that if you are cold-applying for a job, you are very likely to get lost in a pile of trash. The recruiting experience is much better if the company finds out about you on their own and goes after you. Having an internal referral is a form of that.
Note, I am not saying this is good or how it ought to be, I am just saying how it is.
Let me ask you - if you were the recruiter at Apple and let's say you owned 5 roles each of which got 2000 resumes (I am stabbing at a number but it's Apple, so likely tons of people jump on every role) - how long would it take you to get through it all?
Back of the envelope: 5 roles x 2k resumes = 10k resumes. If it took you just one minute to read a resume and you did nothing but read them every day for 10 hours that's like 17 working days = so 3+ weeks.
Keep in mind that this pile of resumes is your lowest likelihood of success pile - these are not the people you'd identified priori as targets, they weren't even internally referred, they are just mainly random people spamming you or are very weakly qualified. It "doesn't matter" if one of them is a diamond in the rough like the op was describing - it might take you weeks to get to their resume, and that's only if you don't fill the role w someone from the higher bandwidth channel.
So like I said, not "great" but - what would you do differently if you were HR here?
Hire more HR staff to reduce queue times? Apple literally has $100b+ of cash that they don't know what to do with, they could spend some of it on improving their hiring.
Seriously, it isn't complicated.
Also, there are roles --where time and expertise are a requirement-- that cannot possibly get thousands of legitimate applicants. Some not even hundreds.
> * Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads.
might not be what you want. You might want the best engineers who you will have to make exceptions for in their TC
I've seen startups blow 2-3 headcount worth of budget to secure a FAANG engineer, only to realize that engineer needed an SRE to deploy their code, a tools engineer to setup their CI/CD, etc. The founders were so excited to add "FAANG engineer" to their Series A deck.
Firing this engineer was tough because the startup went to the board to get approval for the salary + equity offer letter. To make matters worse, this engineer was kept on for 6+ months without shipping anything ... because firing would've gone into the next board and investor update.
All of those things might even be true! But doesn't change the reality that you're burning 2-3 engineers of runway on 1 engineer with no valuable outputs.
This is one number, which even if it is true doesn’t matter. There are so many easy way to increase the number of applicants like posting it in linkedin, decreasing number of years of experience in posting(which are more often than not, not a hard limit for job) etc. They want to decrease the applicants if at all while keeping the number of new hires same.
Related: apply to jobs during [earlyish] business hours whenever possible - you're a lot more likely to hear back in a timely manner
Don't apply at 9pm on Friday night if you can avoid it
This is a core part of their offering, it's not just user generated content, it's YC companies posting on YC's job board.
I understand the ones who raise the possibility that some of these aren't, in fact, breaking the law, for one reason or another, but the ones who seem to take offense at the notion that YC might have even a sliver of responsibility here in the first place are really surprising.
But Sequoia lost $200M on a fraud having done zero due diligence, so perhaps it’s simply different shades of apathy all the way down.
(Note: I'm not saying they are or aren't, I have no idea either way.)
You have an incredible reach with highly technical users, and you can inject your hiring ads into the posts.
They are also clear that they are talking about companies based in NYC that are clearly required to follow NY law.
No salary range posted, job is in NYC.
IIUC, it's generally held that in a price negotiation, the first party that posts a number is at a disadvantage. Starting salary is one kind of price negotiation. So I can understand why employers would be reluctant to do that.
I’ve always wondered that.
My guess is if you say too high of a number they don’t take you seriously so anchoring can’t work?
The reason companies don’t want to post a salary number is all things aren’t equal: they have far more information on pay than you do. Vastly more. So they have the luxury of letting your uninformed ask be the anchor point cause they know it’ll probably be low. Plus, if someone asks too high, they can ignore it and move on. They (often but not always) have the luxury of choosing the lowest asks to move forward with.
He says "They treat me well", and I'm like, no they fucking don't. They don't value your work anywhere close to what it should be. I told him that he could easily triple his TC by going almost literally anywhere else.
I used to work for said company. I left because the salary was way below market and literally doubled my salary from $100K to $200K at my new digs. I made it no secret to my old manager that money was the #1 reason why I was leaving (#2 being that the team I was working on was basically falling apart due to internal politics), and he acknowledged that salaries are significantly below market and that HR is promising updates to salary bands to bring them up to market within the next couple months. Spoiler alert: It's been 1 1/2 years since I left, and the couple people I talk to from there say nothing has changed.
example, developer makes 100k, has imposter syndrome, sees a great job that has an internal range of 150k-200k. if the dev knew the range they’d think no way they would qualify for THAT much money. the company would happily pay at bottom range for them, but instead they don’t even see the developer.
ranges select for confident people.
