9 ms·

If these were extremely specific job postings (e.g. "We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer II with 2-3 years of experience") then it would make more sense. B

If these were extremely specific job postings (e.g. "We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer II with 2-3 years of experience") then it would make more sense. But most of the "Who is hiring" posts aren't job postings. They're literally answering the question "Who is hiring" and inviting a wide range of people to apply. Requiring salary ranges would significantly elevate the amount of work that goes into answering the "Who is hiring" question and therefore would reduce the number of postings significantly. The smallest companies and startups would be the most negatively impacted. Big companies could probably kick it over to HR and legal and have them spend a week drafting up a post that complies with all of the various requirements in different states, but the average poster in that thread isn't going to want to touch a salary requirement posting for something that isn't a specific job ad.

908B64B197 5y ago
I find that salary data is pretty well known anyways. Everyone talks about it around the Bay. Not hard to reach out to people inside and really figure out what's going on.
- mandevil 5y ago
  Yeah, that's a terrible justification: that just means that people who are connected and friends get better pay, and those who are outsiders and less connected get worse pay: because they don't know what to ask for they'll likely be wrong, but it's only in one direction: if they go too high they'll get told no, if they go too low they won't know it.
gumby 5y ago
First example I’ve seen of why not to do this, that I have considered a legitimate point. Thanks!
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Thanks. It's a difficult topic to broach on HN because most commenters here are coming from an IC perspective, not a hiring manager or even startup perspective. Big companies posting official job listings can make sure they comply with all of the relevant laws simply because they have HR and legal teams to do all of the legwork. If you're a startup who really just wants a wide range of enthusiastic candidates to apply, you either: 1) Don't participate at all, lest you accidentally violate the rules or, worse, the law. 2) Post a huge range of salaries (This position pays $80K to $500K) so you don't exclude any candidates, but then your risk angering the readers. 3) Break every listing into multiple positions with different salary bands (Software Engineer I: $100K - $150K, Software Engineer II: $150K - $200K, Software Engineer III: $200K - $300K and so on). This barely provides any more signal to the reader, but it complies with the rules and laws. Personally, I'd be most afraid of making it complicated enough that HR has to get involved. I'd rather allow engineers to post up generic invitations to apply to a company, not change the rules to require highly specific job postings or nothing.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Violating the law is not a concern. You can simply put $50k/year to $1B/year and you comply with the law. Hiring managers / business owners simply do not want sellers of labor to know the minimum they are willing to pay. Naming the minimum is a loss of negotiating position for the purchaser of labor, and that is why employers do not like the idea. Employers also do not like the idea of having to increase their current employees' pay if market prices are rising. I know, because I have benefited greatly from paying different people different amounts simply because they do not know what I am willing to offer other employees.
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > Violating the law is not a concern. You can simply put $50k/year to $1B/year and you comply with the law. Right! Which is completely useless and would just clutter the thread.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        No, it is not useless. The lower bound is most of the information that sellers of labors are interested in, and that buyers of labor want to hide. The proof is employers excluding Colorado residents from their job listings. If buyers of labor were not going to lose anything by putting $50k/year to $1B/year, then they would be doing just that. But they correctly calculate that they would lose big time if existing employees are easily able to find out what the real time minimum market prices for labor are.
        PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        > The proof is employers excluding Colorado residents from their job listings. FYI this happens because they don't want to risk legal action in a remote state that contains less than 1% of the workforce anyone. Excluding CO from the job listing is the quick and easy way to ensure you don't violate Colorado law. It really doesn't make sense to add another state's entire legal requirements to your startup unless you have to. It may seem simple, but it's actually a pain to bring in yet another legal code you have to understand and check just to do anything.
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?
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.
  - 5y ago
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.
- jandrese 5y ago
  You're worried about hiring a junior developer and offering them $80k and them getting mad because they just spent 4 years coding in college and are now experts that should be starting at $150k?
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    FYI: $150K salaries for new grads are extremely rare. Only a select few companies offer that range and they're highly selective for a very small number of graduates. The median salary for all software engineers in the United States is quite a bit less than $150K. Only within a tiny bubble are new grads paid $150K+
    - comp_throw7 5y ago
      Is 5% "extremely rare"? I bet at least 5% of new grads are making that kind of money, given that the companies that pay that kind of money employ 8-10% of the engineers in the country, and I suspect hire a disproportionately large % of new grads relative to the industry as a whole. (So that number could be as high as 10-15%.)
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      Tiny geographic bubbles, maybe, but I would hazard to guess a whole lot more software jobs exist in those bubbles compared to the landmass they occupy.
    - softwarebeware 5y ago
      For Silicon Valley, New York, and Seattle, at least, $150k yearly is below average market value for new grads. (I may even be missing some development centers.) "Salary" may be lower than that, but not total compensation including cash and stock bonuses.
sakoht 5y ago
It's not impossible to say "Positions vary from $20k to $600k, DOE." for these cases, if you really are hiring your new CTO and also a janitor. The nice thing about having to put _some_ kind of range is that there is some the poster will have to choose whether or not to reveal they _might_ pay well. And there are balanced incentives to go either direction. If you post low, you miss out on talent, and if you post high you have to convince every noob that might be useful they aren't worth $1M/yr. But having to decide that balance is useful.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > It's not impossible to say "Positions vary from $20k to $600k, DOE." What value would that bring to the thread? > The nice thing about having to put _some_ kind of range is that there is some the poster will have to choose whether or not to reveal they _might_ pay well. Yes, and the least scrupulous companies will put a $500K upper limit when they don't plan on paying anyone more than $120K/year.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
    Less scrupulous companies doing that might but be all bad because they can be called out. With no salary range, there's nothing to call then out on.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Maybe make separate postings for the door greeter and CEO?
freeopinion 5y ago
A response to "Who's hiring" that is so vague as to not indicate whether it is hiring a Graphic Artist or a cafeteria Dish Washer is a waster of everyone's time, anyway. Hundreds of developers polish up their two-page resume and send it in because a company couldn't have their HR staff write up a proper one paragraph response? Companies with 4 employees have an HR department. I guess these days everyone wants to call themselves a founder without having to work like a founder?
alexashka 5y ago
> But most of the "Who is hiring" posts aren't job postings What the hell are they then? They better be job postings, because that's what 'hiring' implies - a job. Regarding various requirements - what requirements? Cry me a river - nobody is getting sued over posting a salary range and if someone does sue for that, we should have a 'Who is a giant piece of shit suing people for providing salary ranges' to solve that problem. When you don't post a salary range - you waste everyone's time. It's why it's so hard to hire competent people - because only the desperate are willing to jump through the bullshit hoops of talking to employers playing games. The competent ones will jump through the bullshit FAANG hoops once and never again.
scarface74 5y ago
So because you don’t want to “elevate the amount of work” to add salary ranges, i as a candidate should waste time going through the interview process just to find out whether I am interested?
maybelsyrup 5y ago
> Requiring salary ranges would significantly elevate the amount of work that goes into answering the "Who is hiring" question and therefore would reduce the number of postings significantly. So like ... 30 seconds more of work? If you know you want/need to hire someone, but you haven't so much as glanced at your numbers to see how much you might need to pay such a person, and you're also legally an adult, it seems to me like you need to have your head examined. This is dumb, just post a salary range. It's HN, it's just a web forum.
jorgemf 5y ago
If a company doesn't have clear the positions they are offering, and so, they are more less know how much should they pay. I don't want to apply. I have applied to so many companies which didn't know very well what they wanted to hire that it was a completely waste of time. I you know how much value the position is going to add to your company you have a clear defined role and a range to spend in that role. So yes, it will be more difficult for startups, but it will clear some undefined roles that wont be translated into jobs in the future.

