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Comment by no_wave | Hacker News Reader

Advertise the salary you're offering. If your positions look like 90k positions but you're offering 150k, how will an applicant know?

EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant.

Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

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There are two major problems with listing salaries publicly.

1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale.

2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior developers with over a decade of experience, but the expected salary range can swing by as much as $100k—publicly listing such a big range isn't helpful for anyone. (Yes, I understand that we could theoretically have different job listings but our criteria are driven more by "how much smart shit can you get done" and "how much will you learn" than by years of experience or anything quantifiable on a careers page.)

> Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

It's not that I think an unadvertised salary will by itself attract skilled engineers—I'm just using our experience as a counterfactual for the claim that there are loads of senior developers but we aren't willing to pay them enough. Note that in private conversations/outreach, we do try to be upfront about salary ranges.

If listing the salaries for the technologists will make the non-technologists in your firm jealous, then perhaps you should raise their wages, too.

You don't have to just post a range. The listing just needs to communicate that you're paying well above market, which is a step beyond competitive (and I've never seen "above market" in a job listing). Of course, this is only if your company really is committed to doing so!

I don't have a clever solution for 1. This is definitely a broader cultural issue - non-lawyers at a law firm would completely expect to make less than the lawyers but programmers still don't nearly get that level of respect.

EDIT: I think we're miscommunicating a little. There absolutely are quite a lot of qualified senior developers right now. Most of them are employed. You're just not seeing a lot of qualified senior developers applying to your jobs, which is a different issue entirely. Given that nobody's turned an offer down, there's something that your job postings are missing that people are learning during the interview process. "Not paying enough", in this case, can be effectively synonymous with "not communicating that you're paying enough".

> Given that nobody's turned an offer down, there's something that your job postings are missing that people are learning during the interview process.

You are quite correct—I haven't yet figured out how to convey the interesting product/technical challenges we're working on in a mass way: especially not well enough to overcome must developers instinctual reaction to "publishing."

If you have a minute, I would love to hear your thoughts on how we could better communicate through our listings: http://www.cafe.com/careers

Yeah, those career listings are pretty bland. Not much sense of what you'd actually be doing, or even what the company is hoping to do in a bigger sense. If nothing else, more specificity in both those areas would help you stand out. Especially since, as you say, it's publishing and techies are kind of skeptical about their role in that.

And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Here's what I'm getting at- sell people on the vision and what their specific role in it would be. What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world? As a startup, you've got the vision thing, or at least you damn well better, and it's your advantage. :-)

Thanks for the feedback.

> And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

What do you think would sound better? Above market compensation?

> Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Good catch. I'm on there (Director of Product & Technology) but we haven't done a good job of keeping it up to date with new hires.

> What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world?

Yes, I definitely need to work on this. I've done a pretty good job of refining the technical vision and how it fits with the overall company, but haven't yet distilled it down to a good description. How's this:

Cafe is building technology for discovering, publishing, and sharing great stories. We're building: web scrapers which analyze content across the web (with NLP and Amazon Mechanical Turk) to identify promising writers, a platform which makes it easy for non-technical writers to publish interactive stories, and analytics which model how ideas and stories flow across the web in real time. As a developer at Cafe, you'll be using technology to inform and entertain millions of people while driving clickbait off the web.

Yes, "Above market compensation" is better. It makes me curious to find out what it is, and that's what you want.

I like the reworked description too. Definitely implies some interesting work to be done.

A cynical man would read your salary offer(for lead developer) - " As we haven't taken any outside funding, we can offer you meaningful equity with a competitive salary." as: not-so-good salary , with promises of getting rich on a startup that wasn't even able to convince investors.

Is that because you're reading "competitive" as competitive with other companies that haven't taken outside funding?

Because i'm reading competitive as standard market rates.

And standard market rates aren't good?

No, I think "standard market rates" are what employers are paying their engineer who has been there for a few years (and whom they are currently paying below what he/she could get if they left for another job) or possibly what someone would pay for a "standard software engineer" who really needed a job.

If you want to attract exceptional engineers then by gosh, you might just have to pay exceptional salaries.

At the end of the day, it's a business relationship and an intelligent engineer is quite justified in capturing some of the value that he or she generates.

Heh, interesting read. Maybe I should adjust. I meant to imply that our equity is sizable (because we're still early-stage) while our salary is still competitive with later-stage startups (our founder is self-funding off his last $545M exit).

If you add the last part about $545M, things would sure look different. :)

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