That's 100% worth the cost, friend. Knowing what you're applying for/to is absolutely critical information, and having it before applying is a substantial amount of leverage in any negotiation.
That's like saying people shouldn't post where a job is because some people might not live there, or not to post C++ jobs because not everyone knows C++...
also on higher levels comp comes from equity base pay of $100k is immaterial if RSU/equity is $500k
i do believe it hurts the people in weaker positions vs helping
cause high comp individuals know how to play the game anyways
Insecurity in pay only arises through hiding the true value of labor.
maybe a solution is to have a website that had to post a range but also require them to post it on another site where ranges are not allowed
so those that want to see jobs and not be distracted by $ can do so
> $175K-210K base compensation
'Post about the problem on HN' shows its power once again.
But yes, industry comp will decline if layoffs pick up steam. I've already noticed a tremendous easing in being able to hire competent people
Glad to see they updated - but anything less than $220k is hard to swallow for non-remote in NYC.
The law passed in 2019 and went into effect Jan 1, 2021.
NY state is waiting on governor’s signature, but seeing as how it has been months and she has not signed it, I assume she will not.
It did pop up with New York City job listings, like this one:
https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/job/new-york/duane-reade-shift...
Which do not list the pay range, but have tiny text at the bottom that says
>To see the salary range for this position please click here: Pay Transparency Duane Reade Shift Leader .
https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/paydrsfl
And then if you search for similar positions, you get:
Here's a photo I took of the posting: https://i.imgur.com/jSl1Rjk.png
I found the a job listing in boulder here, which has the same pay range link as above:
https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/job/boulder/pharmacy-technicia...
But yes, per CO law, the job posting you took a picture of should also state the same pay range and benefit info (page 4).
https://cdle.colorado.gov/sites/cdle/files/7%20CCR%201103-13...
The major difference with the NY law is that NY is actually expected to enforce it. That being said, the law is deliberately expected to be leniently enforced, starting with warnings, and only after the warning has been issued will fines be enforced.
Also, another big difference is that other major states (CA & WA I believe) are expected to enact similar laws in 2023, so most US companies are pretty much switching over to displaying salary ranges by default nationally.
Pretty good signal of a less desirable employer though.
“If you are a Colorado or New York City resident and this role is a remote role, you can receive additional information about the compensation and benefits for this role, which we will provide upon request. Requests can be submitted here.“
link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOlYgPtpG56uqO0O9j...
When I submitted my information I did not hear back, which does feel like a blatant violation of the law(s)
See page 4, it is spelled out pretty clearly that the posting itself needs to advertise the range.
https://cdle.colorado.gov/sites/cdle/files/7%20CCR%201103-13...
Not disclosing pay is illegal in three states in the US, and has the practical effect of reducing the number of applicants to the advertised job by 14%, so it's self-harming for the employer anyway. Bonus: a lot of job boards will just plug an "estimated salary" in for you to max their CTR and revenue on syndication.
> people are figuring out and it’s easier to forget about if you’re in the habit of re-using old listings.
Some companies don't hire very often, so yes. But for startups and venture funded, high growth companies to be unaware after two years is not cool. We need to do better... and you can see from the people posting here, some of them would rather report employers to the AG than get a job at that company. I'm not sure how productive that is, but I do think it shows why a law was required to get a minimal level of disclosure.
Another downside is that it's easy to scrap and collect this data and companies might not like candidates or employees easily accessing historical data.
Sharing salary range basically reduces the knowledge advantage of a company in many ways.
It's surely great for candidates and existing employees.
They are spending 14% more on recruitment advertising than they would have to if they just put a range in the salary box. So, yes, financial self harm. 14% is substantial for many companies.
> ther downsides - e.g. it might tilt existing employees.
People have access to wage data and job boards in their pocket. If they answer that unknown caller, it's as likely to be a recruiter as a car warranty hustle. It's amazing how many business leaders think that their people are not going to look.
Oh boy, huge assumptions there, so bad that I would associate that thinking with HR recruiters. What matters is what selects/filters for desirable employees. Getting 14% more applicants is a terrible metric to be measuring - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law which is obvious since one can increase applications by advertising in irrelevant places to get more irrelevant applicants.
Alternatively 14% more could be extremely important, if a lack of salary indication filtered for bad candidates, and salary indication brought in good candidates.
> A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later. [your top level comment].
That’s an interesting metric, since anecdotally the best candidates get snapped up extremely quickly.
