4 ms·
Ask HN: What about a job site that showed bid/ask spread for wages?
Maybe this is a dumb idea, but I think it would be interesting, if only as an experiment. Workers can have a hard time finding work, and employers have a hard time finding employees. Maybe full transparency can shine a light on what’s really happening.
The idea is, show the bid/ask spread for time. Workers are selling time, companies are buying it. Of course, broad categories of jobs will be separated from each other.
A bid ask spread looks like this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bid%E2%80%93ask_spread
There are a few complications:
1. Employers don’t want to share their bid. Well, the law might require them to.
2. Workers might have variable ask. Fair, since it matters if they have to commute and what the role is exactly. That can potentially be countered with a formula. (I’m willing to commute X minutes for Y more dollars per hour, I’m willing to relocate for Z more dollars where Z could be infinity, etc)
3. Jobs are variable and people are variable so time is hard to price. This is true but maybe a close match is good enough to merit an interview.
- mdcds 4y agoPeople and jobs are non-fungible: no two candidates are identical, no two jobs are the same. Bid/ask spreads make sense to me only in situations when fungible units of A are traded for fungible units of B.
- jononomo 4y agoperfect response to what at first sounds like a good idea.
- b20000 4y agoif that is true then why does everyone need to do bullshit coding interviews instead of being hired for their projects and experience, degrees and track record?
- jfrisby 4y agoBecause employers _want_ people to be fungible. The quest to quantify and systematize hiring is a Quixotic effort at solving real challenges, but it persists because nobody has come up with an actual solution.
- b20000 4y agopeople have a long time ago, it’s called a university degree also in the US employment is at will. not happy? fire the person.
- janalsncm 4y agoI don’t want to defend the idea as an actual product too much because I’m mainly interested in it as an experiment. It would be revealing to have a “God’s eye” view of the labor market even if it has an asterisk. If people and jobs were fungible you’d be able to skip the interview process too. I definitely agree that it’s imperfect though. Maybe with some filtering it would be possible to narrow down candidates qualified enough for an interview.
- skibidibipiti 4y agoLevels.fyi and teamblind.com
- mdcds 4y agoI don't trust numbers on Blind. But I do look at averages for a specific role at a specific company on Levels
- vivegi 4y agoHow is this different than an employer providing a payscale range for the position (as mandated for job postings by some jurisdictions)?
- b20000 4y agoin a market you have buyers and sellers. you describe only the buy side with the sell side missing. right now there are only public bids and no asks.
- vivegi 4y agoWouldn't a job applicant be on the "sell" side. Even in a large liquid market like equities only a small fraction of buyers and sellers are "interested" in a specific transaction at a given time. Doesnt the applicant pool for a specific job approximate that already? At the end of the hiring process there is a bid-ask spread and the parties do agree to a final "price". Also, hiring isnt one dimensional for most jobs.
- janalsncm 4y agoYes, the applicant is “selling” their time. Companies are buying it. The current information gap is that we don’t know what the sell side looks like at all really, and the buy side is incomplete. You’re right that the other glaring issue is that most jobs aren’t fungible like commodities or shares in a company. I don’t think it would be a useful product but it would be interesting if we even had an approximation.
- quickthrower2 4y agoupwork.com for full timers?
- b20000 4y agointeresting but the main issue is that most engineering people undervalue skills and don’t negotiate. they don’t know the true value of their skills. so the question is how this order book and market can help with price discovery such that the historically poor pricing of skills is improved upon.
- simne 4y agoThis could be interest exercise, but is not main issue for industry. Few years ago, I've spent large amount of time, to figure out, why there are so few good films. Findings shocked me. So simple, but impossible to fix. Just people are unreliable, in sense, You could have best crew, enough budget, best etc, but still deliver something average. And people are most unreliable part of formula. This is not intentionally, just too sophisticated model, accepts too many outcomes, and many leads to fail.
- simne 4y agoSo, in reality, average wage just not exists. As I know this market after 20 years exp, exists some minimal wage, for novices, and for people, who for some reason could not show their strengths. And for experienced people, exists looong and not easy negotiations and headhunting schemes, where wage could jump more than TEN-fold above minimal wage. And also important thing, clean price per hour exists only for novices, because they usually don't know anything else, maybe few things, like "free" lunch, or just their business value too low to consider other options. For experienced people, who create reliable business value, exists looong list of pph alternatives. They could account for percent of value for business (this is usually one time payment, but believe me, it could be 100 times more than pph); - for share in business; - for some other benefits, like corporative auto, or shares in property.
- simne 4y agoWhat I mean, business value too low. You may hear about VP, and how they work. For them exists maximum number of accounts with which they could work, and this number is not scaling. Same thing with employers and workers - typical employer have capacity for some number of workers, and cannot hire much more (usually, hire 10-20% more is possible, but 50% impossible, because for this need to reconfigure all management structure). Worker, with proved experience is better than inexperienced, because they need less management time, so same management structure could work with bigger number of experienced workers and will deliver more business value.