908B64B197 5y ago

I find that salary data is pretty well known anyways. Everyone talks about it around the Bay. Not hard to reach out to people inside and really figure out what's going on.

mandevil 5y ago
Yeah, that's a terrible justification: that just means that people who are connected and friends get better pay, and those who are outsiders and less connected get worse pay: because they don't know what to ask for they'll likely be wrong, but it's only in one direction: if they go too high they'll get told no, if they go too low they won't know it.

gumby 5y ago

First example I’ve seen of why not to do this, that I have considered a legitimate point. Thanks!

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Thanks. It's a difficult topic to broach on HN because most commenters here are coming from an IC perspective, not a hiring manager or even startup perspective. Big companies posting official job listings can make sure they comply with all of the relevant laws simply because they have HR and legal teams to do all of the legwork. If you're a startup who really just wants a wide range of enthusiastic candidates to apply, you either: 1) Don't participate at all, lest you accidentally violate the rules or, worse, the law. 2) Post a huge range of salaries (This position pays $80K to $500K) so you don't exclude any candidates, but then your risk angering the readers. 3) Break every listing into multiple positions with different salary bands (Software Engineer I: $100K - $150K, Software Engineer II: $150K - $200K, Software Engineer III: $200K - $300K and so on). This barely provides any more signal to the reader, but it complies with the rules and laws. Personally, I'd be most afraid of making it complicated enough that HR has to get involved. I'd rather allow engineers to post up generic invitations to apply to a company, not change the rules to require highly specific job postings or nothing.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Violating the law is not a concern. You can simply put $50k/year to $1B/year and you comply with the law. Hiring managers / business owners simply do not want sellers of labor to know the minimum they are willing to pay. Naming the minimum is a loss of negotiating position for the purchaser of labor, and that is why employers do not like the idea. Employers also do not like the idea of having to increase their current employees' pay if market prices are rising. I know, because I have benefited greatly from paying different people different amounts simply because they do not know what I am willing to offer other employees.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Violating the law is not a concern. You can simply put $50k/year to $1B/year and you comply with the law. Right! Which is completely useless and would just clutter the thread.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      No, it is not useless. The lower bound is most of the information that sellers of labors are interested in, and that buyers of labor want to hide. The proof is employers excluding Colorado residents from their job listings. If buyers of labor were not going to lose anything by putting $50k/year to $1B/year, then they would be doing just that. But they correctly calculate that they would lose big time if existing employees are easily able to find out what the real time minimum market prices for labor are.
      - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        > The proof is employers excluding Colorado residents from their job listings. FYI this happens because they don't want to risk legal action in a remote state that contains less than 1% of the workforce anyone. Excluding CO from the job listing is the quick and easy way to ensure you don't violate Colorado law. It really doesn't make sense to add another state's entire legal requirements to your startup unless you have to. It may seem simple, but it's actually a pain to bring in yet another legal code you have to understand and check just to do anything.