It is obviously very difficult to find good factual correlations: a lack of good data just produces opinions.
HR and recruiting is not legendary for financial acumen, but they do spend in aggregate, billions on advertising, and they do in many cases have very good analyitcs on that spend.
> Alternatively 14% more could be extremely important, if a lack of salary indication filtered for bad candidates, and salary indication brought in good candidates.
We've not seen a change in quality of candidate in either direction. It does reduce the cost per applicant significantly.
Mind you I prefer when companies post salaries, but 14% greater/fewer applicants does not directly equate to 14% greater/lesser spend on listings. A company only needs one qualified applicant. More applicants means you might find better candidates faster/more easily, but by itself listing salaries isn't necessarily going to save the company money.
does not mean
> spending 14% more on recruitment advertising
if a company gets 86 applicants instead of 100, that's less screening work which means less $ spent for the hire.
Using this logic, then just hire the first person who applies and you will minimize all cost. Screening is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of making a bad hire, and the quality of the final candidates requires you have enough candidates to make a good selection from.
Defaulting to an adversarial relationship with its own staff is not the sign of a good company.
Oh wow, true. Now I'll know exactly when to negotiate a raise or leave.
Fucking good.
It's absolutely scummy to secretly pay new hires more than your experienced existing employees.
It's also extremely short-sighted. You'd rather deal with attrition costs of losing a trained, experienced employee and having to find new candidates and train someone new, than to just give your current employees the pay raise they obviously deserve?
> Sharing salary range basically reduces the knowledge advantage of a company in many ways.
That's the fucking point.
The job market is a market, meaning it's a game between buyers and sellers. "Deserve" does not exist there. The companies are obviously counting on the fact that majority of people will prefer to stay put instead of risk jumping ship for a salary increase - which is in fact what happens in practice.
Most startups are paying the lower end of market rate to below market rate salaries and compensating more with equity, so it's not necessarily irrational on the part of the startups.
> But for startups and venture funded, high growth companies to be unaware after two years is not cool
There are a million more important things to worry about at most startups than being in regulatory compliance with every silly law. I would venture to guess that the more a startup is in regulatory compliance with every little thing the less likely it is to succeed.
Being a scofflaw does not increase your company's valuation.
I hope you don't mind if I don't weep for the billion dollar VC's that encourage others to "move fast," but are unable to respond to changes in the law.
If only they had enough money to hire a lawyer!
This law didn't suddenly materialize overnight last month. No laws do. It was in the works for months, perhaps longer.
All companies are responsible for keeping tabs on legislation that may affect them. From the corner doughnut shop to billion-dollar startup incubators.
That Ycombinator missed this says something is wrong behind the curtain.
So what? The idea of transparency on salaries is not a new one. Why would I want to do business with a company that won't even tell me how much they're offering for a job when asked? That just wastes people's time.
I don't care for this legalistic and disingenuous approach to business, it's an indicator that management is not going to be transparent with people who work there and is relying on information asymmetries rather than actually trying to build a team. Anyone acting like they don't know that potential hires have a strong interest in knowing what a job potentially pays is BSing you.
All "anonymized" of course.
This is the appropriate venue to talk about it and make YC aware of it.
I agree it's unrealistic to expect them to monitor compliance across the globe, of course.
There were probably other reasons behind the change but to preserve the meaning of the post something about this being a possible/likely violation of nyc law should IMO be added back to the post.
For those curious, the originally submitted title was "Ask HN: Why are YC companies breaking hiring laws?" and the first edit was "Ask HN: Why are YC companies hiring in NYC not posting their salary range? I've just edited it a second time, to "Ask HN: Why are YC companies in NYC posting their salary range, as law requires?". I don't think that's a very good HN title, as it makes a general claim about "YC companies in NYC" which is almost certainly both untrue and unfair. But for reasons I explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33974170, I suppose it's ok as a tradeoff.
Edit: whoops that second edit dropped the 'not', which was obviously critical. I've replaced it with Ask HN: Why are YC companies in NYC not posting salary range, as law requires?.
Edit 2: I've changed it again in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976153. It's now "Ask HN: Why are some YC startups not posting salary ranges when law requires it?"
Is that the right polarity? I think the question was/should be why "aren't" they posting it. Right? Or do I totally misunderstand?
Edit: ok, fixed now.
The tyranny of the horse's ass, or rather the 60's terminal, strikes again.
(reference: the width of train tracks are rumored to be based on the width of a horse's ass, from ye olden days.)
I've edited it again with that in mind - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976352.
