10 ms·

Yeah, the recruiter told me the whole hiring team thought I was bullshitting about my salary. It was a problematic company from the get go. I was cold called a

by revvx 7y ago

Yeah, the recruiter told me the whole hiring team thought I was bullshitting about my salary. It was a problematic company from the get go. I was cold called and the recruiter was very insistent. Their engineers were very unprofessional during the technical interview and complained A LOT about technical debt left by past co-workers during the interview. Now, when I tell recruiters my minimum salary I refer recruiters to Glassdoor, just in case they doubt me.

chrisweekly 7y ago
IIRC it's becoming illegal to ask about current salary. IMHO it should be irrelevant. The question is, what is the market rate for someone w/ your skills and experience?
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > illegal The inevitable result of that is the people making bank will be sure to tell you, and ones making low salaries will not. The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary. Businesses don't like risk (just like employees don't) and hiring a new person poses a lot of risk. It's expensive, and the employee may not work out at all. The more risk there is in hiring someone, the lower the salary offer will be to compensate. Salaries are a proxy for one's value when hiring. Removing that piece of information increases risk, and hence will lower the salary offers.
  - stale2002 7y ago
    > The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary. Thats still way better than being forced to give an exact number. Now the employer has to kinda sorta guess. Instead of getting underpaid by 30%, you might only get underpaid by 20%.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      The more an employer has to guess, the more risk there is in hiring someone. Risk is mitigated by lowering the price, i.e. you get a lower offer. Also, if you wind up getting a salary that's more than you produce for the company, you'll be first in line to get laid off.
      - stale2002 7y ago
        > The more an employer has to guess, the more risk there is in hiring someone. An employees current salary is only barely correlated with a employees skill. They have a multitude of other, much much better factors that they can use to determine if someone is a "risk" or not. > Also, if you wind up getting a salary that's more than you produce for the company You are describing something that is close to impossible to measure, for the vast majority of situations. A company does not go around making exact measurements on programmers, and thinking to themselves "Is this person *really 18.2% more effective than the lower paid employee?". Thats just not how it works. Instead, a person might be 3 times more effective, or half as effective, as the other employees, and salary will be almost entirely unrelated to how much they "produce", which can't really be measure very well anyway. And this is without even getting into more complicated things, such as sunk costs, and the replacement costs. IE, you may be 10% less effective, but the costs to replace you are equal to 6 months of your salary, so in reality, it makes zero financial sense to do so. And finally, you are ignoring the fact that an employee can just lie about their previous salary, and there is basically nothing the employer can do about this. I have never, in my life, had someone demand my tax returns, or call up a previous employer to verify my salary, and in many places this can even be illegal. I can just lie about my current salary, and easily get away with, as I have done so multiple times in the past, as well as has many other people that I know.
        WalterBright 7y ago
        > I can just lie about my current salary, and easily get away with, as I have done so multiple times in the past, as well as has many other people that I know. You're not fooling employers, they likely know you and your friends are lying, and discount the offer accordingly. Try bringing a paystub next time, your prospective employer will appreciate it. It's worked out well for me. There have been some high profile cases of people who've worked for decades for a company, rose to the top echelon, and were discovered to have lied on their resume. They were out the door without their severance package.
  - georgeecollins 7y ago
    > people making bank will be sure to tell you Actually if you work a while and are lucky enough to have done well, you may want to pick a place to work for reasons other than it has the highest salary. In that case you may not want to advertise your salary history because it can scare away employers. It shouldn’t but it does.
  - kraigie 7y ago
    >The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary. Then again if it's illegal to find out, how will they check if your lying or not?
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  Because experience is a very weak signal and skills are hard to quantify and extremely hard to measure in the relative brevity of the interview process. There are obviously problems with a reliance on salary as a signal of quality/value produced. But I don't understand the impulse to pretend that there isn't nontrivial signal in a previous salary.
- jstarfish 7y ago
  There are now services like Equifax Workforce Solutions and The Work Number (and another I can't remember) that records this information for inquiry by future employers. If you have third-party payroll your salary info is almost certainly reported to such a bureau.
Vivtek 7y ago
I had that same experience interviewing with a startup in 1996, if you can believe it. They were looking at their "burn rate" by literally spending extra on airfare, but when I told them what I was earning, they said, "with that site?" No, doofuses, with my consulting; the site was just brochureware. They didn't actually give me any answer until I asked them to give me one - then they said my attitude with the top management made it clear I wasn't a good candidate for the position. Dodged that bullet.
scotty79 7y ago
> Their engineers were very unprofessional during the technical interview and complained A LOT about technical debt left by past co-workers during the interview. That was them just warning you: "Dude you won't hear it fom HR and I am not allowed to tell you directly but you most likely don't want this job."

by revvx 7y ago

chrisweekly 7y ago

IIRC it's becoming illegal to ask about current salary. IMHO it should be irrelevant. The question is, what is the market rate for someone w/ your skills and experience?