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?

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.
- 5y ago

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.

jandrese 5y ago
You're worried about hiring a junior developer and offering them $80k and them getting mad because they just spent 4 years coding in college and are now experts that should be starting at $150k?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  FYI: $150K salaries for new grads are extremely rare. Only a select few companies offer that range and they're highly selective for a very small number of graduates. The median salary for all software engineers in the United States is quite a bit less than $150K. Only within a tiny bubble are new grads paid $150K+
  - comp_throw7 5y ago
    Is 5% "extremely rare"? I bet at least 5% of new grads are making that kind of money, given that the companies that pay that kind of money employ 8-10% of the engineers in the country, and I suspect hire a disproportionately large % of new grads relative to the industry as a whole. (So that number could be as high as 10-15%.)
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Tiny geographic bubbles, maybe, but I would hazard to guess a whole lot more software jobs exist in those bubbles compared to the landmass they occupy.
  - softwarebeware 5y ago
    For Silicon Valley, New York, and Seattle, at least, $150k yearly is below average market value for new grads. (I may even be missing some development centers.) "Salary" may be lower than that, but not total compensation including cash and stock bonuses.

sakoht 5y ago

It's not impossible to say "Positions vary from $20k to $600k, DOE." for these cases, if you really are hiring your new CTO and also a janitor. The nice thing about having to put _some_ kind of range is that there is some the poster will have to choose whether or not to reveal they _might_ pay well. And there are balanced incentives to go either direction. If you post low, you miss out on talent, and if you post high you have to convince every noob that might be useful they aren't worth $1M/yr. But having to decide that balance is useful.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> It's not impossible to say "Positions vary from $20k to $600k, DOE." What value would that bring to the thread? > The nice thing about having to put _some_ kind of range is that there is some the poster will have to choose whether or not to reveal they _might_ pay well. Yes, and the least scrupulous companies will put a $500K upper limit when they don't plan on paying anyone more than $120K/year.
- omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
  Less scrupulous companies doing that might but be all bad because they can be called out. With no salary range, there's nothing to call then out on.
jandrese 5y ago
Maybe make separate postings for the door greeter and CEO?

freeopinion 5y ago

A response to "Who's hiring" that is so vague as to not indicate whether it is hiring a Graphic Artist or a cafeteria Dish Washer is a waster of everyone's time, anyway. Hundreds of developers polish up their two-page resume and send it in because a company couldn't have their HR staff write up a proper one paragraph response? Companies with 4 employees have an HR department. I guess these days everyone wants to call themselves a founder without having to work like a founder?

alexashka 5y ago

> But most of the "Who is hiring" posts aren't job postings What the hell are they then? They better be job postings, because that's what 'hiring' implies - a job. Regarding various requirements - what requirements? Cry me a river - nobody is getting sued over posting a salary range and if someone does sue for that, we should have a 'Who is a giant piece of shit suing people for providing salary ranges' to solve that problem. When you don't post a salary range - you waste everyone's time. It's why it's so hard to hire competent people - because only the desperate are willing to jump through the bullshit hoops of talking to employers playing games. The competent ones will jump through the bullshit FAANG hoops once and never again.

scarface74 5y ago

So because you don’t want to “elevate the amount of work” to add salary ranges, i as a candidate should waste time going through the interview process just to find out whether I am interested?

maybelsyrup 5y ago

> Requiring salary ranges would significantly elevate the amount of work that goes into answering the "Who is hiring" question and therefore would reduce the number of postings significantly. So like ... 30 seconds more of work? If you know you want/need to hire someone, but you haven't so much as glanced at your numbers to see how much you might need to pay such a person, and you're also legally an adult, it seems to me like you need to have your head examined. This is dumb, just post a salary range. It's HN, it's just a web forum.

jorgemf 5y ago

If a company doesn't have clear the positions they are offering, and so, they are more less know how much should they pay. I don't want to apply. I have applied to so many companies which didn't know very well what they wanted to hire that it was a completely waste of time. I you know how much value the position is going to add to your company you have a clear defined role and a range to spend in that role. So yes, it will be more difficult for startups, but it will clear some undefined roles that wont be translated into jobs in the future.