Recall that making something less salacious when you are the subject is quite different from toning down clickbait headlines when you're wearing your neutral-editorial hat.
Original title was 'Why are some YC companies breaking the law?' And frankly, that's a great question.
Admittedly not-so-great is the absence of any specific example on the OP, but that's another matter.
The post is about law-abidingness and to change that to protect YC on a chat board run by YC is sketch, YC.
The way we'd normally moderate a thread like this is by downweighting it as a generic riler-upper (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Posts like the OP are extremely common, because the internet is perpetually noticing something seemingly outrageous, jumping to the most extreme interpretation, exclaiming angrily, and then egging itself on. That's how the medium works. If we didn't downweight such posts, the front page would be be nothing but sensational/indignant material; there'd be no room for anything else. This is a no-brainer as a moderation call, and this practice has also been established on HN since the beginning. However, because the thread mentions YC startups, I haven't touched it or done what we normally would.
Editing sensational/indignant titles to be more neutral and reflect the substance of a story (not that there's really a story here) is another well-established moderation practice on HN, again for what ought to be obvious reasons: if we didn't do it, then the front page would consist of nothing but that. So in this case I limited myself to the minimum viable title edit, while letting the post continue to burn at a much higher rank on the front page than it would ever normally get away with.
For me the real conflict or tradeoff here is: how do we balance the need to not suppress criticisms (even when they are unfair or untrue—because the good will of the community is more important, in fact it's the only asset HN really has), with the need to preserve HN for its intended purpose. The ecosystem is fragile and takes a lot of tending to, and one of the most important forms of tending—which only moderators can really provide—is to not allow garden-variety internet indignation to drown out the quieter, more interesting material that HN is supposed to be for. It should be clear why the rule is "we moderate less when YC is the story", rather than "we moderate not at all"—the latter would be a loophole you could drive a convoy of trucks through.
Therefore, when I asked myself what was the minimum reasonable thing to do, editing the sensational or (to use your word) salacious title to accurate reflect what (little) substance the post actually included, while not downweighting the submission the way we usually would, seemed to me the right tradeoff. This post doesn't deserve the hours on the front page that it's getting, but that's the local price we pay in favor of a global optimization.
Edit: I changed the title again after posting this, in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973106, which made a fair point.
The “minimum” reasonable thing to do would have been to leave the thread alone if it is in fact your policy to moderate YC threads less than usual.
Can you point to some non-YC posts that you have explicitly removed references to breaking the law from?
It is, in fact, breaking the law to list NYC jobs without providing salary range in the same way that it is breaking the law to jaywalk or piss on the subway. Do you find references to those laws to be salacious and sensational?
It was a mundane observation that these companies were breaking the law in the same way that it is a mundane observation that editing a title to obscure that gives the impression that it was not motivated by some sort of stoic adherence to some objective ideal.
Was “TikTok is an illegal fork of OBS” a sensational, salacious title?
But you did get me curious to see if I could find a past example of this kind of title edit. I did find one from earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30680267. We changed "Google Fi Illegally Bricked My iPhone 11 Pro Max" to "Google Fi bricked my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020)" That's a typical example of HN moderation because we not only took out the sensational/disputable word, we also added the year—which besides being a normal edit, has the side effect of damping the riler-upper aspect. (The internet only likes to get angry about fresh things.)
Re the Tiktok bit, you seem to be asking about this post: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 - Dec 2021. I couldn't find any record of us moderating that post, so my first thought was that perhaps we just didn't see it. But I commented several times in the thread, so that can't be it either. Given that https://twitter.com/Naaackers/status/1471494415306788870 was exactly the sort of riler-upper that we routinely downweight, and in this case neglected to, my guess is that I was too busy in the comments and forgot to look at the article.
In a case like that, it would be normal to add a question mark as a way of making the title more neutral. We did that, for example, here: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33343681 - Oct 2022 (246 comments)
Now I have added another lot of words. I hope some of this is useful!
Maybe the tone wasn't perfect - but isn't it YOUR job to pay attention to what gets posted here? Were you not aware of the labor laws in these states? It isn't something that happened just a couple of times.
Get off your high horse, buddy. HN has gone down hill in the last 10yrs and part of that is because of these stupid policies and actions.
There's no transparency into what you do. Your words are just words.
I was writing from a place of general irritation and even defensiveness. I wasn't thinking about your point of view or how you would feel reading my general putdowns of this type of post. If I were in your position, I'd be pissed off too.
Even after doing this for a long time, I still find myself making unhelpful assumptions. All I can tell you is that I'll continue to work on it.