WalterBright 7y ago
> illegal The inevitable result of that is the people making bank will be sure to tell you, and ones making low salaries will not. The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary. Businesses don't like risk (just like employees don't) and hiring a new person poses a lot of risk. It's expensive, and the employee may not work out at all. The more risk there is in hiring someone, the lower the salary offer will be to compensate. Salaries are a proxy for one's value when hiring. Removing that piece of information increases risk, and hence will lower the salary offers.
- stale2002 7y ago
  > The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary. Thats still way better than being forced to give an exact number. Now the employer has to kinda sorta guess. Instead of getting underpaid by 30%, you might only get underpaid by 20%.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    The more an employer has to guess, the more risk there is in hiring someone. Risk is mitigated by lowering the price, i.e. you get a lower offer. Also, if you wind up getting a salary that's more than you produce for the company, you'll be first in line to get laid off.
    - stale2002 7y ago
      > The more an employer has to guess, the more risk there is in hiring someone. An employees current salary is only barely correlated with a employees skill. They have a multitude of other, much much better factors that they can use to determine if someone is a "risk" or not. > Also, if you wind up getting a salary that's more than you produce for the company You are describing something that is close to impossible to measure, for the vast majority of situations. A company does not go around making exact measurements on programmers, and thinking to themselves "Is this person *really 18.2% more effective than the lower paid employee?". Thats just not how it works. Instead, a person might be 3 times more effective, or half as effective, as the other employees, and salary will be almost entirely unrelated to how much they "produce", which can't really be measure very well anyway. And this is without even getting into more complicated things, such as sunk costs, and the replacement costs. IE, you may be 10% less effective, but the costs to replace you are equal to 6 months of your salary, so in reality, it makes zero financial sense to do so. And finally, you are ignoring the fact that an employee can just lie about their previous salary, and there is basically nothing the employer can do about this. I have never, in my life, had someone demand my tax returns, or call up a previous employer to verify my salary, and in many places this can even be illegal. I can just lie about my current salary, and easily get away with, as I have done so multiple times in the past, as well as has many other people that I know.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        > I can just lie about my current salary, and easily get away with, as I have done so multiple times in the past, as well as has many other people that I know. You're not fooling employers, they likely know you and your friends are lying, and discount the offer accordingly. Try bringing a paystub next time, your prospective employer will appreciate it. It's worked out well for me. There have been some high profile cases of people who've worked for decades for a company, rose to the top echelon, and were discovered to have lied on their resume. They were out the door without their severance package.
- georgeecollins 7y ago
  > people making bank will be sure to tell you Actually if you work a while and are lucky enough to have done well, you may want to pick a place to work for reasons other than it has the highest salary. In that case you may not want to advertise your salary history because it can scare away employers. It shouldn’t but it does.
- kraigie 7y ago
  >The employer will therefore still know if you're making above or below the usual salary. Then again if it's illegal to find out, how will they check if your lying or not?
wutbrodo 7y ago
Because experience is a very weak signal and skills are hard to quantify and extremely hard to measure in the relative brevity of the interview process. There are obviously problems with a reliance on salary as a signal of quality/value produced. But I don't understand the impulse to pretend that there isn't nontrivial signal in a previous salary.
jstarfish 7y ago
There are now services like Equifax Workforce Solutions and The Work Number (and another I can't remember) that records this information for inquiry by future employers. If you have third-party payroll your salary info is almost certainly reported to such a bureau.

Vivtek 7y ago

I had that same experience interviewing with a startup in 1996, if you can believe it. They were looking at their "burn rate" by literally spending extra on airfare, but when I told them what I was earning, they said, "with that site?" No, doofuses, with my consulting; the site was just brochureware. They didn't actually give me any answer until I asked them to give me one - then they said my attitude with the top management made it clear I wasn't a good candidate for the position. Dodged that bullet.

scotty79 7y ago

> Their engineers were very unprofessional during the technical interview and complained A LOT about technical debt left by past co-workers during the interview. That was them just warning you: "Dude you won't hear it fom HR and I am not allowed to tell you directly but you most likely don't want this job."