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Comment by cyrieu | Hacker News Reader

Hey sorry about that this is our job posting - we duplicated a another one and missed adding that information, thanks for catching that! We added in the salary range. Feel free to email us if you have any other questions!

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To be fair, this law should be enforced on the platforms as well where if selected location = NYC, salary range field must be filled out. Seems like they just added the salary range as text in the description. I would put some more burden on these hiring platforms as well.

Didn't mean to call you out specifically, just wanted to see if OP was correct. Thanks for being so responsive, it's a good sign for applicants!

Well done for acknowledging it and correcting it so quickly. Mistakes happen, especially at startups.

Why not add it by default?

> Why not add it by default?

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.

Yeah, this isn’t correct. All things being equal, the first to post a number is at a big advantage. As another commenter pointed out, this is called anchoring. Think about a house being sold in a normal market, the price is always well above its market value to anchor the numbers high.

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.

Also they might be underpaying their current staff.

This is the truth of it. They have devs who are making $130k who have worked there for 4 years and they don't want to give them a raise to $200k.

I know a guy that works at a very well-known tech company and has been a software engineer for over 15 years for them and is only being paid $120K.

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.

Just remember that these employers underpaying their staff are going to be the first ones on HN saying how unions are not needed because pay is already high in the tech world.

This is probably true but also bad practice imo. It instantly signals that employers value leverage rather than employees.

Wouldn’t the concept of anchoring say the opposite though?

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?

posting a number can help confident people but hurts others

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.

I'm sorry but... what kind of victim blaming nonsense is this? Seeing a salary range intimidates 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++...

i’ve had nearly 10+ jobs and i never knew the range

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

There's just so much here in your small comment (you've burned through "nearly 10+ jobs" and you're giving advice to people?!) I can't really address this but to say you're completely wrong that it hurts people to know what they'd get paid for a job, and I think that's pretty obviously the case, as do most folks, including the good people of New York who passed a law requiring it.

If you care about people in weaker positions so much, perhaps develop a web plugin for them which will hide the compensation amount on the job pages?

Read another way, hiding salary range let's companies take advantage of low confidence applicants by exploiting their labor at below market rates.

Insecurity in pay only arises through hiding the true value of labor.

OK. Let's take it as read that ranges discourage the uncertain and nervous. How should companies go about posting ads that treats those people compassionately and puts them on an event footing with confident people? Preferably while not denying people who would like to see it useful information?

my point was that ranges can hurt

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

Write a greasemonkey script. Or pay someone to do it for you. Reducing the amount of information available in a job posting is easily solvable client-side, especially since I disagree with you about the overall negative effect.

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