NYC does a one-time 90-day notice-and-cure, so you can "effect positive change" with listing YC companies without subjecting them to fines, if that's really what you're worried about.
I don't see what this has to do with HN, at all.
It's not reasonable to suggest that HN should also run an HR practice. Again: totally fair to be irritated at a YC company who lists a noncompliant job. Go report them!
Regulators are usually more than willing to work with such young companies to get them to become compliant, rather than to throw the book at them at the first opportunity.
Given the state of the companies advertising on YC my assumption would be that they are too busy to get to either an MVP or to break even to be acutely aware of all of these compliance issues. One thing YC does is to help the companies with legal support, they probably could give some assistance with making sure that public job ads are compliant either by serving as a clearing house or to offer a set of written guidelines to ensure basic compliance, thus minimizing the risk of accidentally running afoul of the law.
Companies should list their salary ranges! Like, regardless of the law!
Yes, definitely. It's to everybody's advantage. The assumption should be that if a company does not list its salary range and they're young that they don't know better and if they're older that you are about to get screwed.
I also don't really expect Dan to moderate this. Seems like it isn't really his job, unless he made the decision to allow that content here to start.
Thank you, I appreciate how difficult your job is. (And how difficult people like myself sometimes seem to make it.)
Technically, in the phrase "YC startups are breaking the law", there is no clear implication that it is all YC startups.
The phrase simply does not speak on the point of quantity, and is pretty decent 'headline English', which traditionally does away with 'some', 'the', etc, trading specificity for celerity.
However, with the phrasing 'Some YC startups are breaking the law", there is actually additional information being added. Intentionally or not, dang is injecting into the discourse a self-protective disclaimer.
If you're really curious, one can probably work out a symbolic representation of the truth claim being made in any higher-order logic that can express Vagueness (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/) and demonstrate how the truth functions differ, but frankly I'm not a grad student anymore, and I'm less excited to do free symbolic logic problems ;D
Popping the devtools on my brain, I think the reason this issue jumped out at me in the first place is that YC's moral ground has shifted lately, mostly because of its exposure to blockchain bets, many of which turned out to be, how to put this politely, more valuable than worthy.
In this new climate, it's impossible for me not to pay close attention to how organizations shield themselves from reputational risk.
It might be advisable to HN to come up with some self-regulatory editorial policies and guidelines to prevent unintentional conflicts-of-interest.
For example, if it turned out that HN was being used to systematically privilege coverage of its friends, allies, and clients, that would have reputational impact on the publication going forward.
I don't think that's what's intentionally going on here, but I also feel we've seen just how fraught the act of edition actually is.
Rephrasing: HN needs better self-regulation, because the weather has changed, and it's not a good look when you're standing halfway between several unhinged billionaires.
This is a friendly observation. Please be well and do the best you can.
Sorry, what are you referring to? I'm not aware of being let down by anyone.
There are also zero posts disparaging the company, YC, or HN. Any particular range you're upset about this?
I read that as an accusation. OP did not name any specific companies supposedly breaking hiring laws. New York City started requiring salary ranges in job postings for most companies (not all) just a few weeks ago. I would interpret a few job postings that don't include salaries as oversights or perhaps companies exempt from the law (which has a few exceptions).
If someone posted "Why is HN allowing shanelbellone to break the law?" would you read that as an accusation?
I don't have any investment in the topic. I don't care if companies post salaries in their job postings. I just pointed out that the OP made a couple of accusations, including the implication that YC was allowing their companies to break the law in HN job postings. OP did not provide any examples.
> HN is completely capable of responding to any accusations properly.
Exactly, that was the point I made above. If OP thinks HN is complicit in something illegal, take it up with them. I didn't post unsourced accusations on HN. If I had an actual concern about YC allowing (OP's word) their companies to break the law I would contact YC about it privately.
If someone posts in a public forum that some (unnamed) companies have broken the law (without any supporting facts), and that YC maybe allowed that because of their financial interest, making them complicit, I think that person should expect pushback. Either back up the claim or back off.
My personal reasons for commenting make no difference. Questioning my motives or "investment" amount to ad hominem, and don't address the issues raised by the OP or subsequent comments.
Your comments sound angry, defensive, and accusatory.
I have no stake in this. I pointed out that OP leveled an accusation against YC and some "YC startups" claiming that their job postings did not include salary ranges "when law requires it." With not a single referenced job posting or example that just stands as an unfounded accusation.
Again, no need to try to infer my motives or emotional state. Either the OP made an unsupported accusation or they did not. Easy enough to determine that from the post without projecting or speculating about my emotional state.
