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ct0 5y ago

Most of the who's hiring posts offer remote work. The issue with posting a salary range is that the salary is very depending on the location of the person applying.

exdsq 5y ago
Which is dumb. If you're hiring remotely and a small company, pay for the role not the candidates address. Want to save money? Then offer a lower salary but still get insane talent from Asia. Want to get some of the most insane candidates from Europe? Offer Bay Area rates and get top-tier PhDs with 20 years industry experience applying for your $130k role.
scarface74 5y ago
Why should salary be dependent on where I live if it’s in the US?
- michaelmcdonald 5y ago
  Because they feel they can get away with paying you less if you live in an area with a "lower cost of living". It's a way for the company to extract more value from the employee without having to pay the employee what they're actually worth. Remember: you are an asset to the company only worth what you're willing to fight to be paid for. A company will pay you the least amount of money they can to keep you. If the job is not remote or has on-site duties the argument becomes moot.
908B64B197 5y ago
Is that really the case? Everyone seems to be talking about geopay but from what I heard it magically doesn’t apply to core contributors. There’s a hunger for talent right now. While some businesses try to cut every corners, others are simply raising more money and hiring talent to innovate faster.
jorgemf 5y ago
I never liked this argument, does your company charge differently based on the location to the people who is using its products? No. So why does it pay differently based on location?
- ct0 5y ago
  Yes its not an uncommon practice to price products depending on the users location. https://www.steamregionalprices.com/ https://www.steamregionalprices.com/ https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/countries-netflix-cost/ https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/countries-netfl...
  - jorgemf 5y ago
    you know that in some examples the company sells more expensive the products in the regions where they pay less salary. In that example the games are more expensive in euros than in dollars, but the companies from states probably will offer less salary to someone from Europe. So it is even worse with your example.
    - ct0 5y ago
      I think you are implying that goods should cost less if you get paid less but that is not the case and is not what I was suggesting.
      - jorgemf 5y ago
        Actually the justification to pay you less in some places is because cost of life is lower. Which is true because food and rent is less expensive, but some products are the same or more expensive (like technology). So quality of life is worse.
detaro 5y ago
Then be honest about it.

vasco 5y ago

Even a small company - or especially one - will certainly have a ballpark range in mind for what's possible. Even if a wide one, they could offer quick guidance with something like: Looking for help! CTO / VP ($100-$150k), Developers / PMs ($80-120k). Bam, everyone gets a range, and the small company can cast a wide net. It doesn't have to be so complicated.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Even a small company - or especially one - will certainly have a ballpark range in mind for what's possible. Even if a wide one, they could offer quick guidance with something like: Looking for help! CTO / VP ($100-$150k), Developers / PMs ($80-120k). In the tech startups I've worked for, we did not actually have fixed, pre-approved salary ranges like that. Startups tend to gather a wide range of talent from recent grads through ex-FAANG employees and you need to be prepared to rise to whatever level is necessary to hire whoever comes through your application process. But the real problem is that requiring specific positions and specific job postings changes the thread from something where anyone can invite people to apply to something that is essentially an extension of their company's HR department. > Even if a wide one, they could offer quick guidance with something like: Looking for help! CTO / VP ($100-$150k), Developers / PMs ($80-120k). You may think those ranges are wide, but they don't even come close to the variation we got at startups. When you're hiring developers straight out of college and also straight out of FAANG companies your compensation range from low to high can extend to a 5X difference or more.
- beachy 5y ago
  Not in favour of any mandatory salary labels. But: > But the real problem is that requiring specific positions and specific job postings changes the thread from something where anyone can invite people to apply to something that is essentially an extension of their company's HR department. If you have managers inviting people to apply, but without any approval by HR, you're setting yourself - and particularly your candidates - up for some hideous experiences. Of course if you're so small you don't have any HR then fine, you're a classic startup, do whatever works.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  > When you're hiring developers straight out of college and also straight out of FAANG companies your compensation range from low to high can extend to a 5X difference or more. I wonder whether that kind of variation in compensation is really good, presuming we're talking about hiring into comparable roles. I'm familiar with the whole "10x performer" trope, and I get that there's value in flexibility rather than sticking to a rigid "Someone with this title and this many years of service in the company gets paid this much with 5% variance" formula. But it seems like "Agatha, George, and Bob are all 'Software Engineer II' but George makes 2x what Agatha does and Bob makes 2x what George does, because we hired Bob away from Google, George has no experience but he just graduated from Stanford, and Agatha was a star performer wasting her time at an office park in Boise" is a setup for some pretty hard feelings -- or worse -- if the pay disparity becomes known.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    The hard feelings only come if there was already a veil of equal pay. No one in finance or sales balks at coworkers earning much more than others, because the expectation is that individuals have different market prices. If Agatha and George are unhappy they are earning less than others, then they are free to go find another job. When, and if they cannot, they will quickly learn to be happy with the maximum they can get, even if someone else is earning more. Just like they already are happy with sports and movie stars earning more.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    > Agatha was a star performer wasting her time at an office park in Boise Why is Agatha being paid less here? Just because she has not FAANG experience? Also, lumping them all under SWE II is dishonest (to hide the disparity)
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      Probably Agatha is being paid less at the new job because she was paid a comparatively low salary at her previous one. To a degree, companies have to consider the candidate's salary history when they make an offer -- say their target for a position is a $175K salary, and someone they really want to hire is already making that at their current company. They have to decide whether or not they can offer more and, if so, whether to. The flip side of that, though, is that if someone in a much, much lower-salary market than Silicon Valley (e.g., virtually all of them) is making $80K, you could offer the the $175K you'd offer someone locally, but you could just offer $120K. Look! It's a 50% salary increase! Fantastic...? > Also, lumping them all under SWE II is dishonest (to hide the disparity) While I picked SWE II arbitrarily, the notion that there was such a wide range of salaries offered for essentially the same position seem to be the point of the comment I was replying to. If it's a startup they'll probably have squishier titles, like just "Developer" or "Engineer", but the point is that if you can have two people on the same team ostensibly at the same level where one is making three times what the other does, it's…curious.
      - sangnoir 5y ago
meetups323 5y ago
Sounds lovely -- if you want to exclude every medium to high performing IC from considering your posting. I don't know any IC's at my company that make less than 120k. (In fact I believe the starting salary for college grads is right around 120k)

freedomben 5y ago

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.

stickfigure 5y ago

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.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
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 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-tradeoffs/ | https://danluu.com/startup-options/ https://danluu.com/startup-options/
- stickfigure 5y ago
  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.
- freedomben 5y ago
  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.
michaelmcdonald 5y ago
> 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.
dangus 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- freedomben 5y ago
  > 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.
  - dangus 5y ago
    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.
    - paulcole 5y ago
      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.
danaris 5y ago
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.