Okay? But this law exists in other places too.
>Why not contact the company and politely ask for the salary range?
Because its not their responsibility to make sure some random corp is following the law? They're just getting burned by the effect.
HN does not enforce NYC laws. Nor does it enforce Colorado laws, or any laws regarding jobs including salary ranges. Whether YC/HN have an ethical responsibility or not comes down to one's ethical position. Laws do not necessarily equal ethics.
Personally I would ignore job postings that leave out crucial information, including salary ranges. If we all did that (i.e. behaved according to our professed ethics) companies would post salary ranges just to get applicants. Compelling companies to post salary ranges by law may have some underlying logic I agree with, I don't know for sure. Compelling HN or any other public forum to enforce those laws (which vary and change by jurisdiction, with numerous exceptions) seems a stretch to me -- I would rather see the job posts and decide which to ignore and which to respond to rather than have HN try to enforce the patchwork of local laws by hiding postings. Once you get into the moderation business you have to invest a lot of effort in that and still you will piss off a lot of people.
Then it will make it easier as more and more states require the bare-minimum worker right of public salaries.
that's not true afaik.
> Rutter (YC S19) Is Hiring a Senior Software Engineer in NYC (ashbyhq.com)
> https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rutter/7b222f5f-cd46-4592-9cf8-6cd1...
Which I can't comment on, it's just an ad for a YC company.
Most jobs have official job postings. It's those that need to carry the salary requirement.
If I'm telling a friend, Hey, there's an opening in my company, you wanna apply, I am not required to tell him the salary range. However, when I point him out to the job application page where he can get more official information on it and can apply for it, that should carry this information, or at least link to it.
I don’t think that‘s generally true.
“Any advertisement for a job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that would be performed in New York City is covered by the new law. An ‘advertisement’ is a written description of an available job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that is publicized to a pool of potential applicants. Such advertisements are covered regardless of the medium in which they are disseminated. Covered listings include postings on internal bulletin boards, internet advertisements, printed flyers distributed at job fairs, and newspaper advertisements.” [0]
> Most jobs have official job postings. It's those that need to carry the salary requirement.
What is your reasoning for this? I don’t see anything in the text of the law [1] about “official job postings.”
> If I'm telling a friend, Hey, there's an opening in my company, you wanna apply, I am not required to tell him the salary range.
This at least is correct, because that case is not “a written description [...] that is publicized to a pool of potential applicants.”
[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/Title-8-Text-o...
If that existed today I would still choose to see the unfiltered job listings, because if I was looking for a job my goal would come down to "find a job" rather than "make sure all job postings comply with every regulation."
Can you clarify what you mean by "ethical" in this case? It's not obvious to me which ethic / whose interests deserve priority in a case like this.
It's also contrary to the ideals of a free market, if that matters to anyone.
I'll admit that it's ethical if one's ethical framework is based on Pirates of the Caribbean. "Take what you can, give nothing back." Which probably is pretty common, especially among people who succeed at business.
With many of these roles, it’s unclear who has the advantage: the seed-stage start-up or the key employee.
It's literally their job as a business owner, and millions of people successfully do this every year.
If that's the case where you're incorporated and operating, specialists in what the law says and how it applies exists. Use some of that VC money to use them.
That said, your examples are pretty terrible. ADA rules for buildings are incredibly clear, and a halfway decent contractor will know them. Ditto fire rules. Seriously, a business owner with a shed that hurts or kills somebody for not being compliant with fire codes deserves their day in court.
Oh, and the usual "Ignorance of the law is no excuse to break the law" applies here too.
True, but irrelevant, as that's not the only reason to do it. YC has a brand whose value they surely wish to maintain. Presumably that gives them an interest in not directly aiding companies in breaking the law.
So I don't think a reasonable person should quickly (and publicly) jump from "this job posting apparently for NYC doesn't include salaries" to "the company broke hiring laws" and "HN directly aids companies breaking the law." Try a more generous interpretation on.
Even assuming the best of intent -- in fact, especially when we assume that -- YC's role as a guide to often-novice entrepreneurs means they should be helping out here. Both by educating them on changing hiring laws and by sending back inadequate job postings for reworking.
Regarding your last paragraph, I'll also note that whether "the company broke hiring laws" is a purely factual question, as is whether or not HN publishes job ads that break the law. A generous interpretation involves why and how they did it, but can't include denying the facts.
The NYC Commission on Human Rights has a complaint process documented at NYC.gov/HumanRights. If someone has evidence of an actual violation perhaps start there rather than posting unsubstantiated accusations and implying illegal behavior on the part of un-named employers and YC.
I'll also note that the person who did post about this perhaps left the company names out because they were being considerate, not wanting to invite trouble for people who could be entirely well meaning when they are just examples of a broader problem. So as long as you're arguing for assuming good intent, maybe you could try that yourself?
Whether YC would want to prevent illegal or unethical behavior is a question I can't answer. I would hope so. But I don't think it's reasonable to put the burden of enforcing various employment posting laws on YC/HN, especially when the laws are new and have jurisdiction questions and exceptions. My reading of the NYC law tells me job boards are not subject to any enforcement -- only the companies posting the job ads have to comply.
I don't object to a discussion about what responsibility YC and HN have in regards to allowing job posts that don't include salary ranges. Personally I would ignore job posts that don't voluntarily include that. I objected to the OP characterizing the job posts from YC companies as "breaking hiring laws." Whether the law was broken or not would require more facts than the OP gave. Maybe the OP didn't name the companies that supposedly "broke hiring laws" out of consideration, but in the original post it seems clear OP intended to call them out in comments but couldn't comment on the posts, not that the OP decided to take the considerate path of not naming them.
How very generous of you to allow us to discuss things.
And folks at startups are usually wearing multiple hats. They might not have a VP of Recruiting/HR/Legal on board that knows all applicable federal/state/city laws. It might be a SWE posting these jobs.
I wouldn't jump to assuming deliberate illegal behavior. The NYC law went into effect last month, and waives the penalty for first offenses to give companies time to comply. If I saw a NYC-based job posting with no salary I would give the benefit of the doubt at least.
> All employers that have four or more employees or one or more domestic workers are covered by the NYCHRL, including this new provision of the law. As with other provisions of the NYCHRL, owners and individual employers count towards the four employees. The four employees do not need to work in the same location, and they do not need to all work in New York City. As long as one of the employees works in New York City, the workplace is covered.
I don't have a law degree, but I read that as the law only applies if the company currently has at least four employees, one of which "works in New York City." If a company intends to hire someone in NYC but has no employees there yet the law wouldn't apply to them yet, probably because NYC wouldn't have jurisdiction without a nexus in the city.
* https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...
This is a good way to get subpoanaed, sued, and see every one of your start-ups fined for each and every violating post.
The law in question only has vague enforcement provisions that include fines "up to $250,000," which means any actual cases brought for enforcement will end up in court in NYC. A civil judge will then get to decide what "good faith" means in each specific case, and also decide questions of jurisdiction and responsibility.
I don’t think Hacker News faces liability for posting non-compliant ads. (Not a lawyer!) But if it turns out to be a trove of them, HN’s essentially a honey pot.
> any actual cases brought for enforcement will end up in court in NYC
Precisely what you want your early-stage portfolio dealing with.
Agree that investors should not tolerate illegal behavior from their portfolio companies, but realistically VCs can't manage every day-to-day detail of their portfolio. And even when they do get involved they can't always control the management -- see Uber, for example. Sometimes the VCs provide the legal cover for questionable behavior because the potential profits outweigh the potential fines and risk of enforcement by well-intentioned but ultimately toothless laws, as I suspect the NYC law will turn out.
New York City has no shortage of investigators with overlapping jurisdiction looking for troves of targets.
> VCs can't manage every day-to-day detail of their portfolio
These are job postings on Hacker News!
For example, Employee-at-will contracts popular in the US are illegal in other zones, and not worth the paper they are printed on in places like Canada.
This is a good reason to always hire a local law firm to review your paperwork, and immigration lawyers to check the intended working arrangements.
Trust that no matter how you personally think things should be done, the law becomes rather expensive if you assume local laws apply internationally.
This lesson is expensive if you learn it the hard way. Also, one may find most firms are allergic to legal posturing, and candidates with an aggressive lack of impulse control. =)
It's nice that there's a carveout for small companies, who don't need more friction as they're trying to get off the ground.
If you maintain this wide-eyed innocence you will be no more than everyone else's victim.
To be fair I don't reply to an offer that does not state the pay, but I've been a victim of bait and switch many times.
Notably, when going through all the interview stages and being told I have been accepted only to find out in the contract that the salary is much different from what has been offered.
They were hoping that I would agree given I have invested so much time going to interviews and so on.
The excuse? "We have gone over budget with hiring and unfortunately now that the maximum we can offer, we are very sorry."
Could it just be they made an innocent mistake?
Just inform the companies when you see it and then report them if they refuse to disclose and update the listing.
It actually tells you more about the moral compass of the company if they refuse to disclose which I would find valuable.
This is literally everyone in the world, including yourself unless you’re in favor of a lawless society.
Nowadays if you're in a professional organization, for example if you're a lawyer, people will make professional complaints against you for your first amendment speech, irrespective of your professional practice. Essentially filing fraudulent complaints to silence you. And they do so as an organized political activity.
And sadly it's been hilariously effective so far.
You don't give up your rights just because you practice a particular profession.
If you say something that some people don't like, the first step in response shouldn't be them coming after your livelihood.
This whole idea that founders and capitalists contribute some special sauce to society and therefore shouldn't be regulated is some old fart libertarian Randian fantasy silliness and I'm glad it's being called out. That sort of thing just doesn't work in civilized society.
If someone made a competitor that had just-as-good tech discussion without the VC “value-add”, I’d never come here ever again.
I also like seeing so many of the ruling class get angry and post about requiring salary ranges, it’s been very entertaining this morning :)
Its mind-boggling that so many users come here to rant against capitalism, or advocate against startups, or have absolutely no relationship whatsoever with the space. It's not only crazy for me, its crazy for the makers of this site was well!
The whole salary transparency discussion IS something many hackers find interesting, especially since much of the actual "hacking" is on the labor side rather than the capital side.
I don't think it's hackers' fault that venture capitalism made a bad name for itself. The VCs did that well enough on their own. Hacking culture predates (and will hopefully outlast) tech opportunism.
And I also hope this forum/audience eventually moves to a FOSS, community-supported model instead of being a part of YC. But for now it's where we gather.
And besides, VCs and their portfolio companies leverage the law to make other people do (or not do) things all of the time. IP law being an obvious example.
However, this community has a lot of intelligent folks who both disagree with my understandings of the world and who have a lot of insight into domains I never want to touch (finance, bigco culture, small-l right libertarian politics).
There are plenty of sane, interesting, well-informed folks here who I vehemently disagree with, and that's a necessary condition of learning about the world.
At this point get rid of negotiation straight up. Ether someone is qualified or not.
If not create a junior role for them, or not hire em.
Maybe 5 years ago or so, I got an email that sounded good in terms of domain and tech stack, and with good detail on tasks and responsibilities.
As I reached the bottom, I saw a salary heading and assumed it would have a good range. It said something like $80k - $2 million.
Immediately deleted and a filter placed in my email to never hear from them again.
If the goal is, in good faith, to find someone to do a job, then publishing all known constraints will drastically improve the search. But when they don't do that, it's usually because they want to hold their cards close so that they can both 1) hire someone to fill a _need_ the company has, and 2) pay them as little as possible.
As other comments have discussed, it's kind of a self-own that just makes the process slower and worse and leaves everyone less happy at the end.
> employers advertising jobs in New York City must include a good faith salary range for every job, promotion, and transfer opportunity advertised
I think the question is what is "good faith" and what is the legal test (if there is one) for such a description. I'd love it if a lawyer could pontificate on this.
Is there an obligation in the law to list salary range at every recruiting reference?
If not, is HN now obligated to monitor every official posting for salary range?
If you have a problem with the company, report the company.
“Any advertisement for a job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that would be performed in New York City is covered by the new law. An ‘advertisement’ is a written description of an available job, promotion, or transfer opportunity that is publicized to a pool of potential applicants. Such advertisements are covered regardless of the medium in which they are disseminated. Covered listings include postings on internal bulletin boards, internet advertisements, printed flyers distributed at job fairs, and newspaper advertisements.”
— https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...
Second, who implements this part?
"Does this new law apply to my job postings?
All employers that have four or more employees or one or more domestic workers are covered by the NYCHRL, including this new provision of the law. As with other provisions of the NYCHRL, owners and individual employers count towards the four employees. The four employees do not need to work in the same location, and they do not need to all work in New York City. As long as one of the employees works in New York City, the workplace is covered.
Employment Agencies are also covered by the new law, regardless of their size. As such, employment agencies must ensure that any job listings they promote or seek to fill comply with the new salary transparency requirements.
Temporary Help Firm Exception: The new law does not apply to temporary help firms seeking applicants to join their pool of available workers. Temporary help firms are businesses that recruit, hire, and assign their own employees to perform work or services for other organizations, to support or supplement the other organization’s workforce, or to provide assistance in special work situations. However, employers who work with temporary help firms must follow the new salary transparency law"
And in this case, these ads are given special treatment here on HN. So of course YC owns some part of the responsibility.